D&D General Highest level PC you've achieved.

[DragonLancer]

I'm looking for the highest level PC you've had, and roughly how long it took you to get there.

20th and that sort of campaign took about 18 months, of weekly sessions of 4 hours.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I have found that by level 8-10, I really want to play a different archetype, so I usually switch PCs. Most of our group is like that. One of things we liked about AD&D modules. You weren't stuck in a level 1-15 (or 20) campaign like most 5e adventures are. You had flexibility to easily end campaigns when the group wanted to.

 

[Ogre Mage]

2E: I don't remember. At least 10.
3.5E: 13.
4E: 6.
5E: 15.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

the highest level characters i've ever had was level 13 in 5e, but the campaign started at level 3 and i joined at level 4, so i guess that doesn't count.

the next highest level character i have is level 9 also in 5e, and normally that wouldn't count since that game also started at level 3, but we level up once every...what, dozen sessions? at most? so maybe that counts.

the only character ive had that started at level 1 was in 4e, and he got to level 6 before one of the players lost their pc and we swapped campaigns.
...no, wait, sorry. he got to 4 and then i retired him for a swordmage to better fit the party dynamic, and the SWORDMAGE got to 6. and that was milestone...so...uh...

i have a pathfinder 2e character at level...8, i think...who got there from level 1 with xp. but that's not dnd. so. hm.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Current Pathfinder 1E campaign I am playing in is still ongoing after 5+ years and we are Level 18. I expect we will make it to 20 before the campaign ends.

 

[Lanefan]

Level 12 in 3e.

This thread needs a poll!

Pardon the terrible pun, but that would be a messy poll as you'd have to list each level by each edition.

15th level in 4e ain't the same as 15th level in 1e.

 

[Corinnguard]

I started playing 5e back in June 2021 and the first 5e adventure I played was Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. This adventure ran from June 2021 to December 2022. My DM used the benchmark approach and by the time we finished the adventure, everyone in the party had advanced to 12th level.

Currently my group is playing Tyranny of Dragons and we've been playing this adventure since January 2023. We're about 2 1/2 chapters from completing this adventure and we're all 10th level characters atm. So, we will have been playing it for almost 3 years now. We'll probably reach 11th level by then.

 

[Weiley31]

In a recent one shot that my one buddy started last week, because his g.f. couldn't make it for Mork Borg, the DM said a bud and I could start at level 12 or roll out starting levels.

So, ya he's playing a Level 19 Halfling Berserker(2014) and I'm playing a Level 18 Shadar-Kai Witch (Kobold Press).

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

In AD&D 2E, 8th level. Approximately 200-300 hours of play @ 4-6 hours per session over the course of 2 years of play.

5E has been 12th level. About same number of hours.

 

[Willie the Duck]

My initial game was a BC/BECMI/1e mashup using mostly BECMI rules. We definitely got to the Immortal levels, but not by playing by the rules. No cheating (I think, and IIRC), and we didn't consider it Monty Haul, but we clearly didn't understand the rules completely. I seem to recall the jump from 25-36 involved conning a king out of over 1,000,000 gp per character in the party and everyone shooting up 10-11 levels (no limit on levels gained per adventure). Likewise, the characters that had to start over at level 1 and get back to 36 to gain Immortal status got to be effectively ride-alongs (just had to survive, not really contribute) on high-level adventures backup high-level characters were doing (and thus power-level back to near-the-top). That kind of thing. Basically, we got these new Master and Immortal boxed sets, and by golly we were going to find a way to use them. In that game, I think the highest we got in gameplay was just into Immortal status. Some of the PCs went on to intermediate or higher-power status, but only when they became DM-controlled (the 'gawds' of the campaign world,etc.). No one really found the actual Immortal rules particularly playable, and we kinda lost interest.

More legitimately, we continued with a mostly-BECMI game as older teens, and I got a dwarf character to max level (12) and then to attack Rank E (I remember because he broke the million xp mark). That one was mostly RAW/RAI, although even there I bet we botched rules on XP for gold gained as rulers/commanders and the like (and who knows if we did the treasure tables right).

In AD&D, I seem to recall a ranger that got to name level. Also a human fighter that got to 7 or 8 and then switched to wizard and got back up to 6 or more. We didn't aim as high at that point.

I had a 2E fighter that I ran from the middle of 8th grade until I graduated from high school, so almost 5 years playing about once per week give or take. He reached I think somewhere between level 9-11 but I think we stopped making our characters go up levels at a certain point because we didn’t really want them to get more powerful than they were.

That's one of the problems. By the time we learned to play vaguely 'rules as written/intended,' we advanced to vaguely name level and then kinda stopped caring about level that much.