D&D General Adventurers in Faerun-The Book of Low and Mid Level Adventures?

[Sword of Spirit]

You realize that the PHB and DMG already do this, and suggest starting at Level 3 as the norm...?

Yep, and their statements were off. My brief examples were more accurate to the actual nature of how play works at those levels. The need to be accurate was part of the point I was making.

I know that these sorts of tiers appeal to lots of folks. I hate them. I think that threat inflation leads to boring, predictable stories where the stakes no longer really matter. And I think that's why so few campaigns run to high levels: the stakes have become unrelatable.

Above all, I do not do world/universe/multiverse ending plots. Maybe I would if I was ending the campaign and wanted to commit to potentially never using that setting again with that group of players, but otherwise, the stakes could not be more fake.

I just build stories out of the character's backgrounds and choices and then adjust the threats to their character level. So, for eample, in my home campaign the characters are finally getting around to revisiting the estranged father of a party member; I've known for awhile that he is in trouble with a local consortium, but since they are now level 7 the goons strong arming him will be trolls instead of ogres, etc.

So what I'm hearing you say is that D&D levels are mostly meaningless to your adventure concepts? From that perspective, yeah none of this is going to matter.

Honestly, you might be better off just not having players gain levels in that sort of play. Decide which level mechanically works best for you and just stay there. "Guys, I'm planning a long campaign here, but we won't be gaining any levels. Everyone will be level 6 the whole time, because that lets us beat interact with the study." There are role-playing ganes that lack D&D style advancement and do that sort of thing. But I don't know that D&D in any edition has really been designed for level to be irrelevant in that matter.

Now I realize that you might have social or other reasons for choosing D&D to play that way, and I'm not saying "don't play D&D like that". We're talking on a theoretical level, where I'm making the point that D&D is designed for different level ranges to offer very different experiences, and I think the mismatch between that reality and people's expectations might be behind a lot of the distaste for high level play. Its something different by design, and you either are interested in it or not.

The problem I would have is that I would need to run another campaign before I get to this one. I would want something that ties in to how the PCs get there. I might never get to play that or I'm waiting for someone to make a 1-10 lead in.

The other point in an earlier post was to use planar sites and the Blood War to challenge these PCs. I might like that once, or once in a while. I do not like D&D in space or other planes. I like D&D saving a town or raiding a crypt to find a magic sword. This style tends to be levels 1-7 or up to 10ish.

I did like the shift to make low level go by fast and then slow the 'sweet spot' of levels 3-10 or whatever. Then make high level go by fast again. I think a lot of people have gone to leveling not based on XP but on story. Not sure if this slows the sweet spot unless the DM is watching.

I think you're in that same situation. High-level play is a specific D&D thing that you aren't even theoretically interested in.

To cycle back to the examples I was giving about more accurate tiers of play--a major reason that would be useful is so people can clearly see how play is supposed to work in those various level ranges and pick the level range they want to play in. The tiers could be given example comparisons to various books and movies and such so people would have clear frames of reference as to what they are intended to enable and represent.

I just think that a disconnect between the adventures a group want to play and the mechanical design realities of the level range they are playing at is part of the issue people have. The assumed level progression and how the experience is supposed to change in D&D is very much idiosyncratic to D&D. If you aren't interested in that very particular experience, you likely won't enjoy a level 1 to 20 campaign. My suggestion is that this all be made much more clear and explicit in the customer facing materials so that people know how to get the play experiences they want.

For instance, I actually enjoy the classic D&D full level spectrum experience where you might start as a kid on a farm and end up literally ascending to godhood, with the campaign passing through multiple play experiences on the way. (I also like D&D experiences focused on a more specific limited scope.) But I know how D&D does things and am not constantly irritated by a mismatch between expectations and design realities.

 

[TheSword]

I’ve played and ran a fair few high level adventures. However in all but a couple of adventures they were the culmination of years of game.

The problem is that the scope of PC abilities is so wide that they can go anywhere and do anything. Their capability to prepare is vast and the resources they should have at that point are spectacular. 5e is better in this regard than pathfinder or 4e but it is still substantially different. One example is that the number and complexity of foes required to challenge players 15+ means that combats can come to dominate the game. They can also be slow despite only lasting a couple of rounds.

Where we have played one off or jump-to high level play with pre-written adventures then they are usually very tightly controlled artificial scenarios. Vecna for instance - portal in, have a very clear goal, leave, go to next portal, teleport in, very clear goal etc. It’s very hard to consider more.

2 pages wouldn’t even come close to getting started discussing the kind of stuff that would be necessary for high level play.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Which? WHat 5E WotC product "didn't sell"?

Vecna Eve of Ruin is high level but I don't hear a lot of people talking about it.

 

[SlyFlourish]

This is kind of a chicken and egg question, though, isn't it? If high level stuff is rare and often bad when it does get published, of course people who play at high levels are going to have to home brew.

Given how many people homebrew their games anyway and still don't reach high levels, I don't think this is a chicken and egg thing. I think most games don't reach high levels period. It's not because there aren't published high-level adventures (and there are a lot of them from other publishers). It's because most games fizzle out well before those levels anyway.

@mearls had some actual data on this in the early days of 2014 D&D I think. He got surveys back showing that most groups stopped at like 5th level but then started back over at 1st again the next week. He can correct me if I'm wrong about that.

I did my own polls on it here:

Question: "What is the highest level D&D campaign you've run or played in?"

Poll posted 17 August 2017, 269 respondents.

Response % of total
1st to 3rd 3%
4th to 6th 16%
7th to 9th 25%
10th to 12th 13%
13th to 15th 20%
16th to 18th 7%
19th to 20th 15%

This is an old poll so not up to date but I think it shows my point. Even among my relatively well connected audience (I think this was on twitter), only 3 in 20 ever reached 20th level and less than half ever reached 13th level.

I'm about to finish a 20th level campaign I've been running for two years and in the like 11 years I've been playing 5e with close to a thousand games, this is only my second 20th level campaign.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Vecna Eve of Ruin is high level but I don't hear a lot of people talking about it.

On the whole it’s not very good. I’m running it at the moment, it does have a few interesting ideas, but even they need reworking to make it playable. The difficulty is walk-in-the-park.

 

[Reynard]

Given how many people homebrew their games anyway and still don't reach high levels, I don't think this is a chicken and egg thing. I think most games don't reach high levels period. It's not because there aren't published high-level adventures (and there are a lot of them from other publishers). It's because most games fizzle out well before those levels anyway.

@mearls had some actual data on this in the early days of 2014 D&D I think. He got surveys back showing that most groups stopped at like 5th level but then started back over at 1st again the next week. He can correct me if I'm wrong about that.

I did my own polls on it here:

Question: "What is the highest level D&D campaign you've run or played in?"

Poll posted 17 August 2017, 269 respondents.

Response % of total
1st to 3rd 3%
4th to 6th 16%
7th to 9th 25%
10th to 12th 13%
13th to 15th 20%
16th to 18th 7%
19th to 20th 15%

This is an old poll so not up to date but I think it shows my point. Even among my relatively well connected audience (I think this was on twitter), only 3 in 20 ever reached 20th level and less than half ever reached 13th level.

I'm about to finish a 20th level campaign I've been running for two years and in the like 11 years I've been playing 5e with close to a thousand games, this is only my second 20th level campaign.

I think if there was really cool content at those levels, people would engage it.

Remember that a campaign doesn't have to "get to" high level -- you can start there.

 

[Parmandur]

I think if there was really cool content at those levels, people would engage it.

Remember that a campaign doesn't have to "get to" high level -- you can start there.

I juat don't think there is a natural market for it,or one of the myriad TTRPG publishers would have tapped it.

OD&D capped at Level 10. B/X went to q4. Narratively, that area is juat the natural stopping point where people want to start over.

 

[DEFCON 1]

It just became harder and harder to get things to fit my own story and world. It became easier to create from scratch, or rather, to build off of what has already been established but without the aid of external material. I'd like to think it's because I've improved, but once I get back to the lower levels, I'm right back to cannibalizing content with ease and preference.

This right here I think is the real issue. You've hit the nail on the head.

High-level campaigns have 12 to 17 levels of previous campaign material and stories that have occurred over the course of however many months / years the game has been running that an adventure needs to insert itself into. What are the odds that some random adventure writer will come up with a plotline for an adventure that will actually make total sense for where the DM's narrative has evolved to and would make sense for the players to interact with? Usually not great. Especially because high-level modules tend to have more involved plots with odder, more powerful villains that don't just "show up in the wild" like low-level modules and monsters do. At 5th level one can write a "townsfolk are disappearing, what is happening?" adventure and the DM can plop it into their campaign, because it'll involve something like ogres out in the hills surrounding the starting town... something that most campaigns are already starting with.

But no writer is going to use that easily-inserted plotline except this time write it for 16th level characters. Because you'd have to do all kinds of whackadoo things to warrant having it being at 16th level-- the townsfolk are sent to the Abyss... the person kidnapped is the King... the kidnappers are githyanki on a Spelljammer ship... or whatever other weirdass thing the writer can think of to make it worthy of actually being written for characters that high and powerful. But all of those whackadoo things make them less useful to large numbers of DMs because their campaigns just have not moved forward to a place where going to the Abyss, or involving a King, or having to go Spelljamming make any sort of logical or narrative sense.

I think this is one of the reasons why the Adventure Path format has become so useful and popular... because it almost guarantees that the DMs and players that play it will actually see their campaign stories reach the point where those Level 10, Level 12 "adventure sites" at the ends of the book are actually spot-on as to where the party is going to be. The campaign has lead to those locations and plots. And ultimately they will see more use than if those final "modules" that we get at the end of Adventure Paths just got published on their own.

A Tyranny of Dragons adventure path that propels the characters forward from 1st level all the way to a finale at the Well of Dragons against a summoned aspect of Tiamat will see that finale scene get more use than just some writer making a module for Dungeon Magazine that is a 12th to 15th level adventure of Tiamat being summoned and the party has to arrive to stop it. Sure... some DMs and their campaigns might find a way to work that module in to what they've already been building over the preceding 12 levels of the campaign... but most would just look at it and shrug their shoulders, knowing that it just doesn't fit with what they have going on in their game.

 

[TiQuinn]

I think if there was really cool content at those levels, people would engage it.

Remember that a campaign doesn't have to "get to" high level -- you can start there.

You can but there’s also more friction in that when you build a character or play a character up through the levels, you become intimately familiar with the class abilities and the spells. When you start a character at say 15th level, it can be a little difficult to manage all of those new abilities all at once.

 

[Rushbolt]

Yeah, it is notable that the point where 5E play seems to end organically by and large matches up pretty closely with the transition from Expert box Levels to Companion box Levels, if you look at the conversion guide for older editions to 5E.

Given that the audience that passed on Companion and higher and those that simply fizzle out and start new Campaigns by Tier 3 are completely different...I would posit simply that yhe natural end of D&D for most players is around the top end of Expert. This isn't a chicken and egg, build it and they will come thong...it has been built, by different companies across decades...and they did not come.

Leveling is much faster these days thanks to milestone leveling. Experience point leveling was far slower in BECMI.