The thread title, "High Tiers = Superheroes", calls attention to the defacto five tiers:
• Student (levels 1−4)
• Professional (levels 5−8)
• Master (levels 9−12)
• Grandmaster (levels 13−16)
• Legend (levels 17−20)
Prominently, there is a distinctive "mid tier", the Master levels 9 thru 12. This roughly corresponds to the "name levels" of 1e, when a class comes into its own. Before this tier are a quasi historical genres that feel relatable. After this tier are superhero genres that feel fantastical. In between, the Master tier is ambiguous. The relatable world heightens and the fantastical world sprouts.
Each tier has four levels. The proficiency bonus improves at every fourth level. The feat becomes the main class feature at every fourth level. The rest of the character features time and organize around these, to form the four-level rhythm across every class while advancing the levels: from 1 thru 4, 5 thru 8, 9 thru 12, 13 thru 16, 17 thru 20. There are five main tiers.
There are two low tiers: 1−4 and 5−8
One mid tier: 9−12
And two high tiers: 13−16 and 17−20
The five tiers feel distinctive. Each four-level tier is a fantasy genre to itself.
It is possible to create a strictly nonmagical historical period genre, if the adventure setting only has two tiers: Student (1−4) and Professional (5−8). Level 8 is the cap. These Students approximate adult humans of age 20 on up. They are college students, police rookies, underground musicians, and so on. Before all this, the highschool teens and younger are typically in the Zero tiers, but a few precocious students might be advanced enough to function at a college student level. The accomplished adults are the Professionals. Within the realistic or quasi historical setting, Professionals are the individuals who wield the most personal power possible. The Professionals can form their own genre, such as a story about mercenary soldiers or accomplished professors and inventors, or savvy politicians, each group within a world of fellow colleagues and peers.
The action movie genre leans into the quasi-magical Master tier, levels 9 thru 12 (with special effects such as "wire fu"). This tier is when the "rule of cool" becomes more important than the "laws of nature". Relatedly, the Master tier is when the superhero genre starts to emerge. The concept of a "normal human" except "extra", is prominent here.
The heightening of those individuals who are Masters requires the players to indulge a suspension of disbelief. The premise of the genre must allow for narrative plausibility, where at least within the context of the story such individuals can make sense. But the premise of a Master setting can still be taken for granted or vague. "These individuals are unique and rare", "This new discovery causes awesomeness", "The ancient legends turn out to be true", or, "This is happening but we dont understand how". A number of fantasy stories have this last premise, "hanging a lantern" on the fact that people are ignorant about how this magic can happen. But the ignorance continually provokes the audience (the participants, the players) to seek to understand how it is happening, and can result in a story that is ultimately unsatisfying, if the mystery turns out to lack revelation. In any case, the consistency and continuity of the narrative premise is the essence of the success of the fantasy genre at the Master tier.
Note, magic can exist during the "realistic tiers" of Student and Professional. But this "low magic" is never enough to be world-altering.
The historical period cultures − or their speculative fantasy approximates − can and do remain intact. Even a slot 3 spell like Fireball that becomes available during the Professional tier, only has the cultural impact of gunpowder or a grenade. The magic remains within relatable reallife analogies. Even a slot 2 Invisibility spell at the Student tier is not too different from camouflage or the cover of darkness. The citizens of a low magic setting can revere or fear mages, analogous to a weapon wielder or a perplexing stage magician. What defines the setting that features the Student and Professional tiers is, those individuals who are in power over a culture can and typically do lack the magic themselves.
D&D core rules mention the Students as "apprentices" (1−4), and the Professionals as "adventurers" (5−10). The adventurer approximates the reallife medieval guild status of a journeyman. Afterward the guild might accept some of the journeyers who prove their skill and versatile expertise as "masters" within the guild organization. The guild and its masters become a reputable cultural institution regarding its area of expertise. However, in a context of D&D, these masters wield personal powers that lean into superhuman. They defacto form their own salient tier (9−12). Life among the masters within a guild can be quite unlike the life among the typical inhabitants outside it. The D&D tiers almost always refer to combat training and effectiveness, whether the weapon of choice is a sword or a spell. But it is possible to use these same tiers to grade the difficulty and impact of noncombat features as well.
The Master tier of levels 9 thru 12 is a blurry overlapping cusp between the realism of the low tiers (1−4 and 5−8) and the full-on magic of the high tiers (13−16 and 17−20).
There are also Zero tiers before these five tiers, and Epic tiers after them. But 5e mainly ignores these befores and afters. The Zeros relate somewhat to those creatures whose statblocks have a fractional challenge rating. The Epics relate to individuals who achieve a pervasive world-changing influence.
There are potentially several tiers of Zero, depending on whether a player character has background features or not, or partial class features or not. At the opposite end, each Epic tier has a proficiency bonus improvement, and each level gains an Epic Boon instead of other character features, the design space of each boon can increase every fourth level.
Mainly the ultra powerful Epic creatures inhabit other planes of existence, to prevent them from directly altering the adventure setting. Alignment can assist here. The Good alignment respects freewill, personal freedoms, and fundamental rights. Thus Epic Good tends to be laissez faire about the Material Plane, while desiring its less powerful creatures to decide their own choices. Meanwhile, Epic Good actively thwarts any coercive influences from Epic Evil. The result helps the narratively relatable Humanoid cultures to govern the setting in Material Plane. Thus they set its themes, tropes, tones, and premises of the world.
5e core rules normally ignore the Zero and Epic tiers, but it is possible to make player characters for these befores and afters.
The high tiers − Grandmaster 13 thru 16 and Legend 17 thru 20 − are full-on magic. These are the tiers of the superhero genre. Magic, by whatever name whether wizardry, psychic powers, mutations, or advanced technology, shapes the world and the player characters. It is a story about marvels and wonders.
The powers that Grandmasters and Legends wield are unambiguously superhuman. Players perceive them to be generally impossible in reallife. Maybe some players can allow scientific technology to make such things possible in the future, or to be miraculous interventions in the past, but these superpowers are far beyond ordinary reality today.
The superheroic cultures whose citizens comprise Grandmasters and Legends are necessarily utopias or dystopias. The superpowers have obvious implications − and their impact becomes implausible for the narrative to ignore. The masses of any reallife culture would necessarily notice and respond to such superpowers.
In this superhero genre, the high-tier utopias can be hidden away from the realistic low-tier cultures. Examples include secret military experiments, the masquerades of vampires and werewovles, the covens or otherworlds of witches, an observer alien colony, the emergent but not yet recognized influence of AI, or so on. In these contexts, the world at large remains recognizably normal, but the world within the utopia is anything but.
Sometimes the utopia is public but self-restraining, such as the Justice League of superheroes, or in the Greyhawk setting the Valley of the Mage whose citizens are typically Human, Elf, and Gnome, who share an isolationist culture of spellcasters.
Whether the containable superhero utopia is incognito or public, the narrative premise must explain how the utopia fails to revolutionize the rest of the world (as the reallife players know it). What is the reason for self-restraint? Why do the masses at large choose to continue on with business as usual?
If the superpowers revolutionize the entire world, the setting becomes a sociological thought experiment. The setting becomes less relatable to the players but can be important in its own right. It speculates about how reallife humans might behave in a scenario where such a superpower is true. It explores the potentials of reallife humanity. Many scifi settings are utopian worlds or dystopian worlds, such as a remote alien civilization or the achievement of a high tech future.
The high tiers are where characters become Grandmasters and Legends. The setting is where the DM explores a hypothetical world, exiting reallife human history, and entering a place "whose only limits are your imagination".
In sum, there are five main tiers.
• The overwhelmingly realistic low tiers of Student and Professional
• The overwhelmingly fantastic high tiers of Grandmaster and Legend
The cusp between them is the ambiguous mid tier of Master. The Masters are where the normal world heightens and the superhero world initiates. Simultaneously.
