Interest-DND 5e from level 0 to 20

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ClosedDungeons & Dragons 5thPublic1 / dayAmberthegirlgeekgamer87
Project Zero to Hero will be a Unique storytelling Dnd 5e homebrew game which will take the players through collaboration and playing the game which will incorporate their backstories by playing them as children until they come of age as adults from level 0 to 1 as the prologue of the campaign and the main campaign will be level 1 all the way to level 20.
The players will be able to bring their world to life and affect the world around them through their characters actions and can help create the world around them.


Mar 12, 2023 12:37 am
Would anyone be interested in playing in a dnd 5e homebrew game where you get to play your characters from level 0 to 20? Just curious. I would love to play in a game like this where we either got to play our characters as children until they became level 1 later on as adults. Saw that is how they are doing the dnd actual play game podcast World beyond numbers where the characters all met up as childhood friends and are going from there and it's a pretty cool and interesting concept.
Mar 12, 2023 2:24 am
Heck ya but it would take a dm with some serious endurance!
Mar 12, 2023 2:28 am
Well, if anyone wants to dm and do that, I would totally be interested in playing.
Mar 12, 2023 7:52 am
Playing all the levels in PbP can take a lifetime. Might I suggest including some form of accelerated leveling system to move things along at a more manageable pace.
Mar 12, 2023 11:24 am
If the goal is to go from 0 to 20 with in a resonable amount of time (in PBP standards), I would suggest that then a player would level up, they would add 3 and not 1 to their current level. With a level up every 6-8 weeks of play time it would take about a years game time to reach level 20
Mar 12, 2023 1:33 pm
Well, I would want to play it where you got to play out your backstory where you got to play your character as a child and experience their childhood and adolescence up to where they leveled up to 1 and became of age after that. Cuz at level 0 you don't have the skills or abilities unlocked as a level 1 character but whatever skills you learn at level 0 would help out with your character at level 1.

And stats could be point buy, or standard array.

Cuz in the dnd podcast game Worlds beyond numbers, the cast of the wizard, the witch and the wild one have done a separate campaign called the Childrens adventure where they played out their characters backstory as a child at level 0 until they leveled up to 1 and became adults which would start the main campaign from 1 to 20.

I don't know how this would work as a pbp post game but I would love to try it out as a player.
Mar 12, 2023 2:14 pm
Sounds like it might be two separate games: one with the 'level 0' stuff, which might benefit from some ruleset other than DnD (which does not cater for that); and then possibly (if the group are all still interested) a level 1-20 campaign with the 'real' characters.

You could also make the real characters --so you have a platform to work from-- and flashback to the childhood stuff, possibly playing out whatever you need in another thread in parallel? Trying to make 'level 0' characters that will grow into proper characters in DnD could be hard.

Trying to cram everything into one ruleset could be hard.
[ +- ] non-DnD example
Mar 12, 2023 2:38 pm
For comparison, in a D&D 5e game I'm currently running here, we've been playing for about just over 3 years and the PCs have grown from level 3 and are about to hit level 10. I can imagine the game could've movied faster if we managed to achieve daily posting.

On a separate note, a level 0 to level 1 game can be very fun too!
Mar 12, 2023 7:49 pm
Like I have only played to level 5 in dnd after starting from level 1 and 3 and I just feel like playing at level 0 you basically are learning the skills you need until you unlock your powers and abilities at level 1.

Like I have never played a wizard or witch in dnd 5e before so that would be cool to do like the witch from Kikis delivery service or the spellcaster from Howls moving Castle as Howl but I think he would be either Wizard, Sorcerer or warlock.
Mar 12, 2023 7:57 pm
Like the idea of big game and long and all. but I'm not at all thrilled to play from teenage (pre level 1) at all.
Mar 12, 2023 8:50 pm
DnD doesn't support level 0... like, at all. It would be a completely homebrew system, out of necessity.

As others have mentioned, the real hurdle is the time involved. Games that go 1 to 20 IRL take a while... and PbP is notoriously slow. While certainly not impossible, the amount of time and work involved for a DM is considerable.
Mar 12, 2023 9:22 pm
I am in a game run by Bubbles that started at level 0, which I honestly have never done before. It was an interesting and reasonable progression that has since leveled up to 3rd.
Mar 12, 2023 9:33 pm
Which has taken you over a year, judging by when the game started. If you continue until level 20, you'll be at it for a while
Mar 12, 2023 9:52 pm
Hellrider 2 has gone from level 2 to 10 in about five months. ~1600 non-ooc posts, making roughly 2 posts per person per day - although there's probably a fair bit of variance.

The game uses milestone leveling - I guess that's ~200 posts per level, or ten pages of game posts per level.

So it can be done if you're not shy about racing through the levels. But PCs on a quest through hell tends to lend itself to epic characters and rapid progression. Most of those levels had some big event or two, so I think the levels felt earned.
Mar 12, 2023 10:09 pm
Well I like how Brennan lee mulligan and his three players are tackling this so far so if they can do it, others can too. Like they did the kids campaign first and are now doing the regular campaign and its dnd 5e with milestone leveling and they rolled for their stats but you can do point buy or standard array and the characters are playing wizard, a homebrew witch subclass and Paladin.

Like I feel it can be done with three to 4 player character party.
Mar 12, 2023 10:15 pm
I am not sure how a level 0 game would work.
But I love the idea of a game in which characters make these kinds of progression.
Mar 12, 2023 10:23 pm
Don't even know who that is.

But it doesn't change that the real problem, if you want to call it that, is how long it will take via PbP.

You hear stories about 1 to 20 games taking a year and a half to two years(ish) in real life, with regular sessions and no gaps. PbP is probably twice that with frequent posts.

I would strongly advise anyone running a game like this to only have two players. (This should limit waiting, since if you didn't post last chances are you're up.) The alternative is, players agree to let the DM play for them if they don't post frequently. (Which is unfortunately more work for the DM.)
Mar 12, 2023 10:27 pm
I've never ran a 1-20 game in any format, and I ran a game that reached over 100 sessions usually 5-6 hours per session.

The level 0 thing is really meh- I've played it enough times in my life to know I never want to dp that again. Level 1 is miserable enough.
Last edited March 12, 2023 10:36 pm
Mar 13, 2023 12:40 am
Brennan lee mulligan is the dm for dimension 20 online and is a dnd dm. He is running a game with Aabria iyengar, erika ishii and Lou Wilson right now called World beyond numbers with the wizard , the witch and the wild one and it's a dnd 5e actual play podcast. They did the children's adventure first where they played their characters as children and played childhood friends at level 0 to 1 and are now adults in the main campaign where they play a human wizard, human witch homebrew subclass and a reskinned bugbear bear person Paladin.
Mar 13, 2023 1:22 am
It sounds reasonable if racing through the levels is not the goal, but a technique for telling the story that covers decades of character development and fast-forwarding years between chapter

If I would ever do this online I would make it a 10 one-shot sized sessions. PCs lvl up +2 levels between two sessions.
I believe PCs taking quite a few years to get from 1 to 3 and from 3 to 5 is more logical than 2->3 or 4->5 over a single night

As for PbP it could be little too much though. Maybe 6 chapters 1->5->9->13->17->20 could be done in less that 2 years with an experienced PbP DM and active players.
Last edited March 13, 2023 1:23 am
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