What do you do for level one adventurers that doesn't involve "free beer if you stomp rats"

What do you do for level one adventurers that doesn't involve "free beer if you stomp rats"

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There is a hobgoblin army on our door steps, we need every able bodied adult to take a pike and defend the town while the women-folk, children, old, and sick are loaded into wagons to try and make a break for it.

You kill 3/4 of the characters in the siege.

There is a haunted place, go investigate.
Features either single strong enemy or literally nothing besides environmental hazards.

Is this "because the players don't want to be Lv 1 characters?"

Because, well, maybe don't make them be level 1 characters?

Keep on the Borderlands

Hah, gay

Find a pre-made adventure that's meant for level 1 players and run it or use it to template your own deal.

>Hah, gay
Don't like to kek at stuff like this but... kek

Nah, i'm doing a one off where everyone is playing a weird non class. group consists of

Dwarf Earth Kineticist
Half-Elf Warpriest of Luck/Travel
Human Gunslinger
Halfling Psychic Warrior

>non class
non core class that is, but you see.

I don't believe in scaling the world to the level of PCs.

Kill the rats for beer is fine for level one players getting their feet wet.
New players need to get to know the system, so have them do a simple delivery run and get jumped by lazy bandits just taking their baked goods out of boredom.
Or a tiny goblin/kobold raid.

But if the players are experienced, y'all want to start at level 1, and you know what the campaign is going to be about, don't pussyfoot around.
Throw the PCs into the action.
If there is a massive hobgoblin invasion and each enemy warrior greatly outlevels the PCs, then make that clear and ask how they hope to survive.
Have them encounter refugee npcs they can save or a wounded Hobgoblin as an enemy.
Maybe they find little goblin mooks used to run messages looting a shop.

The point is, you should never wait for the pcs to level before getting to the interesting stuff.
Do interesting now and trust your players not to spit in Lord Zod's face.
And prepare backup characters.

My favorite method of letting the PCs know they're outclassed is to have an annoyingly strong npc or "DMPC" that is essentially Gary Oaks as Batman, better than any of the pcs in every way.
Then have his spine ripped out by a Hobgoblin.

Free rats if you stomp beer.

I try not to scale the world to players, but my players do not know the concept of positioning or fleeing, so if they can't kill it they'll just let themselves die.

>Strange combination of classes
Ah
Large groups of low level enemies fighting to the death.
Mind controlled animals or plants, or undead or constructs if immunities aren't an issue.

The large number lets them try out different attacks and presents an actual threat.
The fighting to the death simplifies the encounter to focus on the group working on how they fight together.
Non-sentient avoids moral issues with combat.
Low level lets them hold them of with defense as they get into the groove.
Then, after the encounter they can figure out why it happened. yay! plot!

Also, bandits later.

Magic puzzleroom where they can't die/it's all virtual, maybe the room resets.
They need to kill the enemy intelligently or be trapped in the matrix puzzle room forever.

>The water is right here you dumb horse! Drink!

>Free rats if you stomp beer.
Crafting missions are lame.
Your wordplay, less so.

>Teetotaler mage sick of the drunks at the tavern across the street hires you to smash their beer kegs in exchange for free, magically enchanted pet rats.
Nice hook

Bouncer duty in a small, shabby-genteel gambling den or private club- Think the Firelight district in Sharn.

Training of some sort- think the first books of the Lightbringer trilogy, with Kip learning to use magic, getting in regular fights with elimination ranking with other trainees, etc. Or the training Jon Snow and friends got on the Wall.

Escorting an elderly wizard who is not a master of combat spells so he can make a map of lands that are newly discovered/not well travelled. Probably not going to run into many people, but there may be hostile wildlife or terrain hazards.

Courier service in the big city needs fast, clever young people who can defend themselves enough not to have their messages or small parcels intercepted.

Private security for the idiot nephew of an important local merchant- keep him from doing anything stupid, help show him around, make sure he doesn't get mugged, but there is an option to call for the city watch if things get out of hand.

An elderly wizard has died and left the entire contents of his estate to the wizard's college. Please help us go through the items and find anything of value, but be careful, he was a little bit mad and may have hidden dark artifacts in seemingly innocuous places, or left spell components not properly sealed...

Not OP, but I'm totally stealing that.

Free rats (you will be accepted into the were-rat den) if you stomp (poison) the beer?

Training missions as students. Since 5e doesn't "really" start until 3rd level, if I'm doing level 1 & 2, I make one-shots of them in a military/school/training setting where they're taking on missions from their teachers or supervisors to launch them into professional status. It works great cause then they actually have a reason to adventure together without having met, and gives them bonding experiences.

Cats are menacing the peasantry, the mayor wants you to save his town.

The point is coming up with low level adventures that won't end up killing the PCs.

Coven of fearful nuns hires the adventurers to take care of the mysterious stranger oppressing them from top of a local hill.
It's a literal strawman.

Hire them to deal with low level scum.
Settle some guys gambling debt. Just deal with local people, with local problems, on a peasant level.

Get embroiled in mafia type corruption. But not a deal high level mafia. Just a family of local hardnuts who think they're big. Level 1 characters get to deal with upstart peasants who're trying to be highway men.

You can just send them to kill off some fucking zombies or ghouls or wolves or rodents of unusual size or large insects or bandit scum for reward.

There's plenty of low level stuff. Goblins are a good one, and animal problems can go beyond the (technically vermin) rats. Hell, animal problems can give low level Druids and Rangers a chance to flex their skills and deal with animals in a non lethal way. Incredibly weak undead can also be used, low level skeletons can be handled by a party whacking 'em with clubs. Substandard equipment can even make Orcs a possibility.

You have options, limited only by your setting and your imagination.

Level 1 is the perfect level for a murder mystery. Someone in town killed Old Man Grunther and now our heroes have to collect clues and intimidate witnesses until they uncover the truth!

I don't know what kind of shitty players you have, but we fought everything from kobolds to orcs. bandits and corrupt guards. Didn't lose any characters that early, it was more when enemies started getting save or die spells. So like level 7.

>go to place
>kill everything inside, optionally grab item
>return for reward
Just do anything other than this. Going into the sewers to stomp rats is boring. Going into the sewers to fetch a crazy urban druid is interesting, even if you stomp some rats along the way.

Lost in the desert! The only hope for survival is a ruined city rising out of the sands. Food, water, and wealth await heroic adventurers inside an ancient pyramid ruled by a strange race of masked beings.

They are tasked to clear nearby cave system.
The only hostiles inside are a pair of Kobolds.
They had months to prepare...

You want to get them murdered and souls ripped out of them?!

1. A foreign host has landed on our shores, the battles have been grim and levies have been raised
Luckily, the heir apparent is personally leading these fresh new recruits and will teach them the way of the soldier. He will, in short, make a man out of you.

2. The great Wyrm Numismaxis has been slain to the west, and the hills are crawling with treasure hunters and profiteers. Well used weapons and suspiciously broken armor circulates everywhere and it's no longer safe to travel alone, least of all unarmed.

3. A locally famous, but lately impoverished merchant is lodging at the One Eyed Cat inn, rumors say he's using up the last of his money for some kind of expedition, he's even offering shares to anyone who joins him!

4. The Weeping Plague has been reported all along the east coast. Groups of repentant priests tour the countryside preaching doom. Nobody from Holten farm has been seen lately, and no one wants to check in on them. People pray to the Golden Saint, who is said to have left an artifact imbued with healing power somwhere in the lands to the North, where he fell to treachery.

And then just figure out what each venture needs and how the group could help in that respect. It would probably mean hunting for game, procuring equipment, bargaining with people and maybe a black murder or two for the vengeance that would elude them should they fall.

>3. A locally famous, but lately impoverished merchant is lodging at the One Eyed Cat inn, rumors say he's using up the last of his money for some kind of expedition, he's even offering shares to anyone who joins him!
When I signed up for Dungeons and Dragons, I wanted dungeons and dragons, not caravans and bandits yet again.

I have mine go hunt a stag. A few wolves, some twig blights, bam, instant hook.

It could be pirates. Or, a scholarly mission. It could be starting a local business and navigating the underworld while dodging taxes.
Hell, it could even be an archeological dig into some old dwarven home, where you can have a dragon.
Assuming the Hobbit movies didn't sour you on the idea.

Man I love the dwarven one. It's just been so long since I've played a good "kick in the dungeon door, dodge the traps, loot the treasure" game.

It's always fucking caravans and fucking bandits as we pass through set pieces that make for a better novel than a game.

Give me a wilderness hex map, give me some dungeons to raid, and give me a tavern to drink and show off battle scars. That would make me happy, but it seems like people don't enjoy this sort of game any more.

Matters of taste, I suppose. I hate dungeons, for instance.
I hate traps, too.
As a GM, I almost never have my players fight something they can't reason with, or at least outsmart without it being terribly inefficient. It's not that I don't throw in a random beast or abomination to scare them, but I find that if they mostly fight people, then when they *do* encounter something inhuman, it is much more effective.
This isn't new, I've pretty much always despised dungeon crawls.

Exploration is boss though. I make sure to throw in obstacles and terrain to mess with them so their maps aren't accurate if they fail the relevant skill checks.

You see, I also don't like the "kill everything" school of campaigning.

To me, a lot of the fun of dungeoncrawling involves exploration and threat assessment (running and hiding is often more prudent than fighting). I still use Gold-for-XP in my own games to promote a mindset of "it's not about slaying the monsters, dummy."

Wouldn't slaying the monsters AND getting the gold max their XP, though?

Rats stole the princess, get her back.

Yes, but the rule of thumb followed in older modules is that somewhere between 66-75% of the XP comes from treasure. So, if you're trying to build dungeons on a sort of level curve (attain level 2 by the time that PCs clear the first floor or whatever), you have more encounters and treasure than the players would need to level up.

If they do explore everything and get more XP, no problem; treasure XP drops off from below-CR encounters.

I like it because it gives a non-combat primary objective, it rewards exploration without turning into a total Monty Haul but simultaneously doesn't punish people that aren't completionists.

Here's a nice analysis of some official adventures.

totalbullgrit.com/treasure-and-experience-in-classic-dd-adventures/

>Free rats if you stomp beer.

The innkeeper's placement of beer barrels has unwittingly trapped a large pack of rats in his basement! The rat-community begs the party to liberate them from the innkeeper's basement by smashing the barrels. If they do, the free rats will help the party in many quests, usually by providing intel on dungeon layouts, treasure locations, and secret passages.

The thing is that slaying ALL the monsters will require you wizards you charge into battle iwth their knives drawn while the fighters take a breather on the floor from all their wounds and the ranger is trying to shoot dead rats out of their bow because they've run out of arrows.

Treasure is, like in a "realistic" sense, the easy option, so adventurers should be constantly trying to speed run the dungeon to get to the treasure and out again, no rest breaks, no looking for monsters to slay (because if you take too long trying to figure out the puzzle room, the monsters will find you, and you need to keep some spells in reserve for the final boss).

It makes sense if you approach the dungeon crawl from a perspective 3e+ kinda left behind.

is dorohedoro finished? I never found the end, and wasnt sure whether because dead

It's ALMOST finished, not sure myself what the schedule is right now though, need to annoy /a/ and ask them about it again.

>If there is a massive hobgoblin invasion and each enemy warrior greatly outlevels the PCs, then make that clear and ask how they hope to survive.

"We're gunna kill rats to grind xp because everyone is a higher level than us."

Bravo dm.

The real question is - do Kaiman and Nikaido JUST FUCK ALREADY!

This is worse than Black Lagoon, I swear!

You, you're alright.

what the fuck is this

man got cursed by wizard, is now lizard
lizard hunts wizards and bites their heads
a man lives inside his mouth and is looking for a specific wizard
the lizard asks the wizards what the man in his mouth said, then kills them

That's just the start. Dorohedoro is a really great manga, stylish as fuck, and mad as a sackful of Finns.

A horror-comedy by one of Tsutomu Nihei's former assistants.

Seriously, check it out

I use encounter based xp rewards.
If the pcs manage to Silent Assassin their way through an entire dungeon filled with killer enemies, then they deserve more xp, not less.

And sometimes, gold isn't the reward, but they still deserve xp.
pic related

Also musclegirls, roaches and mushrooms.

>assistant
Protege would be more accurate, she takes after his style in architecture and design but adds more in terms of character relationships.

"You can't kill rats, there are fucking hobgoblins invading. "

derp.
derp
derp.

throw vagabonds out of bar

find village idiot aka my daughter in spooky woods

deliver this message to next shithole village over oh no they're being raided by bandits

guard this trade convoy

rescue these miners

and so on, and such and such

I'm not trying to claim that it is the one true way; it's just an approach that I find works. I also think still has some merit and is certainly interesting in its rarity.

What systematic method would/do you use to allocate extra XP for sneaking past the killer enemies?

>I'm not trying to claim that it is the one true way; it's just an approach that I find works. I also think still has some merit and is certainly interesting in its rarity.
It's a fine method that I applaud for rewarding non combat focused xp.

>What systematic method would/do you use to allocate extra XP for sneaking past the killer enemies?
It's not much of a systematic method, but I tend to award 5-20% more if they go above and beyond in stealth or creativity in defeating the encounter.
Unless, they creatively avoid the encounter, then they just get the 5-20%.
There is probably a better system out there, but it works.

>Bravo dm.
Well, like said, "grinding" is not a thing people actually do, and it's not much of a survival method.
If several big guys break into your home, you don't go down into the basement to do bench presses, even if you could "level" in a few hours to be stronger.
Derp indeed.

Although, hiding in the sewers, fending off rats while avoiding the invaders might work, for a while at least.

>Spar with a number of squires so they experience different forms of combat (also giving the party a chance to test out non-lethal combat)
>Assist the local mercantile company with a few odd jobs for a hefty sum (also connections)
>Give a local ranger/game hunter/scholar with his work for the day, giving the party a chance to get familiar with the local area and maybe even get some simple loot from hunting and foraging
>Run some parcels from the mercantile company to the local guilds, letting the party get a feel of the starting city
>Ride with the local lumberjacks as they deliver lumber to one of the nearby towns, could be the easy set up for fighting bandits/goblins/kobolds
>Escort a group of miners to a recently discovered iron vein where they can set up a proper mining camp. Succeeding would award the party with some raw ores for improving their gear
>The local mage college needs some helping hands in clearing out an old storage room. Nothing too difficult, and in the end the college will give the party a few magical things, maybe just simple scrolls
I just like the idea of mundane tasks to get the party comfy with their starting city/capital

>What do you do for level one adventurers that doesn't involve "free beer if you stomp rats"
bodyguard, caravan escort, collect mundane reagents from local wilderness, scout borders/kobold camp/etc but do not engage. you know, basic mercenary work.

I had an idea recently, but haven't the chance to use it:

>You sorry lots, go collect the feud taxes. You'll get a portion of what you collect. That includes limbs in exchange for any of my peasants you kill.

Lots of roughing up villagers to loose up their coins, sweet talking, avoiding open rebellion, facing their own mommas staring at the shameful work you're doing (how could you tax poor aunt Liseld?), adoption/patronage by the baron X defending the small folk, bribes, tracking the secret route the folks use to warn the next village the tax collectors are coming, and the possibility that the PCs say 'fuck it' and run away with the money/sheeps/grain/horses.

>When I signed up for Dungeons and Dragons, I wanted dungeons and dragons, not caravans and bandits yet again.

On that note: Dragon kidnaps party and forces them to run sadistic maze-dungeon for personal amusement. Gives you a great excuse to have it be tailored to PCs since it's intelligently designed, and a reason why someone hasn't already found and cleared out the dungeon.

I just play games where level 1 characters are actually competent and don't die to a lucky hit or crit.

DnD4e (whatever you feel its other faults are) fixed this, it was pretty dumb of 5e to reintroduce it.

>There's a portal opening up to the netherworld in the basement
>You look drunk enough to check it out
>Free beer if you come back alive

Convince these townies not to hang you bunch of strange heretic drifters before sunrise.

Not playing D&D usually do the trick.

Play something where level 1 PCs aren't worthless hobos with sharp sticks and the ability to mutter up some fancy light shows?

I mean, my last level 1 adventure was the party fighting their way through a zombie apocalypse to confront a death knight and his charnel wurm.

The haunt is actually the place's owner in a costume.

I would cringe with that type of players. But well at least im my games im capable of running an interesting world, so that kind of bullshit never appears.

An Elf asks the adventurers to deliver a message of his uncle who he haven't seen "for ages".

All he knows is that he is a mage, the not-exact whereabout of his dwelling.

The message is an inquiry of apprenticeship.

The uncle is an ancient Elf, but he did not pursue magical knowledge for long, as he found out that his best talent is sculpting statues.

For hundreds of years, he perfected his sculpting, and enhanced his sculptures with his Illusionary knowledge.

Here are the players, entering a dungeon where nothing is real, but illusion and sculpture...