D&D 5E Why is level 5-10 the "sweet spot" in D&D

[Uchawi]

I always saw it as the medium where martial and caster classes played nice together, before casters moved ahead. This is probably more important for 5E classes that do not gain their main abilities until 3rd level versus those that have flexibility from the start, e.g. wizard or cleric.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Oh man. This is how it usually goes:

*snip*

Yeah, I guess I can see that. However, in my own anecdotal experience with those types of optimizers it's usually either

a. Here are all my level 20 PCs builds, which are super awesome and can do a ton of things better than everyone else. Check out how easily I can kills stuff!!
But have you actually played them, or just made a bunch of PCs?
Umm...

b. Everyone else in the group also prefers that playstyle, so level 1-20 is gained super fast monty haul style, so they can spend a lot of time doing end game stuff

 

[Ancalagon]

However true this might be, I think a 5e that came out with only 10 levels would've been savaged for that fact, simply because of broken expectations.

I completely agree. There is a bit of "playing safe" with this edition of D&D and that probably felt like a risk not worth taking.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Just a comment that my 5E experience so far shows the sweet spot idea doesn't work so well for this edition....I used to define levels 5-10 as the sweet spot in 3.5/PF but in 5E I've run games up to level 16 that felt smooth and enjoyable in the same way, so 5E seems to have fixed this issue (for me).

 

[procproc]

Because those are the levels Gygax and Arneson intended play with something approaching the modern playstyle.

In oD&D when you are low level most of the game is about NPC management. Can you and your team of armed and dangerous schlubs raid and rob the dungeon. The wizard has one spell at level 1 - and the fighter falls easily. Instead you bring a collection of fighters and as many war dogs as you can to do your fighting. The level 1 five PC party was never intended to work in oD&D - you instead went in mob handed and your most important stat was Charisma because it controlled how many hirelings you could bring with you.

At level 5 the wizard had fireball level spells. The fighter was on the verge of the next attack - and had enough magic items to put them on a whole different level to the hirelings you had with you. Meanwhile the 0th level hirelings were by this point chaff that monsters would one-hit without breaking a sweat and would be foolish to enter dungeons which 5th level PCs would find challenging. Which meant that from level 5 to level 9 the intended mode of the game was adventuring as a small team of PCs - strong enough that the wizard didn't just die to a stray blow, and against opposition hirelings couldn't handle.

Level 10 was the soft-cap. Almost all classes (let's not talk about the 1e Monk) gained land and followers. And stopped gaining hit points (seriously, go back to your AD&D books and check). The game after that point was intended to be domain management and the highest level PC in Greyhawk was Sir Robilar at IIRC level 13. PCs did sometimes go adventuring - but it was intended to be a change from the normal course of play.

I don't have my books to check, and since no one else has said anything, I'm probably wrong -- but I was pretty sure you got land and followers at 9th (name level.) And you still gained hp after that, but not hit dice; so you got a fixed number (1 for magic users, up to 3 or 4 for fighters) and no Con bonus.

re: the OP's question, it's a combination of factors, as others have mentioned. The first time I heard the "sweet spot" idea mentioned, it was in the context of 3.x, and one of the biggest issues there is that that's where the math works best. I don't think anyone else has mentioned it yet, but 6 is the first level you can normally qualify for a prestige class in 3.x, which is a huge defining feature for a lot of character concepts. 5e may have moved this down to 3rd level: several classes get a strong defining feature at 3rd level, which serves as a proxy for PrCs since they don't exist in 5e.

Others have touched on it here, but higher level magic fundamentally changes the way people should act, and makes players and DMs alike have to re-calibrate how the world works. The lower end of this is figuring out the implications of easy travel (overland flight and teleportation) and economy-affecting spells like Major Creation, and the higher end involves scrying and reality-altering magic. Often, these aren't things that are well-balanced at the design level: IIRC, at least one edition had the issue that there was basically no defense against an opponent that could scry on you, figure out when you were sleeping, and teleport an assassin to you. Once this level of magic starts showing up, it can become a chore to figure out how to maintain the game as a fantasy setting that feels intuitively like the way a world should work.

Lastly, there are practical and psychological constraints. Playing from 1 to 20 takes a lot of time, and people move and have real-world scheduling constraints that come up that often end games prematurely. For a lot of players and DMs, a big part of RPGs is the sense of mechanical advancement, so as you get closer to the level cap, it implies an end to the game that no one may really want. 10th level is probably an important psychological breakpoint because it implies, true or not, that you're halfway to the end of the game/campaign.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I don't have my books to check, and since no one else has said anything, I'm probably wrong -- but I was pretty sure you got land and followers at 9th (name level.) And you still gained hp after that, but not hit dice; so you got a fixed number (1 for magic users, up to 3 or 4 for fighters) and no Con bonus.

Just clarifying, fighters soft-capped and gained their followers at level 9 - wizards soft-capped and gained their tower at level 10. And the XP tracks were, of course, different. You gained a few hp after the soft-cap (1/level for wizards, 3 for fighters) but only a few.

 

[Ancalagon]

Magic, and similar effects start to really become a bit overbearing for most GM's after about level 10 or 11, due to the way that levels higher than that can so frequently bypass things we normally associate with as challenging. Lord of the Rings, for example, wouldn't have worked well as a story if Gandalf had access to teleports and massive damage spells quite like a d&d caster would.

Really, if you look at any fantasy story, it all takes place within constraints found in levels 1-10ish. Except for superheros, which have a firm grip on the level 20 style games. What's missing is the stuff between 10ish and 20. So the GM flounders a bit because he can't use the great encounter ideas he has knowing trivial things like travel and gravity really don't mean anything anymore.

Yes - it gets very challenging as a GM to well, challenge the PCs at higher levels. Not because the spellcasters have attack spells of doom, but because their *problem solving capacity* becomes immense. I call this the "swiss army knife" wizard problem.

So, are 5e casters less good at bypassing point plots and fixing everything with a spell?

But I think the point is that even if those high levels were almost never used they were still in the books. A sort of never achieved carrot for players. Or, at least rarely achieved. Leaving them out would have been pretty controversial. It's kinda like dropping gnomes. Sure most people don't really care but there's always that one guy in every group that does.

This is a pretty good point.

One does hope though that we see some domain management rules at some point which I think would go a long ways towards making high levels more viable.

That would be interesting, but I suspect only a portion of groups would like it. And the portion of groups where *every player* is interested in that will be minute.

The middle levels--which vary from edition to edition--are desirable because they're a crossroads. The game has enough moving parts and challenges to be interesting, it retains the "expected" tone, it's generally not TOO unbalanced, characters are more likely to endure (perhaps by the skin of their teeth) and thus generate a longer and "richer" history, DMs are better-supported with setting material/monsters/premade adventures/etc., it generally takes a little longer to get from level to level...

It's a D&D "Goldilocks zone." Not too weak, not too powerful...just right. Not too quick, not too slow...just right. Not too gritty, not to "distant" (for lack of a better term for what happens when you switch to domain management rather than cleaning out dungeons yourself). Not too "mundane" (punching rats in the sewer), not too "gonzo" (sailing the Astral Sea to kill a dead god). That plus the breadth of official support makes it, IMO, practically guaranteed that "the mid-levels" will be the subjectively "best" parts of the game.

agreed

 

[discosoc]

However true this might be, I think a 5e that came out with only 10 levels would've been savaged for that fact, simply because of broken expectations.

Agreed. I'm not advocating the game be released without a full 20 levels. Only that the expectation of players achieving all 20 of those levels for a "complete" journey needs to go away. I remember WotC talking about how they wanted to encourage groups to get past certain levels after determining that "most campaigns stop at 12" or whatever the number was. Except they never bothered asking *why* most campaigns stop then.

Keep the full 20 levels, just stop making level 20 the "finish line."

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Except they never bothered asking *why* most campaigns stop then.

In a round-about way, they kind of did ask that - they asked when campaigns typically end (about 12th level), when we'd like for them to end (I know I answered that question, indicating at least 20th level), and what the biggest factors in a campaign ending have been (such as schedules drifting apart faster than a campaign can reach its end).

Keep the full 20 levels, just stop making level 20 the "finish line."

I pretty sure that only 4e had any kind of built-in assumption of the "finish line." All the other editions it was just players seeing a spread of levels in the books and hoping to get to play them all.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It seems that in 5e the "sweet spot" is level 5-10. Now is it *exactly* 5-10? (4-9? 5-9? etc etc)

classic: 3-8, 3.0 2-10, 3.5 'E6', 5e ...

but let's not worry about the exact value.

Oh, OK.

The thing that is remarkable about this is that the "sweet spot" for 2e and 3e were *also* level 5-10 (roughly speaking). I don't think that everyone would agree but there seems to be a general consensus.

There was definitively a 'sweet spot' for every edition (with the possible exception of 4e, which was either fine at all levels or intolerable at all levels or troublesome starting in Paragon or Epic, depending on who was evaluating it).

Why is that?

The class/level structure, attempts at imposing balance, incentives to play, rewards for system master, etc...

The basic class/level structure and advancement in classic D&D started with characters very fragile, but the 'tougher' ones hard to hit, making it randomly deadly, and was imbalanced in favor of MC'd non/demi-humans and fighter-types. Through the sweetspot, that imbalance more or less resolved and parties had a good chance of surviving most adventures, but still found them challenging. As you exited the sweet spot, the pendulum swung the other way, humans and casters achieved primacy and few challenges (other than fiendish 'gotchyas') stood up to their capabilities and magic-item collections.

3e tried to improve things, but really only playtested level 1-10 (on the theory that's what people actually played). High levels remained quite problematic, and the very lowest levels unpredictably deadly. The fighter-caster imbalances remained, but was accelerated, with casters both catching up and pulling ahead sooner (how much sooner depended on system mastery).

4e changed the class/level advancement structure dramatically, putting all classes on equal footing, so there was no class-balance-pendulum over levels, and 'da math' (after some kludges), worked out over all 30 levels, making encounter balance fairly stable, as well. Play increased in complexity over 30 levels, though, so depending on how you coped with that, it had an upper limit to it's 'sweet spot.'

5e is back to very fragile low level characters, quickly getting very durable to the point that it can be hard to establish 'threat' at higher levels, though it gives casters so much flexibility (including cantrips) that they're not particularly 'behind' the tougher melee-type classes at first. As always, exactly where the sweet spot is varies with preference, but the designers, themselves, set the exp charts for the most rapid advancement over the first 3 or 5 levels, decidedly slow advancement for a while after that, speeding up again towards the end. That at least strongly implies that the slower-advancement levels are meant to linger in the 'sweet spot.' All, presumably, in service to 'classic feel.'