D&D 5E How many of your campaigns ACTUALLY ever get to 20th level?

[Emirikol]

How many of your campaigns ACTUALLY ever get to 20th level?

We find all kinds of cool combinations and broken goodness at upper levels, but honestly, I usually get bored or burned out around 12th. How frequently do you guys ever get your D&D/Pathfinder campaigns up to 20th level?

jh

 

[Boarstorm]

In my experience... roughly never. I played in one 2E campaign back in the mid-90s that STARTED at level 24, but I don't think that counts.

 

[Crothian]

In 1e I had a wizard go above 20th level but we were unsure of rules and I'm not sure how much of a campaign that was.

These other were campaigns. I played an elven Wizard/thief to over 20th level as a thief but about 15th level as a Wizard. Most of the other characters were close to level 20 if not passed.

Another 2e campaign I ran took the characters to level 25. We knew 3e was coming out so we just kept playing that campaign until we could start 3e.

That first 3e campaign went to level 20. A 3e campaign I played in I took a bard to level 24.

A different group one character got her character over 20 in 3e.

A third group in 3e we got to 16th level before the TPKed.

In Pathfinder we got to levels 18 at the end of Kingmaker and we stopped there. That's as close as we got in Pathfinder.

 

[Tony Vargas]

When the game starts to break down at higher levels, people tend to stop playing it.

I ran AD&D, through both 1e & 2e. That campaign ended at about 14th level. I'd so heavily-modified the rules I don't know if it was legitimately D&D anymore, but I did get it to go 14 levels.

3.x, similarly, the campaigns I was in all gave up the ghost before 14th, some before 10th. One that started at 15th didn't last long enough for anyone to reach 16th. The two that got closest to 14th ran 6-8 hours a week, 3 months a year (alternating with eachother, other D&D campaigns that folded quickly, and my own Champions campaign) for the full run of 3.x.

Mechanically, most versions of D&D just had a 'sweet spot' where they worked well. You slogged through the fist level or few to get there, enjoyed the mid-levels, and then the campaign broke up, or characters retired or you otherwise re-booted back to playable levels.

I don't know if 5e plans to be an exception to this phenomenon. The way it's designed to have characters level very quickly at first, slow down, then level quickly again around 11ths, suggest that it /has/ the sweet spot, and is just designed to linger there, where powering through the levels that bracket it.

 

[Stormonu]

None. Highest I got a campaign was 15th.

Though like above, I played a short-lived game that started at 18th in 3E. I dropped out just before the group hit 21st (they had an adventure I missed that took them from 19th to 21st), and they played up to 30th level.

 

[Ebony Dragon]

I've been playing with the same D&D group doing 3.0/3.5/3.P for the last 12 years, roughly. During that time we have played through 4 full campaigns, with 3/4 of them going to level 20+

So yeah, I kind of expect our games to make it to the higher levels and plan accordingly when concepting a character.

However, I may have finally convinced our DM to run the next campaign as an E8 game in order to keep the number bloat and high level superhero play under control. Looking forward to seeing how it goes.

 

[Wormwood]

Let's see, in chronological order (and with my old person memory):
AD&D: ended up around 16th level. After we killed lolth and took over her ship. Good place to stop.
Basic/expert: only got to about twelfth level there.
2e: never really got above tenth. It was the early nineties and there were just too many other amazing games to spend all our time in dungeons.
3e: the party got to the high teens. By that point I was so burned out running high level 3e that I quit.
4e: two separate campaigns from level 1 to 30. Each one took about two years and I was the primary DM for both.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

My first 3e game got to level 22. The highest I ever played in 1e was about to 14-16th level.

 

[Starfox]

I played Savage Tide to 20, took about 3 years.

Still the answer is that very few campaigns get this high.

 

[Haffrung]

In 30+ years only two campaigns have reached 10th level. None higher.

Back when we had lots of time to play, level advancement (in AD&D) was extremely slow. Advancement was accelerated in newer editions, but we play far less frequently.