Level Up (A5E) How does A5e support high-level play?

[xiphumor]

So, disclaimer: I’ve never played O5e or A5e above level 7, excluding one-shots, but I know that lack of support for high-level play is a common point of complaint regarding O5e as it gets harder and harder to present meaningful challenges to players. Having not looked at this super closely myself:

1. How does A5e address this issue?

2. How can A5e improve on addressing this issue?

I’ve often felt that part of what’s needed is mid-to-high-level monsters that don’t necessarily feel like boss monsters. Elite minions, more or less. IMHO, Kobold Press is quite good at making such creatures.

 

[lichmaster]

I think the challenging part is not the monsters, but the adventure/campaign design itself.

At low/mid level the game can be quite straightforward, and a DM can limit itself to creating static dungeons and a few quests here and there. The tactical part of the game is mostly 2d exploration and combat.

As the levels get higher, characters become way more powerful not just in terms of DPS and skill checks, but do acquire powers and spells that definitely alter the game: they can learn to fly easily (making straight 2d combat almost insignificant or skipping it altogether), teleport, gather information and location of creatures or objects easily, travel to other planes of existance, etc.

All this requires a significant re-thinking of the game: random encounters with monsters ambushing the party on the road may not make any sense and travel may be trivialized if they have access to spells like wind walk. Thus if a DM was relying on travel difficulties and road encounters to beef up the contents, that's a strategy that won't be applicable anymore. This is only one example.

I think most games stop at mid levels exactly for this reason: the DM (or adventure designers) need to put a lot of effort to design something that isn't trivialized by the casting of a single spell, and probably most are not ready or comfortable with truly epic level gameplay. The version of D&D you're playing has a marginal effect on this, although A5E generally makes for more interesting gameplay from all angles.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Haven’t played A5e yet, but 5e works just fine at high level. We are 15th level and it has been great fun. Now, I am not the DM so I don’t know if he is doing a lot of work to make it work. But the PC’s work just fine and our DM has been able to keep up the tension and danger.

Since A5e is a derivative of 5e, I would assume it plays at least as well.

 

[tetrasodium]

So, disclaimer: I’ve never played O5e or A5e above level 7, excluding one-shots, but I know that lack of support for high-level play is a common point of complaint regarding O5e as it gets harder and harder to present meaningful challenges to players. Having not looked at this super closely myself:

1. How does A5e address this issue?

2. How can A5e improve on addressing this issue?

I’ve often felt that part of what’s needed is mid-to-high-level monsters that don’t necessarily feel like boss monsters. Elite minions, more or less. IMHO, Kobold Press is quite good at making such creatures.

I've run multiple o5e games through low to mid teens & found it much better running levelup to 11ish. The math is a lot tighter so you can do a better job but to some degree it depends a lot on how willing your players are to burn hit dice for recovery of exertion & similar instead of letstakerest the second a body in an encounter hits the ground.

 

[Ondath]

Disclaimer: I'm running a hybrid O5E/A5E game where most of the player-facing content is from O5E, while I silently upgraded my DM tools to A5E and offered some A5E features to players. So PCs have O5E races, classes, subclasses and backgrounds, and the majority of their spells and magic items are the O5E versions (meaning things like the overpowered Fireball and Counterspell don't have their A5E balances). But they also have A5E Strongholds and Destinies, and I use A5E encounter guidelines when designing monsters (so encounters are balanced according to A5E's CR formula and I have Tier*2 encounters per day) and A5E monsters when available. The PCs are level 15 with a LOT of toys at their disposal.

With all that preamble, here's my experience running this hybrid at Tier 3: I think everything that A5E adds makes higher level play easier to run, but there are still some problems inherent to 5E that A5E fails to overcome.

The pros:

• The encounter/day guidelines are much better, and provide a far healthier way of spending the party's resources. At lower tiers, they only need to go through 2/4 Medium encounters per day, but at Tier 4 they'll go through 8 Medium encounters per day. Also, the new CR-based encounter difficulty system really works: When they say the encounter will be hard, the players get a scare but manage to overcome the threat. A medium encounter is manageable at full resources. And the maximum monster CR at each level helps you avoid putting too dangerous a threat.
• Gold now has a purpose. I'm O5E, Gold became meaningless starting from Level 9-ish. A5E's wealth curve is tighter (in O5E, each level at Tier 3 gives you tens of thousands of gold, while A5E reins this in a little) but there are also more options in the form of strongholds, donations, pets, ships, meaningful downtime activities and even crafting magic items. Granted, I think the prices on the last one are too low (a holdover from O5E pricing that put Uncommon items at a measly 500 gp but still involved fairly powerful items at that rarity), but in total there are far more ways to spend your gold, and that gives adventures in higher levels a cool new flavour and expands PC power horizontally (they can do more things) instead of vertically (their numbers go up).
• Regions and exploration challenges make even high tier exploration pillar useful. Need a noncombat encounter for your high-level party? A CR 13 exploration challenge gives them something interesting to do. The party teleported to a location you didn't prepare? Picking the most appropriate sounding region and rolling on the Tier-appropriate table is not perfect, but it gives you sufficient inspiration to improvise. The tools at your disposal for the exploration pillar are simply more numerous.

The Cons:

• The Saving Throw disparity remains. I think this is 5e's biggest problem since the gap between a strong proficient save and a weak nonproficient save becomes insurmountable at later levels. To the point that a PC or monster that has its weak save targeted simply cannot hope to succeed. Sadly, this is a problem A5e inherits from O5E, and even the lead designer behind the Monstrous Menagerie acknowledges it. That said, I think the problem can be fixed and I'm currently considering writing a short article on the forums about fixing 5e's saving throw math with a little inspiration from old school saving throws...
• Players still end up having too many toys, and combat takes LONG. Now, I did award them magic items above O5E's or A5E's guidelines, so my case might be a bit of a Monty Haul GMing too. But even beyond the magic items, higher-level play takes too much time IMO. The players have too many options, and that leads to analysis paralysis. Combat in particular has become incredibly long. An average encounter takes around an hour and a half, so I'm basically forced to have all my combats be interesting setpieces, otherwise the time investment isn't worth it. Especially spellcasters like the wizard have too many options that they could take, so players need time to choose, and they can do more things at their turn as well. I don't know how this could be solved, TBH.

The ones I can't comment on:

• The martial-caster disparity. The party doesn't have anyone using the new martial classes with A5E's combat maneuvers or exploration knacks, so I don't know how these change the game's feel. But the O5E parts of this issue make sure that casters in my game are king. The Blood Hunter and the Wizard in the group had a Best of 3 1v1 in a non-canon fight, and Wizard won 2 times easily. Just too many options.
• Tier 4. Since the party is currently Level 15, I don't know how they will do at the far end of the level range.

If you have any specific questions, I can also answer those separately!