I don’t have any actual data, but my personal experience was that the longest* D&D campaign I’ve ever participated in was a 4e game. We played from 1st level to 11th, and the only reason we stopped was because half the players moved away, and VTTs and video call services were both still in their infancy at the time. But everyone was enjoying the game as much as we had in the beginning if not more, and we would all gladly have kept playing if we could have. I’ve never had a 3e or 5e campaign go that long before losing steam.
I think one of the major factors was that most D&D editions have the characters’ capabilities grow so much over the course of their career that what the game is fundamentally about has to change drastically by around mid-level. But 4e avoided that by taking the combat math of the best parts of 3e, and extending that math across 30 levels. 4e doesn’t really have a level after which the characters have access to such world-altering powers that the scope and scale of the narrative have to change. The player and enemy combat numbers kept pace with each other across the whole 30-level spread, and the kinds of game-warping magical effects that dramatically change the nature of challenges were gated behind expensive rituals instead of just limited on a per-day basis.
*in terms of delta between party level when the campaign started and party level when the campaign ended
I'd say there are probably five...let's call them "strains" of play, which loosely fit across an arc.
You have what
I would call "Novice Levels" and what its fans generally call "the best part", or at the very least, "low level". Maybe a fairer term would be "Greenhorn"--people who really have almost no experience at all. Things where concerns are deeply immediate and concrete: food, water, shelter. You're contending with threats that are either ordinary, or an ordinary thing with a small tweak, e.g. wild dogs (or some monster of about the same threat level), cutpurses (or goblins or kobolds or...etc.); or threats that are classified as basic/standard/introductory for D&D, like weaker varieties of slimes or particularly fragile undead etc. One might call this the "Gritty Survival" strain. Very polarizing; folks who like it usually
love it and don't really have nearly as much affection for any other strain, often trying to add in as many limitations and things as they can to try to resist pulling away from this phase, and almost always removing a number of options or features (usuallly spells) which weaken or obviate it.
Then you have what
I would call "first level" and "the prelude to the best part", but which might be more neutrally called the "Budding Adventurer" strain. Where the previous is almost painstakingly down-to-earth, this is ever so slightly less so. It's a world unafraid to be openly magical, even if magic isn't commonly practiced, and where threats likewise start to become openly fantastical in return. Here you see many basic types of undead, many
many classic monsters (rust monster, anyone?), and a lot of the "staple" spells like
fireball and
haste. 3e topped out here in terms of balancing its mechanics, or perhaps just a hair beyond, but not much. Certain
kinds of old-school D&D also intentionally topped out here...but were later extended (e.g. B/X as opposed to BECMI).
Third, you have what (again)
I would call "the best part", but more neutrally would be called the "High Adventure" strain. Power has escalated, but the characters are far from being the biggest or the baddest thing around, even in their local context. 4e would've called this high Heroic to early Paragon; 5e calls it roughly level 9-14, etc. Riffing off what Zardnaar said, for a significant chunk of fans (particularly those who adored the
idea of 3e but didn't care for how gonzo it often got), this is where the game taps out; once you "beat" this part, it's time to start over. Threats in this space can kind of run the gamut--it's still
plausible to run into the most powerful of "mundane" threats, while just barely becoming plausible to fight the lowest echelon of world-shaking ones. The focus is shifting from small to large, from local to global, from petty to grand, it's right in the middle and thus can touch just about any of it with the right explanation.
Fourth, I dunno if I'd even have a name for this one myself but I think a neutral term would be "Ascension". Again, using 4e terms, high Paragon to (very) early Epic, where your characters have transcended the limits of whatever context they originally came from and have graduated to threats almost unimaginable in their pre-adventure lives. Their story has flowered and grown, they've done mighty deeds and achieved lasting effect (for good or for ill). The power, and the perspective, has shifted decidedly toward
ultimate dangers, but you haven't entirely left your old life and context behind yet. Your powers may be great, but you don't have wide-spanning victory yet. (Note that this doesn't have to go balls-to-the-wall for stakes; it's quite possible to start really
really local and only graduate up to the affairs of continents at this point, rather than the more stereotypical plane-hopping adventures at this stage of play.)
Finally, again I don't really have a personal name for this one but there's a pretty obvious ready-to-hand one: "Apotheosis". When you've reached this strain of play, you are either a mover-and-shaker of the whole world/plane/universe, or you're a trusted servant/advisor or well-paid mercenary for such a power. This is where Wizards get to alter reality and Clerics can nearly guarantee divine intervention etc. The gloves come off and the power level spikes real damn high.
The problem is, 5e distributes these things...rather unevenly, and doesn't really provide any assistance for GMs to spool out one or mitigate the change to another.
Levels 1-3 are very much Greenhorn territory. And levels 4(ish)-9 are Budding Adventurer (hence why the books properly speaking recommend that most groups start at level 3...but almost no one ever does...even though people then complain about the problems of starting at level 1...not that I'm bitter about this or anything...).
But level 17 sharply pushes everything into Apotheosis territory because of one simple issue:
wish. That spell defines the top end power level of D&D, and guarantees that characters at that level are
extraordinarily powerful simply because tradition demands it.
So...now that means between level 10 and 16, we have to squeeze
all of both High Adventure
and Ascension. It's not so bad that Greenhorn is short--we expect characters to grow out of that quickly. But with Budding Adventurer spread out so
long, while High Adventure basically
has to get force-marched through at an incredibly rapid pace, there's a real feeling that power levels escalate exponentially. Indeed, that they do so very suddenly without really clear reasons why (to the player). They just know that things don't feel quite right.
This is just another reason why D&D should in fact develop comprehensive Novice Level rules, which include spooling out proper levels almost indefinitely (not
truly indefinitely, but pretty far). If it's going to offer, or at least appear to offer, extensive support across
that broad a range, it needs to have ways for GMs to control how quickly things shift up or down the power curve. Its presence can't be meaningfully denied. You'll just piss off too many fans if you try to declare that only one or two strains are valid and everything else is verboten. But we
gotta find a way to help players play at the scope and power level that makes them happy. Trying to squeeze everyone onto a single 20-level progression track where progress occurs at a very very roughly constant rate
isn't working.
