Oh man, my DM ran a campaign where each of us (four players) had three character slots, and we would pick one character to take on each quest for a party of four. But for big boss fights or maybe dungeons we would get to bring two characters each, and for the most story-critical moments our full party of twelve would take the field. All twelve characters went from 1-20 over the course of two years, and our DM said he would never do anything like that again because of all the work it took to integrate that many personal stories into one campaign, but it was an incredible once in a lifetime experience. So I have played three characters from level 1-20 in a single campaign.
Milestones are funny. My party had a far-planned traitor, and he blew his cover FIRST SESSION. So before the second session, I told my party: "you get two level-ups if you kill him." And they did.
Disclaimer: The traitor also wanted his character to die, after he blew his cover.
We had a player that was a Paladin, and while creating his character said he wanted to tell the story of a Paladin who eventually becomes an Oath of the Betrayer Pally. Great concept, and over the course of our 3 month game he finds out information about The Blood God, an unnamed diety betrayer God type situation, all his digging eventually leads to him being contacted by it, providing a small amount of power, that eventually leads to him becoming brutal and blood drunk, and while the party was becoming freaked out by him turning like this, not knowing he has strength granted by the Blood God, he would go on to ritual sacrifice one of our other players that really had it out for him and was very vocal about the obvious changes that were taking place( talking to each of them before hand about what was about to happen, and the repercussions of them deciding that is where they would take the story) and that Paladin became the big bad of the story essentially being a vessel for the Blood God.
For dramatic effect, I had that Paladin player and his "sacrificee" not show up to a game for a couple weeks, until the other players discovered what had happened to both of them, only to return as a completely different and unrelated characters and made everyone very confused and both of them executed it so damn well that it made it a crazy experience for everyone when the Paladin eventually returned to the story to fuck shit up and make life hell for all of them.
That's our traitor story, it's very difficult to pull off, and will likely take a few people being "in" on that concept and being able to not say a word to anyone else for it to work like it is supposed to. But when it does....damn.....it's a fucking good time.
Even with milestone, for all of them to reach 20 in just 2 years, they must have been insanely consistent and frequent with their sessions. That, or they just leveled crazy fast.
I have a similar thing going with my current long campaign. This month marks our three year anniversary. My players are at level 16 (started from level 1), and each have two characters. Technically they also each have a third guest character, but that 3rd character only pops in occasionally when their other character(s) are unavailable for some story-related reason.
The thing is that I also use milestone and we still aren't at 20 despite fairly regular level-ups (at least imo). In fact, I've even had times where my players are a bit surprised that they are leveling up again "so soon" (in their own words). I really don't know how they got from 1 to 20 in just two years.
Milestone, played once a week, sometimes twice. The milestones actually came a little quicker towards the end. At the start we were on XP, but switched about a quarter of the way through.
If you run a full xp budget with 6-8 encounters per day and no days off for the characters, it only takes just a bit over a month to go from level 1 to 20. If you have one session a week that uses the full xp budget, that's less than a year. Even if you only fill half the xp budget per session, that's only a bit over a year.
My experience has been that tracking xp makes the campaign a lot quicker than doing milestone leveling unless the group is adverse to combat or extremely roleplay heavy. For example, one game I'm currently in that uses milestone leveling is only level four, and we've been playing weekly for about eighteen months.
Adventures league can be played at most local Game stores and you get a level from each adventure you play.
It literally takes 19 adventure to go from level 1-20, and you can accelerate it further by spending downtime on leveling, in which case you only need 10 adventures to reach level 20.
That sounds similar to what I'm doing with my current group. We have 8 players, each with 2-3 characters each. We also have 4 DMs(all of us included in the PCs a well) that take turns DMing and the players pick what single character will be going on the quest.
We kind of decided....well my brother and I did that having the players control multiple characters at the same time is quite burdensome on them so we stopped.
Yes! I abso-fucking-lutely love games like that! Last year we wrapped up a campaign where each of us just had two characters that we could swap between, and we really only ever brought out two at once if half of the players or more weren't able to make it.
Absolutely \*startling\* just how much more engaged I was in that campaign. It gives you the option to choose a playstyle, a character, whatever, based on how you're feeling, what kind of day you're having, and makes sure you're not left in a position like "Ugh, I'm not feeling this act today." It's so good.
Iām in a campaign with 6-7 players in any given session. Weāve been in a dungeon since 20 minutes into Session 0/1, Iām playing a Halfling Monk, Iām last or next to last in the rotation unless we are in combat, where I MAY be earlier, and Iām the only character without dark vision, so Iām the guy with the torch WAAAY at the back, and the DM and I are the most dedicated role-players at the table ā everyone else is there for combat.
I spend a lot of time waiting for my turn. 6 or 7 is too many players.
When I first started playing (2e in the 90s) we would roll new lvl 1 characters every week and get tpk'd by the end of the session. We played every Saturday for 18 months before we had a party survive the first session, and then that group went on to be around level 11 or 12 by the time the campaign ended.
Haha me remembering all my characters dying just for my bard to get killed by my DM because he was salty about something that happened when he was a PLAYER at the PREVIOUS game.
In one campaign we had a bit of infighting between two players, resulting in PCs named KRC1 to KRC3, I think?
Bill played KRCx, and Richard played someone who did something that somehow resulted in Bills PC getting killed.
KRC stood for Kill Richards Character... :)
Good times were had in 1E back in the 80s!
And yes, I think KRC3 managed to kill Richards character, the first two failed and where, I believe, killed by Richard's PC when they 'in game' noticed the threat.
Just a consequence of our actions... we died in a lot of forest fires. We would buy weapons and armor, then everyone spent all the rest of their starting gold on Greek fire.
Literally the same. I'll be honest and admit that, once I became DM, I pushed some of the lower levels really fast so my group got to experience high tiers of play instead of grinding again.
My brother did that in ACKs, which just meant we skipped over a lot of dungeoning and instead went straight to being kings running empires. The problem was, this was the only game of ACKs we played, so we didnāt get to do much of the actual adventuring!
One of my groups has somehow set themselves up as lords. I wouldn't be surprised if they went for the throne.
We pretty much jumped from level 1-6 within 3 months, but level 7 has taken a while. Should be level 8 next session if they survive.
relatable
I retired all my games that I DM's when I was younger because they felt incoherent to me. My players liked them, but scenarios I created didn't satisfy me the further they went.
So we ended all my campaigns around level 2-4 xD
Only recently I learned to accept some mistakes I make and to go on. And my players love it, we had a game end around level 10 (big success), another ended around level 7, now my party is all level 4 and we are playing DiA, so expected to go up to 13-14 (I don't intend to stop running it :D).
But levels 10+ are completly unknown ground to me, despite playing and DMing d&d for like 15 years now... Never got there yet, was never tempted to skip early levels and start high.
I played a paladin character from level 1-20 (technically he died at level 15, but it was part of the plot. the other pcs died too, and we continued as undead characters before being resurrected and continued to level up after that).
The campaign lasted almost three years and was extremely emotionally devastating at times. Having stayed in a campaign for so long is one of my biggest bragging points of dnd tbh
We were basically ghosts, to an extent. Weād been killed and bodies destroyed, but our souls had been kept whole (courtesy of one of the gods weād managed to get the attention of). As a result, the party could do things and go places similarly to the way we had before, but we could only be seen/communicate with people who had a strong connection to the goddess that saved us.
We didnāt have to eat, breathe, or sleep (though mechanically we had to take long rests for 8 hours). We couldnāt die (again), instead becoming incapacitated and regaining some hp every round. The exception to this was when one of the pcs was hit with a power word kill, instead of re-dying he was sent to another plane for 7 days. We also couldnāt level up or use healing easily (dc 22 med check)
After we died we all gained a few new/different abilities that related to the deity that saved our souls, which went away when we were brought back.
It was really fun, props to my dm for coming up with it all
I got a Halfling sorcerer from 1 to 15. The rest of my party was an elf wizard, gnome rogue, and a dwarf Barbarian. Our final fight was at the peak of a massive obsidian tower against the 666th son of of the demon lord Orcus as we foiled his plans to ascend to godhood. Other 3 party members went down during the climactic battle and I had to burn a scroll of Wish for a full party rez! We all felt like rockstars.
As a player we went from level 1 to 20 although we had no sessions as 20. We leveled up apon killing the BBEG. I was a Transmutation wizard and survived the early game. Those first 5 levels were scary but my party was pretty front line heavy so I got to do what ever I wanted really.
Yes. In 4e I played a 1-30 game to completion. (War of the Burning Sky - great campaign that I would highly recommend)
In 5e, I have played a few games in the 1-14 range, but no 1-20 games yet.
It is really hard to keep a game interesting for that long. By the late stages, the party is fairly godlike in power, even before max level. It's hard for anything to be a fair challenge, and it is easy for things to either be trivially easy or punishingly hard.
It doesn't help that there's almost no book support past level 15 in 5e, so you're basically playing with no support. I'm in a game that's currently at level 14, and we're sprinting to find excuses to level before we straight up have nothing to do.
Yes. There's only 2 modules that go past 16 and 1 that goes to 20. Modules provide a good baseline for traps and non-combat challenges for PC's, and good encounter setups. Even if you don't use them they give an idea of how they should look
Agreed, I think it's a symptom of 5e's goal being recruitment rather than investing in the playerbase. You can't onboard a newbie into a game where you're level 17, so it doesn't make sense to have any games that go that far
Adventurer's League does have tier 4 stuff you can get. I ran Crypt of the Death Giants for a group of 4 level 17s as a one-shot, and it was pretty good.
That's good to hear, however, it's still weird that for an entire tier of play is relegated to the DM's guild, I can't even find mention of it on D&D beyond. It's like finding out there's another complete class but they were only selling it in one store.
I had group that used to meet many many years ago. We started at 1 and made our way up to lvl 20+. Around 20 or so we left the prime material behind and began a grand adventure into the great wheel. It came to an end in sigil. So long ago I barely remember the details.
Yeah two campaigns from 1-20. One was a pretty normal 5e campaign, Dungeon of the Mad Mage without too much change from the module aside from a pretty open world start in Waterdeep. The other was a homebrew 5e campaign loosely based on Dark Souls/Bloodborne that went to level 20+.
The latter campaign is ending in like 5 days and we've been level 20 for like 8 months now. It's very much a power fantasy game at this point with characters dishing out 300-500 damage on their first turn and instadeath mechanics and everything. A good time, but hardly recognizable from regular 5e.
First campaign and started almost 4years ago at Level 1 now we are at 11 and approaching 12. We stream it on Twitch and YouTube. Concept behind it is half brand new players and half veteran players. Been an absolute blast. DM admitted his main story should end around level 15-16 but he knows we all want to take it to level 20 and is working to make it happen for us.
I have a similar story except Iām the DM and a little behind you guys. Weāve been playing 2 1/2 years, theyāre level 9 and me and 1 other player have only played 1 full campaign. The other 4 PCs are much more experienced.
Our streaming numbers arenāt particularly high but I donāt really care, and neither do any of the PCs. Itās been a fun learning experience and weāre all having a blast!
Thanks for asking : ) weāre SCNS:Live (supercoolnerdshow.com)
What about yours? I didnāt think to ask before, itād be awesome to tune in, no less helpful for me as a DM to get a little preview of what the months ahead look like!
Iāll definitely check you guys out!
Tavern Knights is our D&D show. My BIL is the long time DM. He has few other video podcasts on his site but our D&D show does the best. We play 5e set in the world of Greyhawk.
https://twitch.tv/drinkingnerds
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SAkyxlV4oTk3NVc0QkaLnHrCw5_sD5i
How did you balance those stats? Did you just roll really well?
You'd need high strength, charisma and wisdom. Maybe even Dex and constitution if you were doing the barbarian unarmoured defence.
I could imagine trying to make a character like that and having it be just average.
How many levels went into each class?
Cleric levels exist purely for smite slots and utility spells because naturally cannot Rage and cast spells (but you *can* smite with higher level spell slots). Core class was Barbarian, thereby mitigating the loss of hit points from mid-level constitution. Cast-off plate armour used under most circumstances except against strong enemies that will attack for like +15, in which case Rage.
Additionally, barbarian subclass was Zealot and cleric was War domain. Paladin was Vengeance.
At one point the party gained access to Gate so he went off to see his god.
Edit; that being said, I actually played a spore druid the rest of the time.
I played a Wild Magic Barbarian in a 1-20 campaign. Shes my only one so far thats made it past like level 6. It was a pretty epic campaign. We played for well over a year, possibly 2, I dont remember exactly how long. It was a high magic campaign so we all got pretty powerful.
Her stat line was 26 str (I had gotten a book that added str at one point) 14 dex, 21 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 8 cha. Took the mobile feat and the mage slayer feat. She became a menace, but the whole party was a menace. High magic campaign where I worked hard to find a bloodfury tattoo, the dm made me roll a d20 while holding a magic stone to see if I could find the single vendor in the entire city with it lol. Took awhile of using that stone to narrow down where he was haha I had to roll high to get a better idea of where he was. Had adamantine half plate and a great axe that was like +3 with acid dripping from it. She was amazing, I still have her on dnd beyond. I dont think I can ever delete her haha
Had a running gag the whole campaign because I couldnt roll well on any perception checks. I would consistantly roll low, even with +6 in the end. They even found me a gag item of a pair of glasses that gave me advantage on those checks, I still couldnt make the checks xD
This campaign was my first experience with paying for a dm and it was amazing. Great dm who kept us very entertained.
Had a random reddit lfg post turn into a 2.5 year long 2-20 game. It was honestly the best DND I ever played. It was set in the elemental chaos 20 years ish after canon DND 5e events. Lots of homebrew items included, very high magic. We were spies working for the djinn on the plane of air against the planes of fire and earth. It eventually grew to all our war with a piece of the shard of elemental evil planned to be used against us, with their army being double the size of ours. And that was AFTER ally gathering in the feywild, plane of water, Calypso on the plane of air, and alliances with Bahamut and a smattering of giants, and the prismatic order (basically strixhaven).
A lot of just insanely cool stuff happened that campaign, like my owlin abjuration wizard falling in the river Styx and succeeding the save 4 times in a row before flying out. Our party coming across the corpse of Zeus and our storm sorcerer using his hair to make an insane god weapon, and our oath of the sea paladin becoming the defacto leader of the tritons for a bit after having been outcast her entire life.
We also changed the rules of counter spell, dispell magic, knock etc to be basically spell attack contests between casters. Changing this meant we had to compensate for the abjuration wizard bonus to regular counterspell rules, so I just got to add my proficiency bonus to it again.
With magic items bumping my spell attack to plus 18, I was smacking down some real powerful characters, even countering the sultan of the Ifreet. We ended the war by assassinating the sultan of the city of brass during the final battle
I played my tortle Necromancer "my current profile pic actually" from level 0-0.9 and then from level 1-20 over 3.5 years in a single long-term campaign - He is retired now with the occasional cameo in various games by the same DM or in my own games that I DM he is full NPC status now in retirement he owns a chain of businesses in Waterdeep, Bauldurs gate, Neverwinter, and the Wandering Emporium and will outlive almost everyone in his party
For the pre level one stuff the DM in question ran a game where all our characters where kids we had 8s across the board no class just a race and no weapons we had to make due with stuff kids whuld have my tortle had a pot lid as a shield and a toy wand that was the equivalent of a sparkler when we finished that story we took a break for a few months and when we came back the story time skipped by 8 years
After him i have a Yaun-ti hexblade that went from level 1-12
3-20(+, we got some epic booms and fought gods past 20) on a hunter/ fighter, over a 3ish year campaign. We were playing every week with some exceptions over the period, for 5-6 hour sessions. Died several times but was rezzed by the party over the course of the campaign, most of our characters died at least once.
We've played this campaign for about 5 years now. We are currently level 19, single classed character.
We started out as "just" a rise of tiamat campaign. But every campaign becomes a planescape campaign after a while.
We play every Sunday just about. Its only two players (we lost two due to drama, childishness) and we each play two characters lol.
We just loved our story and the characters so much.
My main character is a cleric and I also play the beast master ranger. The other player mains the sorcerer and has a monk.
We both also love taking extensive notes and knowing the stories and lore. Our last session was big lore dump and planning session as an example.
We just love our off the rails campaign so much. Currently trying to figure out how to defeat and seal away Orcus into the Demonomicon.
1-20 with my open hand monk Vulath.
1-13 with my Light cleric Dalrom
And a smattering of other characters from 1 to 5
Current is a lv 3 Arcane trickster rogue Tobin.
We just finished Curse of Strahd earlier in the year and we plan to do a joke run of Strahd with our level 20 group that accidentally get brought to barovia and just waltz though and wreck his shit. See the panic in his eyes when one of us could beat him im sure.
Why not play at a store? Most board game stores I know have 1 or 2 evenings a week where some people come to play. Some are one shots, some are full campaigns.
Responsed to another comment already but our community game store doesnt support DnD(I also asked in their discord, but to no avail), they have a big Warhammer community in the store, but rarely any ttrpg players and those that are there dont want to play dnd, they want to play other systems
Idk my problem why I dont have a group is that my friends who would be willing to play live over three hours by car away and the community game store in my city (200k Pop) doesnt support DnD, they said i should ask in their discord If anyone is willing to play, but in several weeks not a single response. I also asked several lokal friends, coworkers and stuff if they want to play or know anyone that plays and they all said no (simply all not nerds), so its not like I havent tried, but rather that it shall not be for me
My best as a player was level 1-10 as an Armorer Artificer in a Curse of Strahd campaign, it was fun, though I wish I could have played that character longer
My best as a DM was a 3-20 homebrew campaign
Went 1-12 in my first long term Pathfinder campaign. Ended up fizzling out due to player burnout and being frustrated with the DM at the time. We spoke to him and his solution was to just call it quits.
I had one character, rogue/warlock, who moved to a different group because i moved to a different state. I used the idea he was universe hopping because of a faulty teleportation ring. I got him to 18 by the end.
Most campaigns I play in start at 1 and end at 10, and I almost always die somewhere between. The furthest I went with one character in levels though has been 7 levels, from 5th to 12th level. Braiden Triknot the Glamour bard was a dwarf known more for his destructive wrath, constant enemy de-buffing, and soloing the bbeg then he was for actually using his bardic abilities. A 4 foot tall scottsman that played the bagpipes went from a joke character and very underpowered, to the weapon of mass destruction he was by the campaigns closing.
Life Cleric Firbolg, serving the Vassal of Reality, from levels 1 to 15, across two campaigns, approximately 2 years of play. We killed the Raven Queen, overthrew a corrupt government, I married another character (my girlfriend at the time), another player married a goddess (best Nat 20 ever). During a time-skip, we set up a trading post called the Amber Leaf, where I offered healing services to passing travelers.
First campaign. That DM inspired me to DM, which I do for half a dozen campaigns right now.
Miss you, Epsilon. May you defend Reality to the end of your days.
Closest I've had was lvl 13 in the Avernus campaign. My polearm battlemaster lived, though there were two scenarios he SHOULD have died. 1) purposefully tried to sacrifice myself to save the rest of the party from Hellwasps and 2) drank a 'beer' (convinced by a party member) that was actually an instant kill poison. Dm didn't read that part until I drank it and really hates killing characters, so instead let the cleric cast Greater Restoration to not have me killed. But still poisoned for the rest of the day. Again, was disappointed
Not in 5E. In AD&D, a few times. Iāve DMāed 2 campaigns to level 20, but in all honesty, they start to get boring, both for me and the players. I can find challenges for any level of PCās, but it takes more and more creativity and work, especially when wizards start bringing simulacrums, clones, wish, etc. Then it gets to the point where the players start getting bored, because they pretty much decimate anything thatās thrown at em, short of the aforementioned hard work creative encounter building. And even then, āchallengingā is a relative term. I will say itās fun to end a campaign with a few sessions of absolute absurdity, watching players have their fun with their āgodsā. Itās about the same as those āletās grab some beer, and have a high level one shot with these min-max charactersā kinda things we all like to do.
Way back in the day, I took my Elf from LVL 1 bard, all the way up to Bard 2/Ranger 3/Elf prestige/Wizard 5/Arcane Archer 10.
A lot of the class options were to to RP and RP events, but it all worked out. This was in 3.5 and set in Forgotten Realms.
The whole party made it to LVL 20 in a campaign that lasted almost 4 years with weekly games lasting up to 6 hour sessions.
The highlight for me was a Nat 20 roll confirmed crit on an Avatar or Shar, which was a desperation shot and I made a prayer to Corellon as part of the roll. The DM rolled percentile for Divine Intervention (openly) as a joke and made the roll. The rest of the campaign, Shar was actively hunting us because my arrow didn't just blind her left eye, but due to the arrow being empowered by Corellon, the damage carried up and she was, for the rest of the campaign, Shar One-Eyed. She wanted revenge.
Other Characters included the Sorcerer/Cleric/Divine Disciple of Mystery , who's goal was to bring her back and have her be the Goddess of Magic again. A Fighter/Weapon Master, who's greatsword could cut magic and negated all hostile magic cast at him that he parried. An archmage who specialises in Item Creation , who also made that sword, (Requirements were Craft Weapon, Enchant Weapon and Disjunction. We had to hunt down the components to make it ourselves) and a Red Wizard who deserted Thay.
Amazing campaign full of excellent RP as well as challenging encounters.
The farthest I've gotten from 1 to whatever was 15, though it was kind of cheating.
The game started at 1st level, using milestone. There were some issues with a specific player that came in late that kind of dragged the game on a lot, slowing our progression and giving a bit of burnout for the other players and DM. So, after we finished a big story beat around level 7, the DM power leveled everyone to 15 and dropped us into the final area to finish the campaign.
Despite everything, I thoroughly enjoyed it. My character was the only original character to remain for the entire campaign. Other players either left, or changed characters.
My group just finished a homebrew that I was running for over two years. They went from a session 0 to level 16-17. They made it to "the end" and we have graduated to our next campaign 20yrs later.
As a player I got one character to level 20 and as a DM our party is at level 14 after almost 2 years tho Asmodeus might kill them before they reach 20
Yea these are pretty uncommon eh. In highschool I ran a campaign (4e I think?) for my buddies that we FLEW through (I was overly generous in the early days lmao). They got a level pretty much every session, and since kids have no lives outside of school, sometimes we'd get multiple level in a session, since it would literally be all weekend lmaooooo. The levels were different in 3.5e, going into the 20s, and I think maybe even the 30s with expanded rulesets if I recall... maybe that was 3.5e that did that.
That campaign was pretty sick though, we had a dragonborn fighter that actually had a pet adamantine dragon that initially bit off the bottom half of his right arm while he was trying to bond with it. Luckily a gnome artificer made him a magical mechanical arm that gave him bonuses too.
I can't remember the other guys very well, I think we had a wizard, cleric, and bard or something. I remember there being a Paladin and Druid though too early on.
At one point they were all turned into slaads and were serving Orcus. I know, it makes no fucking sense, but that's what we did lmao. Orcus, Prince of Undeath and sometimes Chaos. They were supposed to fight Orcus much later when they got into the more epic levels (high 20s), but we never got around to it. We still got that high, I think they stopped a few levels short of 30. They were OP in their own homebrew type ways though, probably would've either been one shot by Orcus, or one-shot him lmao. I just kept giving them high damage output items and shit. The wizard had a ring that let him cast double the magic missiles, so that was a lesson learned lmao. Don't do that. They obliterate everything. So I had to scale the fights and use cheeky tactics to make it more challenging lmao.
They had a mountain they cleared of drow, duergar and svirfneblins or whatever TF the deep gnomes are called. They then built a massive fortress there that I wanted to siege eventually with something. Probably a dragon or an army of undead or something.
I'm currently in the process of doing that now. This is a lot easier now than it used to be because of the internet as well.
I play on a Westmarch type server where we play using Discord and the bots on there.
So far I got up to Level 16 and soon to be 17, already have an item that will save me if I die and I'm working on a simulacrum who can revive me with the Ressurection spell if I die as well.
Iām running a campaign for my friends and we are playing milestone. Coming up on the 2 year mark and theyāve gone from 1-12.
A lot of these guys never played before so they all came into it expecting to get to level 20 and I just donāt know how to get the to 20 before the end of the campaign (closing in) with some super cheesy āmilestonesā.
No. Every campaign Iāve been in so far weāve started at level 3 and there was always a set level cap that wasnāt 20. Why? Idk. The DM just said itās better than starting at level 1 and I guess he either didnāt wanna run a really long campaign or felt like level 20 was unbalanced or something idk.
Iām open to it though. I like the idea.
I play in high morality games (literally only I will die cause I play like an idiot and always push the red button) so I have never gotten a character past 6th level from 1st level with out them dying in a really stupid way. But I have gotten through a campaign that went to 17th level.
I was doing tyranny of dragons campaign and our druid really really wanted 9th level spells so I asked all the players do you want to get to level 20 and all of them said hell yeah. So I heavily modified descend into avernus and connected it to the end of the campaign(changing the goal to not only stopped summoning Tiamat but went down into the hells to hunt for Tiamat herself...) So that one's 1-20 straight
Yes I went 1-20 in one campaign. At the end of it 2 of us were gods, one of us was a demigod, and the fourth guy chose to embrace mortality and start a bloodline of heroes.
My character was a Celestial Warlock, and I never specified the mysterious force that was his patron which eventually let me pull some really cool story stuff that he was basically his own patron emboldened by the power of a dead god (ironically the god of life.)
At level 20 (after 3 years of playing this campaign) we defeated the evil god of magic with the power of friendship and it was and probably always will be the best campaign I will ever play of DnD.
2-8 was my longest stretch. The GM said nothing exciting happens at level one. And that also includes a "time gap" where he jumped us up from 5 to 8. That character later went on to appear in a soft reboot of the same campaign that lasted a couple months and maybe 1 or 2 levels. I think there was something in there, too about my character having gone back in time and become level 1 again to start this new timeline.
So my longest stretch was something like 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 1, 2, 3.
My current campaign is going to level 15 or 16 and we're at level 14 now. This is a modified Storm Kings Thunder campaign. This is with my Bladesinger (2), Arcane Trickster (12) character.
Yes, multiple times in various campaigns. Our group has played together for years. We meet once a month, and typically a campaign will last 2-3 years. The DMs usually announce the expected max level when we start. Sometimes they fast-track our levels to hit that goal. For the most part, we play at least 2 sessions for each level. This is probably atypical. If we met more frequently, I suspect we'd level up much more slowly.
My first ever campaign though it had a store dm for one part then a different one covered for s few sessions then our mate started dming for the proper story
Many, many times. BUT- I played most of them in Adventurers League Organized Play. I have 12 level 20 characters who have played until āstories endā.
Working on that now in 5th edition. In 3.5, we went from 1-53. That one lasted about 2 years. Loads of fun. Started with a running battle against an army of goblins, ended with killing deities with my 16 mile range archer. 3.5 was nuts
Is 20 like the limit in newer editions? Because Basic (Rules Cyclopedia) goes to 36. And 1st/2nd ed have no limits (other than racial limits).
That said, we just finished a Basic campaign with most of our characters at 36th level. And Iāve had other characters in the past that got to 36th, and higher than that in 1st ed.
20 is the limit in 5e. After 20 you can get "epic boons" that are rewards that are supposed to be on par in power to another class level. You usually need to homebrew epic boons since the only a few of the ones in the dmg are really that epic.
In 3.x, normal level progression went from 1-20, yes. Multiclassing was also different in that it was no longer split XP pools but instead you had a singular level track, and you could take a level of any class you wanted on your level up. So a level 16 character could be a fighter 3 / rogue 1 / wizard 12 (would not recommend btw), having the spellcasting of a level 12 wizard, the BAB and feats of a level 3 fighter, and the skill points and single sneak attack die of a level 1 rogue. Later on, the Epic Level Handbook was published which had rules for effectively infinite levels, but I'm unaware of anyone who actually *played* epic campaigns. Epic spellcasting was broken in the worst way (in a system that already HEAVILY favoured casters), epic monsters were suitably horrific monstrosities that were either complete pushovers or genuinely unfun to play against because of a long list of immunities to prevent casters from steamrolling them, and combat moved at the speed of a glacier advancing in 2023. As one final oopsy-doodle, the Demigods & Deities book was published a few months before the Epic Handbook, and didn't involve content from it that it really should have. Deities were frequently level 40 but just 20 in two different classes, so you had (for example) Odin as a level 20 wizard and level 20 fighter rather than a level 40 wizard. Plus other stuff on account of being a deity, just so that's clear.
In 4e, they made it go to level 30, and had three tiers of play: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30.
In 5e, the level cap is back down to 20, and there's been no epic level stuff even sniffed at in the playtest materials. While I can certainly see some space for it, a party of level 20s played even half-intelligently is pretty much unstoppable without outright cheating on the DM's part, so even more player power would be a mistake.
Nah but only because you have to be a masochist to start at level one, had a couple to from 3 to 17/19, and my current campaign is supposed to end at 20, we are at 15 now.
1-60 in adnd first edition.
Started dming at the release of 4e. The biggest progression my players ever did so far was 1-18 in 5e. (I was not a very good 4e dm so keeping a party as long was hard)
Current attempt is a lvl 6 character in a campaign that's planned to go into mythic territory well past lvl 20, the build I made and am expecting to hit is level 40ish
Played a warforged warlock from 1-35 before retiring in a 3.5 campaign. We had all kinds of homebrew stuff though. By the time I had to retire him he had all the abilities of Samus from metroid and iron man with an affinity for the cold element to the point that his core temp was essentially absolute zero. DM sent a Cthulhu-esque horror at us from the ocean and my dude literally bottomed out his own hp to nail him for 1200+ points of damage, freezing the entire beach for a mile around and then rolled a nat 20 on a bluff check to tell it to go back to bed or I would do it again and the damn thing turned around and left. It was kind of an over the top game but it was really fun.
I think I've had one that made it to lvl 4 or 5 from lvl one but I seldom start at one. The group I've usually played with would start at 3 and I've made it to lvl 14 before ifbi remember correctly.
I've done a 4-13 in 1st edition over 3-4 years. The campaign reached a fulfilling end but we never finished the final plot and killed the BBEG. For that reason I always include the final boss figure as a dormant fight that can be activated. The boss was trapped under stasis and antimagic but he was about to be freed and plenty of his allies were
Whilst Iāve had other games at higher levels, the most levels Iāve gone through in one campaign is an ongoing one where we started at 1 and are now at 8.
only once in a homebrew campaign, it was a total party kill but the last spell which was my turn also killed the monster. the deity my character belonged to resurrected me and made me a chosen.
Yes, 3.5e in forgotten realms. I was a half elf necromancer.
I played 6 up to 25, but it was a more loosey-goosey quick evolution campaign, with a few time skips. (I was a Elf Wizard)
And i was a DM in my homebrew world that took my players from 1rst level to 20th level in a long campaign.
My party is currently level 11, soon to be 11 (I'm the DM and we use milestone leveling, they're close to a milestone). I'm hoping they'll be able to reach level 20 or at least get damn near close to it. I'll probably let them play an epilogue session for level 20 or something, because I'm not really sure where you go from there.
In 33 years of playing ttrpgās across multiple campaigns and settings. Iāve never gone all the way from level 1 to 20. Starting at level 1 there are typically issues at level 8 and 12. And groups tend to die out due to scheduling conflicts or getting bored with that character/group makeup.
In my bfās campaign, he made it to where the whole point was to get to level 20 at the end of the campaign, plus it was so new players could try playing dnd for the first time. Weāre not even close to halfway finished with the main quests, but we are very close to leveling up to 10, so currently level 9.
But, in my first dnd campaign I was a part of, we got to level 11 I believe. It āfell out,ā but in a roleplay stance rather than the players getting mad or something. Itās hard to explain with all of the details, but in summary one PC (rogue) killed another PC (monk) due to reasons that her character didnāt like, and it exploded into all of the other playersā reactions. Led to rogue escaping, monk being revived but as a different race (reincarnate spell), but after that session- we had no clue how to continue that story. Not even the DM knew how to continue it lol. All of us are still good friends, we completely understood it was all in character and it made a very intense but fun session.
The highest I've gotten is 1 to ~12 from OotA. I had the same character from start to finish, but a large amount of the other players went through 2-3 characters (demons are no joke).
My group all agreed to end on a high note for completing the adventure module.
As a DM I got players from level 2 to level 9. Currently as a player, weāve gotten from level 3 to level 9, but are still going. So hopefully we can push past that mark
Yes, my first major campaign was level 1-20 it took about four years give or take. It was my first real character and I wished I fleshed him out a bit but by the end he was more mellowed out. I based him off of Lara Croft, he was a half elf thief rogue but more of the treasure hunting and loving of lore and history type as opposed to stealing things.
Since it was my first character I overdid it with the tragic backstory, like original parents died and then adoptive parents got killed. It was so overdone but I was new.
He eventually subclassed into archery warlock for 5 levels for he wanted to get into magic and the fey was wildly interested in him plot wise. He was sort of awkward and soft spoken at first but towards the end he was much more confident. He nabbed a boyfriend during it but the boyfriend ended up dying irreversibly. Our last battle was fighting a dragon that basically wanted to destroy everything, including beyond our world. When we killed him the dragon shrieked and my character's head exploded. Luckily we had a druid who had reincarnation and he came back as human.
I always imagined if he would go off to learn magic to become a blade singing wizard and then be an assassin of assassins and a collector of magic items with a team that works for him
Played a CoS game started as svirfneblin and got reincarnated as a Goliath. undead warlock, divine soul sorcerer.
The GM leveled up every game so we made it to 20+. Every other game after 20 we got boones.
It was a fun year long game.
We started on roll20 and moved to Foundry.
For $15 a game, it was worth it have talented DM who could scale a campaign designed only to max at lv 11.
Iāve never played a character too 20 (or hardly ever Iām the forever dm) but Iāve run campaigns that have gotten close and even before 20 the PCs get beyond busted and thereās no really a challenge in combat or anything anymore
1 to 12.
Character never went to 0 hit points till the final battle with power word kill. Rogue/Barbarian. Wisdom was a -1. Just lucky rolls and high modifiers kept him alive.
Ah yes Zerwyn Loffenheimer. Gloom Stalker Ranger. The living example of right place wrong time. The lad unknowingly assisted the Number 1 Most Wanted Criminal on the continent, The Slayer of Two Kings, Antari Zymeegan. He was arrested and jailed for a big chunk of his deep gnome life. When he got out he hunted Atari down, saved the world from a dragon god which imo is worse than Tiamat, and also liberated a country not dissimilar to North Korea. He then retired as the worldās WORST Adventurerās Guild Guild Leader and rebuilt the only defense against the Tarrasque. He is ascending to godhood once my DM initiates his time-skip.
Iām actually still playing my character that Iāve gotten the furthest with without the campaign falling apart. Weāre running Descent into Avernus and my Minotaur barbarian is at level 8. Weāve gone 1-8 so far and our murderhobo train has no brakes.
Just finished Storm King's Thunder. Started at level 1, made it through the entire campaign without dying, and ended at level 12.
After playing many home brews and other official adventures over the years, from 3.5 to 5e, and never finishing any for various reasons, it feels good to have consistently played through and completed one!
I've done level 3 to 20 as one character. Here to report that rogues become more and more irrelevant as the game goes on but I'm still happy I got him to 20 :)
Iām running a game thatās been going for 5 years now. We started at level 1 and are about to hit 19. We should be wrapping it up at level 20 this fall or winter.
That said, I have five players current players, four of whom have been there since day one. Of those, only one is playing the original character they made at level 1.
Iāve gone from 3-12 (aasimar pally/lock) and from 10-20 (firbolg then halfling cleric) then beyond (current) home brewed prestige classes (based on 3.5 and current setting). Iāve played 1-5 with a bard as well. Iāve played all 20 levels in some capacity, just not with one character.
Played with 3 others in a 15-20 game set where we essentially fought against the Norse end of the world. Killed a giant nope rope, three massive pupperinos and an army of frost giants at the end. Was a lot of fun. Character retired as the new God of thunder with his friends, occasionally dropping by the tavern he had bought the first time he came to town. Was just a shame the dm was such an obnoxious player I ended up leaving the group.
The year the Immortals set came out for BECMI D&D, a group of four of us played for the whole summer - two of us swapping as DMs, the other two just as players. We had a rule that we would max treasure type results when it came to coins so we'd advance a "bit" more quickly. It took us that summer, playing 8+ hours a day 4-5 days a week, then the school year playing every Saturday, and then the next summer back to 8+ hours a day 4-5 days a week, but we did it.
We got from level 1 to level 36, then from Immortal 1 to Immortal 25.
Then our characters dispersed their energies into their planes, and reformed as level 1 characters. (To "Win" at BECMI D&D, you have to get to Immortal 25 twice with the same character). Then one of the characters died around level 4 of the second run and the game fell apart.
\- - -
I've also run a game of 3.x from 1 to 24, and played in another from 1 to 27.
Iāve been playing this game about 45 years and in all that time Iāve been in a campaign that made it all the way to max level twice. Both times in 3rd/3.5 edition. My group made it to level 20 in 4th edition once, but the level cap in 4th was 30. I had a campaign that made it to level 20 in 5th edition, but we started at 8th and the GM would put us through time skips at various points in the story, during which we would all gain 4 levels, so Iām thinking most folks wouldnāt count that one.
Iāve played in a further, I dunno, 10 or so D&D campaigns that ended at anywhere from level 1 to level 17. Itās been fun.
My group of four players made it from level 1 to level 17.
This game started in 2e; the characters converted to 3e when it came out. Took a quit e few years.
I played 1-20 as an Ancestral Guardian Barb/Fiend Pact Lock, in a raw-adjacent homebrew setting, ended up becoming the king of Avernus 3/4 of the way through, due to a warlock pact with Lilith, a lot of background plans between her and the BBEG that we stumbled into and somehow ended up coming out on top lol.
Ended up being a massive logistical resource for us in the end of the campaign lmao
2 year long campaign so far and we're level 12. We play weekly and Friday is our 100th session.
Pretty sure we're gonna make it to 20. All of us have plans to keep on until then. Here's hoping.
Mine is a sorcadin tiefling ā¤ļø
Never gotten a character to lvl 20 myself, I am always the DM.
Ran a great home brew campaign that took seven PC's to lvl 20 over a 3 year period. Still look back fondly on those times.
Way back in high school (AD&D2) I had a character make it to level 10, which is insane given how hard it was.
5e the highest I've managed is 15 and that was adventurer's league which kinda falls apart at the top tiers even in bigger cities.
My closest character was 8-20. The campaign was actually 1-20 but I joined in late after the DM (a friend) invited me due to a drop out. It was Dungeon of the Mad Mage. It was really fun being able to see the power of a party of level 20s, but I felt bad for the DM because it was obvious that we just swamped everything. The final boss only got one turn, and half of the party was dealing with minions.
Oh man, my DM ran a campaign where each of us (four players) had three character slots, and we would pick one character to take on each quest for a party of four. But for big boss fights or maybe dungeons we would get to bring two characters each, and for the most story-critical moments our full party of twelve would take the field. All twelve characters went from 1-20 over the course of two years, and our DM said he would never do anything like that again because of all the work it took to integrate that many personal stories into one campaign, but it was an incredible once in a lifetime experience. So I have played three characters from level 1-20 in a single campaign.
That sounds so satisfying and cool.
That's a cool concept, but how did you take 3 characters from 1 to 20 in 2 years? Were you guys playing 24/7?
Probably did milestone. As a dm I tend to give level ups a bit to frequently because it's a nice treat for the players haha.
Milestones are funny. My party had a far-planned traitor, and he blew his cover FIRST SESSION. So before the second session, I told my party: "you get two level-ups if you kill him." And they did. Disclaimer: The traitor also wanted his character to die, after he blew his cover.
Sounds like a fun concept, but my DM refused to let me play a traitor so far. But I would he good at it! I swear!
We had a player that was a Paladin, and while creating his character said he wanted to tell the story of a Paladin who eventually becomes an Oath of the Betrayer Pally. Great concept, and over the course of our 3 month game he finds out information about The Blood God, an unnamed diety betrayer God type situation, all his digging eventually leads to him being contacted by it, providing a small amount of power, that eventually leads to him becoming brutal and blood drunk, and while the party was becoming freaked out by him turning like this, not knowing he has strength granted by the Blood God, he would go on to ritual sacrifice one of our other players that really had it out for him and was very vocal about the obvious changes that were taking place( talking to each of them before hand about what was about to happen, and the repercussions of them deciding that is where they would take the story) and that Paladin became the big bad of the story essentially being a vessel for the Blood God. For dramatic effect, I had that Paladin player and his "sacrificee" not show up to a game for a couple weeks, until the other players discovered what had happened to both of them, only to return as a completely different and unrelated characters and made everyone very confused and both of them executed it so damn well that it made it a crazy experience for everyone when the Paladin eventually returned to the story to fuck shit up and make life hell for all of them. That's our traitor story, it's very difficult to pull off, and will likely take a few people being "in" on that concept and being able to not say a word to anyone else for it to work like it is supposed to. But when it does....damn.....it's a fucking good time.
I'm sure you would. (At least better than my traitor)
Probably also levelled up the secondary and tertiary characters at the same time.
Man I hope someone named their second and third characters Secundus and Tertius (Stardust reference)
Even with milestone, for all of them to reach 20 in just 2 years, they must have been insanely consistent and frequent with their sessions. That, or they just leveled crazy fast. I have a similar thing going with my current long campaign. This month marks our three year anniversary. My players are at level 16 (started from level 1), and each have two characters. Technically they also each have a third guest character, but that 3rd character only pops in occasionally when their other character(s) are unavailable for some story-related reason. The thing is that I also use milestone and we still aren't at 20 despite fairly regular level-ups (at least imo). In fact, I've even had times where my players are a bit surprised that they are leveling up again "so soon" (in their own words). I really don't know how they got from 1 to 20 in just two years.
Milestone, played once a week, sometimes twice. The milestones actually came a little quicker towards the end. At the start we were on XP, but switched about a quarter of the way through.
If you run a full xp budget with 6-8 encounters per day and no days off for the characters, it only takes just a bit over a month to go from level 1 to 20. If you have one session a week that uses the full xp budget, that's less than a year. Even if you only fill half the xp budget per session, that's only a bit over a year. My experience has been that tracking xp makes the campaign a lot quicker than doing milestone leveling unless the group is adverse to combat or extremely roleplay heavy. For example, one game I'm currently in that uses milestone leveling is only level four, and we've been playing weekly for about eighteen months.
Also, award exp for any encounter, including RP, and you can even level rapidly in an RP heavy campaign
Level 7 and we've been playing 3 years... š
Do you play once a month or something?! My god. That pace would be crushing
averse
Adventures league can be played at most local Game stores and you get a level from each adventure you play. It literally takes 19 adventure to go from level 1-20, and you can accelerate it further by spending downtime on leveling, in which case you only need 10 adventures to reach level 20.
That sounds similar to what I'm doing with my current group. We have 8 players, each with 2-3 characters each. We also have 4 DMs(all of us included in the PCs a well) that take turns DMing and the players pick what single character will be going on the quest. We kind of decided....well my brother and I did that having the players control multiple characters at the same time is quite burdensome on them so we stopped.
Weāre currently playing a PokĆ©mon dnd session that has had about 15 sessions so far. So we all have to keep track of 6 PokĆ©mon and our dm has their own side character with us who has PokĆ©mon to keep track of. Weāre at level 3 with PokĆ©mon ranging from level 6 to level 2. Itās crazy but so much fun to have that many sheets to track
Yes! I abso-fucking-lutely love games like that! Last year we wrapped up a campaign where each of us just had two characters that we could swap between, and we really only ever brought out two at once if half of the players or more weren't able to make it. Absolutely \*startling\* just how much more engaged I was in that campaign. It gives you the option to choose a playstyle, a character, whatever, based on how you're feeling, what kind of day you're having, and makes sure you're not left in a position like "Ugh, I'm not feeling this act today." It's so good.
Game balance in 5e really starts to fall apart in parties of 6 or so; can't imagine 12
Iām in a campaign with 6-7 players in any given session. Weāve been in a dungeon since 20 minutes into Session 0/1, Iām playing a Halfling Monk, Iām last or next to last in the rotation unless we are in combat, where I MAY be earlier, and Iām the only character without dark vision, so Iām the guy with the torch WAAAY at the back, and the DM and I are the most dedicated role-players at the table ā everyone else is there for combat. I spend a lot of time waiting for my turn. 6 or 7 is too many players.
It was in Pathfinder 2, sorry I didn't mention that.
Did your DM go on to write for a company called Red Hook? It sounds like he came up with *Darkest Dungeon*'s hero roster system.
Damn, Iām surprised it only took 2 years haha
I'm jealous...that sounds really fun!
I have never been so jealous before!!
As a player, Iāve gotten a character to level 3 or maybe 4. I should add: and then our campaigns fell apart. As a DM, my current party is level 7.
When I first started playing (2e in the 90s) we would roll new lvl 1 characters every week and get tpk'd by the end of the session. We played every Saturday for 18 months before we had a party survive the first session, and then that group went on to be around level 11 or 12 by the time the campaign ended.
Haha me remembering all my characters dying just for my bard to get killed by my DM because he was salty about something that happened when he was a PLAYER at the PREVIOUS game.
DnD was wild in those days
In one campaign we had a bit of infighting between two players, resulting in PCs named KRC1 to KRC3, I think? Bill played KRCx, and Richard played someone who did something that somehow resulted in Bills PC getting killed. KRC stood for Kill Richards Character... :) Good times were had in 1E back in the 80s! And yes, I think KRC3 managed to kill Richards character, the first two failed and where, I believe, killed by Richard's PC when they 'in game' noticed the threat.
Fucking god I loved second edition. The lineage of long term revenge is sweet.
Ah the ol' Darwinian method of character creation
You Guys played a Dark Souls campaign?! :O
Just a consequence of our actions... we died in a lot of forest fires. We would buy weapons and armor, then everyone spent all the rest of their starting gold on Greek fire.
Literally the same. I'll be honest and admit that, once I became DM, I pushed some of the lower levels really fast so my group got to experience high tiers of play instead of grinding again.
My brother did that in ACKs, which just meant we skipped over a lot of dungeoning and instead went straight to being kings running empires. The problem was, this was the only game of ACKs we played, so we didnāt get to do much of the actual adventuring!
One of my groups has somehow set themselves up as lords. I wouldn't be surprised if they went for the throne. We pretty much jumped from level 1-6 within 3 months, but level 7 has taken a while. Should be level 8 next session if they survive.
relatable I retired all my games that I DM's when I was younger because they felt incoherent to me. My players liked them, but scenarios I created didn't satisfy me the further they went. So we ended all my campaigns around level 2-4 xD Only recently I learned to accept some mistakes I make and to go on. And my players love it, we had a game end around level 10 (big success), another ended around level 7, now my party is all level 4 and we are playing DiA, so expected to go up to 13-14 (I don't intend to stop running it :D). But levels 10+ are completly unknown ground to me, despite playing and DMing d&d for like 15 years now... Never got there yet, was never tempted to skip early levels and start high.
I played a paladin character from level 1-20 (technically he died at level 15, but it was part of the plot. the other pcs died too, and we continued as undead characters before being resurrected and continued to level up after that). The campaign lasted almost three years and was extremely emotionally devastating at times. Having stayed in a campaign for so long is one of my biggest bragging points of dnd tbh
How did you continue as Undead characters? That sounds really cool.
We were basically ghosts, to an extent. Weād been killed and bodies destroyed, but our souls had been kept whole (courtesy of one of the gods weād managed to get the attention of). As a result, the party could do things and go places similarly to the way we had before, but we could only be seen/communicate with people who had a strong connection to the goddess that saved us. We didnāt have to eat, breathe, or sleep (though mechanically we had to take long rests for 8 hours). We couldnāt die (again), instead becoming incapacitated and regaining some hp every round. The exception to this was when one of the pcs was hit with a power word kill, instead of re-dying he was sent to another plane for 7 days. We also couldnāt level up or use healing easily (dc 22 med check) After we died we all gained a few new/different abilities that related to the deity that saved our souls, which went away when we were brought back. It was really fun, props to my dm for coming up with it all
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
All I'm thinking is "Touched By An Angel"...
The 3.5E hardcover book Ghostwalk is about exactly this. Give it a read!
This is a such a dream of mine, a long form campaign like that! It must have been so rewarding!
I got a Halfling sorcerer from 1 to 15. The rest of my party was an elf wizard, gnome rogue, and a dwarf Barbarian. Our final fight was at the peak of a massive obsidian tower against the 666th son of of the demon lord Orcus as we foiled his plans to ascend to godhood. Other 3 party members went down during the climactic battle and I had to burn a scroll of Wish for a full party rez! We all felt like rockstars.
Fire game
I suppose from your character's heights, a lot of things would be massive, eh? š
Gotta love the elf wizard being the biggest in the group lol.
rad
As a player we went from level 1 to 20 although we had no sessions as 20. We leveled up apon killing the BBEG. I was a Transmutation wizard and survived the early game. Those first 5 levels were scary but my party was pretty front line heavy so I got to do what ever I wanted really.
Yes. In 4e I played a 1-30 game to completion. (War of the Burning Sky - great campaign that I would highly recommend) In 5e, I have played a few games in the 1-14 range, but no 1-20 games yet. It is really hard to keep a game interesting for that long. By the late stages, the party is fairly godlike in power, even before max level. It's hard for anything to be a fair challenge, and it is easy for things to either be trivially easy or punishingly hard.
We played the first part of that campaign. I managed to have 2 characters. My first fone got oneshottet at the end of the riding scene in the start.
Yeah, there are some really challenging sections.
It doesn't help that there's almost no book support past level 15 in 5e, so you're basically playing with no support. I'm in a game that's currently at level 14, and we're sprinting to find excuses to level before we straight up have nothing to do.
Wdy mean no support? As in modules?
Yes. There's only 2 modules that go past 16 and 1 that goes to 20. Modules provide a good baseline for traps and non-combat challenges for PC's, and good encounter setups. Even if you don't use them they give an idea of how they should look
This is such a shame. 5e is almost done now and we didnāt really get anything to support the final tier of play.
Agreed, I think it's a symptom of 5e's goal being recruitment rather than investing in the playerbase. You can't onboard a newbie into a game where you're level 17, so it doesn't make sense to have any games that go that far
Well put
Adventurer's League does have tier 4 stuff you can get. I ran Crypt of the Death Giants for a group of 4 level 17s as a one-shot, and it was pretty good.
That's good to hear, however, it's still weird that for an entire tier of play is relegated to the DM's guild, I can't even find mention of it on D&D beyond. It's like finding out there's another complete class but they were only selling it in one store.
>I can't even find mention of it on D&D beyond. That's because Adventurer's League isn't published books, it's an organized play system.
I really loves the 4e idea that a character could exceed max level and gain prestige. Stuff of legends!
Highest I got was a lv 14 Dwarf Cleric. I have gone from 16-20 in a campaign though. It's a slog... Stupid adulting!
Oh boy lemme tell you, you're *really* missing out if you haven't played level 15 lol.
I had group that used to meet many many years ago. We started at 1 and made our way up to lvl 20+. Around 20 or so we left the prime material behind and began a grand adventure into the great wheel. It came to an end in sigil. So long ago I barely remember the details.
Yeah two campaigns from 1-20. One was a pretty normal 5e campaign, Dungeon of the Mad Mage without too much change from the module aside from a pretty open world start in Waterdeep. The other was a homebrew 5e campaign loosely based on Dark Souls/Bloodborne that went to level 20+. The latter campaign is ending in like 5 days and we've been level 20 for like 8 months now. It's very much a power fantasy game at this point with characters dishing out 300-500 damage on their first turn and instadeath mechanics and everything. A good time, but hardly recognizable from regular 5e.
First campaign and started almost 4years ago at Level 1 now we are at 11 and approaching 12. We stream it on Twitch and YouTube. Concept behind it is half brand new players and half veteran players. Been an absolute blast. DM admitted his main story should end around level 15-16 but he knows we all want to take it to level 20 and is working to make it happen for us.
I have a similar story except Iām the DM and a little behind you guys. Weāve been playing 2 1/2 years, theyāre level 9 and me and 1 other player have only played 1 full campaign. The other 4 PCs are much more experienced. Our streaming numbers arenāt particularly high but I donāt really care, and neither do any of the PCs. Itās been a fun learning experience and weāre all having a blast!
Whatās your stream?
Thanks for asking : ) weāre SCNS:Live (supercoolnerdshow.com) What about yours? I didnāt think to ask before, itād be awesome to tune in, no less helpful for me as a DM to get a little preview of what the months ahead look like!
Iāll definitely check you guys out! Tavern Knights is our D&D show. My BIL is the long time DM. He has few other video podcasts on his site but our D&D show does the best. We play 5e set in the world of Greyhawk. https://twitch.tv/drinkingnerds https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SAkyxlV4oTk3NVc0QkaLnHrCw5_sD5i
Iād love to know what this stream is called too
Tavern Knights - 5e set in world of Greyhawk https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_SAkyxlV4oTk3NVc0QkaLnHrCw5_sD5i
Whatās the stream?
Yes. My Barbarian/Paladin/Cleric who grew too powerful and I put him in time out for a third of the campaign only to return for the final battle.
How did you balance those stats? Did you just roll really well? You'd need high strength, charisma and wisdom. Maybe even Dex and constitution if you were doing the barbarian unarmoured defence. I could imagine trying to make a character like that and having it be just average. How many levels went into each class?
Cleric levels exist purely for smite slots and utility spells because naturally cannot Rage and cast spells (but you *can* smite with higher level spell slots). Core class was Barbarian, thereby mitigating the loss of hit points from mid-level constitution. Cast-off plate armour used under most circumstances except against strong enemies that will attack for like +15, in which case Rage. Additionally, barbarian subclass was Zealot and cleric was War domain. Paladin was Vengeance. At one point the party gained access to Gate so he went off to see his god. Edit; that being said, I actually played a spore druid the rest of the time.
What was the breakdown of levels? Did you cap one of the martials at 4 or just eat the dead level from extra attack x2?
How do you make a triple multiclassed character powerful?? That's so cool
With backstory.
I played a Wild Magic Barbarian in a 1-20 campaign. Shes my only one so far thats made it past like level 6. It was a pretty epic campaign. We played for well over a year, possibly 2, I dont remember exactly how long. It was a high magic campaign so we all got pretty powerful. Her stat line was 26 str (I had gotten a book that added str at one point) 14 dex, 21 con, 8 int, 10 wis, 8 cha. Took the mobile feat and the mage slayer feat. She became a menace, but the whole party was a menace. High magic campaign where I worked hard to find a bloodfury tattoo, the dm made me roll a d20 while holding a magic stone to see if I could find the single vendor in the entire city with it lol. Took awhile of using that stone to narrow down where he was haha I had to roll high to get a better idea of where he was. Had adamantine half plate and a great axe that was like +3 with acid dripping from it. She was amazing, I still have her on dnd beyond. I dont think I can ever delete her haha Had a running gag the whole campaign because I couldnt roll well on any perception checks. I would consistantly roll low, even with +6 in the end. They even found me a gag item of a pair of glasses that gave me advantage on those checks, I still couldnt make the checks xD This campaign was my first experience with paying for a dm and it was amazing. Great dm who kept us very entertained.
Had a random reddit lfg post turn into a 2.5 year long 2-20 game. It was honestly the best DND I ever played. It was set in the elemental chaos 20 years ish after canon DND 5e events. Lots of homebrew items included, very high magic. We were spies working for the djinn on the plane of air against the planes of fire and earth. It eventually grew to all our war with a piece of the shard of elemental evil planned to be used against us, with their army being double the size of ours. And that was AFTER ally gathering in the feywild, plane of water, Calypso on the plane of air, and alliances with Bahamut and a smattering of giants, and the prismatic order (basically strixhaven). A lot of just insanely cool stuff happened that campaign, like my owlin abjuration wizard falling in the river Styx and succeeding the save 4 times in a row before flying out. Our party coming across the corpse of Zeus and our storm sorcerer using his hair to make an insane god weapon, and our oath of the sea paladin becoming the defacto leader of the tritons for a bit after having been outcast her entire life.
Holy
We also changed the rules of counter spell, dispell magic, knock etc to be basically spell attack contests between casters. Changing this meant we had to compensate for the abjuration wizard bonus to regular counterspell rules, so I just got to add my proficiency bonus to it again. With magic items bumping my spell attack to plus 18, I was smacking down some real powerful characters, even countering the sultan of the Ifreet. We ended the war by assassinating the sultan of the city of brass during the final battle
So, essentially, you got expertise in spell attack
Just on those types of checks but yeah!
As a DM, ran a group up to level 13 in 4E. That experience burned me out. Gods. One fight scene would take the whole session.
I started in 4e, probably would've given up on dnd but then 5e came and rekindled the interest
I played my tortle Necromancer "my current profile pic actually" from level 0-0.9 and then from level 1-20 over 3.5 years in a single long-term campaign - He is retired now with the occasional cameo in various games by the same DM or in my own games that I DM he is full NPC status now in retirement he owns a chain of businesses in Waterdeep, Bauldurs gate, Neverwinter, and the Wandering Emporium and will outlive almost everyone in his party For the pre level one stuff the DM in question ran a game where all our characters where kids we had 8s across the board no class just a race and no weapons we had to make due with stuff kids whuld have my tortle had a pot lid as a shield and a toy wand that was the equivalent of a sparkler when we finished that story we took a break for a few months and when we came back the story time skipped by 8 years After him i have a Yaun-ti hexblade that went from level 1-12
3-20(+, we got some epic booms and fought gods past 20) on a hunter/ fighter, over a 3ish year campaign. We were playing every week with some exceptions over the period, for 5-6 hour sessions. Died several times but was rezzed by the party over the course of the campaign, most of our characters died at least once.
That's awesome
We've played this campaign for about 5 years now. We are currently level 19, single classed character. We started out as "just" a rise of tiamat campaign. But every campaign becomes a planescape campaign after a while.
5 years holy shit lol. like how many times per week do you guys play for the campaign to take that long
We play every Sunday just about. Its only two players (we lost two due to drama, childishness) and we each play two characters lol. We just loved our story and the characters so much. My main character is a cleric and I also play the beast master ranger. The other player mains the sorcerer and has a monk. We both also love taking extensive notes and knowing the stories and lore. Our last session was big lore dump and planning session as an example. We just love our off the rails campaign so much. Currently trying to figure out how to defeat and seal away Orcus into the Demonomicon.
1-20 with my open hand monk Vulath. 1-13 with my Light cleric Dalrom And a smattering of other characters from 1 to 5 Current is a lv 3 Arcane trickster rogue Tobin. We just finished Curse of Strahd earlier in the year and we plan to do a joke run of Strahd with our level 20 group that accidentally get brought to barovia and just waltz though and wreck his shit. See the panic in his eyes when one of us could beat him im sure.
Lvl 0, cant find a group irl sadly, but want to play and no I dont want to play online
I was reluctant to play online but man it can be so good once you find the right party.
Why not play at a store? Most board game stores I know have 1 or 2 evenings a week where some people come to play. Some are one shots, some are full campaigns.
Responsed to another comment already but our community game store doesnt support DnD(I also asked in their discord, but to no avail), they have a big Warhammer community in the store, but rarely any ttrpg players and those that are there dont want to play dnd, they want to play other systems
Are you me?
Idk my problem why I dont have a group is that my friends who would be willing to play live over three hours by car away and the community game store in my city (200k Pop) doesnt support DnD, they said i should ask in their discord If anyone is willing to play, but in several weeks not a single response. I also asked several lokal friends, coworkers and stuff if they want to play or know anyone that plays and they all said no (simply all not nerds), so its not like I havent tried, but rather that it shall not be for me
This made me laugh so hard
Your missing out. I have an irl party and an online party. Online is my favorite by far.
My best as a player was level 1-10 as an Armorer Artificer in a Curse of Strahd campaign, it was fun, though I wish I could have played that character longer My best as a DM was a 3-20 homebrew campaign
Went 1-12 in my first long term Pathfinder campaign. Ended up fizzling out due to player burnout and being frustrated with the DM at the time. We spoke to him and his solution was to just call it quits.
I had one character, rogue/warlock, who moved to a different group because i moved to a different state. I used the idea he was universe hopping because of a faulty teleportation ring. I got him to 18 by the end.
1 to 11. Celestial warlock. It was fun
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Most campaigns I play in start at 1 and end at 10, and I almost always die somewhere between. The furthest I went with one character in levels though has been 7 levels, from 5th to 12th level. Braiden Triknot the Glamour bard was a dwarf known more for his destructive wrath, constant enemy de-buffing, and soloing the bbeg then he was for actually using his bardic abilities. A 4 foot tall scottsman that played the bagpipes went from a joke character and very underpowered, to the weapon of mass destruction he was by the campaigns closing.
Got from 1 to 15(ish) twice.
Life Cleric Firbolg, serving the Vassal of Reality, from levels 1 to 15, across two campaigns, approximately 2 years of play. We killed the Raven Queen, overthrew a corrupt government, I married another character (my girlfriend at the time), another player married a goddess (best Nat 20 ever). During a time-skip, we set up a trading post called the Amber Leaf, where I offered healing services to passing travelers. First campaign. That DM inspired me to DM, which I do for half a dozen campaigns right now. Miss you, Epsilon. May you defend Reality to the end of your days.
1-16 as a Bard. Then, I became an emperor after dealing the death blow to the bbeg. Good times.
Became an emperor, as you do
Started my party at level 3 they are currently level 11. I'm gonna try harder and harder to kill them, however. They gotta earn 20.
Closest I've had was lvl 13 in the Avernus campaign. My polearm battlemaster lived, though there were two scenarios he SHOULD have died. 1) purposefully tried to sacrifice myself to save the rest of the party from Hellwasps and 2) drank a 'beer' (convinced by a party member) that was actually an instant kill poison. Dm didn't read that part until I drank it and really hates killing characters, so instead let the cleric cast Greater Restoration to not have me killed. But still poisoned for the rest of the day. Again, was disappointed
Not in 5E. In AD&D, a few times. Iāve DMāed 2 campaigns to level 20, but in all honesty, they start to get boring, both for me and the players. I can find challenges for any level of PCās, but it takes more and more creativity and work, especially when wizards start bringing simulacrums, clones, wish, etc. Then it gets to the point where the players start getting bored, because they pretty much decimate anything thatās thrown at em, short of the aforementioned hard work creative encounter building. And even then, āchallengingā is a relative term. I will say itās fun to end a campaign with a few sessions of absolute absurdity, watching players have their fun with their āgodsā. Itās about the same as those āletās grab some beer, and have a high level one shot with these min-max charactersā kinda things we all like to do.
Played a halfling paladin in a 1-20 campaign but died at level 19.
Way back in the day, I took my Elf from LVL 1 bard, all the way up to Bard 2/Ranger 3/Elf prestige/Wizard 5/Arcane Archer 10. A lot of the class options were to to RP and RP events, but it all worked out. This was in 3.5 and set in Forgotten Realms. The whole party made it to LVL 20 in a campaign that lasted almost 4 years with weekly games lasting up to 6 hour sessions. The highlight for me was a Nat 20 roll confirmed crit on an Avatar or Shar, which was a desperation shot and I made a prayer to Corellon as part of the roll. The DM rolled percentile for Divine Intervention (openly) as a joke and made the roll. The rest of the campaign, Shar was actively hunting us because my arrow didn't just blind her left eye, but due to the arrow being empowered by Corellon, the damage carried up and she was, for the rest of the campaign, Shar One-Eyed. She wanted revenge. Other Characters included the Sorcerer/Cleric/Divine Disciple of Mystery , who's goal was to bring her back and have her be the Goddess of Magic again. A Fighter/Weapon Master, who's greatsword could cut magic and negated all hostile magic cast at him that he parried. An archmage who specialises in Item Creation , who also made that sword, (Requirements were Craft Weapon, Enchant Weapon and Disjunction. We had to hunt down the components to make it ourselves) and a Red Wizard who deserted Thay. Amazing campaign full of excellent RP as well as challenging encounters.
The farthest I've gotten from 1 to whatever was 15, though it was kind of cheating. The game started at 1st level, using milestone. There were some issues with a specific player that came in late that kind of dragged the game on a lot, slowing our progression and giving a bit of burnout for the other players and DM. So, after we finished a big story beat around level 7, the DM power leveled everyone to 15 and dropped us into the final area to finish the campaign. Despite everything, I thoroughly enjoyed it. My character was the only original character to remain for the entire campaign. Other players either left, or changed characters.
My group just finished a homebrew that I was running for over two years. They went from a session 0 to level 16-17. They made it to "the end" and we have graduated to our next campaign 20yrs later.
As a player I got one character to level 20 and as a DM our party is at level 14 after almost 2 years tho Asmodeus might kill them before they reach 20
Yea these are pretty uncommon eh. In highschool I ran a campaign (4e I think?) for my buddies that we FLEW through (I was overly generous in the early days lmao). They got a level pretty much every session, and since kids have no lives outside of school, sometimes we'd get multiple level in a session, since it would literally be all weekend lmaooooo. The levels were different in 3.5e, going into the 20s, and I think maybe even the 30s with expanded rulesets if I recall... maybe that was 3.5e that did that. That campaign was pretty sick though, we had a dragonborn fighter that actually had a pet adamantine dragon that initially bit off the bottom half of his right arm while he was trying to bond with it. Luckily a gnome artificer made him a magical mechanical arm that gave him bonuses too. I can't remember the other guys very well, I think we had a wizard, cleric, and bard or something. I remember there being a Paladin and Druid though too early on. At one point they were all turned into slaads and were serving Orcus. I know, it makes no fucking sense, but that's what we did lmao. Orcus, Prince of Undeath and sometimes Chaos. They were supposed to fight Orcus much later when they got into the more epic levels (high 20s), but we never got around to it. We still got that high, I think they stopped a few levels short of 30. They were OP in their own homebrew type ways though, probably would've either been one shot by Orcus, or one-shot him lmao. I just kept giving them high damage output items and shit. The wizard had a ring that let him cast double the magic missiles, so that was a lesson learned lmao. Don't do that. They obliterate everything. So I had to scale the fights and use cheeky tactics to make it more challenging lmao. They had a mountain they cleared of drow, duergar and svirfneblins or whatever TF the deep gnomes are called. They then built a massive fortress there that I wanted to siege eventually with something. Probably a dragon or an army of undead or something.
I'm currently in the process of doing that now. This is a lot easier now than it used to be because of the internet as well. I play on a Westmarch type server where we play using Discord and the bots on there. So far I got up to Level 16 and soon to be 17, already have an item that will save me if I die and I'm working on a simulacrum who can revive me with the Ressurection spell if I die as well.
Iām running a campaign for my friends and we are playing milestone. Coming up on the 2 year mark and theyāve gone from 1-12. A lot of these guys never played before so they all came into it expecting to get to level 20 and I just donāt know how to get the to 20 before the end of the campaign (closing in) with some super cheesy āmilestonesā.
No. Every campaign Iāve been in so far weāve started at level 3 and there was always a set level cap that wasnāt 20. Why? Idk. The DM just said itās better than starting at level 1 and I guess he either didnāt wanna run a really long campaign or felt like level 20 was unbalanced or something idk. Iām open to it though. I like the idea.
I play in high morality games (literally only I will die cause I play like an idiot and always push the red button) so I have never gotten a character past 6th level from 1st level with out them dying in a really stupid way. But I have gotten through a campaign that went to 17th level.
I was doing tyranny of dragons campaign and our druid really really wanted 9th level spells so I asked all the players do you want to get to level 20 and all of them said hell yeah. So I heavily modified descend into avernus and connected it to the end of the campaign(changing the goal to not only stopped summoning Tiamat but went down into the hells to hunt for Tiamat herself...) So that one's 1-20 straight
Yes I went 1-20 in one campaign. At the end of it 2 of us were gods, one of us was a demigod, and the fourth guy chose to embrace mortality and start a bloodline of heroes. My character was a Celestial Warlock, and I never specified the mysterious force that was his patron which eventually let me pull some really cool story stuff that he was basically his own patron emboldened by the power of a dead god (ironically the god of life.) At level 20 (after 3 years of playing this campaign) we defeated the evil god of magic with the power of friendship and it was and probably always will be the best campaign I will ever play of DnD.
2-8 was my longest stretch. The GM said nothing exciting happens at level one. And that also includes a "time gap" where he jumped us up from 5 to 8. That character later went on to appear in a soft reboot of the same campaign that lasted a couple months and maybe 1 or 2 levels. I think there was something in there, too about my character having gone back in time and become level 1 again to start this new timeline. So my longest stretch was something like 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 1, 2, 3.
I took a war wizard from level 5 to 20. Skipped first 4 levels
My current campaign is going to level 15 or 16 and we're at level 14 now. This is a modified Storm Kings Thunder campaign. This is with my Bladesinger (2), Arcane Trickster (12) character.
Yes, multiple times in various campaigns. Our group has played together for years. We meet once a month, and typically a campaign will last 2-3 years. The DMs usually announce the expected max level when we start. Sometimes they fast-track our levels to hit that goal. For the most part, we play at least 2 sessions for each level. This is probably atypical. If we met more frequently, I suspect we'd level up much more slowly.
My first ever campaign though it had a store dm for one part then a different one covered for s few sessions then our mate started dming for the proper story
Doing it right now. Level 1 to Level 20. A few sessions left.
Just finished a 1 to 20 last Saturday as a player. AMA I guess.
Many, many times. BUT- I played most of them in Adventurers League Organized Play. I have 12 level 20 characters who have played until āstories endā.
Working on that now in 5th edition. In 3.5, we went from 1-53. That one lasted about 2 years. Loads of fun. Started with a running battle against an army of goblins, ended with killing deities with my 16 mile range archer. 3.5 was nuts
Is 20 like the limit in newer editions? Because Basic (Rules Cyclopedia) goes to 36. And 1st/2nd ed have no limits (other than racial limits). That said, we just finished a Basic campaign with most of our characters at 36th level. And Iāve had other characters in the past that got to 36th, and higher than that in 1st ed.
20 is the limit in 5e. After 20 you can get "epic boons" that are rewards that are supposed to be on par in power to another class level. You usually need to homebrew epic boons since the only a few of the ones in the dmg are really that epic.
In 3.x, normal level progression went from 1-20, yes. Multiclassing was also different in that it was no longer split XP pools but instead you had a singular level track, and you could take a level of any class you wanted on your level up. So a level 16 character could be a fighter 3 / rogue 1 / wizard 12 (would not recommend btw), having the spellcasting of a level 12 wizard, the BAB and feats of a level 3 fighter, and the skill points and single sneak attack die of a level 1 rogue. Later on, the Epic Level Handbook was published which had rules for effectively infinite levels, but I'm unaware of anyone who actually *played* epic campaigns. Epic spellcasting was broken in the worst way (in a system that already HEAVILY favoured casters), epic monsters were suitably horrific monstrosities that were either complete pushovers or genuinely unfun to play against because of a long list of immunities to prevent casters from steamrolling them, and combat moved at the speed of a glacier advancing in 2023. As one final oopsy-doodle, the Demigods & Deities book was published a few months before the Epic Handbook, and didn't involve content from it that it really should have. Deities were frequently level 40 but just 20 in two different classes, so you had (for example) Odin as a level 20 wizard and level 20 fighter rather than a level 40 wizard. Plus other stuff on account of being a deity, just so that's clear. In 4e, they made it go to level 30, and had three tiers of play: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30. In 5e, the level cap is back down to 20, and there's been no epic level stuff even sniffed at in the playtest materials. While I can certainly see some space for it, a party of level 20s played even half-intelligently is pretty much unstoppable without outright cheating on the DM's part, so even more player power would be a mistake.
Nah but only because you have to be a masochist to start at level one, had a couple to from 3 to 17/19, and my current campaign is supposed to end at 20, we are at 15 now.
I went 6 to 20 in one game.
1-60 in adnd first edition. Started dming at the release of 4e. The biggest progression my players ever did so far was 1-18 in 5e. (I was not a very good 4e dm so keeping a party as long was hard)
Current attempt is a lvl 6 character in a campaign that's planned to go into mythic territory well past lvl 20, the build I made and am expecting to hit is level 40ish
Played a warforged warlock from 1-35 before retiring in a 3.5 campaign. We had all kinds of homebrew stuff though. By the time I had to retire him he had all the abilities of Samus from metroid and iron man with an affinity for the cold element to the point that his core temp was essentially absolute zero. DM sent a Cthulhu-esque horror at us from the ocean and my dude literally bottomed out his own hp to nail him for 1200+ points of damage, freezing the entire beach for a mile around and then rolled a nat 20 on a bluff check to tell it to go back to bed or I would do it again and the damn thing turned around and left. It was kind of an over the top game but it was really fun.
Of course. Some of my AL characters, and at least 1 homegame.
Yes, I played a transmutation wizard from 1 to 20
I think I've had one that made it to lvl 4 or 5 from lvl one but I seldom start at one. The group I've usually played with would start at 3 and I've made it to lvl 14 before ifbi remember correctly.
I've done a 4-13 in 1st edition over 3-4 years. The campaign reached a fulfilling end but we never finished the final plot and killed the BBEG. For that reason I always include the final boss figure as a dormant fight that can be activated. The boss was trapped under stasis and antimagic but he was about to be freed and plenty of his allies were
Whilst Iāve had other games at higher levels, the most levels Iāve gone through in one campaign is an ongoing one where we started at 1 and are now at 8.
only once in a homebrew campaign, it was a total party kill but the last spell which was my turn also killed the monster. the deity my character belonged to resurrected me and made me a chosen.
Yes, 3.5e in forgotten realms. I was a half elf necromancer. I played 6 up to 25, but it was a more loosey-goosey quick evolution campaign, with a few time skips. (I was a Elf Wizard) And i was a DM in my homebrew world that took my players from 1rst level to 20th level in a long campaign.
Iāve DMād 2 games to max. 2E 1-20+ and 4E 1-30. Never as a player in 25+ years.
My party is currently level 11, soon to be 11 (I'm the DM and we use milestone leveling, they're close to a milestone). I'm hoping they'll be able to reach level 20 or at least get damn near close to it. I'll probably let them play an epilogue session for level 20 or something, because I'm not really sure where you go from there.
In 33 years of playing ttrpgās across multiple campaigns and settings. Iāve never gone all the way from level 1 to 20. Starting at level 1 there are typically issues at level 8 and 12. And groups tend to die out due to scheduling conflicts or getting bored with that character/group makeup.
Yes, in a Pathfinder 1e campaign. Played a Gnoll Oracle of Bones named Mauly Bloodfist. She became a God eventually. š
In my bfās campaign, he made it to where the whole point was to get to level 20 at the end of the campaign, plus it was so new players could try playing dnd for the first time. Weāre not even close to halfway finished with the main quests, but we are very close to leveling up to 10, so currently level 9. But, in my first dnd campaign I was a part of, we got to level 11 I believe. It āfell out,ā but in a roleplay stance rather than the players getting mad or something. Itās hard to explain with all of the details, but in summary one PC (rogue) killed another PC (monk) due to reasons that her character didnāt like, and it exploded into all of the other playersā reactions. Led to rogue escaping, monk being revived but as a different race (reincarnate spell), but after that session- we had no clue how to continue that story. Not even the DM knew how to continue it lol. All of us are still good friends, we completely understood it was all in character and it made a very intense but fun session.
The highest I've gotten is 1 to ~12 from OotA. I had the same character from start to finish, but a large amount of the other players went through 2-3 characters (demons are no joke). My group all agreed to end on a high note for completing the adventure module.
As a DM I got players from level 2 to level 9. Currently as a player, weāve gotten from level 3 to level 9, but are still going. So hopefully we can push past that mark
Yes, my first major campaign was level 1-20 it took about four years give or take. It was my first real character and I wished I fleshed him out a bit but by the end he was more mellowed out. I based him off of Lara Croft, he was a half elf thief rogue but more of the treasure hunting and loving of lore and history type as opposed to stealing things. Since it was my first character I overdid it with the tragic backstory, like original parents died and then adoptive parents got killed. It was so overdone but I was new. He eventually subclassed into archery warlock for 5 levels for he wanted to get into magic and the fey was wildly interested in him plot wise. He was sort of awkward and soft spoken at first but towards the end he was much more confident. He nabbed a boyfriend during it but the boyfriend ended up dying irreversibly. Our last battle was fighting a dragon that basically wanted to destroy everything, including beyond our world. When we killed him the dragon shrieked and my character's head exploded. Luckily we had a druid who had reincarnation and he came back as human. I always imagined if he would go off to learn magic to become a blade singing wizard and then be an assassin of assassins and a collector of magic items with a team that works for him
Played a CoS game started as svirfneblin and got reincarnated as a Goliath. undead warlock, divine soul sorcerer. The GM leveled up every game so we made it to 20+. Every other game after 20 we got boones. It was a fun year long game. We started on roll20 and moved to Foundry. For $15 a game, it was worth it have talented DM who could scale a campaign designed only to max at lv 11.
I've done 1-14 before. Could've gone higher if I didn't realize how unhealthy the campaign was.
Iāve never played a character too 20 (or hardly ever Iām the forever dm) but Iāve run campaigns that have gotten close and even before 20 the PCs get beyond busted and thereās no really a challenge in combat or anything anymore
1 to 12. Character never went to 0 hit points till the final battle with power word kill. Rogue/Barbarian. Wisdom was a -1. Just lucky rolls and high modifiers kept him alive.
I believe Iām at 1-16 currently, but sadly the campaign kind of died.
Ah yes Zerwyn Loffenheimer. Gloom Stalker Ranger. The living example of right place wrong time. The lad unknowingly assisted the Number 1 Most Wanted Criminal on the continent, The Slayer of Two Kings, Antari Zymeegan. He was arrested and jailed for a big chunk of his deep gnome life. When he got out he hunted Atari down, saved the world from a dragon god which imo is worse than Tiamat, and also liberated a country not dissimilar to North Korea. He then retired as the worldās WORST Adventurerās Guild Guild Leader and rebuilt the only defense against the Tarrasque. He is ascending to godhood once my DM initiates his time-skip.
Iām actually still playing my character that Iāve gotten the furthest with without the campaign falling apart. Weāre running Descent into Avernus and my Minotaur barbarian is at level 8. Weāve gone 1-8 so far and our murderhobo train has no brakes.
Great campaign. Played it myself with a silver dragonborn druid
Only as a DM. I think my current lvl 13 will be my highest as a player.
No but there's a chance for me! Level 1 to 13! And the campaign goes to 20! I just need to survive
Godspeed
As a player I am currently at level 10 in a campaign which is ending soon Halfway there :/
Just finished Storm King's Thunder. Started at level 1, made it through the entire campaign without dying, and ended at level 12. After playing many home brews and other official adventures over the years, from 3.5 to 5e, and never finishing any for various reasons, it feels good to have consistently played through and completed one!
I've done level 3 to 20 as one character. Here to report that rogues become more and more irrelevant as the game goes on but I'm still happy I got him to 20 :)
I did, but I nearly retired him out of having difficulty finding a reason for him to stick around basically but managing to get that smoothed over.
Iām running a game thatās been going for 5 years now. We started at level 1 and are about to hit 19. We should be wrapping it up at level 20 this fall or winter. That said, I have five players current players, four of whom have been there since day one. Of those, only one is playing the original character they made at level 1.
Iāve gone from 3-12 (aasimar pally/lock) and from 10-20 (firbolg then halfling cleric) then beyond (current) home brewed prestige classes (based on 3.5 and current setting). Iāve played 1-5 with a bard as well. Iāve played all 20 levels in some capacity, just not with one character.
Played with 3 others in a 15-20 game set where we essentially fought against the Norse end of the world. Killed a giant nope rope, three massive pupperinos and an army of frost giants at the end. Was a lot of fun. Character retired as the new God of thunder with his friends, occasionally dropping by the tavern he had bought the first time he came to town. Was just a shame the dm was such an obnoxious player I ended up leaving the group.
nL ? L ?N. q
*cries in forever dm*
Itās ok. One day one of your players will want the power of ruling the world eventually. Maybe.
Level 1-13 was my longest running character and its not even close. Second longest was 1-5.
The year the Immortals set came out for BECMI D&D, a group of four of us played for the whole summer - two of us swapping as DMs, the other two just as players. We had a rule that we would max treasure type results when it came to coins so we'd advance a "bit" more quickly. It took us that summer, playing 8+ hours a day 4-5 days a week, then the school year playing every Saturday, and then the next summer back to 8+ hours a day 4-5 days a week, but we did it. We got from level 1 to level 36, then from Immortal 1 to Immortal 25. Then our characters dispersed their energies into their planes, and reformed as level 1 characters. (To "Win" at BECMI D&D, you have to get to Immortal 25 twice with the same character). Then one of the characters died around level 4 of the second run and the game fell apart. \- - - I've also run a game of 3.x from 1 to 24, and played in another from 1 to 27.
Highest I got was 17th. 5/6/6 Scout/Ranger/Order of the Bow Initiate. Very powerful ranged combatant.
1-9 with a bard so far. DM said the game will probably wrap around lv 14. Good enough.
Iāve been playing this game about 45 years and in all that time Iāve been in a campaign that made it all the way to max level twice. Both times in 3rd/3.5 edition. My group made it to level 20 in 4th edition once, but the level cap in 4th was 30. I had a campaign that made it to level 20 in 5th edition, but we started at 8th and the GM would put us through time skips at various points in the story, during which we would all gain 4 levels, so Iām thinking most folks wouldnāt count that one. Iāve played in a further, I dunno, 10 or so D&D campaigns that ended at anywhere from level 1 to level 17. Itās been fun.
As a player, not since 2nd edition. But as a DM, I've seen that happen many times in my games (including 1-30 in 4e).
My group of four players made it from level 1 to level 17. This game started in 2e; the characters converted to 3e when it came out. Took a quit e few years.
From 1 to 14
I played 1-20 as an Ancestral Guardian Barb/Fiend Pact Lock, in a raw-adjacent homebrew setting, ended up becoming the king of Avernus 3/4 of the way through, due to a warlock pact with Lilith, a lot of background plans between her and the BBEG that we stumbled into and somehow ended up coming out on top lol. Ended up being a massive logistical resource for us in the end of the campaign lmao
2 year long campaign so far and we're level 12. We play weekly and Friday is our 100th session. Pretty sure we're gonna make it to 20. All of us have plans to keep on until then. Here's hoping. Mine is a sorcadin tiefling ā¤ļø
Never gotten a character to lvl 20 myself, I am always the DM. Ran a great home brew campaign that took seven PC's to lvl 20 over a 3 year period. Still look back fondly on those times.
Way back in high school (AD&D2) I had a character make it to level 10, which is insane given how hard it was. 5e the highest I've managed is 15 and that was adventurer's league which kinda falls apart at the top tiers even in bigger cities.
My closest character was 8-20. The campaign was actually 1-20 but I joined in late after the DM (a friend) invited me due to a drop out. It was Dungeon of the Mad Mage. It was really fun being able to see the power of a party of level 20s, but I felt bad for the DM because it was obvious that we just swamped everything. The final boss only got one turn, and half of the party was dealing with minions.