6. Or 14.

IIRC, in the Dragon, there is an adventure hook about high level characters going to hell to fight the devil(s); which at the time I thought was a pretty cool hook. So if I'm doing levels, yeah, give me a bunch.

It depends on how fast you level up, and the rate of character death.

In vanilla AD&D1e, hardly anyone would survive past 3rd level or so without a lot of DM fudging, and while levels 1-3 were got through quickly, from 4th to 5th was slower, from 5th to 6th was a crawl, so really anything above 6th or so was just a waste of paper.

But if characters survive well and xp is short, then by the time you get to 8th level or so, it's been a year of play, and you might be tired of it all and want to play something else.

If characters survive well and there's lots of xp, then the sky is the limit for levels...

Generally at high levels players start to get bored, because so few DMs have ever answered adequately the question, "But what do we do?" Even at 3rd level nobody has any interest in fighting orcs and zombies, it's just a lot of dice-rolling with no real uncertainty about the eventual outcome, now at 11th level...? How many Tiamats and Asmodeuses are there for us to kill?

Thus the AD&D1e assumption that about 9th level, you become a lord - and then you're playing a different game. That is, 9th level is enough.

For 3.x D&D, my preferred rate of advancement:

1st to 2d: 1 session
2nd to 3d: 2 sessions
3rd to 12th: 3 sessions each
12th - 13th: 4 sessions
13th on: time to wrap it up before the DM implodes.

Where 1 session = 4 hours, give or take.

Three sessions a month for about a year and then it's time to move on to new characters & maybe a new setting.

My campaigns usually topped out around level 12.

Depends on what you and the players want to do. Retire and become lords of the land? Journey to the netherworlds and slay demon kings? Commit genocide on a few Drow cities? Spread your god's faith across the continent in a holy war of conquest?

But heck, if the players are fine with cleaning out the environs around Fishingville and becoming mayor of the place at level 7, more power to them.

I'm enjoying the DCC 10 level system.  I never realized just how fiddly and unwieldy D&D leveling was.

I like DCC's and ACKS's limits. For Dnd 0-2e 15th works out since we rarely got past 12th anyway for 3e I really suggest stopping at 12-15ish.

10 is good.

10 levels, except for elves. They go to 11.

I liked the unlimited nature of AD&D

The 20 limit of later versions seemed appropriate too.

14 levels seemed perfectly fine in BX.

Usually by the time you hit such lofty levels your character has done quite a bit and if they arent in the kingdom builder stage by now, may be ready for it.

Depending on the campaign.

Quote from: Doughdee222;755490My campaigns usually topped out around level 12.

As far as what levels actually get played:
My big high school 1e campaign went from 3rd to deity level, PCs with dozens of levels across multiple classes. Lots of solo play, it was a big deal when two high level PCs would team up to take on an enemy deity like Wotan or Druaga.
My first 3e campaign went to around 17th-18th level, but the system was terrible from about 11th on.
My subsequent 3e campaigns started at 1st and all topped out around 8th level, and often had a soft 10th level cap; NPCs maxed out at 9th-10th.
My first two 4e D&D campaigns went 1st-8th and 3rd-10th.
My current big 4e campaign has gone 1st-18th and will go to 30th unless I fall under a bus.
My online Labyrinth Lord/BX and 1e AD&D/OSRIC campaigns have tended to go from 1st to around 5th level, but my current OSRIC online game is Rise of the Runelords and should go much higher, somewhere in the teens is my guess, maybe 17th-18th.
My current Pathfinder Curse of the Crimson Throne game started at 2nd and should go to around 13th, to fit the Adventure Path.

I generally would like the system to accommodate characters a couple levels higher than the PCs are likely to reach; eg a 3e type game where the campaign runs to 8th level would suit having 10 levels of play.

I should have also said I care a lot about opinions on scaling; as in, you could have a dnd system where levels went to 10, and a level 10 character might be similar in 'power' to anything from a level 5 to a level 20 character in another version of dnd.  

Essentially I don't think existing scaling is 'sacred' or 'ideal' just because it was printed in a book somewhere.

In fact, I consider it somewhat illogical.

I played one 2E game back in college where the remaining players reached 20th level. We all meet up again a few years later and did a one-shot with level 21 characters using the 3.x epic rules (just the fighter and me, the rogue).

We had lots of fun, but it was obvious after a while that we were ignoring or replacing rules and ideas we didn't like to the point that most of the high-level rules went unused. Since all of us had been DM at one point or another, there was a lot of agreement on what worked for our table and what did not.

Now, I much prefer games that top out around level 10. We don't even bother that much with ever-growing numbers. Just give me a few baubles for leveling up, some fun adventures and NPCs to interact with.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;755382Not more than 20, and that's only for the folks who like their epic demi-god style of play akin to the Immortals set back in the day.  Seeing as how 99.99% of all my game play happens below level 15 (most PCs have retired by level 12 or so), I'm perfectly good with a 12-15 cap.

Seconded. Ten is toward the lower end of what suits me, 20 is about my cap. 14 or 15 is nice for my needs.

Level 10 feels right.  At that point you are already wondering why your party of adventurers would still bother being together as they are lords with their own agendas and set of henchmen.  I know we were thinking of retirement of our characters at about level 12 with one player giving two of his characters up as NPCs so he could play something else.  Racial limitations would also be much less severe then.