What is the Highest Level You Have Reached From Level 1?

[Aenghus]

23 in a 3rd ed game as a DM, 14 in a 2nd ed game as a player, from 1st level. I'm DM almost all the time, so have limited chances to play nowadays.

I've played in high level campaigns that started at high level though, 18th level in a 2e game and 31st level in an epic 3e game, ending at 33rd level.

I find the limiting factors in such things are groups breaking up due to new jobs and other real world issues, or referee burnout.

Groups are very idiosyncratic in their campaign lengths, some games run in the same setting for decades with different parties, others run lots of short campaigns with huge amounts of variety in setting.

 

[Piratecat]

Lvl 24 with a half-orc rogue/cleric. Took 16 years of (roughly) biweekly play and spanned 2e, 3e and 3.5e. So, so worth it.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

We had a series of campaigns run from 1st to 30th level, but I changed characters around 6th level or so. Other than that, I don't think I've had a character reach higher than 7th unless it started high.

 

[Nytmare]

With AD&D, things generally petered off around 4th or 5th maybe? There was one particularly Monty Haul campaign when I first got to college with 20-some odd normal players, with nearly unlimited funds, and a magic item that converted money and items into XP that finished up with everyone being like 20/20/20/20 multiclassed monstrosities, but I'm not going to count that one.

3rd/3.5 campaigns (both run and played seemed to die off around 10th level. Then we found E6, and things (oddly enough) stopped at 6.

I only ever ran 4th Edition, but the two full campaigns both touched the paragon tier and stopped dead.

 

[Roland55]

Lvl 24 with a half-orc rogue/cleric. Took 16 years of (roughly) biweekly play and spanned 2e, 3e and 3.5e. So, so worth it.

Lvl 19 under not-dissimilar conditions.

 

[Weather Report]

DMed a 1st/2nd Ed campaign to 14th level (stopped due to proximity).

DMed a 3rd Ed campaign starting at 3rd Level to 13th level, then switched the campaign over to 4th Ed rules, played it from 13th level to 17th level, the campaign is currently on a serious hiatus (stopped due to my disillusionment with 4th Ed).

 

[drothgery]

I've played in one campaign in almost 20 years of D&D that made it from first to 20th. I went through 3 characters in it, though.

 

[Stormonu]

Level 8 with a 2E Necromancer witch and 6/2 in 3E with a dwarf barbarian/cleric. Most of the time, I'm DMing instead. The highest level campaign I ran got characters up to 15th level (in 2E, some 3E carry-over play).

 

[stoloc]

1/2e reached around level 10 after several years playing and the campaign finished
3e 11ish after about half that time and I was so unhappy with the rules that I didn't want to play any longer
4e Level 30 - basically playing the same character from when 4e was released until we finished the campaign (well we have one last fight to finish it up but after that it's all over but the writeups)

Favorite campaigns were 1e and 2e ones but that was more of a gm thing than a system thing.

 

[billd91]

Highest level characters I played to from 1st: 13-14 back in 1e days.
Highest level characters I ran a game for from 1st: 16 or 17th in D&D 3.5