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A lot of people have mentioned that allowing people to start characters at higher levels would de-emphasize the role-playing and continuity, but in certain circumstances I think it would actually enhance those aspects.  People play LFR in different ways.  Some people play LFR in clubs where you just throw together a bunch of random players each week and are always playing with someone new.  Some people (myself included) have a small group of players (4-6) that always play together and go through LFR more like a home campaign.  Other people do a mix of those (well, maybe I'm more in this category, but most of the time I play with my "home group").  While letting PCs start at a higher level might have a negative impact in the club-type play experience (or may enhance it, I don't know), I think it could definitely enhance the play experience of small home groups that play LFR like it's more of a home campaign.  The club-like play style is generally more disposable anyway.

For example:  As in any home group, we've had turn-over with our players.  Maybe we discover that one player really doesn't match our play-style (he likes playing evil characters and we like heroic or he likes to play uber-optimized/cheesy characters and the rest of us don't) or maybe someone moves away or maybe they get too busy with life to play D&D or whatever.  So that player is gone and we get a new one that may or may not have played LFR before.  If the home group has all played the same group of PCs together all the way up, they'll have a lot of continuity and story and shared experiences.  Now what do we do if we have a new player that has never played LFR?  Well, they have to start at level 1.  That means the rest of us have to start at level 1 too.  Ok, so everyone makes new characters so the new guy can play with us.  And maybe we all play together and have shared experiences, etc.  But now what do we do with all of our high-level characters that we have invested so much in and had so much fun playing before as part of a shared and continuing storyline?  Do we just throw them out?  Do we tell our new guy "Sorry, you can't play with us every other week because we want to play our P1 characters"?  (In which case we'd have to find someone else with a high level character to play.)  Do we tell our new guy "You need to go to a gaming club to level up your PC fast so you can play with us"?  (When there may or may not be a gaming club in the area or easily accessible.)  In that situation, letting the one new guy make a higher level character so he can play with the rest of us would enhance our play experience.  We would be able to continue to play the highly developed group of characters and not all have to start new characters that we don't really want to play anyway.  This is more of a theoretical example.  My group isn't quite like this since we have 10 PCs each across the level bands. 

I think there are many factors (already present) that make LFR have a disposable feel.  People have mentioned them already - replaying mods, excessive retraining rules, lots of random regions and disconnected storylines, some mods having better treasure bundles than others (combined with replaying), etc.  If done correctly, I don't think that letting people start at higher levels would necessarily increase the disposability of PCs or deteriorate the quality of play.  I agree that letting anyone start at any level they want any time they want could have serious negative impacts on the campaign as a whole.  If done carefully and on a limited basis (i.e. not an all-retrain-all-the-time kind of rule) I think it could possibly enhance the play experience.  (Like letting the guy who just moved to the area and started playing LFR be able to play with his new D&D group.)

For the people who are against being able to 'give out levels', what if they added an option to the campaign that whenever you played a heroic tier module and got full xp, you could instead gain enough xp to level you to the next level? Let's say for this purpose that MYREs are completely excluded from this option.

Ie, so if you wanted to catch someone up to paragon tier characters, they might only play 10 modules to do so. Those modules might actually be a good story arc, might focus on events that matter to their character (more so than if they had to fill in a bunch of extra modules to make up the xp difference), etc, and they had to play their character successfully at every level so they learned how to play.

Feb 26, 2010 -- 3:50AM, lorika wrote:

A lot of people have mentioned that allowing people to start characters at higher levels would de-emphasize the role-playing and continuity, but in certain circumstances I think it would actually enhance those aspects.  People play LFR in different ways.  Some people play LFR in clubs where you just throw together a bunch of random players each week and are always playing with someone new.  Some people (myself included) have a small group of players (4-6) that always play together and go through LFR more like a home campaign.  
...
If done carefully and on a limited basis (i.e. not an all-retrain-all-the-time kind of rule) I think it could possibly enhance the play experience.  (Like letting the guy who just moved to the area and started playing LFR be able to play with his new D&D group.)

Since I play mostly public game days I would say that it doesn't make all that much difference.  My personal preference would be to have 1 or 2 "main" characters that I play whenever I can.  Allowing auto-leveling would help me do that because when I schedule games I could always just sign up with my "core" characters.  

As it is now I have a multitude of characters (well 5-soon-to-be-6 seems like a multitude to me) because I want to be sure that I have all of the tiers covered.  In addition, I want to support new people coming in to the group, so I am always ready to support a low level table if I need to.

But smaller game days are in almost exactly the same boat.  If you only support 2 or 3 sessions per game day and one of those sessions has to be H1 to support newbies so you can grow the group you never get out of heroic level play.  I know we could cater solely to the people lucky enough to have P1 or P2 but then the game day doesn't grow.

I am speaking from experience here - I support 2 coordinate for 2 game days on opposite sides of town.  I've seen multiple small game days that were supporting 2 tables fall apart because people got tired of playing H1 and H2 mods and constantly creating new first level characters.

If someone has a better suggestion of how to support people that want to advance characters to a higher level, I'm open to suggestion.  As it stands right now, if you happen to have a cohesive group or a large enough group you can get to higher levels.  Otherwise you're SOL.

Feb 26, 2010 -- 6:38AM, Keithric wrote:

Ie, so if you wanted to catch someone up to paragon tier characters, they might only play 10 modules to do so. Those modules might actually be a good story arc, might focus on events that matter to their character (more so than if they had to fill in a bunch of extra modules to make up the xp difference), etc, and they had to play their character successfully at every level so they learned how to play.

I don't see "power leveling" as being any better than auto leveling.  The PC still hasn't had to go through the same number of hours to get the character.  In some ways it might make it worse because there are power gamers who wouldn't want to do anything else.  On the other hand, power gamers would be less likely to create many higher level characters if you penalize the PC somehow.

Allen.

Feb 26, 2010 -- 6:45AM, Thanlis wrote:

That wouldn't horrify me. It's not my preferred solution (cohorts! cohorts!) but it doesn't suck, either. You'd need to figure out an appropriate gold award; PCs leveled this way would also lag behind a bit due to lack of magic items, but I don't think that'd be crippling.

Eh, the difference in treasure isn't all that bad. They can still spend a found item every level if they want. They have less gold, but still about 40% of it and that's not more than one at-level item. It's livable. It's also nice to have a real penalty for taking this approach.

How would 'cohorts' work? I'll admit that I'd find something akin to sidekicking rules ala some MMOs interesting. I think I mentioned it earlier, but basically 'Okay, you're being sidekicked by this guy two levels higher than you, so you count as his level for the module, gaining +2 attack, all defenses, +10 hp. Play!'

Somewhere down the line -- 2012 or so -- you'd open up the same thing for paragon tier, right?

Yeah, pretty much.

It's got flaws, certainly, but I think it has a lot of benefits too. For example, it's a nice option for a group that's leveling in lockstep where one member misses a couple sessions due to illness. It's nice for still having people play lower level options to level someone, but not feeling like they're trapped into them and can't play their primary character. And I like it a lot more than just giving out free levels.

That said, I've played home games where free levels were given out and haven't felt bad about it. I just joined a new gaming group earlier this year and started at 14.5th level, cause that's what level they'd made it to - on characters they started at 11th, because that's what modules they were playing. A campaign I started DMing last year started at 7th level and went fine. A campaign I'm playing in now just hit 16th level, playing Revenge of the Giants. We started by doing a quick 4th level adventure, then an 8th level adventure, then a 12th level adventure, so we'd get used to the characters, but still be the right level to start the RotG campaign. That staging worked out quite well, actually.

Aside: If we do have any kind of 'poof' instant level thing added, I'd suggest it pretty much never apply to paragon level. I'm okay sitting down next to someone playing a 4th or so character they've never played before - it won't take them appreciably much longer to create or master the character (2 powers, 2 feats). But 12th? Meh.

Feb 26, 2010 -- 7:52AM, Thanlis wrote:

You'd want to give more than a +5 to hit bonus to someone who was playing up 10 levels, to account for magic items and such. The cohort would be playing at a disadvantage, but you can tune the precise numbers to keep it from being a huge disadvantage.

I'd suggest just using the rules for monsters. Playing up 10 levels sounds like a bit much, but I guess in theory it'd be +10 attack and defenses, +5 skills, +5 damage. That'd probably work out fine honestly.