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

[J-H]

I have not had any problems DMing at high levels, as long as I don't have 6 different enemy types with unique spell lists for each. You just have to be willing to see the party hit really hard.

My BG2 campaign just had the party fight Jon Irenicus in Suldanesselar. It lasted a round and a half (not counting the time stop) thanks to some counterspells and my chaos player doing his thing... he transformed into the slayer and tackled Jon off the tree, clawing at him as they fell 300' through the forest, killing the wizard on impact with falling damage and knocking off over half the player's HP.
The fight against the sneaky ancient black dragon that kept hiding took a lot longer than the wizard battle!

Encounter and adventuring day design is still pretty important. This was their 6th fight of the day, plus they had 1-2 short rests and some outside healing/spell slot restoration. Since it wasn't a nova/only fight of the day I didn't feel bad about it.

 

[Umbran]

DM quits/can't be bothered is main reason imho.

I think it is more a combination of two influences:
1) Getting folks to commit to long-term activities is hard, and lives change over the course of years.
2) Maybe those upper levels of power really aren't all that interesting a draw in and of themselves. Character advancement is a draw, but maybe not an unlimited one.

I think the WotC numbers were probably about right overall but they were a while ago.

The WotC's 1999 market surveys, if I recall correctly, said that most campaigns tended to last about 12-18 months. And that's not about level achieved, so much as time the group can expect to want to or be able to commit to playing the same stuff.

 

[Umbran]

2) Maybe those upper levels of power really aren't all that interesting a draw in and of themselves. Character advancement is a draw, but maybe not an unlimited one.

So, I know I'm replying to myself, but there's some expansion we can do on this idea.

When a player creates a character, they likely have some core idea of who the character is/will be, or what the player wants to do with them. Maybe it is a matter of tactical powers, or theme, or exploring personality, or whatever. And, yes, it is great to play through a period of growth into that concept.

But the player isn't going to plan to have that growth take years of real time. Real life is too short for that. So, plans are going to be to reach that core concept pretty quickly. And once the player reaches and explores that core concept... they've achieved what they set out to do with the campaign.

Unless the campaign gives the player a really enticing reason to redefine what the core concept of the character will be, the player's need to continue playing that same character is going to drop off.

And just having tiers of new powers probably isn't enough to really fire the player up to redefine their character. You have to reignite their imagination around the character, not just offer MOAR P0WRZ!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My current 5e campaign has been going on for four years or so, 52 sessions, and the characters are on 13th level. There is no end in sight, so whilst I'm not sure we reach 20, there probably will be at least some levels more.

That high level games are rare is of course to a certain degree perfectly normal, overwhelming majority of games start at the first level, or third at most. And longer the campaign goes, greater are the chances of it ending due the story culminating, people getting bored and wanting to play something else, insurmountable scheduling conflicts or many other reasons.

Though I think there probably are also reasons in how the4 game is constructed, which cause people to want to conclude them before the uppermost levels are reached. The characters become more complicated, and this might be brain strain to some. It also tends to mean that due a lot of options decision making becomes more involved, which slows down the game especially in combat.

In once played in a 4e game that lasted a decade or so and we reached the 20th level. We continued past it, but at that point we just switched to some weird Fate hack, as the GM felt it better suited the god tier stuff we were dealing with and I think they simply were fatigued with all the fiddly D&D things that got more numerous each level.

And I think that high level games are just more difficult to run for the GM. The characters have so many powers that simply bypass a lot of typical obstacles. And things like long range teleportation makes prepping properly impossible. At any moment the characters might decide to visit a distant location or another dimension that you had not anticipated and thus not prepped for. (Thus I just banned such in my campaign from the get go.) There also is "the Superman problem," where the characters are so powerful that they can properly be challenged only by really rare and powerful foes, and at some point it just starts to stain the narrative credibility that such constantly keep popping up. I found this to be an issue with running Celestial exalted with White Wolf's Exalted game, less so with the less powerful Dragon-Blooded exalted. And my D&D campaign certainly is starting to get into that territory.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So, I know I'm replying to myself, but there's some expansion we can do on this idea.

When a player creates a character, they likely have some core idea of who the character is/will be, or what the player wants to do with them. Maybe it is a matter of tactical powers, or theme, or exploring personality, or whatever. And, yes, it is great to play through a period of growth into that concept.

But the player isn't going to plan to have that growth take years of real time. Real life is too short for that. So, plans are going to be to reach that core concept pretty quickly. And once the player reaches and explores that core concept... they've achieved what they set out to do with the campaign.

Unless the campaign gives the player a really enticing reason to redefine what the core concept of the character will be, the player's need to continue playing that same character is going to drop off.

And just having tiers of new powers probably isn't enough to really fire the player up to redefine their character. You have to reignite their imagination around the character, not just offer MOAR P0WRZ!

I have two types of characters, static ones and then ones with a story to resolve. Static ones are just ones that have personality that is fun to play (and hopefully fun for others to interact with) but they are not expected to significantly change. I mean they will evolve over time, but they do not have some conflict or story to resolve. Such characters can be fun, but most memorable ones are the second type, ones with some trauma, conflict, etc that defines them, and which they need to confront and resolve. But with the latter type I find that when their story has been successfully "concluded" I lose interest in them. I did what i wanted to do with them, and now I want to play someone else.

 

[haakon1]

I suspect a lot of 3.X is broken involved a lot of theory craft hence Pathfinder buying another decade for it.

I suspect the same. That and assuming you’re “obligated” to run every splatbook, including those at the very end of 3.5e.

Do you think the 70% was accurate outside Beyond or if the number changed in last 6 or 7 year?

I suspect the average might be 7, but the median and mode are likely lower. One campaign that goes to 20 pulls up the average for many that sputtered at lower levels.

Also, I suspect some campaigns started in the middle levels, at least given complaints here about lower levels not being powerfully enough.

For what it’s worth, I have been playing for 42 years and the highest level I have seen a campaign run at was 13th. Obviously, YMMV.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Happy to be within the 30%
I do not think I will run another long campaign like this. Currently at around the 9-10 year mark as we are having a blast!

 

[Piperken]

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.

Could you share roughly how much time these were in length, and hours per session?

What positive factors did you find helpful in each of above groups?

 

[AlViking]

My last main campaign lasted for 4 years and went to 20. My current campaign has been going for a 1.5 years and is still going strong. Looking back at a couple others, I'd say the campaigns I run tend to average 3-4 years. We generally spend 4-6 hours playing per session, and lately we've only averaged once per month even if I'd like to meet more frequently. I use milestone leveling and level up every 2-3 sessions, occasionally stretching to 4 because I prefer to have significant downtime between levels to reflect training and whatnot.

I'm not sure why my campaigns tend to run as long as they do but I suspect that it's a few things.

• I run sandbox games. General themes may emerge after a few sessions but I let the campaign go in whatever directions the players want. The goals of my campaigns change and shifted depending on what made sense for the ongoing fiction of the world providing different challenges and opportunities.
• Sometimes there's planar incursions or aberrations from the far realms, other times it's all contained in the material realm. The campaign before last had an ancient red dragon declaring himself emperor trying to take over a region and building an army of half-dragons. Even in a single campaign there are shifts in tone and what challenges the players face.
• I allow people to swap out characters whenever they want I prefer that the change make sense but we can usually figure that out. Frequently the player takes over some already established NPC.
• I limit some spells, making long distance teleportation and plane shifting more difficult so the characters can't just bop around the multiverse.
• I've never been afraid to turn up the threat level to 11. While the characters sometimes completely obliterate the enemy, other times there are multiple characters knocked to 0 even at the highest levels.
• I don't tie any campaign theme or goal to one specific character to the degree that the campaign would suffer if the player has to drop out.

Since my campaigns average 3.5 years, if other people's campaigns are averaging 6 months then those other groups are going to have 7 campaigns to my 1. So of course statistically short run campaigns will dominate. I'm just glad they continue to support high level campaigns, even if I think they could do far more.

 

[Umbran]

Not D&D specific, but I did just lay out a plan for a new campaign. It isn't D&D, but it happens to show some aspects of what I've been talking about.

I had polled my players beforehand - they wanted a year or more of play (of our usual short-ish, weeknight sessions typically twice a month), but they didn't want it completely open-ended, either.

Also, this group knows themselves, and their own playstyles - they've asked that I make sure there's a pretty clear core path through some major issue(s) to the campaign's end.

So, I have a plan that's got at minimum 22 sessions of material (basically 11 "adventures" that take at least 2 sessions of play each to get through). The way my players go, they may be 3 or 4 sessions for some adventures, which is fine. Roughly half the adventures will be "core". The other half will be adventures I add in, either my choice, or attending to player goals/plot development other than the core path - I can add more if play goes through material quickly, or remove it if play goes slowly.

That plan, coincidentally, will probably land the characters in the middle tier of the game's power curve.