Interest-DND 5e from level 0 to 20

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.

Heck ya but it would take a dm with some serious endurance!

Well, if anyone wants to dm and do that, I would totally be interested in playing.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

All of those names mean nothing to me. The idea of watching people play D&D is the same as watching people play video games -- it's f'ing weird to me.

I know some people are into that, but it honestly makes no sense to me. 🤷 If you did it though, more power to you. But I digress...

@GreyWord had a solid idea to address the PbP time investment... level jumps and time skips each chapter. That's a good take.

I can see doing this with D&D fairly easily.
so start out as a character age 7, with all the stats as normal but those are 1/2 vs an adult so strength 18 vs another kid but in the real world it's a 9 when compared to an adult.
maybe 1/4,1/2,3/4 like the dice thing below.

Then all atk rolls are 1d20+modifier-(15- age) so say you're 9 with a +3 = 1d20+3-6


damage is say (1d8+3)*(age/15) the roller can't handle that should be about 7 max
there's probably a way to make a dice rule to make all rolls 50% to 33% smaller but I don't know
9/15 should be 0.6 but it looks like / or * just add numbers
So maybe just cut the damage die in 1/4 to 4, 1/2 to 9 3/4 to 14 then full damage from 15 on

1d4 becomes
1d1 from 0-4
1d2 from 5 to 9
1d3 from 10 to 14
1d4 from 15 to death

Anyway, I'd be willing to join in and work through it with you.

Yeah I would love to play this as a player but if not I could try dming a game like this for 3-4 players if anyone is interested in playing from level 0-1 for playing out your characters backstory and childhood until your characters come at age at level 1 and go from there.

We could figure out how to do stats and what everyone is interested in playing and things like that. Just let me know. I'm a rules as cool and rules as written dm so I'm flexible and open to ideas.

I know the way they did stats was they rolled either 4d6 drop the lowest or 3d6 for stats but we can do point buy if ya'll want to do that or standard array.

And Eyes that sounds awesome if you want to come in and play and help me out with that.

I believe a lot of people would love to play a long game, I am one of those. A game making it all the way from 0 to 20 would be an epic in itself, a worthy of a lifetime award (probably take one lol).

The biggest challenge is finding a DM with the energy and stamina to keep things interesting and fresh for that length of time.

Be very clear in what you want to achieve.
Playing some D&D game from 1st to 20th level? - That is a mechanical achievement
Playing a story from zero to hero? - That is a story achievement

I would love to do a zero to hero dnd 5e game from level 0 to 20. If anyone is interested, I can try running a game like this, just let me know.

And the characters could meet each other as childhood friends or are siblings but its totally up to the players how they want to be connected to each other and how they meet each other via playing out their backstory as children until they come of age as adults.

I surely would be interested. I like the idea of playing the backstory and then becoming big heroes.
All the way to 20 sounds like a big, fun challenge. But the story behind it really appeals.

Bubbles uses a system of starting without any proficiencies and tracking any rolls made. Each roll was accompanied by a d8 and it's result was added to your skill proficiency %. Racial skills progressed at double rate. We had around 4 active sessions/scenes. In between sessions your get a pool of dice, ex 6d8, to add to your skill progression.

Count me In, love to take that for a ride!

So Eyes, Svende, and Basil. Do y'all want to join me? Let me know. I can set a game up to invite you guys to and set up a Session 0 character creation/game idea thread for ideas on how we can do this and character creation and what type of game you guys would like to do. I will take 3-4 players for this but if y'all are just happy with just you three, let me know.

Also would y'all like to do point buy, standard array, or roll for stats? Let me know.

The game is called Project Zero to Hero right now.

Made a recruitment thread if you guys want to join up Basil, Eyes and Svande

Yippee! I have a character concept ready to roll!

Sent out the invites. Please post in session Zero when you guys accept and let me know what you all are thinking about. Thanks.

Let me know when you accepted and I'll close applications and if you guys want this is to be a public game, let me know

Already full? Or one more space available? I would like to join.

Sent an invite Seck. Once you accept, I'll be closing applications

Applications are now closed, thanks for your interest. Got my 4 players now.