D&D 5E Wandering Monsters: Tiers of Play

[Jan van Leyden]

Which one of you douchè-bags voted that epic level characters should keep the rats away from the tavern's food supplies? Monstrous Rats!

Epic level character have certain responsibilites, e.g., regarding the well-being of tavern owners or guests, don't you think?

Or do epic level characters have an ability which shoos rats away from their position?

 

[Rhenny]

I like the questions that James Wyatt is asking. It is interesting to see how responders view leveling and the feel of level ranges.

Overall, I like the idea that the game changes at different tiers. That keeps the game dynamic. If it all played too similarly, I think I'd grow bored after mid levels.

 

[TerraDave]

Maybe due to a lack of patience, but I have always pushed the campaing in terms of its themes (and opponents).

Grand cosmic threats and schemes leavened with kingdom threatening distress, thats mid level stuff!

By 12 in non 4E, or high teens in 4E, you aren't just trying to save their puny home world, but the whole cosmos.

Hmm, I have been thinking of a different approach for the next campaign...no cosmic threats till at least level 15.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The reason high level play breaks down so often is adventures that are structured much like the ones for lower levels. Combine that with the resources available to high level characters and you have a perfect boredom storm. High level adventures should have challenges that can't be solved merely by the application of PC's personal abilities. Merely using tougher opponents, and an overall jacking up of the numbers isn't going to cut it.

Of course if players aren't interested in domain management or any kind of administration then its probably best to just begin a new campaign.

 

[Minigiant]

Which one of you douchè-bags voted that epic level characters should keep the rats away from the tavern's food supplies? Monstrous Rats!

Tavern rats in Valhalla have a couple dozen HP, spell resistance, and regeneration, dawg.

 

[Desdichado]

I think the concept of tiers grasps at (but never quite reaches) the concept I've articulated otherwise as "D&D changes genre as you level up." I think a game of swashbuckling yet worldly heroes who deal with political type thrillers, and a game about the Justice League of Faerun keeping the fantasy version of Galactus from eating the world are both fine, but I think it is problematic that they're both in the same game and are, in fact, actually the same characters.

I also think that they've way underestimating the breadth that can be done at lower levels. It's almost like D&D designers aren't very familiar with the source material in the Appendix N if they think that you need to be in a certain tier to entertain certain familiar fantasy tropes.

Any of those stories could have been done at any level. And I have much less use for higher level D&D play (epic tier) although I freely admit that my suspicion about the concept has less to do with the concept and more to do with the poor, clunky, implementation of it in every prior edition of D&D.

 

[Mistwell]

Is this a hint as to the new Basic / Expert / Companion / Master / Immortal set of books?

Basic / Apprentice = levels 1–4

Expert = levels 5–10

Paragon = levels 11–16

Epic = levels 17–20

I can hope! I'd love for that game to be published alongside the "Advanced" game.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Is this a hint as to the new Basic / Expert / Companion / Master / Immortal set of books?

Basic / Apprentice = levels 1–4

Expert = levels 5–10

Paragon = levels 11–16

Epic = levels 17–20

I can hope! I'd love for that game to be published alongside the "Advanced" game.

back when we had no info on next, I theorized a staggered release schedule of box sets... the game would be 5 boxes each covering 6 levels then a handful of extra boxes that would be world specific...

 

[an_idol_mind]

I think tiers of play are a great idea, but they are largely useless without the proper adventure support.

What made the BECMI model work so well was that the adventures produced for each boxed set were markedly different. You went from dungeon crawling to wilderness exploration to kingdom building to plane-hopping to godhood.

I think one problem that 3rd and 4th edition both faced was that the adventures were designed more or less in the same manner. You basically went to a site and fought monsters, whether they be orcs or Orcus. If you're going to have tiers of play, I think it's best to make the adventures significantly different in feel for each tier. Otherwise, it just feels like you could just add bigger monsters into the same adventure and get more or less the same result.

 

[MarkB]

Hopefully it was only a convenient framing reference, but I really disliked the way the article talked almost exclusively about tiers of play being tied to spellcasting abilities. I know it was very much thus pre-4e, but I'd really like to see decent game-mechanical support for every class having an enhanced ability to shape their world at higher levels.