Starting above 1st level - player reaction?

[Dagger75]

I personally like starting the game at 1st level. The longest running 3e game had the players go from level 1 to 22 after a year and half of gaming everyweekend for 6 hours.

In the Spycraft I am running the PC's I leveld them up to 2 after the first adventure and up to 3rd after the second adventure. After that I start awarding experience.

Personally I have no problems making a character up to 5th level. It still feels new and he may be the best fighter in his village or town but still a fragile person out there in the wilds.
Making a character at higher I lose connection with the character, it just feels like a collection of stats.

For example in the Spycraft game, the Faceman is going to start taking unarmed combat feats, the pointman Demolitions and the soldier has started putting points in hide and move silently. All of this because of the way the game has evolved. If they just made characters at 3rd level they wouldn't have taken skills like this.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I think there's two sides to it:

Firstly, the rules side. I think players have a 'comfort zone' of levels they're familiar with. I'd say pretty much any level they've played a fair bit at and know how the game plays and feels at that point. IMO, if you start above this level players will often put together characters that 'don't really work'.

Secondly, I think that characters created at high levels tend to feel far more 'cookie cutter' than those played from lower levels. They don't tend to have side skills, weird items and all the other claptrap you accumulate during a campaign.


I started my last campaign at 9th - highest start so far. The group was familiar with this level of play, so they all made 'useful' characters. Found it still took a couple of months for people to settle into playing them, but it all worked out OK in the end.

If I was going to do something similar again, I'd probably do what others have suggested and advance them a level or even 2 each week. Possibly play the sessions as a selection of one offs with downtime between each. The only time I could see this being a real problem is if the characters were not meant to know each other before the 'real' campaign started.

 

[Henry]

Our group has started characters at everything from 1st to 5th before. If a new player joins, they usually join at equal or at worst one lower level than the party. It doesn't bug us, because we've played so many games before. We'll have 1st level games when we're missing that nostalgic charm, but otherwise will start at higher levels if there's a bigger story to tell.

 

[diaglo]

all new PCs start at lvl 1.

3d6 six times in order or choose a pregen.

i find it works best if the players learn their characters from the bottom up. that way they can customize them and i can make adjustments to the campaign to accomodate.

 

[Thanee]

Prefer to start at 2nd level. It has the same low level charm, but characters are already twice as powerful and not so incredibly frail. Besides it allows for better starting out as a multiclassed character (without going back to 3.0 apprentice rules).

Of course, in a running game, when a character is replaced, the level will be set appropriately (as the lowest current character or with the XP of the dead one with level loss for ressurection figured in, whatever is higher).

It's more enjoyable to start at lower levels, tho, since then the background feels more "alive" than if you have to make it up completely.

Bye
Thanee

 

[drothgery]

I don't like really low levels (1st and 2nd especially) for all the reasons others have stated. It's too easy to get killed. Spellcasters run out of spell slots too fast (and can't afford the wands and scrolls they'll use to solve this problem later). Melee types can't afford heavy armor -- and even starting with a horse or a longbow is taking a big bite out of your initial cash. And I have a lot of trouble with a 1st-level character that has any significant experience prior to the game.

The last few games I've played in have started at 2nd, 3rd, and 1st -- but in the last case we've gained two levels in three sessions.

 

[DaveMage]

In theory I like to start playing at 1st level...

...In practice, it has sucked. Mainly it has sucked because the folks I have gamed with over the last 10 years have conflicting schedules, causing us to (at times) have weeks or months between games. So, after a couple of years of only bringing that 1st level character to 3rd, it has gotten old. And, that's about the time people grow bored with the game so someone else starts to DM at low level and...the process starts over again.

This all changed with my latest game, where we started gestalt at 10th level about a year ago. Since there is only the DM and 2 players, we have advanced rapidly. We're now at level 20, and I am having a blast. It's so refreshing to actually have access to and *USE* all of the spells in the PHB - especially the 8th and 9th level ones which, in 25 years of gaming, I had never had the chance to use.

So now I can't see going back to level 1 for a very, very long time.

 

[eris404]

What a coincidence! We are starting a new D&D game and I'm trying to decide this very thing. Oddly, as a player I find I don't care what level we start at, but as a DM I'm having a tough time. I think it's mostly because I have two different ideas for starting the campaign, one with the characters at 1st level, the other at 10th level. I asked the players, but they don't seem to have any preference as to level. Go figure.

 

[S'mon]

Here's a point - I think the game is much, much better at starting PCs at high level if you only have 1 or 2 players, or if you're running an explicitly political game where the PCs rule rival domains, that kind of thing. You can do that epic trilogy thing, make them feel they're the stars of a heroic epic. Starting a group of 6-7 PCs at 10th or 15th and putting them through the same kind of dungeon crawls you could do at 1st (just w bigger monsters) seems a huge waste of the extra effort to me.

 

[player 2]

When our current game started, we all started at 3rd level. This was my first game and I liked the feel of my character. Now that I know more about the game, as a player I would feel like a 1st level character would be too fragile. My character left the game and I created a new character (9th level) and even though I knew the background, she had skills and feats that I was unfamiliar with causing me to play her carefully the first time she joined the party.

If my DM asked my for my suggestion, I feel starting the game with characters between 3rd and 5th would be the best place to start. They are not too powerful yet, and they can still handle themselves well in combat.