Do you think the 70% was accurate outside Beyond or if the number changed in last 6 or 7 year?
I think assuming more than 6 levels for a typical D&D campaign is wildly optimistic, though some might make it to the 7-12 range (especially if they start at 3 or something).
It boils down to
table time. Time spent actually playing the game.
Some assumptions:
- The typical game is 2-4 hours, involving 2-4 people.
- The typical game happens 1/week. Given holidays, most months will have 3 sessions.
- Typically, PCs will gain 1 level every 3 sessions (might be 1 or 2 sessions at 1st or 2nd level).
- At 1 level / month, getting to 6th level requires six months of time at the table.
- The most common reason D&D games end is because life changes happen to enough players that the group breaks up.
If your life is the same as it was six months ago (you live in the same place, have the same amount of available free time, have roughly the same income, and your friends and family are all basically in the same place), then you are probably more stable than many. If
every member of your group has the same life they had six months ago, it's a friggin' miracle.
D&D is traditionally designed as a 20 level game, but a lot of that design effort is wasted. It's part of the overall point that D&D is "too complicated" (a point I tend to agree with). It's also part of the root of a lot of martial/magical tension (so few people experience high-level magic in D&D in practice!), and part of why a concept like E6 has good legs (if you only usually play for 6 levels anyway...).
If 6e really wanted to be a revolution, it would explore what it looks like if you chop the top half of the level curve off the game and gave people a 1-10 play experience (which is still probably more than a lot of groups will see), with "epic" options for 10+ (so the folks who do 12 level or 15 level campaigns still have some big capstone options).
I'm a weird outlier then, most of the campaigns I run or played that my wife runs go to 20th.
Probably worth noting that most people on ENWorld are at a pretty extreme end of the fandom. We're posting on a D&D message board in The Year 2025, after all. I'd assume a greater portion of people here have seen a 1-20 campaign than in the general normie populace.
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.
You mention squeezing things into 6 levels or squeezing things into 20 levels, but I think the problem is more that we're designing for campaigns to last two years when it'd be more realistic to design them to last nine months - we're designing for 20 levels when we only need a fraction of that. I'm on board with tier transitions less as a consequence of gaining levels, and more of a campaign style choice. It's genre. Some games would do good with the feeling that the PC's are basically normal people in extraordinary circumstances (like a level 1-4 vibe). Some games feature dragon-slayers and monster-stompers (like a level 11-16 vibe). Some games are "skilled professionals in over their head" (like a level 5-10 vibe). Some games are world-shaking heroes of legend (like a level 17-20 vibe). D&D's design doesn't
have to shepherd you from one to the other, it can just hang out in one or two of those, and most games are going to be fine, since that's what happens in practice anyway. And they'll be fine without two years of "content" in that genre.
Unfortunately, I can't game design more hours into the day or days into the week in the real world. The only solutions I can offer have to be within the confines of the game itself.
I'm of the opinion that the confines should be tighter. Pacing is such an important element of play that D&D design has been very slow to get its head around, and this is a symptom of that. 5e and 4e and 3e have all had a pretty significant "big cake, small pan" problem, where the option proliferation has lead to a lot of hypothetical fun that isn't had in an actual session, because that shiny new spell or magic item looks good on the character sheet, but then doesn't see the light of day in play. Every healing potion that isn't drunk, every niche class ability that just never comes up, every forgotten buff, every sub-par feat that might be fun but isn't optimal for your build, every forgotten familiar's turn, every niche +1 bonus, every neglected species feature...they're all symptoms of having too much to do with the few hours of D&D that we do have in our lives.
