Highest Level – Day 5 D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop

This is day 5 of the of d20 Dark Ages’ D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge! Based off of the challenge’s prompts I will be sharing personal stories about my history with Dungeons & Dragons every day in February. You can hop to another participating blog by using the links at the end of the article or click here to see my previous answers.

Day 5: What is the highest level character you’ve ever played?

The most levels a single one of my characters has ever gained was a 3rd level wizard that I took to 10th level. We were playing in Eberron and started with 3.5, ended with Pathfinder.

I love playing and running Dungeons & Dragons. I love the ever-increasing challenge that high fantasy adventures provide, I love the war of escalation between the heroes’ levels and the monsters they face off against. But that 10th level wizard is my last experience with Pathfinder for a reason: high level play in 3.5/Pathfinder has homework. It’s possible to be completely unready for level-appropriate encounters because you failed to prepare for a monster you’ve never experienced before and had no warning would be in the adventure. I reached a crossroads where I could bring the book home and read it over to untangle the logic of high level Pathfinder or go do something else. After gaining a few negative levels from ghosts that we couldn’t harm the choice was clear: it was time to move on.

I’ve run a paragon level game of 4E going from 11th to 13th level. While Fourth’s combat is fundamentally flawed past the 10th level, burdened with built-in bloat that does little more than make encounters stretch on for hours, the game was fun. The game didn’t require the players to figure out how to be “successful” high level characters, it simply let them do more badass things. Much better.

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