So upon completion of our last campaign, it was ultimately decided once we made arrangements for our next adventure that everyone would start with fresh characters at level 1 as opposed to the more advanced characters like last time where we all started at level 8 and ended up just into paragon before we had to bring things to a close. And at first I think a few people may have been a little disappointed after getting the chance to play around with some of the fancier powers that a lot of the time we don’t reach in our regular LFR games, but the more I think about it myself I think I’m actually looking forward to developing a new, long-term character from a slightly different perspective.
I think one of the big problems that I personally experienced while trying to play Searil, my level 11 Eladrin Swordmage, is that ultimately I made his backstory a little more epic than his statistics were actually able to support! So whereas in story here was this guy who had been trained to be this weapon of arcane destruction by an evil vampire lord throughout his upbringing, when actual combat came along he wasn’t exactly able to clear an entire battalion of guards as his story may have suggested. And then at one point when he actually came back from the dead, naturally he wasn’t really all that stronger than when he had died, even though in my head I couldn’t help but picture the video game hero who dies and then reunites back with the party much later with all of these new moves and special abilities that he didn’t have before.
And granted, he did get bumped up to paragon with the rest of the party when this happened, so you could still make the argument that he did in fact grow stronger, but I digress…
My point is that in building this new character of mine fresh at level 1, I think I’m looking forward to creating an everyday guy who becomes a hero throughout his adventuring career as opposed to having this incredible backstory that leaves me with little upward mobility 3 or 4 levels into the game. And that’s not to say that I’m going easy on the backstory, so to speak, but more along the lines that instead of being this fierce warrior who slew dragons and could warp time and space with his mind, he was more so just a strong warrior who one day sets off to explore the world after hunting alongside his fellow tribesmen through his life up until this point. His people will have an interesting past that he was a part of, but I’m trying to avoid the stereotypical orphan whose parents were killed by the main bad guy who he’s sworn to kill in revenge… or anything like that.
I’ll post more about the actual character once I develop more of the details, but after our first session I think this new world is going to be a lot of fun to explore. It’s kind of like this being all of ours second campaign together, we’re trying a lot of things differently and so far it seems to be leading to some new roleplaying experiences that have been a lot of fun to watch unfold!