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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6636065" data-attributes="member: 4937">Starting at 1st level, I've never seen one make it past 12th at any table, and at my own table none had ever made it past 7th starting from 1st.  Most of that those is simply the amount of time involved in leveling though, as most of the PC's were still alive at that point.  It's just that without force feeding 1e character treasure in order to level them, leveling past name level in 1e is extremely slow.  Each encounter is going to bring only a couple of thousand XP to the entire party, and you need millions of XP to level the party up just one level.  We were leveling about once a year playing 8 hour sessions 30-40 times a year.  Most to the point, starting from 1st level, the highest I've yet seen a character reach at my own table in any system is 8th level (in 3e and still alive, 7th was the previous record in 1e).  More often characters enter or reenter an ongoing campaign at somewhere above 1st level, and level up from that point.  So for example, you might see 7-12 or even 3-15, but rarely 1-10+.  I've heard of it, I've just never seen it happen.  Which is why the AP's of 3.X with there assumption of 1-20 as a complete campaign always struck me as so bizarre.  Nobody I knew above the age of 13 in a 1e game had ever claimed to have a 20th level character, and the 13 year old that did make that claim (a 32nd level paladin) and who complained to me the game had gotten boring and was talking about how weak Morgan Le Fey was based on her stats, I killed in about 20 minutes of play using only a handful of ordinary monsters to prove to him that there was more to the game than just flipping to a page of the MM (or the Deities & Demigods!) and making attack rolls.So when did the default expectation become, "Your character is going to reach 20th level", so that we create AP's for it?   Back in the day, even the claim would have seemed a bit munchkin and proof of Monte Haulism.  I can remember when the default expectation was, "Your character probably won't survive more than 4 levels from the time you start play, and if your character does that character is going to be one you'll really remember and be hugely invested in."   The more usual thing was to boast (as I am here) of just how much of a RB your DM was (see Weird Pete for this behavior as a stereotype).  I always assumed most of the upper levels of the charts were purely theoretical and they ended where they did because in practice you'd never hit the implied caps.   I basically still assume that.  In the unlikely event I'm still running the same campaign 5-6 years from now, I still wouldn't expect to have 20th level PC's roaming around.</blockquote>

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