D&D General 70% Of Games End At Lvl 7?

[GrimCo]

From personal experience, most games i played, that started at lv1, ended around level 7-8. Very few of them reached level ten. I can count on fingers those that ended in mid teen level. None went full 1-20. And that's across various editions over 20 years. Games that started at levels 3-5 usually went to 8-10. Only games that went to late teens or 20 are games that started at levels 8-10.

In both 3Xe and 5e, sweet spot are levels 5-8, stretching it to maybe lv 10, 12 at most. Those are levels at which characters feel competent, but not too powerful. Monsters and encounter design works good enough to find balance between fun and challenging, without being to deadly, to easy or just pure grindfest.

 

[aco175]

How would running one of the starter sets affect these numbers. If I started a campaign with Lost Mines (LMoP) and it goes to level 5-6 then ends. Do people start a new campaign or continue with the same PCs. I continued, but would guess many do not.

Also school campaigns that get together for a semester or summer games when kids go home might only reach level 7 before the year/summer ends.

 

[Plaguescarred]

Nearly 90% of campaigns i run or play starts and end in Tier 1-2 for various reasons. The vast majority of the remaining 10% only get to Tier 3 and perhaps 2% reach Tier 4.

 

[Plaguescarred]

In retrospective, in nearly 40 years of gaming i've never been in a single campaign going Level 1-20.

 

[AlViking]

I'm a weird outlier then, most of the campaigns I run or played that my wife runs go to 20th. I've had a couple that didn't for various reasons but I think this is kind of similar to how most accidents occur within 10 miles of home. Those accidents don't occur because it's more dangerous, it's because most trips are within 10 miles. In the campaigns where we got to level 20, it took years to get there, so people that stopped earlier had multiple campaigns while we had 1.

There are still many more campaigns that don't get to higher levels but the numbers are a bit skewed because even if 25% of the groups got to higher levels they count for far less than 25% of the number of campaigns played.

That and it's simply a content available thing. I run sandbox campaigns, there are always more options. But published materials have you going to hell at 3rd level(?) and fighting Tiamat at 10th(?). If you're going to the most dangerous place in the D&D universe at low levels and fighting gods at 10th where do you go from there? So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It does get more difficult to challenge high level characters but I just don't have an issue turning the dial up to 11 or making a houserule or two to shut down the "I win" buttons if I have to.

 

[payn]

This raises interesting questions about paragon paths and epic levels in 4E and prestige classes in 3.X which generally required 5 levels just to qualify. I suspect a lot of 3.X is broken involved a lot of theory craft hence Pathfinder buying another decade for it.

I dont think the logic follows here. Folks can play a lot of 1-8 level play in 3E and PF1 but not get to high levels. Just because folks bought it and played PF doesnt mean anything about the function of high level 3E/PF1 design.

 

[zakael19]

The 4 major 5e campaigns I ran all got to ~10-11. At that point we'd resolved the story (Curse of Strahd twice, a home-brew Eberron campaign, and Call of the Netherdeep) we'd set out to explore and I was uninterested in moving further.

Level 7 feels more like we hit the end of a constrained home-brew, or the campaign fizzled out for some reason (often scheduling or life issues?).

 

[Steampunkette]

If we want games to go to 20, more often, then there needs to be 3 major changes:

1) Power grading for classes needs to be brought in-line. Quadratic power increase for spellcasters needs to be brought down which mostly means getting rid of some "Classic" spells that we all know are broken.

2) Classes need to be restructured to gain interesting options every level. A5e has been decent about this, with social and exploration features added to every class providing new or more certain ways to get around obstacles that don't require someone to cast a spell.

3) NPC scaling needs to be reined in, hard. Yes. A dragon isn't much of a challenge as a solo opponent when the party can collectively drop 300 damage in two rounds or less. So address the output issue and stop inflating enemy health and damage to ridiculous numbers to try and compensate.

I feel like there needs to be a power-plateau around level 12-13 where after that point the actual output doesn't change much, but the impact does. More ability to affect additional targets, social and exploration functions, etc.

Maybe set up a couple of progression styles post-12 for things like "Leadership" versus "Personal Wealth" or something so that different campaign styles can have different progressions beyond that point built into each class.

'Cause a lotta Wizards want to train apprentices, but it's not appropriate for every game style. So have a separate progression path where the wizard's just pumping out magic items with ease. Things like that. And a third wizard (necromancer) is gonna wanna raise a big undead army for mass combat stuff so have a mass combat progression as well.

I dunno. Probably a bridge too far.

 

[Bri]

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.

Exactly. Wish is very hard to DM. My opinion is that you should always create some kinda curse to balance. If a PC can wish, then so can a boss mob. Make yourself more powerful and it's up to the DM to make sure they learn the meaning of the phrase, "Be careful what you wish for".

 

[payn]

The biggest hurdle is time and keeping a group together long enough to reach the highest levels. I don’t think any mechanics I can think of will help with that.