High Level Play - Your Experience

Just finished a campaign where the heroes reached 15th level. It seemed to work really well. Combats weren’t obscenely long(except for the ones that were by design). The challenges the heroes were facing at that point were very ‘heavy metal album cover’. This would be in 5e.

Celebrim said:

Generally speaking, the RAW of D&D for all editions of the game starts breaking down around when 6th level spells come online, and it requires a great deal of skill and inventiveness on the part of the DM to not have a skilled group of players with high level characters just running wild with little real challenges.

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That's reasonably fair. A lot of things could mess up the classic game, some even earlier than that, but certainly by the time you were using Enchant an Item and it's ilk, there'd be issues. In the classic game. And, not surprisingly since it evokes the classic game so well, in 5e, of course.

In 3.x, by the time you had 4th level spells you were quite possibly seeing real problems. Thus E6.

But, right or wrong, you just can't say "for all editions" and "6th level spells" in the same breath: 4e didn't use the traditional spell-level progression, at all, so there was no nth-level spell marker. For that matter, when the classic spells that had been 6th level did finally come on-line in 4e, some time in Paragon, if not Epic, if, indeed, at all, they were not problematic.

Playing 3e D&D at higher level is IMO mostly an exercise in limiting the chargen options players have available, as if you have access to all the books it is trivially easy to build 3e D&D characters of high level that break the game wide open in various ways.

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It's no great stretch with just the PH, either. That's what CoDzilla was originally coined to illustrate.

Also, it helps if the players playing the tier 1 classes don't have a whole lot of system mastery and if you don't have fungible magic items in your game so that players can optimally kit up their characters.

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That got our first 3.x campaign through to level 13 in better shape than usual, yes. The group's "system masters" were either playing fighters or running the game. I guess masters like a challenge.

I certainly can imagine higher level play working, and I wouldn't mind doing it at some point, but it's an extremely lucky and dedicated group that can get there fairly if the DM is not just Monte Hall and deliberately powering them up to high level.

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True in the classic game, just getting out of the lowest levels is quite a hurdle. But in the WotC era survival into high levels is not that challenging (for the players) unless the DM decides to go well beyond the guidelines...

Tony Vargas said:

That's reasonably fair. A lot of things could mess up the classic game, some even earlier than that, but certainly by the time you were using Enchant an Item and it's ilk, there'd be issues. In the classic game. And, not surprisingly since it evokes the classic game so well, in 5e, of course.

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I'd have to review the spell list for 1e, but the real game breakers tend to be things like Wall of Stone, Harm, Find the Path, Disintegrate, Word of Recall, Feeblemind, Death Spell, Anti-Magic Shell, Hold Monster, Teleport, etc. Add on top of that the problem that damage from spells like magic missile or fireball don't cap, and by 13th level they are starting to become real problems. Very few creatures actually have much more than 13d6 hit points.

For 3.0e, the list of problem spells probably isn't that different, because 3.0 ported the spells from 1e rather faithfully. The breaks tend to be things like Haste, which no longer aged you 2 years every time you cast it, and the fixes tended to be things like Fireball, which was now capped in damage. The list of broken spells gets much longer starting in 3.5 as the 3.5 spell revisions in general broke spells wide open by a ton of unplay tested shenanigans and changes for formalist rather than play reasons (such as Ray of Weakness no longer allowing a saving throw), adding in particular the shapechanging spells like Alter Self and Polymorph to the list of things which were completely broken straight out of the box.

In 3.x, by the time you had 4th level spells you were quite possibly seeing real problems. Thus E6.

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I think E6 was about far more than just ensuring balance between the spell-casters and non-casters. For example, a big reason for stopping at E6 was to avoid issues like 'Raise Dead' being readily available, but perhaps an even bigger reason is simply just to keep the game feeling 'gritty' with less gap between a 1HD orc (for example) and the most potent PC's in the game. At least in the core, there is not a lot that is outright broken and game changing at 4th level spells compared to 2nd and 3rd level spells, and you could easily take it to E8 if your main concern was class balance. Polymorph is the only thing that comes to mind, and it was broken open only at 3.5e. The really big game changers other than invisibility and fly are at 5th and 6th.

But, right or wrong, you just can't say "for all editions" and "6th level spells" in the same breath

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Ok, you are right. I know virtually nothing about 4e, and as far as I can tell it was never broken in the same manner that prior editions had been.

True in the classic game, just getting out of the lowest levels is quite a hurdle. But in the WotC era survival into high levels is not that challenging (for the players) unless the DM decides to go well beyond the guidelines...

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Unless you are heavily character optimizing, 3.X in many ways is more dangerous at high levels than prior editions. One major reason for this is that in 1e your savings throws started to become reliable right about the time that what you were saving against was more and more 'death'. You could count over time on your saves getting better. But in 3.X over time all but your best save(s) got worse relative to the DC of the things you were saving against, which mean that just about the time you were encountering save or die, your saving throws now highly unreliable. The only solution to this was to kit up with a suite of invulnerabilities like death ward, heroes feast, and freedom of action and loading up with a standard Christmas tree of items that boosted saving throws. Not 'going beyond the guidelines' also involved not abusing this hole in the 3.X math and also allowing the Christmas tree by allowing fungible magic items (or placing the trees in the path of the players).

I ran a D&D 3.5 campaign that ran until the characters were around 15th-17th level. By then I was finding it very difficult to run the games. My Star Wars d20 campaign ran until about 12th level, by which time the characters (even without any Jedi) were overpowered. One of them had something like +22 on Pilot checks, for instance.

The capstone game for my AD&D game was a battle in the Abyss against Tiamat, her consorts, and a legion of devils. The party was composed of a 19th level wizard, 17th level cleric, 18th level fighter, 9th/12th level fighter/thief, 16th level ranger, 16th level monk. (approximately) So, top-tier levels for their class. It was a slice of awesome.

At the highest levels the tone of the campaign changed, naturally. There was some political intrigue and other situations where simply hitting it harder was not the necessary solution. Fighters and thieves were valued for their skills in intrigue, loyal followers, and realpolitik. Magicians and clerics were valued for their informational magic.

Lately, the highest my players have gotten is about 8th. But, they show signs of not deliberatly antagonizing greater powers. "the king wants me to bow?! I pee in his wine cup!" "Haha. Okay, what do you really do?" "No, really, I pee in his cup." "Sigh."