D&D 5E No One Plays High Level?

[jgsugden]

I don't think any type of adventure is off the table because the PCs are high level. You just have to account for the PCs' abilities. More specifically, you have to account for YOUR PCs' abilities. This is why publishing high level adventures is hard.

High level murder mystery: Who Killed The God of Death? Investigating the murder of a deity is not going to be trivialized by some high level spells.

High level dungeon crawl: Demiplane of the Archartificer. You can't teleport past the dungeon if it is the entire plane, and teleporting to the end doesn't do you any good if there are 13 levers that have to pulled throughout it to resolve the reason they are there.

It doesn't have to stop being D&D just because they are high level.

Please do not be offended - but this is exactly the mindset I cautioned against, and I believe plays into why some people struggle to run high level games.

Rather than use the abilities the PCs have acquired, DMs tend to try to negate them at higher level to avoid dealing with them. They try to make the low level design work at high levels - and that results in the players feeling constrained and awkward.

To be fair, Mercer's high level games still tend to end with a big but otherwise pretty standard 5e combat.

And? It isn't like I expect there to be no combats at high level - I expect there to be options, though, rather than prescribed methods of resolution. Fighting will be part of many of them as this is still D&D.

The Talks Machina are no longer available, but Mercer did talk about how he was prepared for several other things to happen and for the PCs to go in very different directions.

 

[Reynard]

Please do not be offended - but this is exactly the mindset I cautioned against, and I believe plays into why some people struggle to run high level games.

Rather than use the abilities the PCs have acquired, DMs tend to try to negate them at higher level to avoid dealing with them. They try to make the low level design work at high levels - and that results in the players feeling constrained and awkward.

You don't think either of those (completely off the cuff) examples would make use of high level abilities? I just said high level abilities would not automatically negate those kinds of adventures.

What do you think high level.PCs should be doing that they can't do at lower tiers?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Please do not be offended - but this is exactly the mindset I cautioned against, and I believe plays into why some people struggle to run high level games.

Rather than use the abilities the PCs have acquired, DMs tend to try to negate them at higher level to avoid dealing with them. They try to make the low level design work at high levels - and that results in the players feeling constrained and awkward.

And? It isn't like I expect there to be no combats at high level - I expect there to be options, though, rather than prescribed methods of resolution. Fighting will be part of many of them as this is still D&D.

The Talks Machina are no longer available, but Mercer did talk about how he was prepared for several other things to happen and for the PCs to go in very different directions.

He may have been prepared for other options, but what actually happened (and what we all saw) was basically a big standard 5e combat. The takeaway from that example is that high level D&D is the same game as always with bigger numbers.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You don't think either of those (completely off the cuff) examples would make use of high level abilities? I just said high level abilities would not automatically negate those kinds of adventures.

What do you think high level.PCs should be doing that they can't do at lower tiers?

I still like the domain game, politics, and mass combat.

 

[Shardstone]

Heh. Going to what @nevin said about using the good stuff for NPCs, too, I just finished a campaign at 18th level. The BBEG was a high level wizard who in the final fight, knowing the PCs tactics and abilities, laid out an initial fight to stop them. There was a high level equivalent red wizard of thay in the group, but also a simulacrum of the BBEG. He gave it good magic items, including a con 19 item to mitigate the loss in hit points. After they with a lot of effort beat that fight, they encountered the simulacrum's simulacrum which had a few others with it and no magic items. It was just there to do some more damage and use up some more limited resources. Only then did they reach the still full up BBEG and his group. They barely survived the fight, but they did win and the struggle made it all the more sweet at the end. They knew that they had earned it.

This is exactly what high level is about.

Once you get to 13th/14th+, you can really start throwing insane situations at your players and it is so, so fun watching them just barely succeed. It's the closest D&D gets to feeling like Dark Souls or Elden Ring, where you are able to beat a really hard challenge and get a huge high from it. I've run a very large number of high level games, a lot of them one-shots, specifically because I love building up and then executing insane battles where the players just barely win.

I think the biggest reasons for high level not being popular is that people feel an implied pressure to start at 1st level and that it requires a lot of buy-in both mechanically (you have a lot of options) and fictionally (you have a lot of impact on the world), which is a big time commitment when it comes to reviewing notes, looking over you massive tome of features, etc.

 

[Reynard]

I still like the domain game, politics, and mass combat.

You can do that at any level, and certainly well before "high level" as we have defined it here.

 

[Shardstone]

You don't think either of those (completely off the cuff) examples would make use of high level abilities? I just said high level abilities would not automatically negate those kinds of adventures.

What do you think high level.PCs should be doing that they can't do at lower tiers?

Doing things that should flatout be impossible.

The PCs have 48 hours to defeat an army of 10,000 marching upon a defenseless target.

There is a mountain filled with six Ancient Dragons that have been terrorizing the world and the PCs need to stop them.

Asmodeus has stolen the soul of a messiah and the PCs have to go through all 9 levels of Hell in one goal to bring that soul back, from Asmodeus.

Tiamat has broken out of Hell and the PCs need to wrangle her back in. If they kill her, another Avatar pops up, so they have to find a way to do it without reducing hit points to 0.

The Raven Queen's need for tragedies to find herself has grown voracious. Every shadow in the country becomes a portal to the Shadowfell through which horrors spill out. The PCs have to not only save these people but go into the Shadowfell, find the Raven Queen, and convince her to stop, all while minimizing casualties in their world.

These things could, in theory, be done at low levels. However, these are the kinds of challenges that high level characters NEED to feel good. You can't just put them in a dungeon anymore. You can't tell them to do a lengthy investigation. You need to throw them into situations that should kill anyone going in and then watch and marvel as they figure out a way around it all.

 

[Reynard]

Doing things that should flatout be impossible.

The PCs have 48 hours to defeat an army of 10,000 marching upon a defenseless target.

There is a mountain filled with six Ancient Dragons that have been terrorizing the world and the PCs need to stop them.

Asmodeus has stolen the soul of a messiah and the PCs have to go through all 9 levels of Hell in one goal to bring that soul back, from Asmodeus.

Tiamat has broken out of Hell and the PCs need to wrangle her back in. If they kill her, another Avatar pops up, so they have to find a way to do it without reducing hit points to 0.

The Raven Queen's need for tragedies to find herself has grown voracious. Every shadow in the country becomes a portal to the Shadowfell through which horrors spill out. The PCs have to not only save these people but go into the Shadowfell, find the Raven Queen, and convince her to stop, all while minimizing casualties in their world.

These things could, in theory, be done at low levels. However, these are the kinds of challenges that high level characters NEED to feel good. You can't just put them in a dungeon anymore. You can't tell them to do a lengthy investigation. You need to throw them into situations that should kill anyone going in and then watch and marvel as they figure out a way around it all.

Those are all great ideas for epic level adventures. You could certainly do each one of them including dungeons and mysteries if that is the kind of adventures your group likes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You can do that at any level, and certainly well before "high level" as we have defined it here.

True, but I'm honestly not really a fan of high-level play as WotC 5e defines it anyway. Characters cease to be relatable to me, as the rules and the numbers make it so they can throw themselves off of very high places with barely a scratch (for example). In short, high level PCs in modern versions of D&D have little motivation to behave like human beings. A lot of it is just too many hit points.

 

[nevin]

it does turn into an Anime sort of game eventually.