Did anyone else run high level campaigns in 2e ?

[Greggy C]

Or was it just me? If I had a penny for every time every youtuber, blogger, forumer said "people stopped at 7th level". lol.
Personally my 4 year campaign ended when the players were around level 26 having killed Lolth, Acerak and other powerful beings.
Certainly I had to get creative, many just as high level spell casters filling out the bad guys side. Lots of battles on other planes since that nerfed their items.

 

[TerraDave]

A few characters may have gotten to 10th level in a very long running game.

But I think it would have been doable, at least to the mid teens. In that game I didn't actually see a lot of the issues that people complain about--e.g. I could certainly still challenge the pcs, the fighter, albeit with weapon specialization etc, was doing just fine.

 

[Mezuka]

Last 2e campaign I did we stopped at level 12. Group disbanded.

 

[Retreater]

The longest campaign I ever ran was in 2e. It ran for close to 2 years, playing weekly for very long sessions. We got to about 9th level when it ended in a climactic showdown with a resurrected evil god before he reached his full power.

 

[Greggy C]

The longest campaign I ever ran was in 2e. It ran for close to 2 years, playing weekly for very long sessions. We got to about 9th level when it ended in a climactic showdown with a resurrected evil god before he reached his full power.

interesting, very different campaign. I certainly made sure the monsters I picked gave good xp so that they could gain levels at a snappy pace. we also probably played from 3pm to 1am or so lol.

 

[Retreater]

interesting, very different campaign. I certainly made sure the monsters I picked gave good xp so that they could gain levels at a snappy pace. we also probably played from 3pm to 1am or so lol.

It was one that was very personal to us. One of our gaming group died unexpected at 16 years of age. The campaign became our way of honoring him and dealing with the grief of his loss. Even though we've all gone our separate ways, we stay in touch and try to come together a couple times a year to play.
One thing that made the campaign especially fun and memorable was psionics. I know it gets a bad rep a lot of times, but it made for some very clever problem solving. Also teleportation to different continents and cultures made sure it felt fresh and that the party was always "where the action was happening."

 

[Greggy C]

One thing that made the campaign especially fun and memorable was psionics.

One of the characters had Psionics, it was cool, never had a problem with it in the campaign.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

We had a 2Ed campaign that got into 25+ level PCs after almost 20 years. Sometimes, the PCs were as dangerous to each other as their foes…

 

[Blue]

We had a very long AD&D 2nd ed campaign - or rather like 8 campaigns with very overlapping players, all set in FR. And occasionally meeting up, swapping characters, etc. And the DM ran several nights a week and then a 10-14 hours on weekends (Sat noon until whenever).

By "very overlapping" players, I mean that the "Tuesday" game might have one or two players in common, the the weekend games had six regular players for a good number of years, and we had permutations of various "we run The Dwarves campaign if we're down Dave, and we run this if we're down Scott, that if we're down Ed, and this other thing if we're down Jay.

I had two character go from 1st to 20th and beyond. Basically everyone went beyond the 7th that the OP mentioned. Because of how the XP charts were (basically doubling from 1st to name level IIRC), if you ran a few levels down from the main party level and survived you would catch up a bunch of levels in just a few adventures. On the other hand, at the highest levels it was a year to each level.

My "highest" was a human bard who dual-classed into Cleric of Milil, god of music. Two things the DM allowed was that a magic book that would advance Bard would still work with me (as well as Cleric, obviously), and that a wish could be used to allow a character to benefit from another book. By the end I think I was a 14th level Bard, 18th level Cleric. He was my very first character in that world, and in the most active campaign.

 

[jdrakeh]

I played in a relatively high level AD&D 2e campaign. I think we were around 15th level when we stopped. Now, I know that doesn't sound high level by the metric of D&D 3x or D&D 5e, but in AD&D 2e we were doing things like summoning astral devas to steal their feathers for spell components in order to cast a wish spell. So, yeah. Pretty epic.