Did you survive 1-20?

[Plissken]

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?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I have a few...all from a campaign that started in the mid-1980s. What it took was a core of players who really liked hanging out and gaming together for more than 20 years. We also all took turns running PCs and GMing.

 

[possum]

One character? No. I was playing in a Star Wars Dawn of Defiance game that went from 1-20, even while skipping two of the modules. I lost my first character at the end of the fourth module where he endulged his darker nature. The second lasted from 5-10 and finished the series out.

 

[Dice4Hire]

My Lydda's Curse game on Yahoogroups, after some teething pains in the beginning has gone from 3rd to 15th or so over ten years of play with virtually the same people playing. It is my most successful game. So 9 or 10 years with the same characters.

In my home games, we prefer to do a concept quickly and then move on to something new with new characters.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

My very first character, Olaf the Stout, a halfling thief from AD&D made it from 1st level to 17th level without dying. He made it from 1st level to 15th level in the one campaign and then I got him to 17th level when I brought him back for a couple of sessions in 3rd edition with one of my friends (just so I could play him again really).

I haven't got any other characters beyond around 5th level when I started at 1st level. This was because I played my first character for so long that I didn't get a chance to play many other characters. I am almost solely a DM now so I don't really run PC's at all these days.

My current campaign, the Shacked City AP has the PC's at 12th level (starting at 1st level). 2 players have changed their PC's in the game and one other player has had a PC die that was then raised (died fighting a pair of Ogre Zombies). 2 other players are still playing their original PC's and have not died during the campaign to date.

I have made all of my dice rolls in this campaign out in the open so there has been no fudging of dice. We've come close to a TPK a couple of times but got out of it one way or another. The players do get 3 action points to use per level though and they have saved the lives of PC's on a number of occasions (usually by emulating the Improved Toughness feat to give them hit points equal to their level for 1 round while another PC gets to them with some healing).

Olaf the Stout

 

[Hussar]

One of my earliest gaming experiences we took our characters in 1e from 1 to 20. I had a paladin. Probably only bore a passing relationship to the actual rules.

My 3e World's Largest Dungeon campaign went from levels 1 to 18 before they escaped. Granted, none of the original characters made it the whole way.

Funnily enough, both campaigns lasted about two years.

 

[korjik]

I did 3.x from 1st to 18th, one game from each side of the screen. Everyone died once, but no one at low enough level that it made a difference.

Havent managed to get a 4e group to last to paragon levels. Each game has come apart at 7th-9th level. We do have a game that is not quite dead that is 9th approaching 10th.

I've run both Heavy Gear and WEG Star Wars up into what would be the equvalent of mid-teens level.

Never managed to hit 20th. Most versions of D&D went out of whak enough that pushing all the way to 20 was no fun.

 

[Lancelot]

BECMI: I have both played and DM'ed characters that went from 1-to-36. In fact, from 1-to-Temporal 5 (low ranking deities in the Immortals rules). They were the minority, though. We burned through literally hundreds of characters to see a grand total of 4 PCs reach those levels.

1e/2e: No, but only because we didn't really play much 1e or 2e. We spent 15 years playing BECMI and largely glossed over the "advanced" products.

3e: I have DM'ed three PCs that went 1-to-20+ (cleric and wizard from one group, ninja from a second group). The latter was from the Age of Worms adventure path, which was a heck of an accomplishment (ninja, with 10 Con at the start, surviving all of Age of Worms).

4e: I've played a PC that went 1-to-15 before the rest of the group TPK'ed (my surviving PC retired). The best record to date, out of approx 100 PCs I've DM'ed, is a ranger (archer build) that went 1-to-19 before his party was TPKed. It has become a bit of a running joke that we cannot get to Epic level. We've had three campaigns flame out in TPKs at 19th level (30+ sessions each campaign). At this rate, it is becoming increasingly unlikely we'll ever see Epic level play in 4e....

 

[odinfellhammer]

I Have a 4E Halfling Paladin of Sehanine with a feat in rogue up to 10 th level and almost 11th.

 

[Razjah]

I have only managed to get one character up to level 10, maybe 11. He was a halfling sorcerer in Eberron. I GM all the time, so now I don't play too often. My group(s) and I are all in college, and because schedules change so frequently with semester changes we almost never make it more than 5 levels. I would love to get a character up that high, but most campaigns run out of steam.