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

[delericho]

To better my understanding, what's your rough guess on how many years the 5 campaigns took in total?

"Shackled City" took us eleven months, almost to the day, meeting weekly for 4-6 hours per week. That's the only one I know for certain.

I do know that the 2nd Edition campaign was quick - we deliberately rushed through levelling to try out the high-level stuff. So maybe 6 months?

I had a 3.0e campaign that reached ~12th level, which took about 8 months (again, meeting weekly, 4-6 hours). And there was another 3.5e campaign that reached 15th. That one met biweekly for 3 hours at a time, but was split into 3 chapters of maybe 8 months each.

The most recent, a 5e campaign, was a real oddity - we were meeting weekly, but only for 1 hour at a time. That ran for about 4 years end-to-end.

So those five campaigns account for maybe 9ish years of my gaming career, I think. (I did also run a very long Vampire: the Masquerade campaign for ~6.5 years by itself. V:tM doesn't have levelling, of course, but if it did then it would absolutely be in the list of campaigns to reach "high levels".)

 

[delericho]

I was astonished to read in the 2024 PHB or DMG the authors suggesting we should just start campaigns at level three, completely bypassing levels 1 and 2. I can only conclude that levels 1 and 2 are so boring even WotC thinks they should be skipped.

I think there's a lot to be said for running through levels 1-2 once (with any given group of players) and then skipping them thereafter. Personally, I'm glad they're there and wouldn't like to see them dropped, but I also wouldn't want to linger there.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

The two bolded bits seem to be in direct contradiction. Giving every PC (more) options at every level is going to cause steeper power grading, not flatter.

Either reducing the number of levels overall (and thus, the aggregate number of options available across a PC's career) or making some levels give nothing but incremental hit points and save/attack bonuses (thus again reducing the number of total options a PC can accrue) is the only viable way to flatten the power curve.

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.

Agreed. That, and the real big-bads are so complex to run that one at a time is enough, even when a more viable challenge for the PCs might mean throwing three or four of 'em in there.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Come to think of it, another reason the majority of campaigns end at early levels is that that gives you time to run more campaigns. A level 20 campaign is probably going to take like 2-3 years, and you'll easily have time to run 4 campaigns that end at level 7 in that time span.

I've been in a lot of 3-20 campaigns, and a few 1-20's.

They take 5+ years at least. Getting a group together for that is the main outlier.

If you only play a campaign for a year (much more realistic) it's hard to do more than ten levels, and probably more realistic to do 5 or fewer. So 3-8, give or take, makes the most sense as the more common answer. (1-3 can take as few as three sessions, thus making 1-8 not much of a stretch.)

 

[Lanefan]

There’s something foundational here that tends to go unexamined: not why campaigns end early, but why the game assumes they should run all the way to level 20 in the first place.

The 1–20 progression is rarely questioned because it’s baked into the DNA of D&D. That structure has been carried forward since the beginning—sometimes expanded, sometimes stretched—but never really reevaluated. We know the design rationale: legacy, completeness, breadth of play. But the deeper question is whether this model still fits how the game is actually played today.

It wasn't always a 1-20 model. 1e was largely, if informally, modelled on a 1-9 progression; where PCs were largely expected to retire at "name level" (9th for most classes). BECMI, conversely, was intentionally open-ended; the system could (vaguely) handle whatever levels the PCs managed to get to, up to 100th or so.

The formalization of 1-20 didn't come until 3e, and with it came the whole character-build side of things.

What would happen if the game acknowledged this directly? If 1–10 were treated as a complete game—mechanically and narratively self-contained—and levels 11+ were modular expansions, tailored to specific campaign styles? High magic, domain play, plane-hopping, mass combat. Let DMs and players opt into that scale, rather than being asked to plan for a marathon when most are running a 10K.

That wouldn’t limit ambition. It would focus support where it’s needed, and offer more intentional tools for those few who do want to build long-form campaigns. Right now, the system assumes that every table wants to climb the whole ladder. But what if that ladder isn’t the default? What if it’s the optional module?

Along with this, remove any concept of a "capstone" level. Make it open-ended, or appear open-ended, while making the levels arrive on a steep J-curve such that on reaching 10th-ish it takes ages to get each subsequent level.

 

[Lanefan]

I think there's a lot to be said for running through levels 1-2 once (with any given group of players) and then skipping them thereafter. Personally, I'm glad they're there and wouldn't like to see them dropped, but I also wouldn't want to linger there.

Different strokes, I guess; I love the chaos and unpredictability of low-level play!

 

[Retreater]

Sounds right. Most of my campaigns end around level 5 out of burnout or TPK.
IMO, the main reason games don't last to high levels is that it takes too long and it gets boring. A multi-year epic is a lot to dedicate to any regular social gathering. The expectations should be brought better in line with reasonable social activities in modern society.
The 2024 DMG suggests an outline for a 1-20 level campaign in like 6 months. I think they're getting closer to a pace that reflects modern interests.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Sounds right. Most of my campaigns end around level 5 out of burnout or TPK.
IMO, the main reason games don't last to high levels is that it takes too long and it gets boring. A multi-year epic is a lot to dedicate to any regular social gathering. The expectations should be brought better in line with reasonable social activities in modern society.
The 2024 DMG suggests an outline for a 1-20 level campaign in like 6 months. I think they're getting closer to a pace that reflects modern interests.

With weekly play, that's 26 sessions if exactly none get canceled. More likely it's about 20 sessions.

In other words, if you level up every session you actually play, 1-20 is barely possible to do in six months.

 

[the Jester]

I'll just say that, while evidence and many peoples' anecdotes seem to support this, my own experience varies pretty far from it.

I'm currently running and playing in about six groups, two of which are in the teens level-wise, and one of which is just relaunching after finishing up with my character at 19th level.

I typically run groups to pretty high levels; although it petered out due to losing several players to life issues, my 5e alpha game had several pcs in the epic levels, and various other groups I have run in 5e reached low to mid or high teens.

My 4e game went up to epic levels; the pcs finished up around 26th. The previous 4e game I ran went up to the mid-paragon levels, only wrapping up there because I moved.

My 3e games ended at high levels, including one epic level game that had some pcs in the low 40s and several groups that ran until the mid-teens.

My 2e games ran to pretty high levels, with pcs reaching the high teens; my 1e game had a few pcs in the 20s and one character achieving level 30-something.

 

[cbwjm]

Campaign I ran went to exactly 7. We could have continued, there were other parts of the world to explore but life, ah, finds a way to make scheduling difficult.

I'm in a level 12 campaign, but that's because we started there, it's also a more casual campaign rather than a more serious play on a schedule one.