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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 3664641" data-attributes="member: 38357">I voted "yes". However, by the end of my run of DMing 1e we did have several groups that had made it to 12th or 13th levels. Early on I don't think any group ever survived completely intact to 3rd level, and I don't think I ever saw a group get to 6th without at least one unrecoverable fatality. When attrition rendered a party non-viable (either due to composition or low numbers) the characters where retired; I saw this happen as early as 5th level in some cases. However, we also saw a lot of retired characters get back into the game at a later date. Generally unless the character had very poor stats (and had somehow still survived) at some point it would either be brought back to replace a dead character (often characters would be swapped between players in this case) or if you had the opportunity to get in on an existing party. It wasn't for about 4 or 5 years until we actually hit upon the novel concept of just rolling characters above first level; and even then they came into the game "naked", with only normal starting gold. As such un-retiring an existing character was generally preferable to rolling a new one.Empire-building and such never really caught on with most of the players I gamed with. There where a few DMs who engaged in that sort of things, but I generally preferred to do "actual adventuring", on either side of the screen. Retired characters where sometimes used as DMPCs, personally I had a strict rule as a DM that none of my characters could enter my campaign. This was largely because I was very proud of some of my BBEGs, whom I supposed would not survive meeting some of my higher-level PCs. Of course it didn't really matter much, since most of my BBEGs didn't survive an encounter with my players' (much lower level) PCs either...We did occasionally have someone put together a big one-shot "Threat to the World!" type scenario, and several (or often more) of us would dust off whatever higher-level characters we had to join in. Most of these where three or four session adventures with one huge (and usually very chaotic) battle at the end. Players where given the option to level their character after one of these big to-dos, in lieu of actually trying to calculate XP totals. I rarely did, usually only if I had a specific purpose to bumping one of my characters up...One such purpose was that we often had players who would arrange "death matches" between their retired PCs. This was out of the urge to see which of them was actually better, and as such having an 11th level Master Thief take on a Warlock was kind of pointless. These competitions rarely resorted to any real rules or play, being instead talked-out with whatever DM was available when other gaming wasn't going on. Aside from figuring out who was strongest these also allowed players to concentrate their magic item resources...</blockquote>

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