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

[Maxperson]

What you are saying is the exact opposite of everything that has ever been said about WotC and 3rd Party companies. One of the entire points of opening up D&D was so that 3PPs could make material that was for the niches of the player base that WotC wasn't making stuff for because there wasn't a large enough audience. Like for instance... high-level adventures!

The larger niches like entire settings that WotC aren't touching, like Dark Sun. Very small niches aren't going to be what those 3pp folks are going to go after. They might make money on Dark Sun products, Birthright products, psionics, etc. since a lot of folks liked those settings, but something only 10% of players want, and fewer than 10% will ever see since many don't go online to even see 3pp, isn't likely to make them money.

Well... WotC isn't going to design on a whim either just under the hopes that what they come up with is what you will actually buy. You are proof positive there isn't an actual market for these adventures because WotC only getting a small percentage of people who decide that what they made was worth getting out of a 10% market is so much worse for sales than a small percentage of the other 90% of the market.

Wow. WotC generally creates products with quality to them. I know their design capabilities, unlike say yours. I would buy their products with far higher confidence in the quality, where I wouldn't buy yours sight unseen because I don't know how good you are. You could be the best designers out there. Or the worst. I have no way of knowing about you.

Prove to WotC you are a worthy customer and maybe they'll cater to you. But if you don't? Then just sit on your hands and wait.

Whatever dude. You clearly aren't interested in even trying to understand what I'm saying. You're just reading to respond with your rhetoric.

 

[Maxperson]

they are getting separate books, it’s not like they are getting nothing

Really? I haven't heard about any separate high level books being made by WotC. Can you link the articles on those?

 

[mamba]

Um, no. Small companies without the resources can't afford to go after only 10% of the market. They will go after the other 90%.

no, for one there are small companies covering niches because there is less competition in them, and for another there always is an opportunity cost, so the big company still will go for the 90% if they think their investment there is yielding better returns

A large company with the resources to put out an anthology book that contains 1 adventure for that 10% and 5 or 6 for the other 90% will reach more people that way.

but will it reach more people than it would with one more mid-level adventure instead of the high-level one? I doubt that

 

[mamba]

Really? I haven't heard about any separate high level books being made by WotC. Can you link the articles on those?

Mad Mage is 6-20, Vecna is 10-20. That there aren’t a lot of them is a matter of demand

 

[Stormonu]

Looking about, it seems a lot of the issue is inexperience. High level is rarely reached by designers, so they're unfamiliar with writing good adventures for those levels - they're used to writing adventures for the earlier part of the game that are more familiar and easier to account for abilities. When we do get high level adventures from WotC, I think they tend to be bad because they don't really understand what high level play is actually like vs. in theory. They try to treat it like low level, without realizing what PCs are actually capable of - especially spellcasters.

I think my own dislike of high level stems from inexperience. I've only really done one "high level" campaign and DMing it was so frustrating that I am relatively unwilling to go through it again. If it there wasn't such a ramp up to get to and learn/administrate those high levels (remember, the DM has to be familiar with EACH player's high level abilities, plus NPCs), we'd probably see much more. But I don't think turning high level into "expanded low level" is the cure.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Wheel of Time does get pretty epic...about Level 12 or 13, I reckon.

Casual teleportation all the time, travel back and forth to another plane, battlefield magic that would be at least 8th level spells in D&D...sounds significantly higher level than that.

I wonder if any success has ever been had with a campaign that wasn't strictly linear - where the players had x different character sheets for each level of their character from 1 to x, and on any given session, the GM would run an adventure from any point along a possible timeline, that perhaps took a few sessions to reach resolution, and with the overall effect resembling a kind of mosaic of adventures or stories that perhaps had an interconnecting thread running through them.

I haven't done the flashback part yet, but it is something I've thought of in case it arises.

Here are the first three things I ran in 5e, right after the LMoP:

After LMoP, we had a near TPK, because the party decided they wanted to go after the green dragon after she ambushed them and they drive her off. And she was prepared. One PC survived, and I had one or two brief "after the closing credits" scenes where the souls of the dead in their respective afterlife got the "hey, so and so is trying to resurrect you, do you want to return"?

Then we had a 20th level one-shot. (I think one of two people elected to make a brand new character rather than play a leveled up version of their character.) When it started, the returning characters had daggers crafted from a green dragon.

The adventure was just a short little thing to see what it was like. Their was maybe one or two speed bump encounters, and then they were fighting a kraken in its lair, with an aboleth sidekick or two. It was fun! Just seeing the high level stuff in play in virtual isolation was neat.

The next was our "Savage Kings" theme advdnture, and the premise makes it difficult to remember its actual level, though it was likely around 20. I started by telling the group the premise that they would be playing sovereigns of non-standard races, and I would need to customize their character sheets to take care of that, so they just needed to choose class and subclass, name, and some character concept sort of stuff, and I would assign them the race that best fit. The mystery was to allow them to think I was talking about playing orcs and gnolls and such.

When I started, it was clear something unusual was going on. Each PC got a prelude scene. The cleric ended up being Thane of the Frost People, and the initial scene involved where he was holding audience also included some flavor where one of his people carried in a cage with a little scrawny pointy eared thing in it that they think was called a "welf" or something.

The premise, that they got to see revealed in-character was that they were all giants who also included: Queen of the Fire People (fighter), Chief of the Hill Folk (barbarian), High Regent of the Storm People (bard) and Emperor of the Cloud People (can't recall the class). It was an adventure set tens of thousands of years ago inspired by the ancient dragons vs giants lore in the MM. Elves and dwarves were still young, and the world was ruled by giants (who called themselves the People) and dragons (the Wyrms).

I basically took MM statblocks, adjusted the ability scores a bit, decided about how many levels worth they were, and then added on character classes to get what felt around 20th level.

The adventure involved the kings meeting together and deciding they needed to deal with the fact that the Wyrms had discovered a Well of Creation and were going to harness its power. So they gathered their forces, and went to enlist the leader of the Stone People and his armies. They visited an arch-hag to get an artifact to help them, and then there was a massive clash of armies: all six giants with associated auxiliary creatures to help, versus armies of all 10 types of dragons with each of the 5e age categories. (The head dragon could cast 9th level spells.)

We used a modified version of the early mass battle play test that allowed for larger units, and ran a mass battle, which ended with a pyrric victory and then a brief time lapse description of the passing of ages, with mountains whethering away, etc. A little "closing credits" scene in that far future had some human children dancing around in a circle singing a nursery rhyme that referred in a vaguely remembered way to the battle they had just fought tens of thousands of years earlier in a time where there were still floating earthburgs in the sky and no humans. Although the mass battle got to dragging on, the adventurer overall was really fun! It ran 15 sessions.

The third was only 10th level (in hindsight it would have been fun to gain a level at some point): "Questing Knights" theme adventure. For this one, I wanted to see what a game would feel like with knights of various clases in 5e. We had a Devotion Paladin, a War Cleric, a Battle Master Fighter, and a green knight flavored Ranger. It was the most linear adventure I've ever run. The party started getting the quest from a king, and then went down the road near the castle one direction having encounters along the way, after which they turned around and went down the road the other way past the castle for the final adventures. At one point they found an enscription in a cave about "here lies Chief so and so if the Hill People", which was the PC from the previous advdnture. Took 10 sessions. It was also fun!

3e (my friend DMed these) we had like a 5 year Castlevania themed Ravenloft adventure that ran from 5-19. Then we did some other stuff, and came back and played the Castlevania 2 sequel at level 19 (Dracula's curse has prevented us from gaining that last level). Lasted months. It was really fun.

Other 3e was a fantasy world zombie apocalypse. We started at level 1, played for a while, the jumped to about level 5, then somewhere around 10, and then finally somewhere above 15. Not sure where it ended. Overall was around a year I think. Also enjoyable!

The only one that didn't quite pan out was when we tried to do a 3e Epic Level Handbook thing. The theme was that it was in a world coming to its final days. It wasn't going to be about saving the world. I'm not actually sure what the goal was. It took an absurd amount of time and math to make my advanced T'ien Lung great Wyrms character, and combat was gruelingly slow. The concepts were awesome, but it didn't take long before we sort of just didn't have the next session and never came back to it.

Most recently, we played Memories of Holdenshire for Level Up, and then advanced the characters to around 15 level I think for a short follow up adventure to get more experience with the system. It was fun, though we decided to stick with 2014 D&D (I don't regret my Level Up purchase though, definitely a great option for some people).

Only one of those involved actually playing characters all the way from 5th level.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

And if more people wanted high-level material, WotC and all the 3PPs would know it and actually produce stuff for it. There would be a void in the marketplace that someone at this point would have filled. But since they haven't... ipso facto there's no real void.

My life experiences have taught me that that sort of thing doesn't always happen. Sometimes something just hasn't been done in a way that has caught on yet.

 

[Parmandur]

I especially love your second point, as I don't think we discuss it often. The aspirational aspect of games with character progression is incredibly important (and also basically a D&D innovation...maybe the D&D innovation). Even if, realistically, you are unlikely to reach max level, it is fun to think about and even plan for it. I played my 1e main for around seven years and attained level 13 (maybe only level 11; it gets a bit hazy), but that whole time I was busy sketching out ideas for when our party hit the topmost tiers of play. And even now, I like to run numbers in my head for my current main character at different levels, especially level 20 (level 20 monks are no joke with the 2024 rules!).

That's not to minimize those topmost levels for those who do play them (I've played a total of ONE level 20 game with the 2024 rules). But even knowing those games are vanishingly rare in the overall scheme of things, having those top levels in the game is important.

I also find it fascinating how much those uppermost levels tend to dominate discussions about class balance, given how little play they see. You would think balance discussions should be driven by a focus on levels 1-10, but they really aren't. Even if we seldom use those high levels, we remain preoccupied with them, and if they weren't in the game, we would demand them back!

Balance is actually pretty good at the Levels people tend to play at.

I got the aspiration element from Jeremy Crawford, he answered a question on why they build out high Level options when relatively few tables use them, and I think there is really something to that.

 

[Yaarel]

if some designers out there want to rejigger how high-level D&D works... that's fine. Maybe there's an audience for it, maybe there's not. But no one should waste their time waiting for WotC to do it, cause they'll be waiting a looooooooooooooooong time.

The levels that need attention are 13-16 and 17-20.

But even during levels 9-12 players drop precipitously, and many campaigns dont reach 10.

Part of the reason is flavor. The superpowers at the higher tiers obsolete the low-tech medievalesque assumptions. For at least the small percent of the population who are these highest levels, the experience of any setting feels modern from magitech and of the superhero genre.

The solution to make the setting fun is to explicitly present these highest tiers as a superhero game and streamline the mechanics as choices of superpowers.

In a medievalesque setting these superheroes are the "immortals" of the cultures.

 

[Parmandur]

Casual teleportation all the time, travel back and forth to another plane, battlefield magic that would be at least 8th level spells in D&D...sounds significantly higher level than that.

That kind of proves my point: Teleportion Circle, which is equivalent to Travelling in WoT, is a 5th Level Spell, thst is, it comes online at Level 9 in Tier 2.

Other than a few maneuvers with powerful ancient artifacts, other stuff in Wheel of Time is, similarly, mid-Level. And itnis Epic.

That's what I am saying: people feel like they have arrived as globe-sacing heroes at Level 9. Then they beat a BBEG, ride off into the Sunset a few Levels later.