Would you play a D&D campaign without leveling?

[Kobold Stew]

Absolutely.

LBB Traveller and FATE (pre-Core) are both level-less and (with D&D) represent the three main RPGs that have defined by gaming life.

 

[Gradine]

Note that even most story-games without traditional "levels" have some form of mechanical character progression. This includes E6.

I don't think I'd play in a campaign without some type of mechanical character progression, personally. In-world progression is all good and well, but I much prefer the knowledge that my character is getting better at what they do, in some way.

 

[Blue]

I find that, as an over simplification, many RPGs fall into two broad categories.

One, which includes every edition of D&D is basically Zero to Hero. The advancement has huge effects on what you can do, and the game is designed around challenges at all sorts of different levels of character power.

The other category, exemplified by systems like superheroes in the Hero System, have a slow rate of change. You get mildly better over time, or get some new power stunts, but there is no dramatic changes. Foes that would have cleaned your clock a few months back aren't a reasonably fight now, and just fodder (if you ever seem them again) a few months in the future.

So for D&D, I am sure you can tell a great story at a set level, but you are cutting out so much of the content. Higher level foes, higher level spells, the works. So I guess that a DM I trusted could convince me to do it for a particular game they have a strong concept for, but it wouldn't be my default way of playing D&D.

 

[Seramus]

No. I’ve tried ‘no progression’ games and it was not my cup of tea.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Laurefindel]

So, in short, would you play long form D&D without gaining levels?

Absolutely.

This would actually give me enough time to become efficient with the abilities of my character and synergize with the abilities of the other PCs before leveling-up and gaining new ones...

Personally, my sweet spot for such a campaign would be somewhere between level 5 and 8. A 3rd or 4th level campaign could be cool too, banking on the few abilities that are good at these levels but that quickly become obsolete thereafter (omg, we could even see berserker barbarians!)

A published campaign like Storm King's Thunder maxed at 3rd level would be pretty brutal however. It would force players to tackle the adventure quite differently, which can be a good thing, but I'd hope that the DM makes some adjustments too.

 

[Reynard]

A published campaign like Storm King's Thunder maxed at 3rd level would be pretty brutal however. It would force players to tackle the adventure quite differently, which can be a good thing, but I'd hope that the DM makes some adjustments too.

Just to be clear, I wasn't necessarily suggesting running SKT or PoA without leveling, just using them as examples of a long term, multi-tiered campaign format.

Here's a thing I think is important to the idea: enemies do not have to level up either. You don't need to fight goblins, then orcs, then ogres if they are all filling the same niche in the story. It can always be orcs. Or, it can be orcs here and bandits over there and gnolls over thataway, if varying the type of enemies is important. Likewise with villains and "boss monsters." They don't have to keep getting more and more powerful, they can just be different and interesting for those differences.

As to folks that keep pointing to super hero games or Traveller or whatever as examples of games where limited or no advancement is okay, but D&D is not, do you really see a fundamental difference in the kinds of stories those games are able to facilitate versus those D&D can facilitate? You can't have a "super hero campaign" in D&D (by that I mean a team of people that work together to protect their city/nation/world while trying to balance real life and interpersonal relationships)? Or an exploratory campaign on an airship, with the heroes doing as much to make money trading as anything else? Those things seem perfectly well suited to D&D to me.

 

[iserith]

I think leveling up works so well for D&D because it's partly a very human story: You are called to adventure. You go forth to face your fears. You overcome them and, in the doing, become more capable as a result. That is a tale we tell each other over and over again and with good reason because it's a story of an optimal mode of acting in the world. Tying that to character abilities instead of just renown or treasure (or whatever) makes a lot of sense when thought about in this way in my view.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

No. But I'd consider a much longer time between leveling that default 5e.

 

[Mallus]

Could we still get stuff? Preferable from the things we killed and then robbed...

Seriously though, a 5e campaign where PCs start at 5th or 6th level and never go up sounds great. Like a D&D-ified Traveller game.