Did you survive 1-20?

[Kvantum]

My first 3e character made it from 4th level up to 21st by the end of the campaign. Died 5 separate times, including twice in the span of 5 minutes of in-game time, but he was still alive and kicking (and flinging Meteor Swarms) at the end.

As far as the other side of the screen goes. I've DM'd a 3.5 campaign that went from 1st to 24th level, long enough to see all I needed to of Epic gaming under 3.5. I freely admit to being a math geek and that was just too much even for me.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Never.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

I currently have a character in the War of the Burning Sky campaign who has gone from 1st to 20th, and it looks like she might hit 21 before it is over.

Prior to that I DMed the Age of Worms, and while not all of the PCs made it from 1-20, at least half of them did.

 

[Ringlerun]

I'm wondering...how many people here have stuck with one character and survived from 1st to at least 10th level? 20th?

I'm wondering how often this happens. This is only an assumption, but I assume that a great majority of games either don't end up getting finished because of various reasons (GM quits, players leave, character dies, etc.)

For those that have made it far, what is it that got you that far?

Second, a question for GM's. Have you ever had a party that started from 1st level to at least 10th, without any of the party member dying? AND, doing this without fudging dice rolls too much?

In different systems i have had characters survive into the teens or late teens. I have never got a legit character to 20th level. But i did play a few one offs with 20th level and higher in D&D

In a huge Palladium Fantasy my friend DM'ed i had a Wolven Soldier called Mangonel he got to 11th level
In an Ad&d campaign we started out doing all the modules we could find as one group. My character was, Gwiddion a Half/Elven Cleric/Fighter/Mage of 16th/16th/15th if i remember correctly. We had great fun untill the groups demise at the hands of Orcus in the Bloodstone Pass Module.

But mostly i would have to say characters got around the 7th to 9th level before the games petered out, or for some other reason the group disbanded.

I know this isnt relevent as you are asking about levels from 1-20 but me and a friend co GMed a WEG Star Wars Campaign that lasted 14 years. By the end our group had characters with point totals in the range of 3.5 to 4k. Which is better than Han Solo and on par with the Emperor. We decided to retire the characters as the games were starting to get silly. You can only take down so many Emperor clones before the fun wears off. But we did have fun with a powerfull entity that was creating machines of torture on planets. Then using mind control to take the populace to the brink of total terror then sucking the still screaming life force from the bodies to power alchemiclay infused dark side constructs as machines of War.

 

[Lanefan]

Without dying? Never.

At all? Never.

Then again, no campaign I've played in has got to anywhere *near* 20th level, and that's including some mighty long ones (10+ years). 1e doesn't functionally go that high, and the 3e game I was in was on a very slow advancement rate so it could last longer.

Highest level characters I've ever had were 11th level; one each in 1e and 3e. Highest level characters I've DMed got to 12th.

A better comparison, at least for campaigns that have even vaguely-defined individual adventures within them, is to count adventures rather than levels. Note this also has the pleasant side-effect of being mostly edition-neutral, as 5 adventures is still 5 adventures whether your level goes from 1-15 in 4e or 1-3 in 2e by playing through 'em.

Around here, 10 adventures in a career gets you in the Hall of Heroes. In 30-odd years we've seen about 1100 characters come and go, and maybe 85 of 'em are in the Hall.

By that standard, the longest career any of my characters had was 17 adventures...and counting; he's still in the field, waiting for an ongoing campaign to catch up with him (he's a short way in their future). The longest I've had one go without dying from career start was 8 adventures (died in her 9th); I'm terrible at keeping my PCs alive.

Compare that to our all-time records: one character lasted 32 adventures and would have kept going had the campaign not ended (several others have approached this); another went 24 adventures before dying (no other character has managed more than half this).

Lan-"my 17-adventure character is, in fact, Lanefan"-efan

 

[OnlineDM]

My first Living Forgotten Realms character has just made it to 8th level without dying.

The War of the Burning Sky campaign I'm running just saw the characters get to 9th level; none of them have died yet (although one just played his last session before moving halfway around the world, so we're working on replacing him now).

Now, I've only been playing D&D for 11 months, so give me time! I think the WotBS game could very well go all the way with at least some of the original characters intact, but we shall see.

 

[drothgery]

I was in one (3.5) campaign that made it from 1st to 20th level. I was on my third character by the end, but two made it from start to finish. They both were raised from the dead a few times, though.

 

[pawsplay]

Second, a question for GM's. Have you ever had a party that started from 1st level to at least 10th, without any of the party member dying? AND, doing this without fudging dice rolls too much?

In the campaign I ran from 1st to 20th, my wife's character, a Dwarf Scout with Con 20, never died. I do not fudge dice rolls, ever.

 

[Bluenose]

Without dying and being raised? One, in over thirty years, got to (just past, actually) 20th level. My wizard in our Age of Worms campaign. If you're allowed to have died and been raised then there are a few more. If we/I played more at those levels, I might have more.

The odds are heavily against you, of course. Even if there's only a 1% chance that you'll die in any particular encounter, surviving the hundreds it takes to reach 20th level is a low probability event. Using 3rd edition, at 14 equal-level encounters/level, and a 1% rate of dying in an encounter, only 6.9% of characters survive to reach 20th level. 4th edition, at 10 encounters/level, gives 14.8%.

 

[Coldwyn]

We had a long-running campaign and most of the characetrs survived. We chose to quit at character level 17 because the rules got way to tedious and the combats took too much time.
On a siede-note, I had a CoC investigator survive more or less intact through 4 years of bi-weekly gaming. Does that count as high level?