D&D 5E 8th level Demiplane spell...does this sound right?

[S'mon]

The one thing: one advancement per 30,000 XP is far, far too cheap in my opinion. It makes it easy to rack up Epic Boons and ability score increases at an ever-accelerating pace.

I've told my players that I'm okay with advancing beyond 20th level, but every level past 20 is as much XP as going from level 1 to 20 all over again.

30,000 might be cheap; don't think I'd want to charge more than 50,000 though.
One thing I like about 5e is that it's easy to make arbitrarily tough monsters to challenge godlike PCs, that doesn't work in 3e/pf. In 4e it's not too hard to make a decent level 40 solo monster, but expect 2-3 hours work. In 5e I could do it in a few minutes.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

30,000 might be cheap; don't think I'd want to charge more than 50,000 though.
One thing I like about 5e is that it's easy to make arbitrarily tough monsters to challenge godlike PCs, that doesn't work in 3e/pf. In 4e it's not too hard to make a decent level 40 solo monster, but expect 2-3 hours work. In 5e I could do it in a few minutes.

1.) 50,000 XP is still really cheap. Defeating Tiamat or the Tarrasque would be enough all by itself to level up a three-man party, or get a four-man party 75% of the way there. Maybe it's old-school of me, but I don't think that's worth a level/epic boon/ASI all by itself. YMMV obviously.

2.) It's actually quite hard to make arbitrarily-tough monsters by 5E rules, because the XP table maxes out at CR 30 and there's no guidance at all for anything beyond that. Obviously you can make something up and award some arbitrary amount of XP, but you could do that in any edition. For example, if I made a truly epic Tiamat who is as large as a mountain (6 miles in length), with 10,000 HP and 1000 HP regen per round, a breath weapon dealing 24d12 etc. to a square mile at a time, etc., and the players manage to defeat her, there is no guidance at all as to how much XP she's worth. Personally I would consider that to be worth a level or an epic boon, so under my system she'd be worth about 1.6 million XP so that each PC gets 400K XP, but that's me making it up because 5E gives no guidance at that scope. Unlike, say, AD&D 2nd edition, which could and did give stats and XP for such creatures, although not always stats that made sense.

 

[ehenning]

After letting my group know official content may not be coming (thanks for the Sage Advice link!) but, being D&D we could cobble together some rules, they opted to spend the money on making new magic items, spells, and castles, basically describe their characters retirement years as well as make themselves power brokers. They then asked to start new characters decades in the future so they could be reminded about their previous characters great deeds. And they wanted their new characters to at some point meet the old ones.

I skipped 3rd and 4th editions so I can't comment on them but I can say the 5th edition rules are streamlined and fluid, making for a fun, fast paced game! Also sites like this weren't around "back in the day" so I appreciate the wealth of knowledge and global community access the internet, and enworld, provide. I have had fun just reading opinions (polymorph for example).

Thank you all kindly and good luck and good hunting!

Sounds like a great way to write their character's history!

FYI, I did a little digging and found Merric's great page of 5e modules. There is one for 20th level if you ever wanted to run at that level with a third-party adventure.

http://merricb.com/dungeons-dragons-5e/the-great-list-of-dd-5e-adventures/

Any chance you can post a public page with the character's stats? Would be fun to see.

 

[S'mon]

1.) 50,000 XP is still really cheap. Defeating Tiamat or the Tarrasque would be enough all by itself to level up a three-man party, or get a four-man party 75% of the way there. Maybe it's old-school of me, but I don't think that's worth a level/epic boon/ASI all by itself. YMMV obviously.

2.) It's actually quite hard to make arbitrarily-tough monsters by 5E rules, because the XP table maxes out at CR 30 and there's no guidance at all for anything beyond that. Obviously you can make something up and award some arbitrary amount of XP, but you could do that in any edition. For example, if I made a truly epic Tiamat who is as large as a mountain (6 miles in length), with 10,000 HP and 1000 HP regen per round, a breath weapon dealing 24d12 etc. to a square mile at a time, etc., and the players manage to defeat her, there is no guidance at all as to how much XP she's worth. Personally I would consider that to be worth a level or an epic boon, so under my system she'd be worth about 1.6 million XP so that each PC gets 400K XP, but that's me making it up because 5E gives no guidance at that scope. Unlike, say, AD&D 2nd edition, which could and did give stats and XP for such creatures, although not always stats that made sense.

Well yeah, I meant up to CR 30, though personally I give the stats I want and eyeball a CR
afterwards. Over CR 30 I'd probably go "how many CR 30 monsters is this?" but I would probably want to always stick to CR 30 or below for anything you slug it out with face to face; if I ever used
miles-long critters I would break down into pieces, treat as terrain etc - take some tips from 4e.

I would certainly favour giving my group an advancement after killing Tiamat or similar, but those sort of fights would be rare; I'd expect to mostly use large groups of lower CR critters (bounded
accuracy FTW) giving little XP. A CR 25 demon lord plus a group of other demons would be a big
fight worthy of an advancement, but you wouldn't get the chance to do that often - certainly no more than once every 8-10 sessions in my online game, but probably much less frequent.

Re massive monsters, I wouldn't ever be giving out 400,000 XP per PC. I would cap at either #
50,0000 XP each, or minimum-for-two-advancements XP, but if I were regularly giving out
more than 30,000 XP I'd be very surprised and would reassess. Looking at the DMG pg 82 it says a
Deadly encounter for level 20 characters is 12,700 XP, easy is 2,800 and medium 5700. That is the kind of range of XP award I'd be looking to give for a session.