Low level campaign for high level vacation

[Limas Venomscale]

Anyone run a low level adventure where one of the characters is actually a high level adventurer on vacation or hiding out so has to keep a tight leash on his/her abilities so as not to make it too apparent that almost nothing is actually a challenge (or brushing his teeth with magic which blinds the low level wizard who happened to be using detect magic at that moment)

How well did it work out and did the other characters ever find out?

[Jonas Seaborn]

dot

[Joseph Collins]

Not exactly. There were two Living City adventures where we had to pretend to be lower level. One we were enchanted to look like children (my brother kept his glamered full plate, and as a swashbuckler, I got better). Another we just had to portray low-level adventurers to lure the bad guy out (it was fun to pull out our low-level or beginner certificate magic items, and play up the beginner adventurer tropes - we all bought 50' of rope and 10' poles, my swashbuckler went shopping to specifically buy ugly and mismatched clothing). Both were lots of fun.
In a home game, we were near leveling and had some down time, so we purposefully answered an ad requesting novice adventurers, and we went on a classic mini-quest of killing spiders in a basement, fending off a thief ambush in an alley, and escorting a merchant to the other side of town. There was really no danger, but we all had a blast with it!

[Goblin_Priest]

You want to keepit hidden from only characters or also their players?

[Limas Venomscale]

Goblin_Priest wrote:

You want to keepit hidden from only characters or also their players?

Kept from the characters

[Ciaran Barnes]

I ran a short-term game where one of the players brought one of his old characters out of retirement to serve as a mentor/teacher/bodyguard to another player's character (who was the son of the player's old character, who was a friend of the mentor). He was 5th, the others were 1st. They knew he was higher level though. This was a special case mostly for posterity, and because it was just a few sessions. Disparity in levels is something I was OK with when I was a kid, but not now. It makes crafting suitable challenges more difficult.

[GoblinDog]

Just finished a 2 year campaign of Rise of the Runelords where one PC's backstory was that he was an immortal (as in ageless, but can be killed) dragonborn.

Party seemed genuinely interested as he slowly revealed bits of his backstory as the game went on. By the end, the party was interested in learning his entire backstory.

Mechanically, he was always at the same level as the group, but was only "revealing more of his power as his allies grew more powerful"