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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sobran" data-source="post: 6041630" data-attributes="member: 45528">I've finally managed to introduce my girlfriend to D&D and it seems like she may well like it. We've worked our way up from the Ascension card game, to Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, and finally to D&D4E. So here's my dilemma:I plan on running the War of the Burning Sky campaign, primarily due to a lack of time; school and work are pretty demanding, so I don't have time to design my own adventures. It will be a small party, by necessity, consisting only of my girlfriend, a DMPC, a simple Companion character (as per DMG2), and possibly one more character (details below). She has created a Druid because she loves animals. Unfortunately, I thought the Druid still had access to healing spells, like previous editions, which is apparently not the case.I will be creating a character to fill out the ranks. The idea was for my DMPC to be a strong, stoic type who served as silent protector, forcing her to take the reins when it came to negotiating--i.e. roleplaying. This has morphed somewhat, as it now appears he should be a Leader as opposed to a Defender. Luckily, the Druid does lend itself well to a thematically appropriate Companion character. I plan on handing her a Wolf Companion, which I will have to find creative ways to level up, as I seriously doubt she'll want to trade out her canine companion at any point.She loves dogs. That's... really not relevant. Moving on.Now, there may or may not be a third PC, depending on whether or not my brother can work out some conflicting scheduling issues. If he can, there will be very little issue, as we'll have four characters (sort of). If he can't, then we'll be stuck with three and things get tricky. So how would you handle this?1) I plan on having each character begin at Level 2. This will help some, but the first encounter of the campaign still looks pretty challenging. I don't want to go any higher than that so as to reduce complexity while she's learning the system. Can you think of any other "character-level" adjustments that can be made? Should the characters start with a low-level magic item? Again, complexity is a concern here.2) Can you think of any interesting ways to level up the wolf down the road? This is less of a concern, as I'm sure I can think of something, but group brainstorming is always helpful. One thought I've had is that the wolf may "turn out" to be a dire wolf at some later point.3) I've largely abandoned the original plan for the silent DMPC to be a Defender, as it seems healing is probably more important in such a small party. Is this accurate? I've only played a little of 4th Edition so far. How much can healing be supplemented? For example, creating a Shaman instead of a Cleric seems tempting, both for thematic reasons (primal power source), and because he can serve a secondary Striker role. However, a Shaman's healing capability looks far lower than a Cleric's. Experienced 4th Edition DMs: how much would this difference concern you? How much of the difference could be mitigated?4) Obviously all of this is being done at the character level instead of the campaign level. This is because I have some time available now, but I foresee even less in the future. That means that as the campaign goes on, I will have less time to tweak encounters, so I'm trying to keep that to a minimum. This would be less an issue if I still had access to the Adventure Tools, but with WotC's broken promises on that front, I couldn't justify the continued expenditure. So adjusting encounters on the fly has to be kept to fairly easy fixes: swapping out a scout or two for more minions in the first encounter, for example. Am I overlooking something? Is there an easier way to "de-level" the encounters that wouldn't be time consuming or damage the feel of the encounter? I don't want to simply remove monsters whole-sale if I can avoid it, as that could change the entire feel of an encounter.Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer. I'm experienced with D&D, but 4th Edition is relatively new to me.--SobranPS: Holy crap that was longer than I intended. Sorry for the wall of text.</blockquote>

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