D&D 5E Enhancing Vecna: Eve of Ruin *SPOILERS*

[Shardstone]

And as long as I'm necroing this thread (get it) I'd like to roll a knowledge (high level campaigns) by @ECMO3 for advice.

Sidebar: I actually read through all 49 pages of this thread: D&D (2024) - Wrapping up first 2-20 2024 campaign this week, some of my thoughts and what I saw was the original observation about issues with a high-level 2024 game get ridiculed repeatedly by several people, and then the rest of the thread was ECMO3's (impressively) calm and reasonable responses that showed not only their level of expertise in every raised concern, but also that the people trying to point out "obvious" errors had zero/near-zero experience or objective evidence for their complaints, all of which turned out to be incorrect.

To anyone with experience running or playing this game or other up-to-20 5.5 games:
Given that Eve of Ruin is a 5.0 campaign and I'm running it with 5.5 characters (and using 5.5 monsters whenever I can), broadly: what would you do to change things if you were running it?

We have an Oathbreaker Paladin, Moon Druid, Battle Master Fighter, Assassin Rogue, and Lore Bard (who is the least power-gamey of the group). None of my group are multi-classers, nor do I think they'll bother with it down the line (maybe the rogue?). I'm cutting chapters 3 and 6 (Spelljammer and Krynn, just for story reasons) and completely changing chapter 2, so no worries with that material. Some ideas I've read from other posts include:

• Don't allow Vicious weapons, or houserule them as Very Rare (I'd probably do the latter)
• Don't give unrestricted free reign to PCs to buy or craft whatever they want (which will be hard to do as there is a central city hub that is specifically for that purpose)
• I'll probably houserule the 3.5 rule that you can't have more than 2 magical rings
• I'm going to use Dave2008's excellent "Apostles of Ruin" update to the bosses, which make them at least 6-10 times harder
• I know ECMO3 talks about Tasha's Hid. Laughter and Command as being the most broken spells in 5.5; would you change the spells or just try to play around them?

What else should I be looking out for, given these classes and that material?

5R characters are going to tear through encounters starting in Tier 2 and beyond. I don't think most of your houserules for limiting power do especially anything to 5R charactes, since most of their power is derived from their boosted class abilities. You should instead boost damage of "tanky" monsters by 50-75 points for T2 and onwards, and boost damage by another damage die. I don't think Hideous Laughter, Command, etc are necessarily broken; they're used in my games and they just aren't that special. I don't think you need to do anything especially difficult about them.

Apostles of Ruin can be used as is with 5R characters, with no damage or HP boosts.

 

[Clint_L]

It's weird that this wasn't in the book by default.

Right? Especially since WotC has already done a deal with Stranger Things.

This entire adventure seems to be built assuming that the players will be significantly composed of giant nerds like us who immediately recognize why Brynn is significant, etc.

 

[plecostomus]

And as long as I'm necroing this thread (get it) I'd like to roll a knowledge (high level campaigns) by @ECMO3 for advice.

Sidebar: I actually read through all 49 pages of this thread: D&D (2024) - Wrapping up first 2-20 2024 campaign this week, some of my thoughts and what I saw was the original observation about issues with a high-level 2024 game get ridiculed repeatedly by several people, and then the rest of the thread was ECMO3's (impressively) calm and reasonable responses that showed not only their level of expertise in every raised concern, but also that the people trying to point out "obvious" errors had zero/near-zero experience or objective evidence for their complaints, all of which turned out to be incorrect.

To anyone with experience running or playing this game or other up-to-20 5.5 games:
Given that Eve of Ruin is a 5.0 campaign and I'm running it with 5.5 characters (and using 5.5 monsters whenever I can), broadly: what would you do to change things if you were running it?

We have an Oathbreaker Paladin, Moon Druid, Battle Master Fighter, Assassin Rogue, and Lore Bard (who is the least power-gamey of the group). None of my group are multi-classers, nor do I think they'll bother with it down the line (maybe the rogue?). I'm cutting chapters 3 and 6 (Spelljammer and Krynn, just for story reasons) and completely changing chapter 2, so no worries with that material. Some ideas I've read from other posts include:

• Don't allow Vicious weapons, or houserule them as Very Rare (I'd probably do the latter)
• Don't give unrestricted free reign to PCs to buy or craft whatever they want (which will be hard to do as there is a central city hub that is specifically for that purpose)
• I'll probably houserule the 3.5 rule that you can't have more than 2 magical rings
• I'm going to use Dave2008's excellent "Apostles of Ruin" update to the bosses, which make them at least 6-10 times harder
• I know ECMO3 talks about Tasha's Hid. Laughter and Command as being the most broken spells in 5.5; would you change the spells or just try to play around them?

What else should I be looking out for, given these classes and that material?

Something I don't see in your list but that is in almost every thread on reddit about VEOR+2024 PCs is that for any unique 2014 monsters without a 2024 MM counterpart, use their max HP instead of average. Many posts also mentioned damage adjustments like what @Shardstone describes above.

But a lot of people also described VEOR being easy even with 2014 characters, aside from Windfall and possibly Vecna.