Starting Level of Experience for Player Characters

Once we've established what a character will look like at any level — and knowing that characters of higher level will have more defenses against possible deaths, more widespread and powerful abilities and expectations of fighting more interesting monsters — we cannot be surprised to find Players and DMs alike opting to start campaigns at 5th, 10th or 15th level.  The immediate benefits are too tempting and much too gratifying.  Experienced players in particular, who have observed every character class sufficiently to be jaded, will want to "get down to it" with regards to the campaign, without the pesky trouble of waiting to level up.

Additionally, where the games being played are one page adventures, or where the "campaign" extends no further for these player characters than the end of this module, it's absurd to keep track of experience or even treasure, except where that treasure immediately strengthens the character.  Thus it arises that much of the game's accounting, as well as fruitless bothering ourselves with the preservation of our resources, can be discarded directly through shortening the game's scope and eliminating much of the game's needless functionality.  This enables the players to focus on the moment-to-moment aspects of D&D: i.e., what happens when we open this door, how is this combat going to resolve itself, what is the solution to the convoluted puzzle at the root of the adventure and what sort of character do I feel like playing when this adventure is done and we start a new campaign?

We should recognize that the game is not, as many people think, about overcoming odds and receiving rewards, but about the players feel instantly delighted with their choices.  A furtherance of that ideal is that the players should be free to pick and choose from magic items they've never had the opportunity to use before, or investigate spell levels that they've not yet fully explored, so that they have the chance to fight complex and extremely rare enemies that have been encountered only one or two times before.  No player should ever be forced to "make do" with the tired, overused monsters and problems that may have once seemed worth trying, but are now so yesterday.  D&D shouldn't consist of yet one more banal encounter with orcs!  Surely, a DM should count themselves ashamed to propose such unoriginal material for a gaming adventure!

D&D is about having fun.  No one can have fun with so few hit points that they must worry about being killed by some hacky wandering monster.  Fun is so not there if the players have a mere five or six magic items to their name.  Going through the laborious process of having to actually work ones way up in levels, encounter by encounter, is no way to encourage a good time.  A good DM knows to keep the player's appetite whetted, by ensuring that all the toys are available for today's play.  Game night is not about being stingy; DMs should not be ungenerous!  They should knock the bars off the gates of exuberance and indulgence, and let the players run riot.

Only the worst scrooge of a DM would insist on players actually starting at first level and painstakingly making their way through an extended, pedantic and dull-minded campaign, where every point of experience and copper coin needs to be obnoxiously counted.  What an outrage.  Such DMs, who think the game's "purpose" is found in such balance-sheet keeping, should be identified, tagged and banned from all public gaming groups and D&D get-togethers, in a show of solidarity against these wretches who feel the game should be played as it was originally written in the original books.  In another generation, with firm resolution, we shall purge the hobby of these people, ensuring that D&D being played for "fun" will remain as the only socially acceptable model.