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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peni Griffin" data-source="post: 3415633" data-attributes="member: 50322">The highest level I ever got a character under 1E was 6th, under 2E was 10th, under 3E has been 12th.  I think I DMed people to higher levels under 1E, but I'm not sure. When I started playing in college, we played dungeoncrawls every week - almost always homebrews - zapping in and out in the middles of dungeons as people had time to play.  Nobody started with high level characters.  If you died, you brought in an existing character or you started over from scratch.  I've played games that featured characters ranging from first through 12th level in the same party, and we never worried about balance - we just did the best we could.  If we didn't want to quit when the student union closed we'd adjourn to the apartment of somebody who lived off-campus and pulled an all-nighter.  We called it D&D, but people had characters from all over the roleplaying map who got shoehorned in.  Arduin Grimoire was the big munchkin system and some DMs wouldn't let in an Arduin-influenced character.  I remember one guy complaining that so-and-so had deliberately set out to kill his 23rd level character.  Those of us receiving his complaints didn't think 23rd was a reasonable level.  "Hey, I played him all summer," he said defensively, and we laughed.  I still like 6th level.  You level too fast in 3E.  Don't have time to get used to it.  We used to assume our characters aged at the rate of 1 year per level.  I'm running a monk now who's 10th level after four months of game time!  It's ridiculous.Anyway, we played a lot more regularly during the early years after college - once a week with a core group of myself, my husband, our roommate, and his little brother.  Our roommate worked on base at Lackland and would pick up gamers as they came through, so we had lots of short-term players.  We had two or three rotating campaigns at a time, one week in each - in proper campaign worlds, homebrewed - with interim games in different systems.  Campaigns tended to die because after a certain level it became hard to DM them, to find challenges that were hard, but not absurd, week after week after week.The trouble started when people stopped having time to DM.  Nobody wanted to run modules and fewer and fewer people had the time to homebrew.  I had to stop DMing because it uses the same mental muscles as writing stories and I couldn't afford to dissipate the time and energy into unpaid media.  We even stopped for awhile.  When we started wanting to play again we had trouble finding people we were compatible with.  People would play a game or two and drop out.  But we have a core again, and we've built on it.  Yeah, we can't game every week anymore.  But we play big, consistent campaigns with compatible people now.  I like mature gaming.</blockquote>

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