D&D 5E Have you experienced very high-level (18+) play in 5e? Tell me about it!

Hello! I am in the process of designing some monsters intended for very high-level encounters. I'd like to hear from DMs and players who have experience playing such encounters involving creatures like ancient dragons, tarrasques, empyreans, balors, etc. If you would be so good as to include answers to these questions in your post, I'd much appreciate it.

1. What was the party composition?
2. What did you fight?
3. How did the fight go? Did you enjoy it? Was it too easy or too hard?
4. What would you change to make very high-level encounters better?

Sure, I ran a game to level 20, and most of those monsters showed up at least once or twice. Very few of them showed up at level 20, though; most of the big encounters took place around level 16, and they killed their first balor around level 10.

1) Barbarian, monk, paladin, warlock, wizard. There was also a guest star party member, in the form of a fighter/champion who joined them for the level 16 dungeon.

2) Some highlights - a balor (at level 10); three empyreans (on different days, at level 14); a death knight, followed by an empyrean after one minute, followed by a second empyrean on the following round (at level 16); an archmage, followed immediately by a lich, followed immediately by an ancient black dragon, followed immediately by a kraken, followed immediately by another kraken (later in the same day as the death knight encounter, still at level 16); a solar, followed immediately by the tarrasque (at level 20).

3) The fights were mostly enjoyable, at least by the end when the players started to maybe worry that they might not make it. One balor against a party of five level tens was just the right difficulty, and the other encounters were mostly similar. The second and third empyreans, after the party already knew they could take one and what they could do, felt a little bit too easy.

4) There needs to be some way to prevent the party from regaining their spent HP between encounters. If they started at half HP or lower, we could skip the boring part of the fight, where the monster swings at them and they soak the hits and they don't care because they aren't close to death and they'll be fine afterward regardless. That's not really something you can change about the monster, though, so I guess I'll go with giving it some way to get advantage (or at least negate disadvantage) on its attacks; the least interesting thing a monster can do in a round is to fail to hit.

Edit: It might be worth mentioning that this was a no-feats game, which meant the barbarian wasn't​ vastly outpacing everyone else in terms of damage, and that the average Con score for the group was right around 20. If you're running a game with feats, then you should generally expect your party to deal more damage and have fewer HP, from what I understand.

Most important things I've noticed from high level play:

1. DM needs to be able to adjust and say No. No, you cannot cast a creative spell that negates everything entirely (Ancient Green Dragon is roflstomped by party that pre-casts Heroes' Feast without DM changing things, etc).

2. Spell Casters are either completely broken (rest of the party isn't really even needed) or completely useless (players have no idea what high level spells are capable of).

3. Single enemies simply aren't dangerous. DMs prefer single enemies because they are way easier to run mechanically.

DMs need to suck it up and deal with hitting high level parties with more medium level enemies. That is SIGNIFICANTLY deadlier to the party, especially if the enemies are varied in weaknesses/strengths....kind of like how the party is...

I'll toss in my experience, though the highest level we've reached is 16 and 11.

1. What was the party composition?

1st group was 16th level: Wizard Evoker, Paladin Vengeance, Bard Lore, Cleric Life, Fighter Battlemaster. This was a group with no multiclassing, but feats allowed. Our first 5E run before we knew the game well. No Sharpshooter

2nd group was 11th level: Lots of multiclassing. Paladin Vengeance/Wizard Bladesginer, Paladin Vengeance/Warlock Fiend/Sorcerer Infernal (House rule archetype), Ranger Deep Hunter/Fighter Eldritch Knight, Cleric Death, Sorcerer Shadow, Paladin Vengeance/Fighter. Everything allowed and then some.

2. What did you fight?

1st group: Lots of Dragons. Ancient Green, Tiamat partial avatar.

2nd group: Balor, Marilith, lots of demons.

3. How did the fight go? Did you enjoy it? Was it too easy or too hard?

1st group: Game was challenging and fun up to about level 8 or 9. It started to get easier and easier after that. Dragons became a joke mainly because they lack the ability to defeat battlefield control spells fast enough to threaten anyone. Our Lore Bard picked up spells like bless and fly. We would often buff up and have the bard stand far away from the battle to keep the buffs up. We didn't need the bard's damage and it ensured we didn't lose our mobility spells. So our hammers would fly and engage the dragon. The ability of a party to dish out damage far in excess of the monsters means we win any damage war between a solo dragon and a party.

2nd group: Pretty much like the first group except it started around level 3. The party loaded up with ranged attackers along with two high perception and stealth scouts. Demons and creatures periods aren't very good at spotting Expertise Stealthers and Perception experts before they spot them. So we would often know there was an enemy far in advance of the battle. Most demons don't have a means of ranged attacking, so a party with strong ranged attacks often gets a round or two of attacks before they close. When most monsters are pure melee without much stealth ability, the party can wait them out rather than vice versa. There are very few means to force a patient party into melee battle with creatures that lack ranged ability.

Ranged supremacy in 5E and the lack of ability to resist or control it makes a lot of the monsters weak against a party that can do things like hide in complete darkness with no penalty at very low level while wearing heavy armor. The warlock/paladin with devilsight which comes online at very low level is an extremely powerful class at nearly all levels.

4. What would you change to make very high-level encounters better?

1st group: We played the game out of the box until level 16 to get a feel for how it worked. No modifications. Fortunately we didn't have the ranged supremacy party going, so it was a bit more challenging and fun for longer. Once the higher level spells came online, then that shifted. You really only need one spell per battle, usually bless or fly for 50% or more of battles to win. Which means spellcasters don't use many resources per battle. The hardest fight we had was a flight of dragons around lvl 11. Concentrated fire from many breath weapons was tough to resist.

2nd group: I was the DM. I rewrote a bunch of monsters to counter their bread and butter abilities to force them to think outside the box and cause them pain. I added a lot of spell support to ruling demons. The first regular balor they fought, they killed very quickly. It barely had time to get any attacks off. It missed the majority of its attacks because the particular party we have, at least half can boost their AC into the mid 20s. It's kind of useless to throw a bunch of medium sized creatures at powerful parties, if they don't have spell support. I didn't want to add NPC casters to demon groups, so I added spells to mariliths and balors to empower their ability to empower the demon hordes they rule. I rebuilt all the demon lords into what I think they should be. I haven't test run the first demon lord, but that is coming shortly.

I'm starting to think a bit differently about 5E. I think I may start to set things up in a more cinematic fashion. After watching Chris Perkins and Matthew Mercer DM, I'm thinking 5E has far less of a mechanical focus and more of a cinematic focus. I may start building encounters more like I'm building story or movie/TV scenes with mechanics to fit the cinematic nature of the encounter to ensure it doesn't break down in a really stupid looking fashion in my mind's eye.

A very interesting thread. Subscribed (or whatever the kids say when they decide to revisit a thread a while later )

Can add that my campaign (Out of the Abyss) has just reached level 15.

The time has come to remove the silk gloves; that is, to completely throw out the prebuilt encounters and instead throw some real opposition at them.

They have the following scenes left, roughly speaking:
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By the adventure, everything is set up for the final showdown: activating Vizeran's ritual. I skipped Grin telling them outright they don't need to place the Dark Heart in Menzo; I feel this works better if it's a kind of "why didn't you tell us, Vizeran? You didn't ask" type of deal. Besides, I'm pretty convinced they WANT to wreck the city.

Anyways.

To pad the ramp-up to the end scenario, partially because they (for reasons) missed out on the fungus subthread of the story (I'm saving the myconoid encounter and Zuggtmoy's wedding for another day), I had devised two other storylets:

1) they found out about a Dagger of Innocence, rumored to be able to permanently kill even a demon lord, such as Demigorgon. This made them chase the drow dragon Nurvureem (per the Wyrms of the North write-up accessible from the WotC archive site). A surface adventure, a nice change of scenery. This they have just completed, after a (supposedly) hard showdown with a pair of Cult of the Dragon followers and a Death Knight and his retinue.

2) the other is about a Marilith they "befriended" while in the Labyrinth. She claims to know about a plan to avoid Vizeran's ritual, cooked up by her former master Graazt the Dark Prince. This plan is lifted from the AL module DDEX 3-16 Assault on Maerimydra.

To gain the details, she wants them to spring her from prison. When they activated the Maze Engine, she along with all other outsiders were returned to their home plane, leading to her capture by Graazt's henchmen. But this is no ordinary prison: it's the Wells of Darkness in the Abyss. This part is lifted from the Wells of Darkness adventure in Dungeon #148.

3) My aim is to significantly buff the end combat, and to increase PC participation.

Instead of merely passively watching six demon lords brawl and then kill off the weakened victor, I plan to describe a truly epic hellscape, including many more demon lords and hundreds of other demons. Pazuzu, Turaglas, Kostchtchie, Pale Night, Ugudenk, Vucarik, Ereshkigal. The point is that Menzoberranzan is a mighty city. When reading about the end game, I immediately worried "couldn't city defenders take these guys out all by themselves?". With my description it's clear the city will be engulfed even though parts of the city (notably the Gromph citadel) will resist. Vizeran's revenge will be complete.

Besides, I want the heroes to have more of an agenda than just duck and wait it out. In addition to swatting away random demons, they need to enter one of the vortexes opened by the ritual and go to Maerimydra and defeat Graazt before he can complete his ritual to counter Vizeran's (per that AL module).

This means that when they presumably return to face Demogorgon, they too won't be freshly rested. But even more importantly, they will hopefully feel they have their hands full, rather than just watching ESPN.
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valarmorgulis said:

1. What was the party composition?
2. What did you fight?
3. How did the fight go? Did you enjoy it? Was it too easy or too hard?
4. What would you change to make very high-level encounters better?

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Back when my dad and I were play testing Pathfinder, I made it all the way to 18th level (won the campaign too)

1) My party composition (I was playing as all 4) was Abberant Sorcerer, Fighter, Ranger, and Rune Cleric

2) okay, this is a little complicated. Basically, it was a homebrew half-fiend underworld imperial dragon advanced to somewhere around CR 26. The backstory of my dad's campaign was that this dragon was first tunneling underneath various cities, and then attacking them from underground with its army of ash Giants, salamanders, and grave knights, and then finally torching the place on the way out.
In-game, to increase its own fighting power, the dragon had commanded its alchemist slaves to modify its physiology so as to make ranged attacks almost useless against it. Think 5e damage resistance with a -15 chance to hit with any attack made at range.

3) Controlling 4 PCs at one time was tedious, but my dad has a masterful grasp of theater-of-the-mind, so at least his description of how it all went down for the endgame fight was awesome. The fight itself was pretty dangerous . . . After defeating the BBEG, all of my PCs were below 10 hp, and the fighter (who landed the killing blow) was at 1 hp.

4) the end fight took place in a city under siege by the dragon. There were buildings on fire and collapsing all around me. The king and his Royal Guard were helping to fight back against the invaders . . . Although at a snails pace at the table in actual gameplay, the image in my head for what was happening in-game was that the whole thing was crazy, complicated, desperate, and awesome. I'm not sure it could have been improved.

RulesJD said:

1. DM needs to be able to adjust and say No. No, you cannot cast a creative spell that negates everything entirely (Ancient Green Dragon is roflstomped by party that pre-casts Heroes' Feast without DM changing things, etc).

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If the party knows that they are going against a green dragon, and have a Heroes' Feast beforehand because they know that they will have immunity to poison, seems to me that that is a smart party. What reason would you give for saying no to that?

Saelorn said:

4) There needs to be some way to prevent the party from regaining their spent HP between encounters. If they started at half HP or lower, we could skip the boring part of the fight, where the monster swings at them and they soak the hits and they don't care because they aren't close to death and they'll be fine afterward regardless. That's not really something you can change about the monster, though, so I guess I'll go with giving it some way to get advantage (or at least negate disadvantage) on its attacks; the .

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I think if you increase monster damage you will achieve something close to what your looking for. If the PC(s) are down to half HP after a round or two that is about the same as starting at half, and it has the added exciting of know what took you so low.

You could also modify the healing rate

We had a high level campaign in late 2nd ed (just before 3e started up). It was a bit... strange. Essentially the GM made the campaign for one of his players who had moved with him to Ottawa, along with a bunch of new players so some of the PCs had leveled up, while others were created at that level (12-15). Then the rest of the GM's friends also moved to Ottawa and we ended up with like 8-10 players in a poorly furnished student's apartment with no AC.

The basic story was the player, a high level cleric of Helm, was trying to establish a temple/fort while the forces of hell (!) were trying to stop him. It was pretty chaotic with a lot of the warriors dying and being resurected on the spot etc. Unfortunately the campaign fell apart. Part of the problem was that we would have these epic fights vs the demons/devil (not 100% sure I remember which) and... nothing would change. It was a stalemate.

Party composition, from memory:
High level cleric of Helm
gnome illusionist/thief (me)
half-drow figher/thief
fighter (samurai)
Fighter (plain)
Ranger
Bard
wild mage
Paladin
NPC cleric

And lots and lots of underlings.