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

[Stalker0]

3e…level 3 to 16 in two ish years

 

[Velderan]

BECMI - I vaguely remember having a 3rd level fighter. It was my intro to TTRPGs, but we didn't play long before moving on to other games like TMNT and GURPS.

I never played 1e.

2e - I had a half-elf wizard that got up to level 20 after a couple years of off and on play in a campaign where we swapped DMs. The next highest level character I played was a 15th level elf ranger, which was part of that general campaign where we switched up what characters we played based on who wanted to DM something and what they wanted to run. Pretty sure we played those characters for 2ish years, with the amount of time spent playing dramatically ramped up during summer vacation from school.

3e - I played a couple sessions and don't think I made it past level 2 before my interest in playing fizzled out due to the people I had available to play with at the time.

I never played 4e.

5e - I played a human arcane trickster rogue to level 20 in a Curse of Strahd campaign that we extended out to explore other parts of Ravenloft to get us to 20. I also had a half-elf sorcerer I played to level 13 in Descent into Avernus. Otherwise I spent the rest of my time playing 5e as DM, where the highest level campaign we played to was 14.

 

[Umbran]

One of my original 1e characters made it to lvl 18 (Elven Magic-User).

 

[orangefruitbat]

BECMI - one of our group made it to level 36 and became immortal. Sure I was probably generous with treasure and XP as DM, but we generally played by the rules. Would have been Grade 7-8 and nothing to do in the summer but play DnD for 8 hours a day.

Sigh...I miss my old life.

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.


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.

 

[sabrinathecat]

1st Edition: lvl 10 in 2 years
2nd Edition: lvl 8 as player. As DM the party got to lvl 12. Time isn't really measurable as we were bouncing between games constantly.
3rd Edition: lvl 6 or 7 within a year.
3.5: missed it due to an ill-advised matrimonial misadventure.
4th: got 2 different parties from lvl 1 through 30, and a couple from 1 to 15, and a couple more up to lvl 10. Again, bouncing between games with different people running, but figure each lvl 30 group would have been just over a year of weekly games.
5th: lvl 4 in three months.

 

[Tonguez]

About 9 iirc, I did managed to get one 3.5 druid to level 18 by which time he was a virtual god

 

[Vael]

3.5 ... 3rd, maybe 5th level?
4e ... This is an odd one, we had a rotating DMing group and after a TPK we created new PCs at the next level and continued playing, but it was one campaign and we got up to level 13 - 15.
5e ... 11th level. Curse of Strahd.

 

[Clint_L]

One of my original 1e characters made it to lvl 18 (Elven Magic-User).

That's not RAW. CHEATER!!!!



Edit: My own table ignored those rules, as well. And then Unearthed Arcana really loosened them anyway.

 

[Seramus]

31st level Wizard turned lich in the olden days of 2E, back when we had the time to game for 8 hour sessions. Still took 4 years, and might have kept going if the scheduling monster did not eat us.

I've had DMs keep running some my characters as NPCs in other campaigns after we split up, but I don't think that counts. It always made me feel warm and fuzzy to hear about them causing trouble in other people's games, and I try to return the favor with cameos in my own games, even if my current players don't realize it.

Like, one of my players was a copper wyrmling in a hatching game I ran decades ago. Now there's an adult copper dragon living in a city being a pest in my current setting.

 

[GrimCo]

2ed - level 6 cleric/fighter
3.5ed - i think 16 was highest when playing from lv 1. But we rarley started at 1st level, usually we stuck to starting at 3/4th and ending at 8-10th. That was sweet spot for 3.5
4ed - level 5, we played 3 short campaigns for few levels to test system when it came out, 1-5, 11-16 and 25-30.
5ed - level 14, it's my main character in our decade long grand campaign. Again, when we start something new, we tend to start at level 3.