D&D 5E Nobody Is Playing High Level Characters

According to stats from D&D Beyond, above 5th level characters start to drop off sharply, and above 10th level, the figures are very low. The exception is level 20, which looks like it's probably people creating experimental 20th-level builds.

Some of them say 0%; this isn't strictly accurate, but levels 16-19 are used by an insignificant number of players. Interestingly, there are more 3rd-5th level characters than there are 1st-2nd level.

D&D Beyond has said before that under 10% of games make it past 10th level, but these figures show the break point as being bit lower than that. DDB used over 30 million characters to compile these stats.

 

[Morrus]

I believe that it was in one of the Happy Fun Hour videos that Mearls talks about how some aspects of DndBeyond are different to their own internal data. For example, he says that there are a lot more Warlocks on Dndbeyond than their own data indicates are usually played. He speculates that this is because there a lot of decisions to be made when creating warlocks and therefore people just like making warlock characters (they are also a favourite component of many optimised builds, although he doesn't explicitly point this out).

Mike Mearls says a lot of things.

 

[Don Durito]

...or, I suppose...
3) people don't play high level games because they don't like being part of the fiction they represent?

1) Acknowledges the challenges of getting and keeping a group together in spite of real life.

2) Acknowledges that the game works better at some levels - the sweet spot of conventional wisdom - and less well at high levels, in particular

3) Supposes that the ideas/themes/scope/etc of fiction modeled by higher levels fundamentally lack appeal.

While this is true - we're probably on safer ground just knowing if they like high level play or not.

People are notoriously bad at accurately identifying the reasons why they like or dislike things.

 

[Morrus]

People play the levels the adventures are for. Obviously.

 

[Argyle King]

...or, I suppose...
3) people don't play high level games because they don't like being part of the fiction they represent?

1) Acknowledges the challenges of getting and keeping a group together in spite of real life.

2) Acknowledges that the game works better at some levels - the sweet spot of conventional wisdom - and less well at high levels, in particular

3) Supposes that the ideas/themes/scope/etc of fiction modeled by higher levels fundamentally lack appeal.

The bolded part is one of the biggest mental challenges I have whilst consuming D&D.

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Additionally, while I can certainly appreciate streamlining the game, I think the current game is a bit too shallow to hold attention beyond a certain point.

I would further posit that (as was often pointed out and ignored during playtest) using HP as a primary scaling mechanism exacerbated -rather than fixed- some of the combat issues from the previous edition (while somehow also simultaneously swinging toward some of the problems in 3rd... but that's a different discussion).

Note: I'm not in any way saying the game is bad. 5th edition is very good at a lot of things, but there are some design choices which maybe make certain parts of the game less engaging in the long run.

 

[tetrasodium]

The bolded part is one of the biggest mental challenges I have whilst consuming D&D.

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Additionally, while I can certainly appreciate streamlining the game, I think the current game is a bit too shallow to hold attention beyond a certain point.

I would further posit that (as was often pointed out and ignored during playtest) using HP as a primary scaling mechanism exacerbated -rather than fixed- some of the combat issues from the previous edition (while somehow also simultaneously swinging toward some of the problems in 3rd... but that's a different discussion).

Note: I'm not in any way saying the game is bad. 5th edition is very good at a lot of things, but there are some design choices which maybe make certain parts of the game less engaging in the long run.

This ties into ddb as well. There are all kinds of changes you can implement in your game to help weight the scales or put scaling into other areas, but ddb doesn't support WotC's own variant phb/dmg rules & fails even worse if you as the gm start wanting to make system changes. It's bad enough that my next campaign is shifting from "I want you to use pen(cil) & paper or editable pdf sheets" to "ddb character sheets are simply not allowed in any form so there are no longer any excuses to continue resisting the rulesets I've been trying to extend around 5e's limitations we will be using x y & z."

 

[Tiggerunner]

There really needs to be a way to seperate out whether:

1) people don't play high level games because the games don't get that far.
2) people don't play high level games because they don't like high level game-play.

Of course both are probably true to an extent, but it would be interesting to know to what extent.

3) people don't play at high levels because it's not supported with products in current edition. And by products, I don't mean level 1-20 campaigns, I mean level 10-20 campaigns that are not sequels or continuations of other story arcs.

(Ryan Nock, if you are listening, I'm getting to Act II & III of Zeitgeist someday. I still think it's awesome, and want to do it justice. )

 

[Anoth]

People play the levels the adventures are for. Obviously.

i wish to god they would make their adventures for levels 1-20. I think that would go a long way towards teaching newer players how to play those higher levels.

 

[Don Durito]

3) people don't play at high levels because it's not supported with products in current edition. And by products, I don't mean level 1-20 campaigns, I mean level 10-20 campaigns that are not sequels or continuations of other story arcs.

Perhaps, but this feels like a bit of a chicken and egg thing.

 

[Tiggerunner]

Perhaps, but this feels like a bit of a chicken and egg thing.

That's what an information cascade looks like.

 

[Morrus]

Perhaps, but this feels like a bit of a chicken and egg thing.

Nope. Just a chicken situation.