D&D 5E What Should the Maximum Level Be?

[Raith5]

A'koss, that is the very reason why the designers need to have an initial cap so they can set the highest parameters of play. It doesn't matter if characters exceed that level cap or ability cap. It does matter to accessory and adventure writers though.

I would add that setting out the parameters of play is crucial to mid and lower level play as well to working out how the system can space out the capacities of PCs. We need to set out where should earthshaking powers be situated - ie should Wish be set for 20th or 30th level PCs. More important I think is where should a spell like Fly be located - at 5th level because that is where it has been located in Basic or should it be a higher level spell and leave more space for PCs to be be able to defy gravity? You cant space out the capacities of PCs - especially with respect to magic - until the parameters are set.

 

[variant]

Level 20 cap for the base rules.

 

[S'mon]

To deal with the conversion issue, given the whole 'bounded accuracy' thing, maybe they could release levels 1-20 initially, but with power spread roughly equivalent to 1-14 in BECMI/1-10 in 3e/1-15 in 4e? Then they could release Tiered expansion sets for eg 21-40 (Paragon), 41-60 (Master), 61-80 (Epic), 81-100 (Immortal), having taken the time to get each Tier right? Or more conservatively, release an initial 20-level game with three 10-level expansion sets; Paragon, Epic and Immortal.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I'd like to see a soft cap at 20 -- the soft cap being the highest level defined by the initial core rules when they release -- with a subsequent "Epic Level Handbook" that provides the rules for levels beyond 20. Those rules should be modular with no firm cap. I wouldn't personaly use an ELH, but the option should be there for those who would.

 

[the Jester]

Well, except that it is impossible, practically speaking, to release it in a complete form. The problem is that D&D has both a very deep level range and a very large breadth of material. So, while you're probably right that releasing only levels 1-10 initially means that you lose every group playing at higher than 10th level, the same is also true if you exclude specific races, classes, etc etc.

If the game supports levels 1-20, the trade-off is probably that it can support maybe 8 races and a dozen classes. Drop to levels 1-10, and you can probably double that. Either way, you lose all the groups playing level 10+, or all the groups currently with a Half-orc, or all the groups currently playing with a Dragonborn. You cannot have all three (well, strictly speaking you can - you just have to sacrifice groups with an Elven character).

The Core Rulebooks of the game will always, necessarily be 'incomplete' - at least in the sense that they can never support everything that has been published for the game in near-40 years. WotC have to choose where to draw the lines.

4e is the first edition of D&D not to include all the 'core' stuff that the edition wasn't specifically excluding (e.g. there was no assassin in the 2e PH because there was no intention to have an assassin at all in 2e).

Look at the 3e PH. It easily supported levels 1-20 for all the core classes at the time and added several new ones (see: sorcerer).

I recognize that the game will not be able to support every single class, race and monster ever in D&D on release, but if the goal is to have all PH1 material in at the start, I completely disagree that it is impossible to get levels 1-20 in the initial release. I just don't buy it. Sure, if we want to have 4e-style write-ups where the fighter takes 40 pages or whatever, but I don't see that happening.

There's no need for the PH to have support for dromite wardens and bladeling spellthieves; those have never been 'core' material. What I do expect the PH to be able to support is:

Human
Elf
Dwarf
Halfling
Gnome
Half-elf
Half-orc
Dragonborn
Tiefling

Bard
Barbarian
Cleric
Druid
Fighter
Monk
Ranger
Rogue
Assassin
Warlord
Sorcerer
Warlock
Paladin
Wizard

And yes, I completely expect that a full 20-level spread is viable. Every edition except for 4e- in which it was a conscious choice not to improve the game, but to promote a certain vision of a release schedule- has managed to be complete on release.

As far as the idea that releasing an incomplete game will be good for sales, I'll just point at the one example we have of that philosophy in action- again, 4e- and note that it drove D&D players away in droves. Was the incompleteness of the game the main factor? I really doubt it. Was it a factor? Absolutely. I know people who were quite put off by the inability to play a gnome, druid, bard or sorcerer on release. They still gave it a chance, but 4e already had one strike in their eyes. Is it really a good business model to start off by saying, "We want all you guys back! But those of you playing (f'rex) gnomes and half-orcs, just wait a while and we'll have you covered!"

Existing games MUST be able to convert easily into 5e if WotC seriously wants to capture the people playing those games. And capturing, and in many cases RE-capturing, those groups is, quite explicitly, one of 5e's major goals (if not its primary goal).

 

[S'mon]

I'd expect the game to support play of the original classes & races - Fighter/Fighting Man, Wizard/Magic-User, Cleric, and maybe Rogue/Thief; with Human, Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling. I certainly don't expect them to necessarily include every class & race that has ever cropped up in a PHB in the game's history. 3e Sorceror, 4e Warlock, 1e Monk or 1e sly assassin Half-Orc, 3e noble savage Half-Orc, 4e Tiefling, 4e Dragonborn - all pretty marginal IMO.

 

[Herobizkit]

I think a soft level cap of 10 with limited support for upper level would work fine. 1e did it well enough - once you hit your 'name' level, you advanced at a flat rate, got flat HP/level and stopped receiving Con bonuses to hit points. Spellcasters still followed the pattern for acquiring spells; in the same manner, we could extrapolate for feats and Stat increases and [x]d[level] powers as well.

 

[delericho]

4e is the first edition of D&D not to include all the 'core' stuff that the edition wasn't specifically excluding (e.g. there was no assassin in the 2e PH because there was no intention to have an assassin at all in 2e).

Alternately, only 3e did include all the "core stuff". Although even then, it didn't include all of it - psionics hasn't appeared in the core since 1st Ed.

In any event, that "core stuff" is still just a subset of everything. Indeed, I'd be happy to bet that there are more groups using something from outwith the core rulebooks than there are playing in levels 13+ (3e or PF) or 21+ (4e). And, in fact, the overlap between those two groups is probably pretty high.

Every edition except for 4e- in which it was a conscious choice not to improve the game, but to promote a certain vision of a release schedule- has managed to be complete on release.

With 4e, WotC took a conscious decision to defer less popular elements from the game in order to make room for elements that they felt would prove to be more popular. And it's very likely that they were actually right to do so - the complaints from Gnome-lovers, for example, are very likely well out of proportion to the number of people who actually played gnomes. Besides, 4e did include support for Gnome PCs from the outset - it's just that those were presented in the MM rather than the PHB.

As for the argument that 4e was 'incomplete' - that's as old as 4e itself. Either it is (in that it presents a complete and playable game), or it is not (because it omits something that appeared in previous editions). But in the latter case, the same is true of every edition since 1st - as noted, psionics has been missing from the core since then.

As far as the idea that releasing an incomplete game will be good for sales...

No, it won't.

But it is also true that the current approach of having near-1,000 page Core Rules (with the expectation that groups will then add another 1,000 pages of supplements) is a very significant barrier to entry for new groups. When faced with the prospect of paying $100 for the rules, then spending hours reading them, then more time creating characters and an adventure to go with them, and then you get to start having fun - and all this for a game you might enjoy), it's really no wonder WoW has killed D&D and taken its stuff.

Neither approach is good. But the question WotC need to answer is this: which is less bad for sales - producing core rules that don't include everything people want, or producing core rules that actively drive away new players?

 

[Li Shenron]

Level cap in a vacuum means nothing. Of course there has to be a level cap in the core game, even a game that says "there is no level cap" has an implicit limit given by the amount of material in the book, and once your PC has all the spells, feats, and abilities, you can only inflate numbers. But even numbers (and their cap) don't matter that much in absolute terms but only in relative terms with the monsters you're fighting or the DC of challenges.

OTOH, once you have a certain amount of material designed for the PC, the level cap in the core is important because it affects the spread of such material. For instance, if you have to accomodate spells of different effects magnitudes (e.g. from Magic Missile to Meteor Swarm) across all levels in core, having 20 levels instead of 30 has an effect on how many spell levels you need and/or how often do you give a class access to the next spell level. And then, arrange the spells into too few spell levels and you might have too large differences between spells of the same spell level, while on the other hand arrange them into too many spell levels and you might have too few spells per spell level which means lesser character variety (since at each spell level there are less choices, and all PC will choose mostly the same spells).

I don't care how many levels exactly they end up with, I only care that this level cap is chosen properly so that the designs of all the other stuff related to levels (from bounded accuracy to spells to skill success rate to character variety) goes well with it.

-----------------------------

Second, about TIERS... I really believe they should need some serious re-thinking.

If they are going with tiers in 5e, they should really avoid reducing them to stupid labels that mean nothing. Really, what is the difference between "heroic", "epic", "legendary" or "paragon"? Check out the following definitions:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hero
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paragon
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epic
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend

They all mean the same thing. That "epic" more than "legend" more than "heroic" is just D&D jargon we got used to and carries some habits from previous edition, but it doesn't mean anything at all outside 3e/4e.

If you want to use these labels, go ahead, but what really matters is what do they have in mind in terms of how the game changes. If it's just numbers inflating, the game doesn't change. If just names change, and you get "talents" instead of "feats", the game doesn't change unless the effects of those are significantly different. If only monster descriptions change, the game still doesn't change (you can take an orc and call it Orcus and say it rules a kingdom of the afterlife... but if you fight it just like an orc, the game hasn't changed!).

One important distinction that the designers should make is between adventures and world interaction. Although the 2 are related, they are NOT the same thing.

To explain, let me make some examples. Take the president of a nation and compare it with a karate world champion. Who would be higher level in D&D? The game is first about adventures, thus the karate champion would be higher level. For what we know, the president could be 1st level or less, it could be old, frail and completely unfit and unable for adventuring.

But we also want that sort of stuff in a RPG, at least some of us want it. It's just that if you hard-code powers for world interaction into the game, you get weird and squinted results. It's great if D&D supports that, but it must do so in a way that's not hard-coded into levels (it can be so as an example, but it needs to room to freely adjust it). Thus IMHO this sort of stuff should stay OUT of the concept of tiers, or alternatively it should be arrangeable freely from one tier to the other... because if your PCs just go to bigger dungeons at high levels, there is no point in forcing them to forge a kingdom, just like a karate champion does not become a president. And on the other hand, there is no point in requiring a black belt from someone to elect him president i.e. no point in forcing a minimum level for a PC/NPC to become the king. At the very least, it's campaign-dependent.

So if we want tiers, what should they be based upon?

IMHO tiers should be based on strong game-changing character capabilities during adventures, such as for example:

- seeing in the dark -> rendering illumination not an issue
- charms/compulsions -> rendering social interaction not an issue
- invisibility/undetectability -> rendering stealth not an issue
- flying -> rendering terrain not an issue
- teleportation -> rendering distance not an issue
- going back in time -> rendering causality not an issue

there are more like these of course. Now THESE are the kind of things that really CHANGE how adventures work and feel, in all three pillars social/exploration/combat!! If tiers should be in the game, they should be based on which ones of these the PC having access to and their degree of applicability (e.g. how often, for how long, how reliably, at what cost...).

Just my 2cp.

 

[TerraDave]

I would add that setting out the parameters of play is crucial to mid and lower level play as well to working out how the system can space out the capacities of PCs. We need to set out where should earthshaking powers be situated - ie should Wish be set for 20th or 30th level PCs. More important I think is where should a spell like Fly be located - at 5th level because that is where it has been located in Basic or should it be a higher level spell and leave more space for PCs to be be able to defy gravity? You cant space out the capacities of PCs - especially with respect to magic - until the parameters are set.

Its this.

4E assumed that certain things would happen at pretty high levels, and then stretched out the "sweet spot" to make it easier to play at those levels. And it worked, kinda.

In any case, we know, from many sources, that play in D&D has generally taken place at low to mid levels. Its true know, it was true 30 years ago. This reflects both campaign longevity (or the lack thereof) and that higher level play tends to be harder for the DM and is often harder for the players. BUT, the idea of high level play remains an important motivator for both.

So...do you assume that most groups aren't interested in high level stuff in terms of magic and opponents? Or they would be, if only they could get there (and maybe it was a little easier in terms of play to stay there).

And what does high level mean? Compared to low level characters or creatures, 12th level ones (especially pre 4E) border on the god like. Capable of traveling immense distances, raising the dead, knowing long lost secrets, destroying armies (at least of low level soldiers and there mid level officers)...Do we need power beyond these?

You don't need a level cap, but designers have to decide about both player power, when they get what, and who they fight. Orcus could be a 10th level opponent, 15th level, 20th level, 30th level...

If they figure all this out, then we can talk about how many levels in the PHB.