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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 9570875" data-attributes="member: 3586">I recently posted on Bluesky that in 5E you could call Level 1 "Level 0" and Level 2 "Level 1/2", and then level 3 becomes level 1 - because there was an expectation that experienced players would start at level 3. And then apparently Mike Mearls had already had the same idea for his new RPG (something similar at least!) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Levels 1 & 2 are there to teach new players the mechanics of their class slowly. (This is somewhat ruined by 2024 and weapon masteries).###It has long been an annoyance of mine the 5E published adventures that really speed through level 1. This is not universally true. The level 1 sections in Lost Mine of Phandelver and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist are lengthy and significant. You can do them in a 4-hour session, but it's a session packed with incident. The new players get a lot of things to do and get to experience their characters before they gain a level.Meanwhile, in adventures like Descent into Avernus the level 1 portion becomes One Giant Fight and then the characters gain a level. It feels really wrong. I don't mind level one only being one session. I do mind it when it isn't even that!###You'll find a lot of the published campaign adventures (especially in the early days) start at level 3 or 5. And then they have a very speedy "get people to that level" section. These sections tend to annoy me (e.g. Death House) not because they're bad adventures, but because they tend to throw the storytelling of the main adventure off.Storm King's Thunder begins at level 5. Why was level 5 a good level to start? Because it's where Lost Mine of Phandelver ends! (I much prefer running Lost Mine before SKT - the included introduction to SKT, A Great Upheaval, mucks up the storytelling too much, despite having a really good level 1 & 2 section).Curse of Strahd and Princes of the Apocalypse begin at level 3. And that's for those experienced players who just start at those levels, since they don't need to go through the learning experience of the "apprentice" levels again.(Once again, neither have a great level 1-2 intro section - at least, it doesn't integrate well with the later experience. I rather enjoy running Death House, but find it tonally very wrong with Curse of Strahd as a whole. Give me the Burgomeister's letter introduction any day!)Anyway, that's a lot of the historical design & adventure context around level 1-2 in 5E!</blockquote>

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