Most players claw their way to the high levels by fighting creatures𒊎 of equal or greater strength, but there is one player who worked out how many rats a character would need to kill in order to go from level 1 to level 20.
One of the tropes of Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy games is a starting quest involving rats. These usua🍷lly take the form of an innkeeper needed some enterprising adventurers to clean out a basement that is overrun with giant rodents. These rats will provide minimal challenge and they mostly exist to help teach players about the battle rules in relative safety. The rats in the cellar qu🀅est is such a recurring element that lots of games now parody it or hang a lampshade whenever it happens.
The average D&D character will quickly outstrip a group of rats in power. A Reddit user named took it upon themselves to calꦇculate just how long it would take an adventurer to hit max level by fighting only rats.
According to Wreckedtums, the character would need to kill 35,500 rats, which averages at six a day for over sixteen years. This is a pretty easy task to accomplish and could be done while living an otherwise rat-free life. Killing six rats is 🀅an easy enough task for most first level characters, even the squishy spellcasters.
The vast majority of DMs wouldn't allow the player to claim XP for killing rats after a certain point, as the characters need to have faced a challenge in order to gain experience from it. Most rats aren't going to put up a fight against a chain lightning spell, and even a massive swarm would quickly fall against an AoE spell like fireball. The numbers are more of a thought exercise, especially as the idea of reaching high levels by killing lots of weaker creatures was already used as the premise of a South Park episode and the average DM wouldn't let it ꦡfly in their games.
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