D&D 5E Should D&D 5e have Epic Levels?

[Xenonnonex]

It works, but it's also a mess. CR? A huge gamble. How do you challenge players? It's so swingy and hit-and-miss. Huge hp pools, low ACs. Everyone hitting all the time since hp are the main defensive attribute. Oh, and non-proficient saves against action-denial effects... 0%-5% chance of success.

Go epic and save DCs go even higher, which means your non-proficient saves auto-fail. Attacks hit 95% of the time. Are spellcasters going to be pulling off three 9th-level spells per day? How many 8th-level spells? How do you use CR 10ish creatures as mooks when they have enormous hp pools for "minions" and may possess innate spellcasting or other complex mechanics.

It'd be a bookkeeping nightmare.

Less of a damn nightmare than 3xe.
Problem is. Wizards has not given high level play really a chance. What could be high level adventures have stopped at around 12 or 15. Not great.
They gave a nod with Mythic. More could be done. And it can be more streamlined.

Which means. High level play should not just be about more numbers. Needs to give more relevance to what epic means.

 

[SkidAce]

I answered no.
I consider level 16 to be max, which makes 17-20 epic. Add a few boons if you like, a few legendary items and boom! Epic!

I mean you fight epic, top tier creatures at 17-20, you fight Tiamat at @ 15th!

Thats Epic!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It works, but it's also a mess. CR? A huge gamble. How do you challenge players? It's so swingy and hit-and-miss. Huge hp pools, low ACs. Everyone hitting all the time since hp are the main defensive attribute. Oh, and non-proficient saves against action-denial effects... 0%-5% chance of success.

Go epic and save DCs go even higher, which means your non-proficient saves auto-fail. Attacks hit 95% of the time. Are spellcasters going to be pulling off three 9th-level spells per day? How many 8th-level spells? How do you use CR 10ish creatures as mooks when they have enormous hp pools for "minions" and may possess innate spellcasting or other complex mechanics.

It'd be a bookkeeping nightmare.

You are making a lot of assumptions about how epic levels would even work.

The prof numbers don’t necessarily need to go up, for a start.

The game could already use, at all levels, optional rules for mooks to make sure that they die as easily as they’re supposed to, so that isn’t even a change, but there are also plenty of CR 10 enemies without Spellcasting.
The rest just comes across as having had a bad experience or heard about bad experiences, and extrapolated those to a general case.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I would be another vote for more material for levels 17 to 20+, and reckon epic boons are good start. I am not sure I want to see high level adventure paths but modules that could be added onto after the current adventure parts. Stuff one could adapt into existing campaigns and use as a source of ideas.

 

[Ashrym]

I'm happy with epic boons for that layer of progression.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Level 20 is pretty epic on its own, and if you need more use the Epic Boons. Or just multiclass beyond level 20 or something.

 

[Umbran]

5E should have been built from the ground up with the 1-20 progression it has (or something like it), and another 10 levels of Epic progression - possibly in a 4E-ish Epic Destiny or Paragon Path-type fashion. However, it wasn't, and fitting this in mechanically now, without making the game pretty messy, and making 20+ play rather dull or silly, would be rather tricky. Not impossible. Tricky.

I'm going to go out on a limb, and say... honestly, it sounds to me like the level and style of play desired here really requires a different ruleset - the mechanics of 5e were not built for it, and are not well-suited to it... and if you tried to include it in the design from the beginning, the play experience of levels 1-20 would have suffered.

No ruleset does everything well - they all have their limits of power and genre in which they work well, outside of which they work less well (to downright poorly).

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

No ruleset does everything well

I can't agree more. Rangers are a great example of this in 5e.

 

[Umbran]

I can't agree more. Rangers are a great example of this in 5e.

Yeah. 5e can do a ranger just fine. It just can do one single class that encompasses everyone's preferred ranger.

 

[Teemu]

You are making a lot of assumptions about how epic levels would even work.

The prof numbers don’t necessarily need to go up, for a start.

The game could already use, at all levels, optional rules for mooks to make sure that they die as easily as they’re supposed to, so that isn’t even a change, but there are also plenty of CR 10 enemies without Spellcasting.
The rest just comes across as having had a bad experience or heard about bad experiences, and extrapolated those to a general case.

Check the CR 9-11 creatures. They all have well over 100 hp and can make 2-3 attacks. Mooks with several attacks and 100+ hp? A bookkeeping nightmare.

I’ve run a game at tier 4. It’s a mess. The saving throw issue is real, and it’s awful to have a player taken out for several rounds by a stun or incapacitate because they have a 0-10% chance of success. Massive hp pools everywhere, just bags of hp since that becomes the main defense as opposed to AC.

I can do epic boons, or not advancing numbers. But then how is that different from what we already have?