thenobledrake's page

For a very long time now, basically since I first started finding online spaces to discuss TTRPGs in, I've seen a lot of people state that campaigns only ever reach a particular level before they end. While what level was being mentioned has differed a bit from version to version, it's always been a significantly lower level than the books presented as the play range.

I've had my own difficulties with some games, and heard lots of explanations for why each version falters at getting to the presented pinnacle of progression - but generally speaking I've had a lot less difficulty (or maybe I just had a higher tolerance for particular difficulties at the time) than most people seem to report.

Whether it was "it genuinely takes too much real-time to get past level 12 or so" in AD&D 2nd or Rules Cyclopedia/BECM D&D (which I overcame by using the optional XP rules in the books themselves, which greatly sped up progress), or the "the math gets wonky around 10-13" of 3.X (which I experienced harshly, even though once I managed a campaign that made it to 57th level... and ended with Tiamat getting 1-round-killed by a single character even after I boosted her stats some) there were reasons that could be pointed to that explain why people - even if they wanted a campaign to go "all the way" - would consistently fall short of the goal. But those reasons have been deliberately addressed by modern game designs...

And yet I still see people state it as irrefutable fact that campaigns just don't go all the way. With D&D 5th edition, the system math was deliberately built to try and facilitate high-level play working better than it had before, and yet when surveys went out the info collected said that people wanted to play higher level than just ending around 12-13, but then when asked after the game had been out long enough for campaigns to have gone the distance a time or two over, the info said campaigns still end around 12-13... and as for answers why, most discussion I could find were basically along the lines of "that's just when campaigns end" without any reason - just the circle of logic that campaigns end at that point because that's when campaigns end.

I've also seen this kind of statement pop up in discussion about PF2 - not in the sense of "my campaigns have been ending at that point" but rather in a sense of "no campaign can go past that point". What I wonder, and hope to learn with this thread, is whether others are ready like I am to have the end of the campaign finally line up to the end of presented progression materials.

So thanks for reading all of that, and tell me: Are you, or are you not, ready for it to be "typical" for a campaign to actually get to 20th level instead of ending at something like 10th-13th level?