D&D 5E Why Do Higher Levels Get Less Play?

[MerricB]

The biggest reasons were left off the poll.

First, WotC doesn't provide enough support or content for those levels, so there isn't any interest in playing them. If there were a campaign that started at 10th and ran to 20th, I'm pretty sure there would be an audience for it, if only because it would be the only thing WotC had ever published for 5e that did that thing. Especially if said campaign were published alongside setting-lore and player-facing options? Yeah, I could see a product like that selling reasonably well, again simply because it's such a rarity.

It's called Vecna: Eve of Ruin. Levels 10-20.

Level 5-20? That's Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

It's very funny to see how many people are running Eve of Ruin in my circles - mostly hollowing it out and putting in their own material!

 

[MerricB]

Yeah, I'm running the group through the Planescape adventure, which has very fast leveling. They're enjoying it, but complaining that it's actually TOO fast. It also has a level jump (to 17th) and this time I'm making SURE they're prepared, honestly considering doing a pre-session Q&A/tutorial!

The pacing of Wizards adventures - especially the newer ones - is often quite fast. They're designed with limited space, but with target levels for each chapter. And then you can get through a chapter in 4 hours in many cases, since there isn't more material. I'm sure some groups will expand on them a lot.

I'm slower in my home campaigns with my own material than I am in published adventures!

Cheers!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's called Vecna: Eve of Ruin. Levels 10-20.

Level 5-20? That's Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

It's very funny to see how many people are running Eve of Ruin in my circles - mostly hollowing it out and putting in their own material!

Pardon. I had no idea it covered that level range. Folks have frequently said there just isn't anything made for it, so I was under the impression that that was still true.

Sadly, I haven't heard good things about V:EoR even when I have heard about it at all, so that's not great. A product with a dubious quality reputation will certainly not reverse any patterns on this front.

I honestly haven't heard anything at all about WDotMM, so...I'm not sure what to make of that one.

 

[MerricB]

I honestly haven't heard anything at all about WDotMM, so...I'm not sure what to make of that one.

Well, it was pre-covid now, so that puts it in the distantly-remembered past!

It's one of the adventures I haven't run, so I can't really speak to it. (It's something I'd use more piecemeal as part of a larger Waterdeep campaign rather than just as a monolithic 5-20 dungeoncrawl, since it doesn't have that sort of a connecting plot).

 

[Maxperson]

There were some high level monsters in the books, especially later books; but there were very few high level adventures for 3e. (Of course, there weren't many adventures at any level, but that's another thing.) And like I said, there was never a published epic level adventure, except for a single epic adventure in Dungeon, as far as I can recall.

I will say that the high level adventures we got in Dungeon during the 3e era were some of the best designed high level adventures I have seen, though. They really leaned into some important design principles for high level adventures, such as "assume that high level pcs have high level abilities".

Even so, there was, as is usually the case for dnd, a LOT more support for lower level stuff. I think almost all the high level adventures were in Dungeon (though to be fair, there was a real dearth of published adventures from WotC in 3e period).


Again, there were almost no adventures for high level characters, and what there were were... well... let's just say that 4e's adventures were largely awful. There were a few gems among the muck, but the high level adventures were not among them. I could go on at length about the delve format that all the early 4e adventures were pushed into, but let's just say that they focused on encounters to the point of overlooking pretty basic elements of the adventure as a whole. (Keep on the Shadowfell has an infamous encounter at an excavation site that is supposed to be important, but it makes no difference whatsoever to the adventure as a whole if you just skip that encounter completely, to point at one particularly egregious example off the top of my head.)

4e's epic tier rules were great; but the game never really used them to any degree. Epic destinies were an amazing innovation- but nobody did anything with them. It's a real shame, too; they added a layer to dnd that made epic level characters very important and very special in a way that no other edition has done.


I would disagree, but I agree that it is probably the edition with the least high level support.

It looks like where we don't see eye to eye is on what constitutes support, or how important that support is. You seem to be placing a lot of what counts as support onto published adventures. I'm placing the lion's share of what constitutes support onto the tools for me to run high level. I don't run much in the way of published adventures, so they don't mean nearly as much to me.

3e had a lot of tools for me to put together high level adventures, so I count that as supported. Not perfectly supported, but also not poorly supported.

4e I never played, but it looks like the tools were there for the DMs to use, so that seems to be supported a fair amount as well, so I wouldn't put that in the poorly supported category.

5e we agree on.

 

[Maxperson]

People "just" aren't used to it. They find the levels they're happy running at. They have their campaigns end early. They don't have stories to tell that need higher levels.

Me? I saw the H1-4 AD&D Bloodstone Pass adventures as a teenager and took them as a goal.

Still haven't run them! But I have run two 4E campaigns to level 30, am currently on my third 5E campaign that will reach level 20, and ran 3E to level 21. I also have a Mithral-selling Tier 4 adventure on the DMs Guild. (I am not all that happy with it, but it's reviewed moderately well).

Upthread I mentioned that the one time I played high level AD&D characters was when we started at 18th level. Well, we did it to run through those modules. I don't remember a whole lot of it, but I do remember that it was fun.

 

[GobHag]

because the 1-to-max-level nature of ENW and Paizo (and some WotC) offerings is an explicit and key part of the product

Actually want to mention this: Paizo has repeatedly said that they've gone from 6 book, 1-20 Adventure Path to 3 books, 1-10/11-20 is because those last three books in the old model consistently sell badly.

 

[Clint_L]

I ran decent amount of 5e high level adventures.

First off, characters are powerful. Real powerful. Creating chalenging encounters starts to be problem. If you throw one or two high CR monsters, if party is decently optimized, they can wipe it first round, eventually 2 rounds. What usually works is massive amount of lower cr monsters, and by that i mean 3-4 opponents per 1 PC. But when i did that, it starts to eat time. It's not as bad as PF1 when one encounter could take 60-90 minutes, but it takes at least half an hour and can start to feel like grind fest.

I agree...and am also impressed that you can do a fight like that in half an hour! Your players are a lot more on it than mine are!

Threats need to be on very big scale. We are talking world threatening or even plane threatening.

I really, really disagree with this. In fact, it's an assumption that I think is responsible for a lot of terrible entertainment.

In stories, threats only matter if they are personal. It doesn't matter how high level the character is, if it's a threat to something they love, or a threat that forces them to confront their own weakness, that's when the story gets its hooks in. When the character has to change or die (possibly metaphorically).

I think it is a massive failure of storytelling to confuse the literal size of the threat with the narrative stakes. It's why so many blockbuster movies are /yawn.

 

[Clint_L]

It's called Vecna: Eve of Ruin. Levels 10-20.

...

It's very funny to see how many people are running Eve of Ruin in my circles - mostly hollowing it out and putting in their own material!

That's exactly what I did. I totally altered the plot and a bunch of encounters because...see my post above. I think "the multiverse is in danger!" plots are stupid, clichéd, and not remotely interesting. And I got rid of the Kas subplot because it was way too inside baseball for my group. So I reorganized the whole thing to tie into their character arcs.

 

[MerricB]

Actually want to mention this: Paizo has repeatedly said that they've gone from 6 book, 1-20 Adventure Path to 3 books, 1-10/11-20 is because those last three books in the old model consistently sell badly.

Yeah. That’s a very strong indication of how it is to get a singular story that keeps people’s attention over 20 levels.

Also: if I don’t like this adventure concept after a couple of instalments, why should I buy the rest of the parts? (Lots of Paizo APs I don’t like the theme that much!)

Cheers!