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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zorku" data-source="post: 7016440" data-attributes="member: 6799940">The concern about balancing combat at higher levels becomes less of an issue if you take a combat as warfare approach- it's up to the party to judge what they can handle that way, and you can just throw a messy variety their way.Bounded accuracy doesn't actually make significantly lower CR monsters into reasonable threats. No number of wolves is going to balance against a solo level 20 character; the encounter will basically just be a swarm that is annoying and trivial or annoying and deadly, before accounting for aoe options, and more broadly this doesn't make for an interesting encounter anyway. If you keep the gap between CR and player levels to 10 or less then things still work fairly well (I'd say 15 for math reasons, but I can't stand trying to actually run combat with hordes that big.)Now, monster variety in the MM constricts a bit after CR10 and then (if you don't think that a rainbow of dragons makes for a rainbow of variety,) again at CR15. This is going to be bad news at level 25. If you're handy with spreadsheets it's pretty simple to take existing versions of creatures and essentially make giant versions of them at several CR higher (DMG p273) and there's lots of mythology to draw from for creature names, but the verisimilitude of your world is going to take a hit if there are uber-naga that outclass ancient dragons and Tri-Hydras that can threaten the host of heaven. The PHB sets up the levels in tiers of lowly apprentice, city protectors, continent handlers, and then multiverse tenders, and the kinds of monsters that show up at whatever CR roughly reflect this. If you're going to double the level cap you've got to define another 4 tiers above the multiverse and decide on themes for them, but what's past the struggle between heaven and hell? What outclasses the unknown horrors that dwell in the darkness between stars?You can probably avoid that problem by ignoring it for awhile, but I'm not sure that ignoring it for 20 levels is appropriate. At 40 the Tarrasque is at the low end of what you'd ever throw against the party (and I don't mean as a solo monster,) and what does something even look like in terms of abilities when it's 20CR above the Tarrasque? These questions aren't unanswerable by any means, but there's also little way for me to predict how you would answer them, any everything besides pure stats is predicated on those answers.</blockquote>

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