D&D 5E How do you keep your players going from "goblins to gods" in your games?

[n0nym]

That's something I've been thinking about, a *lot*. To avoid this, my campaigns usually end at level 11, and at that level it's already hard to challenge players with low level creatures to be honest. But now my players also want to keep playing their characters, even though they don't like how the game feels at higher levels... So I needed to find a solution !

Things I will do :

_Use Point-buy instead of rolling
_Limit proficiency bonus to +4 : to prevent Expertise from becoming a problem
_Use fixed Hit Points or PC stop gaining Hit Points at level 5 or 6 : HP inflation makes the game a grind
_Remove 9th level spells (but not spellslots) and tweak some others : gives plenty of room for progression but removes the most annoying spells from the game
_Remove the -5/+10 part of feats
_Limit numerical bonuses for magic items to +1 and make these items very rare
_Limit very heavy armor : for me a player shouldn't be able to wear a full plate 24 hours a day.

I think that should be enough to keep things on an earthly level.

It's a bit like playing E-6 but your Offensive "CR" keeps increasing after level 6, although your Defensive "CR" stays the same.

 

[ExploderWizard]

What I mean by that is: how do you keep your players going from killing goblins to killing gods? How do you tone down the encounter treadmill? Example: My players get tired of the same old starting out at 1st level and killing things like kobolds and goblins and then as they gain levels the encounters have to become bigger and badder. They like to dungeon crawl and explore without making a massive impact on the world as a whole. They have no interest in fighting gods and primordials, they just want to continue fighting normal creatures with maybe the highest being "a" dragon. How do you progress your players without bringing out the big guns?

Bounded accuracy helps quite a bit with this. Of course as the DM, you need to do your part to help ensure that BA can do the job it needs to do.

1) Lower powered characters. If your group doesn't enjoy fighting godlike beings in the campaign then step one is making such beings very rare or non-
existent. THIS INCLUDES THE PCS. Don't use feats, limit or eliminate multi-classing, and begin with lower stat ranges. I am working on stuff for a future campaign with the point buy set at only 20 points. Stats won't be godlike to start, and without feats, the ability score bumps will be more meaningful. It will take longer for PCs to achieve higher bonuses thus extending the range of normal monsters being an adequate challenge.

2) Make magic items very rare overall and swap out +X items with cool & unique abilities. This combined with the lower stats will keep bonus bloat in check which is the main cause of needing to scale up the monsters so much.

3) Enjoy a campaign in which regular humanoids can remain viable enemies for a long time.

 

[zaratan]

if a god is to much and a dragon to weak, they can fight... well, two dragons.


other option is making high level players and monsters trivial in your world. Just boost the monster. Even the lvl 20 PC isn't even close to kill a god because gods would be CR50

 

[MrHotter]

My homebrew world maxes out at level 10. It's part of the lore that any player or NPC that goes over level 10 goes mad and becomes a danger to everyone. That keeps the players feeling like they are powerful enough to make a difference in the world and not have to deal with Lancealots or Elminsters running around.

To continue with the same characters in my game they would need to find a way to escape to the Feywild or Shadowfel (or other planes) where the insanity curse no longer affects them.

I've ran 4 groups in the world and none have gone over level 8. I use milestone advancement so I can keep them at any level until the story is ready to move up a notch.

I'm liking the 1-10 world so I'm thinking of adding half levels to cut out the level 11-20 game all together. Players still like character advancement, so I just need to figure out what good half level rewards would be. I was thinking extra attunement slots, tool proficiencies, languages, and perhaps moving the ability score improvement/feat choice to a half level.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Something that may work is to use the alternate rest timeframe (a night's rest is a short rest, a weekend (or week) off is a long rest) but don't drop the op tempo at higher levels. Even a high level party facing a dungeon full of mid to low level monsters may take pause if they can't just rearm everything overnight. Just use bigger dungeons that they can't clear in a day and you can keep to the middle tier monsters even up to 20th. Each fight may be a cakewalk, but the dungeon will be a challenge.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I'm liking the 1-10 world so I'm thinking of adding half levels to cut out the level 11-20 game all together. Players still like character advancement, so I just need to figure out what good half level rewards would be. I was thinking extra attunement slots, tool proficiencies, languages, and perhaps moving the ability score improvement/feat choice to a half level.

I think the easiest thing to do to get only character power up to level 10 while at the same time let characters level to 20 is to give out all the class abilities on the odd levels, and HP/HD gain on the even levels.

So at 1st level you get everything you would as a 1st level character. When you reach level 2, you gain your HP and HD increase but that's it. Level 3 you gain all the class and character abilities you would normally have gotten at level 2 (except for HP and HD which you already got.) At level 4 you get your third HP increase and third hit die, level 5 gives you your normal level 3 class and character abilities/features... and so on and so forth.

If you want to get to level 20 while severely toning down the amount and power of the abilities you get, that's the simplest way to do it I think.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

5e makes it pretty easy to make monsters tougher. But if you're going to, for example, use goblins fir higher levels, I think it's important to make them feel different, too. Throw in spell-caster goblins. Or, depending on the tone of your campaign, have the goblin lords all wear power armor and wield lasers. Maybe the goblins are servants of demonic forces, and can call on them for aid. Or goblins use scarification rituals to give themselves different powers.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if you want to reduce your monster repertoire, there should be something that still gives variety to the ones you keep.

 

[SHAFFSTER]

I've had a house rule for hit point advancement bouncing around my head for a while that might help.

Characters only gain 1+Con mod HP per level (minimum of 1). Characters still have the normal amount of hit dice available to use during short rests.

Bounded accuracy means low level monsters can still hit PCs but hit point inflation means the damage becomes pretty negligible at higher levels. I'm hoping(Haven't actually tried it in play yet) that this rule addresses a few issues:
1) shortening combats by reducing the HP grind at high levels

2) make smaller encounters more deadly. At level 11 it takes 24 orcs to make a hard encounter for a party of 4 PCs which slows things down a ton

3) still let PCs handle more encounters before resting as they level up. Keeping the number hit dice the same means it's easier to get back to full health and keep going so there's less incentive to take a long rest.

Not sure if that helps but I wanted a way to extend the feeling that the lower levels have, where any one encounter can turn deadly and things like orcs and humans are a major threat, while still letting the PCs have the fun of leveling rather than stopping at a certain point. I also think this rule could pair well with the longer healing variant from the DMG if you wanted to slow down spell casters and other rest based abilities

 

[TheCosmicKid]

5e makes it pretty easy to make monsters tougher. But if you're going to, for example, use goblins fir higher levels, I think it's important to make them feel different, too.

This. I can't speak for your players, but I hate it when games throw new monsters at me that are superficially identical to the old ones, but their stats are for no apparent reason ten times higher. (MMOs, I'm looking at you.) The numbers in a stat box need to have some real meaning, or else what's the point of leveling up?

 

[GMMichael]

They have no interest in fighting gods and primordials, they just want to continue fighting normal creatures with maybe the highest being "a" dragon. How do you progress your players without bringing out the big guns?

I'm not quite sure how to reconcile this statement with your other statement about the PCs wanting to progress to 20th level. Maybe they don't understand the concept of levels?

So, stop giving XP. Just lay out maybe 5 or 6 campaign milestones. The PCs gain a level at each one.