D&D 5E Favourite Tiers of Play?

[discosoc]

I prefer higher levels, especially epic. Lower levels just aren't all that interesting to me, with their goblins and kobolds and local taverns needing the rats cleared out. They're too relatable, too small in scope, too mundane for me to enjoy to the fullest. The next tier up after that is hardly more interesting than the first, it's just a little bigger than the first what with instead of villages you got major cities and fiefdoms asking you and your party to help with the orc raid happening in a fortnight. The tier after that though starts to make things interesting, especially since at that point I feel PC's really begin to shine and become something more, and at this point the decisions of a party could affect an entire realm/nation.

Epic is well...epic, you could be facing demi-gods, dark armies hellbent on destroying everything, avatars of demon princes, real fate of the world in your hands type stuff. It's not that I cannot play in a lower level campaign, I just honestly don't enjoy lower levels all that much, too low power for me.

It's surprisingly difficult to write good adventures for the epic levels. Partly because there's very little inspirational material worth emulating when D&D style magic trivializes nearly every "epic" story. You generally end up just fighting a string of Big Bad CR's without any good context because all the great plots don't work when Wish/etc is around.

Just look at how many published adventures conveniently end by about 15.

 

[S'mon]

It's surprisingly difficult to write good adventures for the epic levels. Partly because there's very little inspirational material worth emulating when D&D style magic trivializes nearly every "epic" story. You generally end up just fighting a string of Big Bad CR's without any good context because all the great plots don't work when Wish/etc is around.

Just look at how many published adventures conveniently end by about 15.

I've taken two contrasting approaches to this issue:

1. In my Varisia/Golarion game the Epic (17-20) PCs will* likely spend most of their time on high level Epic threats from high level Pathfinder AP adventures, Books 5 & 6 of various AP lines. Stuff written for PF 13-18 can definitely handle 5e 17-20 I think. With just Books 5 & 6 of Rise of the Runelords and Shattered Star I have around 40 sessions of well-integrated epic level play, and it should be easy enough to add material from other APs. I suspect stuff like Tomb of Horrors will still be useable at 20th level also. Failing that I can always homebrew around Kill-the-BBEG type plots, as you suggest.

*Group is currently 11th-14th level after 50 sessions.

2. In my Wilderlands sandbox I have an 18th level barbarian, Hakeem the Exalted Champion of Bondor the sword god, but Hakeem is still doing mostly paragon/Tier III type stuff, questing around (often incognito) while gearing up to face his Nemesis/opposite number Kainos the Warbringer, the Empyreal son of the war god Bane, in single combat. I solved the overpowered high level party issue simply by ruling that new PCs started at 11th (non-caster) or 8th (caster) so they would essentially be his sidekicks. I have other lower level PC groups in the campaign where other players get to be the Hero of the Story, but I found that it simply worked best to accept that Hakeem was the leading character for his saga, and not try to shoehorn in a bunch of other 18th level PCs.

 

[S'mon]

Interesting that Tier I/Basic currently has twice the votes of Tier III/Companion. I love GMing newbie adventuring myself but a lot of players are not big fans - is this a GM led vote? OTOH players often do like to start at 1st and work up the hard way.

 

[JonnyP71]

OTOH players often do like to start at 1st and work up the hard way.

I found precisely this to be true - my weekly friday group always insist on starting new characters at level 1 (we play 1E and 5E) - no matter what level the rest of the group are at.

We have started having short breaks from the main group where they play with 'spare' characters though, with the idea that should a main PC die, the player has a backup PC to bring in that they feel they have some attachment to.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

It's surprisingly difficult to write good adventures for the epic levels. Partly because there's very little inspirational material worth emulating when D&D style magic trivializes nearly every "epic" story. You generally end up just fighting a string of Big Bad CR's without any good context because all the great plots don't work when Wish/etc is around.

Anything that actually emulates epic fantasy fiction isn't 20th level material in 5E--it might be 50th or 100th level, if the levels actually went that high. Epic material is pretty much out of scope for 5E. You want to run an adventure that lets a PC play Kaladin Stormblessed and single-handedly stop the Parshendi army in its tracks, long enough for Dalinar and his men to get to safety? Sorry, that's at least 560,000 XP to 3,000,000 XP worth of difficulty, depending: that would be "too much" (by DMG guidelines) for even twelve 20th level PCs, let alone a single guy with a spear. And that scenario is only moderately epic--emulating Belgarion or Rand al'Thor is right out. Wish will hardly even help you in the battle unless you invoke the "anything goes" burnout clause and have a cooperative DM who lets you wish for silly things like "I wish all of the Parshendi would just die, right now" and actually get them.

By 5E rules, any adventure with 160,000 XP in it is a suitable "adventuring day" for 20th level characters. That's an easy threshold to meet. Say, two dozen githyanki, three githyanki knights, and two young red dragons, up to something nefarious (which could be as simple as ransacking the PCs' hometown). Bam, that's 160,000 XP right there: a simple, straightforward hack-and-slash combat adventure all in one giant encounter, akin to playing BattleTech for an evening.

My preferred style is to throw stuff like that at PCs around 9th-12th level, but technically by 5E guidelines it's a full-blown 20th level adventure. If you scale it up a bit more (e.g. planar rift with dozens of Baatezu pouring through every hour) then it becomes actually challenging for 20th level PCs, and they probably get enough XP out of such an adventure to pick up a couple of epic boons.

If they survive.

 

[S'mon]

Yeah you don't stop any serious army single handed in 5e - not by killing them; personally I like that, it makes the world a lot closer to life than 3e/pf.

Recently in my Wilderlands game Hakeem the Barbarian 18 faced off solo vs a pirate ship. Most of the pirates were att +4 2 attacks for d8+2. I calculated he could expect to slay 40 to 50 before he went down. In play he played smart and persuaded them to leave after he killed their leader.

 

[Mouseferatu]

I prefer running lower- to mid-levels, in part because I really like running mysteries. Once PCs gain access to higher-level divination spells, it becomes--depending on circumstances--far more difficult, if not impossible, depending on the mystery in question. I would love to get my players more involved in shaping/running regions or even nations, though.

I find it fascinating to hear about groups who insist on starting at 1st level. My personal preference is 3rd, and much of my group complains when I insist on starting a new campaign below 5th.

 

[cmad1977]

Whichever tier my players are in.


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[TerraDave]

Expert I guess, but with elements from higher levels--powerful planar beings, creatures and ruins from dark forgotten times, strange almost artifact items, the occasional mass battle or high level intrigue.

 

[MNblockhead]

Tier One. Monsters are scary. You have to PLAN and THINK to survive.

A friend ran a zero-level Dungeon Crawl Classics game for me and a couple friends a while back. God that was fun. You are basically farmers, barkeeps, and other non-class commoners armed with thinks like pitch forks, cleavers, and the like. Each player gets four characters, because you are going to have characters die.

It was four hours of pure awesome.