Tradition and innovation have always been natural opposites, as one seeks to maintain an existing set of practices while the other seeks to revise them, or even create new practices entirely. For Dungeons & Dragons, tradition had been a much stronger motivating force until the advent of Third Edition, when innovation was given a much greater role during its design.
The turn of the millennium had comparatively little impact on the world. The same could not be said for Dungeons & Dragons, however…
The evolution of D&D with regards to mandated end-points of character progression – and ways to bypass those end-points – was not a precise one…
Given that D&D Next is still a little ways off, and that its module regarding epic-level game-play is likely a bit further than that, it’s worthwhile to look back at the history of the game and seeing how each version of it dealt with the concept of going beyond the upper limits.