Long campaigns

[Dykstrav]

I've played in six campaigns over the years that have risen from 1st to 20th+. The average number of levels gained, however, seems to hover somewhere between 5-7.

The highest-level campaign that I've ever personally ran started at 1st level and ended with the characters around 26th level. Two of the characters were even around the whole time from the beginning.

Anyone ever played the bloodstone pass series?

 

[AuraSeer]

Follow-up question: Have you ever seen a PC, in any edition, rise in play from 1st level to 20th level?

Yep, our first set of 3E characters did. We started out with three 1st-level PCs, at 0 XP. Along the way we picked up a few more players, who came in around level 7 (IIRC). We all hit level 20 somewhere in the middle of Bastion of Broken Souls, and if we'd been inclined to go epic, the climax of that adventure would have given us enough XP to hit level 21.

This is one reason I have a great tolerance for suboptimal character choices. My original character was a single-class sorcerer who took Combat Casting and Point-Blank Shot as his first two feats. Another PC was the single-class half-elf bard who specialized in the light crossbow. If those two could reach level 20, anybody can.

 

[drothgery]

I think the longest I kept a character was from 1st to 14th, and the highest-level active PC was also 14th (I had a few one-shots at higher level, though nothing beyond 16th). But mostly I've ended up changing my PC mid-campaign (sometimes due to 2e Thief disease, sometimes due to character death).

And given the above, since I've never been in a party with widely disparate levels, I've never seen the first to twentieth level run with one guy.

 

[Arkham]

My campaign started at 5th, and now has at least one of the original characters sitting at 25th. But the game is still going. I don't expect it to finish until around 30th.

 

[Qualidar]

I've DM's a group that's had a character stretch from 2nd-17th level (the rest of the group went from 1st - 15th). It wasn't my primary campaign, just the one we played every now and then when we wanted a break. It stretched over 15 years, from 2e to Skills & Powers to 3e to 3.5. We still might pick it up every now and then.

~Qualidar~

 

[occam]

The highest-level PC I've personally gamed with in 3e is my current one, a monk who's gone from 1st to 14th level. However, there was a favorable encounter with a deck of many things that helped a lot. I believe some of the other PCs are now 11th level, almost 12th, mostly starting at 1st level.

In 1e, I played a cleric from 1st to at least 23rd level, maybe up to 27th, I can't quite recall. I was DM for a PC that made it from 1st to 29th level, capping his career with a one-on-one faceoff against the Queen of the Demonweb Pits (just barely successfully). Of course, those were the days of 30+-hour marathon weekend sessions fueled by MTV, junk food, and teenage hormones. Nowadays, with a family, a full-time job, and other obligations, it's tough to scrape together a monthly 4-hour game.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I had a 2e game that ran from fighter4th - fighter18th. (I standardized the level of the game on a single-classed fighter to make my own life easier). My current 3.0 campaign started at 1st level five-ish years ago and the party is currently 20th. My games, regardless of system, either last for 2-3 months or 2+ years with no middle ground.

I actually set out for my first campaign, the 2e game above, to be a long-duration event. I ripped off the staff-of-the-seven-parts and used it as the game core. With 10 (in my particular case) items to retrieve there was a definite long term plot but with plenty of flexibility. I made it a multiplanar game just to up the flavor and allow me to brush any bad ideas under the rug, as it were.

In retrospect, I used the Bab-5 approach; consisting of an overarching plot (series concept), a number of player-specific sub plots that would last an extended period of time (each season) and then the individual item retrieval (multi-episode arc). Because there was a series of Now/Later/Eventually plots, there was always some sense of continuity, even when I pulled a stylistic u-turn, like the Al-Quadim/Il-Earth setting or the ravenloft-ish demiplane.

 

[Mycanid]

My longest running character is a 1st Ed. converted to 3.5 over time Monk who has reached the ripe old level of 7. This is a PbeM campaign that has gone on for what has to be about 8 years now and has resulted in over 2000 pages of written, narrative campaign text. Good reading, but slow leveling.

Now this is cool ... and just my style.

 

[Dragonbait]

6 months, 3:4 weekends a month, 5-9 hour sessions, 16 levels. 3.5 rules.

Highest 2ed campaign ran for about 6 months and reached around level 12.

 

[EyeontheMountain]

My group usually starts at 3rd, and some of the campaigns have ge through a lot of levels. The last three, if I remember:

3rd-14th or so. TPK by a claw-using Vampire.
3rd-27th. Retired characters because they could not really be challenged.
3rd-9th. TPK in the Red Hand of Doom.

And starting tomorrow 1st- ????????

We level quickly nad cycle through campaigns equally quickly. I think the 27th level gmae took 12-15 months tops.