D&D 5E How viable is 5E to play at high levels?

[Oofta]

...CR guidelines that don't really work was a good move? ...

So explain what kind of system you think could have worked.

Nobody has ever been able to describe something that would have worked, it's just incessant whining about something that simply does not have a good solution.

The only option I see is to just have no CR and no guidelines which is a worse alternative.

 

[Eric V]

I'm not a designer, but the 4e encounter guidelines were the most balanced yet. Improving on those would have been a logical step.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm not a designer, but the 4e encounter guidelines were the most balanced yet. Improving on those would have been a logical step.

Only if the goal were improvement. Classic feel and fast combat were much higher-priority goals, and both starkly at odds with balanced/simple/dependable encounter-building guidelines.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Only if the goal were improvement. Classic feel and fast combat were much higher-priority goals, and both starkly at odds with balanced/simple/dependable encounter-building guidelines.

"Improvement" is pretty dependent on context as well. Is it improvement if you end up with less people playing your game and more people disliking it? "Balance" and "Good" are not necessarily concordant. Just because something may technically have better balance, doesn't mean it's inherently better, and folks need to stop treating it as such. Especially if you judge "better" by metrics like popularity, sales numbers, # of satisfied consumers, etc.

 

[Tony Vargas]

"Improvement" is pretty dependent on context as well..

Exactly. What are you trying to "improve?" Qualities that just generally make any sort of game better - balance, clarity, ease of learning, depth of play? Or qualities that speak to the brand identity, traditions, and long-time fans of a specific game?

Just improving your game in the first sense might broaden its appeal or earn it some better reviews, but those are things that matter more to brand-new games challenging a market leader, to whom the second sense is likely more important to business success

 

[Celebrim]

Again you missed the point. The goal was to do it with ressources a lot less powerful than the players.

I'm finding this conversation tiring, so you can respond to me however you like, but I'm done.

The original poster asked for advice on how to run high level play that didn't look something like, "You open a door and you see 3 adult blue dragons."

Basically the first encounter in "Isle of the Ape" is with 60 3rd level barbarians, 60 5th level barbarians, 40 6th level barbarians, 20 8th level barbarians, 20 9th level barbarians, 4 10th level barbarians, 2 11th level barbarians, 2 12th level barbarians, 1 14th level barbarians, 4 2nd level shamans, 2 4th level shamans, 1 6th level shamans, 1 8th level shaman, and 10 18HD giant carnivorous apes. That's one encounter. They make 300 attacks during round 1 - I wonder how many groups actually rolled all three hundred d20's? The text of the adventure encourages the DM to allow these forces - a small army with 10 giant sized blood crazed (the text's description) apes - to muster precisely, unseen, unheard, undetected, and unavoidably into a perfect position to ambush the party more or less regardless of what they do up to that point. This little army of isolated primitive tribesman contains 29 name level characters, and would suffice rather well - in different garb - for the assembled Knights of the Round Table. There is this wonderfully inadvertently(?) funny notation in the text something to the effect of, "These natives are slightly different from the ones in the Monster Manual, but no great deviations have been made."

Now, I think we could pardon the neophyte DM for not really considering this assemblage when designing challenges for a party of characters based on reading the text he was given from the MM or DMG, or from thinking upon seeing this as a suggestion that this is only a little better than "three adult blue dragons in a room".

 

[Oofta]

I'm not a designer, but the 4e encounter guidelines were the most balanced yet. Improving on those would have been a logical step.

Comparing 4E to just about any other version of D&D is like comparing apples to oranges. For all it's faults, balance was an advantage of the system.

But I judged a lot of 4E, played LFR and ran a home campaign up to 30th. In my experience it broke down at higher levels without DM adjustment, just like every other version of D&D.

My home group easily took out Lollth when they were in their mid-20s, and if I wanted to challenge them I had to customize and adjust.

Just like I do with my 5E game and my 3.5 game before that.

[EDIT] And just a side note - in my experience 4E started to get a little wonky for CR calculations around the mid teens. Even then, there were major differences in tables that would sit down to play LFR at all levels.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But I judged a lot of 4E, played LFR and ran a home campaign up to 30th. In my experience it broke down at higher levels without DM adjustment, just like every other version of D&D.

Not much like 'em at all, really. 4e was unique in that it's advancement scheme didn't result in radical class imbalance by the double-digits, and didn't require radical encounter designs - like the barbarian/ape army, above - to 'challenge' high level parties.

And, that's where it broke down. A DM could get into an easy, balanced, formulaic rut and fail to make higher levels different and interesting. The DMG 2 offered advice to avoid that for Paragon, but there was never a DMG 3 to do the same for Epic.

 

[Eric V]

Only if the goal were improvement. Classic feel and fast combat were much higher-priority goals, and both starkly at odds with balanced/simple/dependable encounter-building guidelines.

Hey man, not having the monster's abilities all in the textbox and having to look up spells (with the PHB's horrible index issues) certainly does NOT speed up combat!

 

[Tony Vargas]

Hey man, not having the monster's abilities all in the textbox and having to look up spells (with the PHB's horrible index issues) certainly does NOT speed up combat!

No True DM needs to look up spells in combat! ;p

And, to be fair, much as I preferred the AD&D/4e class/level organization of spells, 3e/5e's univesal, alphabetical list does make it easy to look up any one spell.