Thomas Shey
Legend
I also should note that I got a character up to 14th level in OD&D, but there were two factors here:
1. I lost a lot of characters along the way. That character and a few others who got close were just the survivors of a large pool played with frequency. In their way they were an extended expression of the funnel concept.
2. When playing in a very large group of potential players, often in multiple worlds, once the first cleric gets up to where they can cast Raise Dead, the survivorship of every character increases dramatically, and that's not even accounting for NPC clerics who will do so for pay. So while you can lose a lot of really low level characters, in that situation characters above a certain level are much more likely to survive long term (and that's generally true in the first place because characters above a certain level in OD&D have dramatically greater survivor ability anyway (in my observation back in the day, 3rd was the first breakpoint and it became much stronger at 5th).
So a lot of the ability to get to higher levels in older D&D depends on the context you're playing in, in practice.
1. I lost a lot of characters along the way. That character and a few others who got close were just the survivors of a large pool played with frequency. In their way they were an extended expression of the funnel concept.
2. When playing in a very large group of potential players, often in multiple worlds, once the first cleric gets up to where they can cast Raise Dead, the survivorship of every character increases dramatically, and that's not even accounting for NPC clerics who will do so for pay. So while you can lose a lot of really low level characters, in that situation characters above a certain level are much more likely to survive long term (and that's generally true in the first place because characters above a certain level in OD&D have dramatically greater survivor ability anyway (in my observation back in the day, 3rd was the first breakpoint and it became much stronger at 5th).
So a lot of the ability to get to higher levels in older D&D depends on the context you're playing in, in practice.
