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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 6709739" data-attributes="member: 463">Then what - if I did actually get a group of 36th level PCs in BECM D&D, which seems unlikely, and they wanted to keep playing, then I'd get hold of the Immortals set and do BECMI. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The alternative of course is new PCs - this is a pretty traditional campaign which allows for multiple PCs, my son (8) insists that all his main PC's children are also his characters - "I rolled them!". <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />But realistically, few tabletop players stick around that long here in London, my Karameikos group are mostly young and their careers will likely take most of them away from London within three years. In my 25th level 5e D&D campaign only one original player & PC is still there from the start at 1st level in 2011, three more of the current group joined through 2012 at ca 6th-8th, and the fifth joined at the start of this year at level 22.  Re the 5e Wilderlands game that might reach 20th in a couple years, actually ideally I would like to play a lot of Epic stuff at 20th level so I could see it going a long time at 20th, but eventually the players will want new PCs - this gets in to what a 'campaign' is separate from a 'world' since there are NPCs in the current game that some players have known in prior campaigns from 2-5 years ago, I think my first online Wilderlands campaign was 2009 and there is player continuity from then.Finally, in my big 1e AD&D campaign that went for many years, by the end the PCs were demigods and a lesser gods and we had years of deity-level play.  Overall, I don't think slow advancement is necessary for continuity unless you don't want the game to change, in which case I'd prefer a lateral-advancement system to D&D; BRP as in Pendragon & Runequest maybe. But I really like in D&D seeing the campaign change over the years, zero to hero to superhero to legend to demigod in some cases. I don't much like 3e/PF super-fast advancement though, my favourite 3e campaign was Lost City of Barakus using half XP.Edit: Overall I think WoTC were right to think that most campaigns last 1-1.5 years, but wrong to design 3e around going 1st-20th in that time - they designed 4e to go 1st-30th in 1.5 years but failed IME since combat is slower than they realised. I would say Gygax was right to design around 1st to name level (ca 9th-11th) in a year of weekly play, that is a satisfying campaign for most people. And he was right to have slower progression after name level for the long term campaigns that wanted to stick with the same PCs. 5e by contrast has a similar rate to 10th level (quicker 1-4, similar 5-10) but then rockets you up from 11th to 20th. The difference though is that 5e power curve seems a lot more shallow; I was reading the 5e DMG yesterday and my 7th-8th level PCs are still doing the sort of adventures it describes for the level 1-4 novice tier, I suspect at 20th they'd mostly be doing the sort of thing it describes for level 11-16 paragon tier, and that should work fine.</blockquote>

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