Can you use existing characters in each of the new D&D 5E Adventurers

[Excollector99]

Just a quick question for the DMs. Can you move existing characters from say, Ghost of Saltmarsh to Rime of the Frostmaiden or is it better to start over as the adventurers don't seem to be easily scaled for players. For example if you are 5th level could you play and enjoy GoS or RotF or would you bulldoze the first few levels and mess up the game plot?

[Yakmala]

As always, the books should act as guidance, not a railway line.

You can skip the parts they are below level for and bring them into the plot later. You can modify the encounters in the early parts to make them appropriate to your party's level. Or you could just have them bulldose the early encounters and treat it more like a roleplaying session. It's entirely up to you.

Unless you are playing Adventurer's League, in which case transfer from earlier seasons to Season 10 is forbidden anyway, there is nothing stopping you from modifying the materials you purchased to suit yours and the party's needs.

[Excollector99]

That was what I thought but my current DM was unsure and I was looking for some information to help him see how it could work as I'm not anxious to start a brand new character every time we change volumes in the series.

[Zhorn]

An approach I've allowed in the past is to allow reused characters with level scaling to match the adventure, explaining it away as non-linear story telling.

running a level 5-10 adventure with a new character
reuse said character in a 1-3 adventure, we're just covering some stuff back in time
return to an 11+ adventure and both prior campaigns are part of that character's backstory
level 4 oneshot, and that 1-3 adventure has happened, but the other's have not yet.


Risky as you have to be really careful to not get a character death for it to make sense, or have that character just retire from that campaign instead of outright die, or bring in a temp character who's overall goal is to resurrect the original character by the end of the adventure to maintain the timeline, etc.

For new DMs it's easier on them to stick to the level brackets.
Once a DM is comfortable in scaling the modules, then that level restriction can be abandoned and can reuse characters all over the place.
being said, I'd lean towards xp instead of milestone in those cases, so the over leveled PCs don't race ahead just because the low level PCs reached a level up milestone.

[Porcupinata]

I took a party through Tales from the Yawning Portal after they'd already finished Curse of Strahd. The Yawning Portal adventures are supposed to be for levels 1-15 and they finished Strahd at level 10, but I didn't adjust the adventures - I just let them have an easy time through the first few; but similarly they didn't really start going up levels again until they'd "caught up" and the loot from those early adventures was fairly irrelevant. They enjoyed it though, especially since the fact that there was little physical threat meant they were more free to "solve" the earlier adventures via talking and negotiation without ever being nervous that if things went south they'd be in over their heads.

I also took a party through Descent into Avernus after they'd done Tomb of Annihilation. Since they are both for levels 1-10, this time I adjusted the second campaign to fit the fact that they were already higher level and also adjusted it to be set in Chult rather than on the Sword Coast - so the missing city was Mezro rather than Elturiel. I had to bump up the difficulty of the encounters and add extra opponents to them, but for the most part it worked out fine. In fact it worked out better because unlike first level characters the group already had a history with some of the NPCs involved in the adventure so they were more invested in it.