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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 5519935" data-attributes="member: 114">One of my big complaints about 3e from the start was the fact that they had removed any possibility of this as a 'core' part of the game, and substituted it with just deeper dungeons all the way down. When we played 1e, the name level was aspirational for just this reason, and it became a natural progression to incorporation within a kingdom or political heirarchy, and got the PCs involved in politically based adventures along with the other stuff they normally did (plus castles and such were great money sinks too!)I never saw BECMI, but in my idealWorld (tm) Paragon would have at least given some clear guidelines for setting up castles and getting into political stuff. Doesn't need lots of rules, just enough to inspire and ideally example adventures in that sphere too. Then Epic would have moved on to situations allowing founding of Empires, battles with thousands, walking amongst the gods and so forth.I've got no idea what actual figures  might be like, but everyone I knew who started D&D got to name level D&D and played castles etc., including defending your fief, clearing lands of monsters, negotiating with foreign armies (sometimes with extreme prejudice). We all had stables of characters in those days too, so if we fancied a lower level game one week we'd all break out our 5th/6th level PCs for an adventure for a week or two.I would imagine that the total number playing like that was greater simply because with time more PCs got to those levels during the 70's, 80's and 90's. In 20 years I'd expect the numbers to even out if all else remains the same (which it probably won't!)</blockquote>

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