Board Thread:Midian Ideas/@comment-4701109-20150103214101/@comment-24302820-20150115200619

One option for advanced characters is to do campaign chapters in very distinct large chunks. Each of these are at different points in the guild's careers. With a coarse enough granularity, there could be several levels between sessions. You still get a somewhat more organic growth, but get to the upper levels quickly.

A sub-option is to jump back and forth. Start high with one chapter or session, then low or middle, then back to high. Not all players can handle this, but it can be an interesting campaign style. You can have the benefit of a skill before learning it in the first place.

The simplest implementation of this is to start in media res (often via cutscene) of the high level characters in a big boss fight. Then you jump back to the actual story from much earlier. This is a technique that comics/manga have used with some success.

The inverse of this is White Wolf's Storyteller system (or maybe just Vampire) with its prelude. This is a pre-adventure session showing how the character became a Vampire. The actual chronicle could be decades or even centuries later. We could do something similar, with a proper starting character, then progress them up to high level for the actual gameplay.

Anakin Skywalker's character arc comes to mind as an example of this form of storytelling. This is both in the big jumps, and sort of in the 'back to the beginning' style with having the second three movies show a young Darth Vader.