Anyone play without pursuing/accepting quests and actually made it to level 20-30?

I have, I made a character I role played as a survivalist, I didn't take any quests or go into any of the towns, I only traded with the traveling merchants and scavengers. It's actually not as hard as it seems, since there are plenty of ways to get XP, in fact I decided to do it like that because I found my self hitting 20 really fast on other characters.

My character is currently level 16 with a 2x slower leveling mod and has accepted none of the Fallout 3 quests. She has played a few quest mods but as far as vanilla goes, she hasn't even asked anyone about James who isn't even her dad since she wasn't born in a vault. She lives in a tent near Ft. Independence and travels to the towns every week or so to do some trading then goes back on her way.

Well I've been trying this out and just settled on doing a few recurring 'collect items for me' jobs but no real quests. The early game is always my favorite and playing as a thief/raider is pretty entertaining. A bold thief can actually rack up quite a few caps at low levels.

Is that the abandoned tent? I've wondered if it was a safe place to keep stuff - I mean, its containers aren't gonna reset and vanish my goodies, are they?

I've recently started a new character that has only done the necessary parts of certain quests to be able to get into his roleplaying role. This guy is basically the leader of an independent mercenary group that I'm pretending is taking missions throughout the DC ruins and Capitol Wasteland. (Think Reilly's Rangers kind of) I'm using FWE which allows for any amount of followers and makes them recruitable regardless of Karma. So, I have only done the parts of the quests necessary to gain access to the vanilla followers to add them to my posse. So, basically, I just went ahead and finished up the main quest to Broken Steel and got Fawkes & Cross. I did the one for V-101 to get Butch out, and I just purchased Charon & Jericho. I toggled up T-51b for all my squad, and I'm using the custom combat armor from my "Trail of Crumbs" mod.

So, now my posse is set, the Enclave is on the scene and we are systematically sweeping the wasteland hunting down Enclave, Muties, Talons & Raiders grid by grid, lol. I started in the southwest corner, made our way all the way up to the Raven Rock area, and then back down the central section of the map and cleared out everything including Bethesda Ruins along the way. We camped in several places inside along the way because even with my badazz posse there's Night Ghouls (from MMM) out there after dark, lol!

The last save I made, we had made it to our safe house in Megaton to rest, heal up and resupply. I think our next excursion will be to start cleansing the city ruins of bad guys, but I'm not sure yet as I haven't received our new objective yet, but hope to have it soon.

So to answer the OP question, I'm not doing any quests to speak of now that I have my team assembled. We have plenty to do for now!

I'm living in a slightly larger modded tent with plenty of room for my companions but the Abandoned Tent near Mason Dixon Salvage would make a great home. I stop in there when I'm in the area and need shelter for the night. The containers don't respawn so you'll have a good amount of safe storage.