Always Low Level

[NotScaryBats]

The highest level character I have ever had in any D&D is my level 12 Succubus (3.5e) on a PbP game here on Gitp. She started at level 12.

I have been playing RPGs for the better part of two decades, now. All the time, I see people talking about really high level stuff, from the 'this will suck until you hit Paragon' to the 'loop this power and this power to win -- but it only works at level 18.'

Playing with my friends and family, we almost always start 'by the book' meaning either beginning characters with 15 Freebies in WoD, level 1 in D&D, standard points in BESM, etc etc.

So, from my experience, all those level 5+ spells, Vorpal Swords, rank 5 Disciplines, are cool to look at, but I will never see them in play.

Has this been your experience as well?

[Mikeavelli]

It's excellent to start off your first campaign, or your first few campaigns, at very low levels. You're learning the rules, balance is easier to manage in the beginning, etc.

But to remain that way forever? That's like having a mansion filled with toys, and going, "no, don't touch. Those aren't for you. Go out back and put the triangle block in the triangle-shaped hole."

[Knaight]

So, from my experience, all those level 5+ spells, Vorpal Swords, rank 5 Disciplines, are cool to look at, but I will never see them in play.

Has this been your experience as well?

Broadly speaking: No. I generally play comparatively low powered games, so there's nothing like D&D high levels, but within the framework of those games there tends to be a variety. Most campaigns end up short (if for the simple reason that you can fit a lot of short campaigns in the same amount of time as one long one, bringing the average down), so there isn't necessarily a lot of character growth in a mechanical sense, but this is mitigated through a high variety of starting points. Sometimes the starting characters are established heroes with a history, sometimes they are largely interchangeable grunts embroiled in things much larger than themselves.

[NikitaDarkstar]

Not really. I've started characters at level 1 and ran it up into the epics (I think we quit at lvl 29.) and we frequently get up into the mid and late teens level wise. And just as often we start at higher levels, simply because we're sick and tired of playing through the "travel to get more powerful so the campaign can actually start" levels.

So no, I've never really had the problem of not seeing levels that high, but I don't exactly enjoy the instant win button either.

[Exediron]

Not at all. I have characters right now ranging from level 55 to level 74 (I think). We started this campaign in 2004 with 1st level characters.

In other games, I typically play low-level characters, because I consider it proper to start a new campaign world with low (usually first) level characters.

[Yora]

Has this been your experience as well?

In short: Yes.

When I started working on a D&D setting a year ago, I decided to simply cut away everything above 10th level since almost all of it would never come up in games anyway.

[Kol Korran]

So, from my experience, all those level 5+ spells, Vorpal Swords, rank 5 Disciplines, are cool to look at, but I will never see them in play.

Has this been your experience as well?

Sort of, but so far we liked it that way.
Our group usually plays D&D, and we have long campaigns startign from 2-4th level up to 12-13th. We were usually comfortable in these levels, so it worked for us I guess.

that said, the current campaign (Which we're still feeling out) may continue to high levels (currently level 3, just started), or we might do a specific high leveled campaign, since some players voiced interest, and I may have a few ideas in mind (Eberron's Argonessen, here we come!)

But that is still a long time to come. Our gaming frequency is quite low.

[shadow_archmagi]

Yeah, my group has an issue with starting games at level 5 and then ending them at level 10 or so. We just always feel that 5 is a good starting place, and then the game falls apart of natural causes.

THIS TIME WILL BE DIFFERENT THOUGH I AM GOING TO RUN THIS THING INTO THE EPIC

[Sir Enigma]

Yeah, this has happened to me a lot, frustratingly. I've had a lot of games that started at low levels and just fell apart before the high levels. The best I ever had was one that ran the Red Hand of Doom, and so survived until level 12, but usually getting past 5-6 is unusual for me unless we start at higher level.

Fortunately, the guy who's DMing the next game has got fed up with it too, and is planning to start around level 6...

[Siegel]

I've no real interest in trying longer-form games anymore; indeed, I see the long-form assumption as a serious impediment to the hobby.

When you want to do high level stuff then do it. You don't have to earn it.

[Jay R]

Of course. I want every character of mine to start at first level, simply because the experience and background a high-level character has is primarily the adventures he had to get there - the people he's met, the lives he's saved, the enemies he's made...

Not every campaign will make it to fifteenth level, so it follows that there are more first level characters than fifteenth level characters.

I also like the original Gygax assumption that adventuring is for the young, and that an experienced enough adventurer will eventually settle down, build an army, and start fighting battles, not skirmishes. Just as a general doesn't lead a small squad on a raid, a high-level character doesn't go dumpster-diving dungeon crawling.

People are free to think differently, and play differently, but I prefer to play a mid-range adventurer, having taken him through the experiences that got him there.

[Urpriest]

I'm going to echo others that it's perfectly reasonable to start at higher level. Also, especially these days in 4e you're going to run into games with accelerated leveling precisely because people have limited time and want to interact with the increased complexity of Paragon.

[Jarawara]

Always ?Low? Level...

12th?

Jeez, back in the old days, "low level" meant 1st to 3rd, "mid-range" was 4th to 7th, and "high level" was 8th to 12th level, maybe all the way to 14th. 15th and beyond was epic level, and nobody I knew ever bothered with that.

So at 12th, you're already on the high end of high. But I guess the game has changed since the old days. Though I haven't. In 33 years of playing, I have never seen a character get above 6th level, with the brief exception of one shot games where we played high level (10th) people just to see what we thought of it. They didn't feel real, so we went back to our regular guys.

Stick to the by-the-book characters, you'll enjoy them better. Especially if you do get to the high level stuff... you'll really feel you earned it then.

[Heart]

In any of the campaigns I've been in, the lowest level we've stopped has been three. Every other one has spanned into epic, but the only DM in my area besides myself really loves the super powered games.

[Kiero]

I have a simple red line for D&D games: I will not start at 1st level (and preferably somewhere around 5th as a minimum). The last game I played (D&D4e) started at 7th level, and was much better for it (though I'd prefer if it caps at 10th level). The previous D20 game, Star Wars Saga Edition, started at 4th level.

Same goes for other systems, no matter what the "by the book" novice level is, I want to play an experienced character from the start. We started DFRPG with "Chest Deep" characters, for example.

I should add, I don't like the top levels, they tend to be overly complicated, take too long to do stuff and not be terribly interesting either.

[Hylas]

The highest level character I've ever gotten to from level 1 is level 5. The highest level character I've ever played is level 6. He was a wizard. I felt like a god.

All of this high level stuff seems pretty wacky to me.

[Remmirath]

That hasn't been my experience, certainly. I typically start new games with first level characters, but I've run first level to twentieth and over a few times, and I believe the longest running character I had went from third to fiftieth.

I've also been in a few games that started at much higher levels as well, but I don't prefer to do that.

Always ?Low? Level...

12th?

Jeez, back in the old days, "low level" meant 1st to 3rd, "mid-range" was 4th to 7th, and "high level" was 8th to 12th level, maybe all the way to 14th. 15th and beyond was epic level, and nobody I knew ever bothered with that.

So at 12th, you're already on the high end of high. But I guess the game has changed since the old days. Though I haven't. In 33 years of playing, I have never seen a character get above 6th level, with the brief exception of one shot games where we played high level (10th) people just to see what we thought of it. They didn't feel real, so we went back to our regular guys.

Stick to the by-the-book characters, you'll enjoy them better. Especially if you do get to the high level stuff... you'll really feel you earned it then.

The game has changed since then, certainly. My longest running first edition character went from first to tenth level, and that certainly felt rather high level then. Levels are gained much faster in more recent editions, and to me at least, they don't feel like they count for as much. I expect that, in a first or second edition campaign, I'd still feel as though twelve was high level, but in third it feels fairly low level.

[kieza]

Having tried both high-level and low-level campaigns, I really prefer low-level. In the one campaign I ran that went from level 1 to 12 (in 4e), the growing character complexity started getting in the way around level 7-9.

[holywhippet]

The highest D&D level I've ever reached was level 5 and the campaign ended just as we reached that level. There aren't that many games I can get involved in locally though which is the main problem.

Still, some people feel 3rd edition D&D is fairly balanced up to about level 7 - after that the power inbalance kicks in and only gets worse as levels increase.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Depends on whether you mean low level or low power.

My 3.X games are almost invariably at high level because most non-caster character concepts need to wait quite a while before they start to actually function as advertised.

Other than that though, I prefer to run games at middling power. The idea is competent, but not story-breaking. If you choose to be a character who's good in a swordfight, for instance, you should be able to defeat almost anyone you like in a one-on-one duel (NPCs who can stand up to you in your area of expertise should be rare, and when they do occur they should be personal rivals or other major players in the story, not random mooks who appear in random encounters to rob you on the road). You should *not* be able to say "Okay, I conquer the country by defeating the King's army by myself."

[Kaun]

I know a lot of my games don't get to far into the later levels for one main reason;

DnD starts to become annoying to run in the later levels IMHO.

There is just to much going on and to much to take into account, it starts to become like homework rather then a fun hobby.

[Arbane]

Stick to the by-the-book characters, you'll enjoy them better. Especially if you do get to the high level stuff... you'll really feel you earned it then.

No, no I won't. I'm sick of the "Earn Your Fun" mentality that seems to think that spending the first six months playing as an incompetent scrub is necessary so that us stoopid playerz can really SAVOR our marginal ability.

But, I like games like Feng Shui and Exalted that start characters out at a high level of competence and then go up from there.

[Grundy]

We typically play low to mid level campaigns. Personally, I like the low levels. The powe of high level play is appealing, but by the time any character is that powerful, they tend to have all sorts of obligations, complications, and general hangers-on. That isn't my kind of escapist fantasy.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I've run several campaigns over several editions that went from 1st to "max" level (Immortal in BECMI, 16thish in 1e and 2e, 20th in 3e) and many that have started in the 3-5 range and went up that high. Haven't played in more than a handful, though, since I've always been my groups' main DM. I was fortunate enough to have groups that met during and after school for several hours multiple times a week, from elementary school through college, though, so we leveled much faster than the norm. Things that get better/get worse/change a lot/etc. around 14th+ level are a very real concern for my groups, and ensuring that characters are fun and viable for the whole level range (or at least most of it) is important, since we run lots of long campaigns and don't change characters until they die or the campaign ends.

[Jack of Spades]

I for one prefer games that start at low levels. I like the feeling of a character who I've made over the course of a campaign, if only because I feel like he's better tailored to the game. Playing a character from a relatively low level means that just about every mark on my sheet was fought for and earned over a long period of time. To be honest, it just feels a bit wrong to me to start out at mid-to-high level and dump a bunch of abilities and stats on the sheet.

However, a big part of that is probably the fact that I don't tend to play games with classes, in favor of those games where XP is currency and you buy what you want for your character. In those games, making a high-level character can get downright exhausting. I should know, I'm in the middle of making a replacement character right now

[Craft (Cheese)]

No, no I won't. I'm sick of the "Earn Your Fun" mentality that seems to think that spending the first six months playing as an incompetent scrub is necessary so that us stoopid playerz can really SAVOR our marginal ability.

The prospect of losing a character and spending 6 months being incompetent again is supposed to scare you to death into being super duper careful so you take the super safe routes and never try to have any fun. It works for old-school D&D style games but not really in anything else.

[DigoDragon]

Has this been your experience as well?

For me yes. When I run a D&D 3.5 campaign, it tends to go for a good while. The LOWEST level my players ended at in any campaign was 14th. So I'm quite disappointed that as a PC, the highest level any of my characters has achieved is 5th. So yeah, I haven't even gotten to experience a Prestige class yet.

With my case, the issue is my group not having anyone else who wants to be a GM with any regularity.

[some guy]

With my case, the issue is my group not having anyone else who wants to be a GM with any regularity.

This is also a big issue for me. The highest level I ever played in a campaign was from level 5 to level 8. The longest I ever played was from level 1 to 7.

But then again, I also run low level campaigns. The highest a player ever reached in a campaign of me was level 10. But nowadays I usually run reasonably short campaigns that go from 1 to 4-6. I run short campaigns because of a larger player base and I like to give everyone the chance to play in a campaign every once and a while.

But then again, again, I just started a campaign at level 5. I expect the players to reach level 8-9. I was a bit tired of low level. But this is probably an exception.

[Andreaz]

What I notice happening in my groups is that leveling a character from 1 to 20 doesn't really happen, but we do play long enough that it should.
So when a game ends we just start another at a higher level.

[Thialfi]

More like that lately since we have had a couple players join our playing group. We never allow a character to start at anything other than 1st level, so we had to reroll several new characters to fit in with the new players.

In our 32 years of D&D, we have played everything from 1st to 30th. We went an entire decade without playing a character below 15th level, so it varies. I actually prefer characters with several levels on them, because low level characters are entirely too fragile in our 1e/2e campaign. Some classes, like mages, are next to worthless before they hit 7th level.