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

[psychophipps]

I will say I find it rather frustrating that lower/equal CR Dragons get all sorts of Legendary abilities and cool ranged attacks while the Big Daddy demons get left in the cold. I will be sure to rectify this situation when my players get to the higher levels in my campaign.

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[Flamestrike]

I will say I find it rather frustrating that lower/equal CR Dragons get all sorts of Legendary abilities and cool ranged attacks while the Big Daddy demons get left in the cold. I will be sure to rectify this situation when my players get to the higher levels in my campaign.

Sent from my XT1254 using EN World mobile app

Make them legendary.

Its dead easy. Here is a legendary Balor. It gets 3 legendary actions (longsword attack, whip attack, teleport [uses two actions]) and 3 legendary resistances.

Id probably name the thing also.

If your PCs have magic items, then I'd also bump its AC up by 1-3 (depending on the items at hand). If they were really tooled up with magic items, I'd also tack on an extra 9 hit dice (and 120 hit points). Id probably increase its proficiency bonus by 1 as well for a nice even +15 to hit.

I think its a bit naive to assume that monsters play the same for groups with different skill levels. You have a pretty big tool box with 5E to mess around with your monsters, and it takes all of a minute or so to do. In 3E I would have had to spend half an hour advancing the thing, selecting feats, spending skill ranks, and recalculating a ton of bonuses.

I do it all the time. I also like tacking on special abilities to critters to keep the players guessing. This is really important for experienced Players as they likely know the abilities of most monsters. Throwing them a curveball from time to time is part of the fun.

 

[valarmorgulis]

I'm about to run some playtest combats in another forum so I'll let ya'll know how it goes. First up: one of the demon princes vs. 5 20th-level characters.

 

[Flamestrike]

I'm about to run some playtest combats in another forum so I'll let ya'll know how it goes. First up: one of the demon princes vs. 5 20th-level characters.

5 x 20th level PCs have an adventuring day XP budget of 200,000. A 'hard' encounter is 42,500-63,499 XP.

A single CR 23 critter is 50,000 XP. This just tips it into a 'hard' encounter for these PCs, and they're expected to deal with 4 of those encounters between long rests in a standard adventuring day.

The 5e monster manual has 4 x CR 23 monsters:

Ancient blue dragon
Ancient silver dragon
Empyrean
Kraken

A party of 5 x 20th level PCs is expected to fight those suckers (and win) in a standard adventuring day.

If those PCs had access to optional rules like magic items (which significantly boost their power) then you could (and should) increase the potency of those encounters. Depending on how tooled up the PCs are, you might need to boost those critters considerably.

Its feasable your PCs are packing things like artifacts, +3 weapons, robes of the archmagi, vorpal weapons and so forth. Obviously this throws the numbers out a fair bit.

 

[valarmorgulis]

These PCs will have access to the "high-magic" setup in the DMG, with a twist.

3 uncommon, 2 rare, 1 very rare. Or they can trade 1 very rare + 1 rare for 1 legendary.

The encounters will be "deadly" and they will start at full resources.

 

[Flamestrike]

These PCs will have access to the "high-magic" setup in the DMG, with a twist.

3 uncommon, 2 rare, 1 very rare. Or they can trade 1 very rare + 1 rare for 1 legendary.

The encounters will be "deadly" and they will start at full resources.

Solo encounter adventuring days are not really supported as a baseline in 5E. Im not saying you cant use them, but its really just an exersize in rocket tag (moreso at this level). You really need to test out the PCs against an adventuring day, not just the one encounter. The game is balanced around the expectation of a 6-8 encounter adventuring day, and not a single deadly+ encounter.

That said, with magic items like that, I'd consider bumping the adventuring day XP up by 50 percent to around 300,000 (as an approximate figure). Id also increase difficulty thresholds by 50 percent as well, so a Hard encounter sits at [63,750 XP - 95,249 XP] and a Deadly encounter starts at 95,250+

That makes a single CR 26 critter a 'Hard' encounter, and CR 27+ become deadly. It feels about right.

From there (if it was me) Id look at statting up 6-8 encounters [medium-hard]. I'd probably go with 1 x deadly, 3 x hards and 2 x mediums.

For an Orcus/ Demon/ Undead adventure:

• 2 x Balors (brothers) that gate in to attack the PCs. Both have 3 legendary actions [sword, whip or teleport] and 3 legendary saves and AC 20. +2 CR each (Hard)
• 1 x Lich, 1 x Death knight and 6 x flameskulls and 6 x banshees (encounter difficulty not multiplied for the banshees and flameskulls due to low CR). The death knight wears infernal plate armor +3 and a shield +1, and the Lich wears robes of the evil archmage. (Hard)
• 1 Archmage, 1 Champion, 6 gladiators, 1 Priest (Kuao Toa refluffed with bless) (XP not multiplied for the gladiators due to low CR) (Medium)
• 1 Ancient White/ shadow dragon dracolich (Medium) and 10 x shadows (CR not multiplied for shadows due to low CR)
• 1 Fallen Solar, 2 Glabrezus, 6 Mezzoloths (Hard)
• Orcus and a crap ton of low CR undead plus 4 x fiend Warlocks with counterspell (Deadly)

From there you just need to push the PCs forwards to maintain the pressure. Stop Orcus by midnight (in 4 hours time) or he completes a ritual and 'the whole prime material plane gets transported to the Abyss and everyone becomes an undead under his controll' type of thing.

 

[valarmorgulis]

Good advice Flamestrike. But the encounters I'm creating are meant as BBEG encounters and I'd like to assume that the PCs make it to that encounter with full resources, and that the encounter has the potential to kill them. I realize that 5e isn't built with this in mind, but 6-8 encounters a day for 20th level characters just doesn't "feel right". I'm of the mind that at the very high levels there should be only 1-2 encounters a day. Any more and it somewhat devalues the monsters.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Or they ignore the minor demons, use Sharpshooter which reduces all range and cover penalties to non-existent, then focus fire the Balor from a 100 plus feet away. Because I tried this and that's what my players did. It was pretty annoying. It certainly didn't feel right to have the mighty demonic legion leading (gotta love that flavor text because it means so much mechanically) balor having to hide like a baby kitten from the ranged attackers. It looked so great in action.

There's nothing stopping the Balor from "falling" from 1000' feet up down to 20' in a single turn and then landing without damage using the rest of its movement. Dive-bombing is a great and (IMO) totally kosher tactic to use for closing on ranged PCs. And it looks pretty awesome too in my head-movie.

Balor's are still a bit on the weak side, but eh, you can always re-stat them with more HP and better attacks (and old-school Magic Resistance). Right now I'm just talking about how to close distance.

 

[Flamestrike]

Good advice Flamestrike. But the encounters I'm creating are meant as BBEG encounters and I'd like to assume that the PCs make it to that encounter with full resources, and that the encounter has the potential to kill them.

But... they really shouldnt be reaching the BBEG with full resources. Thats what his minions are for. Its fair to assume Orcus, Tiamat, Grazzt etc have the resources available to them that simply walking up to them and attacking them is all but impossible (even for high level PCs) to achieve. I mean these guys have Archmages on staff, demiliches, liches, death knights, whole armies of demons/ devils/ dragons etc and hundreds of thousands of years experience in fighting PCs and cosmic level threats.

Its also really boring to do. High level play should be something more intresting than mindless rocket tag.

Mechanically, 5E is not based around the challenge of the individual encounter. Its based around the challenge of the full adventuring day; marshalling your resources over several encounters, selectively using and rationing those resources (spell slots, hit dice, hit points, action surge, sup dice, channel divinty, smites etc) over those encounters.

The games math, encounter difficulty, class balance, and mechanics revolve around this assumption.

If we're discussing how 5E handles high level play, then we should be looking at it within this paradigm.

I realize that 5e isn't built with this in mind, but 6-8 encounters a day for 20th level characters just doesn't "feel right". I'm of the mind that at the very high levels there should be only 1-2 encounters a day. Any more and it somewhat devalues the monsters.

OK, but if you run it this way, dont expect the game to work. As you point out, the game isnt built to handle 1-2 encounters per day.

More correctly, it is designed to do this, but you need to use the 'gritty realism' variant to make it work properly, and even then, the true test is to see how the PCs are faring after 3-4 such days in a row with no long rests in between.

 

[valarmorgulis]

Yep, we'll see how it works out. When designing a monster that is supposed to be deadly for a 20th level party I don't want to assume that they've already been through a bunch of fights. Pretty sure that isn't how other monsters were designed.