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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9257822" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>You certainly can start at 3rd level or 5th level or 7th level (some of the more popular advanced starts I've seen) but the problem is always, &quot;If the characters had interesting adventures in the past, why didn't we play that out?&quot;&nbsp; I've never had a problem where first level constrained you from having a back story.&nbsp; Mostly it just prevents you from having a backstory where you state how cool your character is, which is frankly a pretty lame backstory.&nbsp; I get that there are Fantasy aesthetics of starting out hyper-competent and just staying that way, but I've never found it necessary and in general consider it a failure of design if your 1st adventure is rats in the basement.&nbsp; It's possible to design epic bangs for even low-level characters, you just make them part of a community and what they are doing at that moment is intensely important to the people around them. An example of this in published modules is the opening adventure in &quot;Rise of the Runelords&quot;, and while the execution of it is flawed to some extent, the general structure of the opinion of &quot;Shackled Skull&quot; is pretty awesome as well.&nbsp; I'm a big fan also of &quot;Of Sound Mind&quot; opening adventure, as well as of course &quot;Whispering Cairn&quot;.&nbsp;&nbsp; And again, while there are flaws in the execution, &quot;Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh&quot; is also an excellent take on making a low-level adventure epic.&nbsp; Indeed, there are probably more good epic introductory adventures out there than good higher-level ones.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9257822, member: 4937"] You certainly can start at 3rd level or 5th level or 7th level (some of the more popular advanced starts I've seen) but the problem is always, "If the characters had interesting adventures in the past, why didn't we play that out?" I've never had a problem where first level constrained you from having a back story. Mostly it just prevents you from having a backstory where you state how cool your character is, which is frankly a pretty lame backstory. I get that there are Fantasy aesthetics of starting out hyper-competent and just staying that way, but I've never found it necessary and in general consider it a failure of design if your 1st adventure is rats in the basement. It's possible to design epic bangs for even low-level characters, you just make them part of a community and what they are doing at that moment is intensely important to the people around them. An example of this in published modules is the opening adventure in "Rise of the Runelords", and while the execution of it is flawed to some extent, the general structure of the opinion of "Shackled Skull" is pretty awesome as well. I'm a big fan also of "Of Sound Mind" opening adventure, as well as of course "Whispering Cairn". And again, while there are flaws in the execution, "Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh" is also an excellent take on making a low-level adventure epic. Indeed, there are probably more good epic introductory adventures out there than good higher-level ones. [/QUOTE]

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