Which D&D editions had official levels past 20? Did you play them? What was the experience like?

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com

E-Rocker

Not a goose
Joined
Mar 25, 2019
Messages
3,701
Reaction score
9,597
Question is in the title: Which D&D editions had official levels past 20? Did you play them? What was the experience like?

Just something I'm curious about, since the 5e game I'm playing in is getting close to level 20, and, to the best of my understanding, 5e does not have levels past 20.
 
BECMI was level 1-36. I've never played anything above 8th or so in "Basic".

AD&D 1e never stated a level cap and I know there were some products with level 25 NPCs and stuff like that. The Level 20 cap was actually added late in this edition via Dragonlance. But Raistlin was Level 21 or Level 22 anyway.

I never played anything from level 1 to level xxx. In terms of continuous play, AD&D 1e and 2e tend to burn out for me around level 8. But for AD&D1e, I made up some level 25 characters for my friend's and my own fantasies of high level play. I ran a fight with the Tarrassque once. It killed all of the characters except a Level 25 Kensai which I had cheated like a bitch on to allow magic weapons and weapon specialization on top of the existing class abilities.

D&D 4e was level 1-30. Nope, never played that high.
 
It seems like we had characters in AD&D 1E that were around 17 to 19. The way we played them, they seemed more like benefactors and mentors to lower level characters. "Here, young warrior. Take my Gauntlets of Ogre Poweron your quest to defeat the goblins."
 
Yeah, BECMI had up to 36. That being said, I think the highest level we've gotten to from 1st was 9th. Much like G Gabriel said, personally I've found play at level 7 and up to start to become un-fun and a slog across all of the editions.
 
My high school AD&D campaign made it up to 16th level or so before I went off to college.

Since then I have not had any campaign run anywhere close to that.

I'm really torn because there was some interesting stuff in the high level D&D spells, but certainly at some point high level PCs in most any system become less fun. One issue is the arms race starts to really pervade things (higher level PCs mean more dangerous monsters). Another issue is the increasing likelihood of magic that just creates too much dissonance in the world (why does XYZ occur in a world where magic does ABC). And with gamer ADD, who wants to run a campaign that long.
 
Incidentally, the official AD&D1e module Throne of Bloodstone lists it's recommended adventurer level range as 18 through 100. So, official AD&D1e product stating that triple digit level characters are possible and legal.
 
I present level 12 or so as the limit of human potential, representing heroes like Conan, Achilles, or John Carter at their peak. I use spells over 6th level more like plot devices representing lost sorcery beyond the ken of man, alien technology, or awesome workings that need a big ritual to pull off. This works fine for me because my D&D games take place in settings where man is ultimately insignificant (Mythos) or otherwise grounded by the limitations of humanity (e.g. fantasy Crusades). Level 13+ is the realm of NPCs, usually due to some terrible supernatural condition that costs one's humanity such as a daemonic pact or undeath.

If I ran a game that went over level 12 I would probably craft a setting that borrowed liberally from superhero conventions, JRPGs, and Exalted to make it more plausible.
 
Character has 25s all the way down, started from all 18s rolled fair, plus a bunch of increases due to wishes? Is Level 131, advanced from level 1, totally legit? Has been through Tomb of Horrors three times, and aced it each time? Has killed all the arch-devils and demon lords in the Monster Manuals?

Yeah, that was what was called a regular Friday at any open D&D game in the 80s.
 
I've done 1-15 in a 5e game someone was running off the Tiamat arc and I'm in a spellslinger game where we're about level 12 at the moment. In practice, I think the sweet spot of D&D in all the versions I've played (AD&D 1e, 2e, 3e, 5e) runs from level 3 or 4 to about 10 or so. Low level spellcasters were a bit crap in 1e-2e so I'd say about level 5 in those editions for spell casters, but low level spell casters work better in 5e.
 
I don't think I've ever gotten past low to mid teen levels.

In all my current homebrew 5e settings, max level is 11. There might be special tricks to cast spells past 6th level like on a special day and permanently lose a point of con. Like Brock, I use high level stuff to immortal npcs.
 
You never really appreciate how important tools like secrets, physical distances, credible law enforcement, and vulnerability are to storytelling until high level D&D takes them all away from you.

Oh yes!

My crew and I were at the 80s game shop one evening. One of the game rooms was open, so I asked if we could use it. The owner said it was fine, so my crew set up shop in there. We decided to run some high level D&D with those aforementioned 25th level characters I had.

I was running the game, and I had something typical for me dreamed up. It was railroady with a bunch of setpieces, and just character interaction. We hadn't even gotten properly started with two other guys came in.

The owner had told them we were running a game, and they were wondering what we were playing. I told them it was high level D&D, and they wanted to join. They already had level 24 and 25 characters they could play. Well, I was a very open person back then, so I said sure.

It wasn't even that they ran afoul of my GMing style when they started playing. Even though it was clear they were not compatible with the style of game I was running. It wasn't even really their characters that were the issue. It was their equipment.

The 25th level party I had made up was about making up an interesting cast for my players. Think about the pre-gens of Dragonlance. They were along those lines. They were high level. They had signature items. They had backstories. But they didn't have packs filled with magic items. They had a magic weapon and armor. They might have a couple of special goodies in their backpacks. They didn't even really have a lot of money.

These guys had characters with multiple bags of holding full of magic items and money. Need 10K GP for something? No problem, that's absolute pocket change. Is there some obstacle that needs to be solved? These guys had a magic item which readily sidestepped it. They also had a few spells they liked which I hadn't really ever considered the implications of which caused absolute havok with what I was doing.

They quickly became disgusted with my game because it was "too easy," and left. None of us were sad to see them go, because they had basically ruined our fun.

I don't know if those two guys had legitimately leveled up their characters. I would presume not, but I can't rule out that they did. Regardless, they had a different conception of a high level character than I did. And I can say in the years since that their versions which had dozens upon dozens of extraneous magic items and hundreds of thousands of nearly worthless gold, is probably closer to what would result in 25 levels of continuous D&D play than the 25th level characters I had created.
 
Yeah, BECMI had up to 36. That being said, I think the highest level we've gotten to from 1st was 9th. Much like G Gabriel said, personally I've found play at level 7 and up to start to become un-fun and a slog across all of the editions.
Same for me, except I'd replace that with "unfun past level 3":thumbsup:.

Also, the experience of not playing those editions was great, I played games I liked instead:shade:!
 
AD&D 1E has no hard level cap for most classes, but most abilities (THAC0, saving throws, thief skills) stop improving around level 20, so past that it's just more hp (which in 1E ae a fixed amount per level at high levels (+1/level for magic-users, +2/level for clerics and thieves, +3/level for fighters), not whole dice) and, for casters, more spells per day up to around level 30, so there's not really much point to continuing to play that high. There's really a "de facto practical cap" for PCs around level 18 with anything above that really just serving as a reference for NPCs (gods, the 30th level ultimate BBEG lich-emperor, etc.).

The mid-80s D&D boxed sets (Companion and Master) explicitly supported play up to 36th level (and beyond, with the D&D Immortals set, thought that was really more a separate-but-related game than a continuation of D&D) but I never played in a game that went that high - we still topped out somewhere around 20th level.
 
The highest level PC (AD&D) I ever had was 12th, may have just made 13th before we started a new campaign. Personally I didn't really start to enjoy the game until 3rd, and 5th to 9th was best.
 
Oh man, could you imagine running a game at a convention and someone plops down their 100th level character in front of you, insisting on its legality and demanding you let them play?
GM: "Uh, these stats are really. . . .high." :trigger: "You rolled these up??"
Player: "Definitely. There were witnesses."
 
I played a 3.5e game that went to 22nd or 23rd level. I played an Elf Wizard/Druid/Arcane Hierophant.

Yeah, having one character will full access of 1st to 9th for two different spell lists meant I had a lot prep on spells. I had my own spreadsheets and such set up to track spells, and I had my own notes on tactics (similar to how I run NPCs as a GM) so I didn't sit there like a deer in headlights when it was my turn in the initiative order.

Also, lots of stat changes due to Wildshape plus by the end of the game we all had Artifacts with various powers.

We played with GM homebrew "Epic" rules, and I don't really remember those doing much more than just allowing us to keep levelling past 20.

Our party really was more like a team of "superheroes" for the latter part of the campaign. We had an evil organization (more like a cult that had taken over a country) as our main enemies for the last half of the campaign. At one point our party plus a small number of NPCs took the field against an "army" of standard levels (1st to 4th) and we slaughtered them (no surprise there).

It was an enjoyable game because we had a clear focus, "destroy the cult!" that kept us moving forward. We were mostly self directed after 15th level or so. I don't think it would have been very fun doing typical dungeon crawls at these levels.
 
You never really appreciate how important tools like secrets, physical distances, credible law enforcement, and vulnerability are to storytelling until high level D&D takes them all away from you.

LOL, so true. Frankly, at very high level D&D the players will use their PCs to write the story. For better or for worse.
 
I got up to level 42 with a character in AD&D. Not easily, same GM, heavens that game was crazy, we were searching for the Throne of Olympus, IIRC? I became a demigod, and well, that was the end as a PC.
 
I got really great scores for a character--in front of two GM's, they were the only people I was ever able to play him under though, since they'd witnessed them, but not all 18's...(and he never got past level 3)
 
AD&D 2E's Dark Sun campaign had a sourcebook for characters of level 21-30. 3E had an Epic level handbook, which went from 21-30. AD&D 2E had a special high level campaign book that talked about what to do when the number scale broke. Clearly, there is an occasional desire to just go into gonzo levels.

I think it all comes down to what a "level" is supposed to mean. By OD&D standards 4th was a hero and 8th a super hero. Seems like there isn't much room to go up from there but Men & Magic did have a paragraph on how to push the scale higher and Greyhawk Supplement I did more of the same. AD&D's PH was designed to go to level 20. We had some OD&D characters go into the 20's (I think a level 25 and a level 27) back in the day, but we threw out the official XP rules because we would never have gotten there by the book.
 
I think the highest level character I ever had in a 1st ed. Game was an 8th level monk, when I was in high school, but I got super lucky and he was psionically gifted too (which basically made him a bad-ass combination of Bruce Lee and Professor X).

Other than that, level 4 or so always seemed to be where things crapped out for the D&D games we played, and we'd start a new campaign.
 
We created high level characters as teens to play a lot of the classic Gygax modules: Tomb of Horrors (10-14), the Giants trilogy (8-12)/Vault of the Drow (10-14), Land Beyond the Magic Mirror (9-12) and the utterly nuts and uber-powered Isle of the Ape (for levels 18 and above!). These were all a blast although I'm unsure how closely to the rules we were 'properly' playing.

Funny thing is when you look at it almost all of Gygax's modules are for higher levels and very high magic.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top