D&D 5E Running 5e at high Levels

[TheSword]

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I'm curious for those of you running quite a bit of high-level 5e D&D (@wedgeski @Oofta @TheSword and others), what do you notice being the main contributor to longer combat time at high level specifically?

Is it mainly monster HP bloat outpacing PC damage? Or is there more going on that's a larger factor?

For me it’s a couple of things.

• The volume of actions and abilities per player and the time it takes to resolve them. Multiple attacks, more mobility, more reactions more interrupts etc.
• The volume of the same for monsters
• The need for multiple creatures with the above to challenge the party.
• The combination of all three above with vastly higher hp 200+ in a lot of cases.

For instance the last fight pitted the party of four against an Archmage, a Cornugon, an Efreet and two champions. It took about an hour and a half to play out.

It’s worth saying though that combat becomes the overwhelming challenge because it seems to be the main and simplest way of providing that challenge because alternatives (Roleplay challenges) require too many variables that can’t be considered at high level.

 

[Quickleaf]

For me it’s a couple of things.

• The volume of actions and abilities per player and the time it takes to resolve them. Multiple attacks, more mobility, more reactions more interrupts etc.
• The volume of the same for monsters
• The need for multiple creatures with the above to challenge the party.
• The combination of all three above with vastly higher hp 200+ in a lot of cases.

For instance the last fight pitted the party of four against an Archmage, a Cornugon, an Efreet and two champions. It took about an hour and a half to play out.

It’s worth saying though that combat becomes the overwhelming challenge because it seems to be the main and simplest way of providing that challenge because alternatives (Roleplay challenges) require too many variables that can’t be considered at high level.

That sounds like a pretty serious fight? For me, I think 1/4 of the total session time would be the maximum amount of play time I'd be comfortable devoting to something like that.

I don't want to overlook your last paragraph – that seems really important – but I'm curious about ways high-level 5e might be streamlined to reduce combat time.

Reading over your bulletpoints, I'm curious which of these you think would have a substantial impact in reducing combat time for your high-level games?

1. Consolidating multiple attacks of a single monster into one or two attacks?
2. Consolidating multiple attacks of a group of monsters? (e.g. the mob rules from the DMG are one way this idea might be handled)
3. Consolidating multiple attacks of a PC into one or two attacks?
4. Using theater of the mind or "rough distances" to handle movement?
5. Reducing the prevalence of opportunity attacks across the board?
6. Reducing the number of reaction powers on monsters?
7. Reducing the number of reaction spells and/or class features available to PCs?
8. Adjusting higher tier monsters to be more threatening in smaller number? (not sure what this means to you, but my thinking is "deal more damage"/"resist being taken out of play")

 

[Shardstone]

I'm curious for those of you running quite a bit of high-level 5e D&D (@wedgeski @Oofta @TheSword and others), what do you notice being the main contributor to longer combat time at high level specifically?

Is it mainly monster HP bloat outpacing PC damage? Or is there more going on that's a larger factor?

Players changing what they want to do on their turn then having to look up another 7th level spell for me to adjicate. Because there are so many options, mastery over all those options is a lot harder; I find that the HP increase actually doesn't matter at all, and that PC damage outpaces the HP bloat, especially if optimized. But players having to scan their spell list of 20+ spells and then decide the best one and then change it due to what the player before them did adds a lot of time. It mirrors low level, just worse due the increased number of options.

 

[wedgeski]

I'm curious for those of you running quite a bit of high-level 5e D&D (@wedgeski @Oofta @TheSword and others), what do you notice being the main contributor to longer combat time at high level specifically?

Is it mainly monster HP bloat outpacing PC damage? Or is there more going on that's a larger factor?

I would first say: we've had long combats throughout the campaign. I haven't noticed the proportion of time taken with combat going dramatically upwards as we climbed to higher levels.

I see two forces at work. On one side, mechanical complexity tends to combats being longer, true. On the other side, from a campaign design and prep perspective, a 17th-level session looks radically different than a 5th-level session: fewer bump-in-the-road, attrition like encounters, and more of the deliberately designed, set piece encounters with tricky objectives that aren't necessarily "kill the bad guy" (as previously discussed).

This change happens for a couple reasons I can think of. First, resource-drain encounters seem insulting to the players at this level, partly because the encounters-per-day baseline has basically fallen apart by this point in their progression, but also because the PCs have too many tricks, and the players have exponentially more imaginative freedom. Second, any combat encounter at this kind of level can be a knife edge. We're rolling dice, after all. A bad save against a finger of death or a plane shift, and that's all she wrote for that PC, and then potentially the party. I intrinsically dislike the idea of ending a long campaign with an encounter I threw in at a moment's notice. or spent 5 minutes designing. So, that's a potentially interesting DM psychological mechanic at play (something I think is often overlooked when discussing the game).

But back to your question, the largest factor at our table is decision paralysis, on both sides of the screen. Lots of reasons for this:

• So many spells! As I mentioned, wish is a big contributor to this.
• When players know they're facing Legendary Resistance, they want to strategise more thoroughly. Lots of discussion. I know it's in my gift to curtail this stuff, but if the players are enjoying themselves, I don't feel inclined to. The only rule for how long an encounter should take is when it stops being fun.
• This also affects the DM. Your bad guy has a few rounds to make an impact/deliver its fun quotient into the encounter. Complex foes with spell-like abilities often have six good moves and one great one. You're always searching for the great one. Prep mitigates this.
• High cost of failure. A single wrong move can disadvantage the whole party. No-one wants to be the one that caused the TPK (especially of a long-running campaign). Even experienced players start couching their actions in terms of a questions, not statements.

There's also a bit of rules lawyering, and the occasional rollback when someone realises their action played out incorrectly. We have table rules in place to curtail this, but again, at such high levels, it can happen, and we wouldn't want a TPK based on a rules mistake.

 

[GrimCo]

I ran couple of tier 4 games.

Combats do tend to go a bit longer, but as stated, it's more due to greater number of options PCs have. And they are still faster than tier 3 combats in 3.x/PF1.

I don't use filler encounters. Characters of that level of power just don't deal with trash. They are big boys and deal only with big boy problems. Fights they have are fights that matter.

Now, i know people i play with and i know what is fun to them. They also don't like long tactical slogs and tactical combat challenge isn't top priority. They like it cinematic and cool. So i design encounters counting on them going all in nova from round one. If they end big bad and ugly in 2 rounds, so be it.

I use transforming monsters, similar to JRPGs. So when they drop beneath certain threshold, they get extra stuff ( "This isn't even my final form" gimmick where they get new damage resistance, new attack abilities, restore HP, grow in size, gain flight or burrow). So i can cram equivalent of 2-3 encounters into one fight. Also, i tend to use solos and pairs, but that's it.

 

[Quickleaf]

Players changing what they want to do on their turn then having to look up another 7th level spell for me to adjicate. Because there are so many options, mastery over all those options is a lot harder; I find that the HP increase actually doesn't matter at all, and that PC damage outpaces the HP bloat, especially if optimized. But players having to scan their spell list of 20+ spells and then decide the best one and then change it due to what the player before them did adds a lot of time. It mirrors low level, just worse due the increased number of options.

I thought it was interesting both you and @wedgeski call out scanning long spell lists as contributing to longer combat time. It actually sounds like this is two separate issues that when combined become a more noticeable problem...

The first issue is what you say - long spell lists. The second issue is the 5e default initiative sequence rules. I wonder if initiative were structured different, could it reduce the "waiting for spellcaster to choose" & "oh no wait I want to cast a different spell" effect?

And would such a change offer meaningful reduction in the time it takes to run through the combat?

I would first say: we've had long combats throughout the campaign. I haven't noticed the proportion of time taken with combat going dramatically upwards as we climbed to higher levels.

@TheSword mentioned their 17th level group taking 1.5 to 2.5 hours for a significant combat. That's slightly horrifying to me - I'd want to do everything in my power as GM to avoid that (except maybe a campaign ending)! Does that not track with your own high level experience? Or another way to ask the question, have significant combats always been 1.5 to 2.5 hours (or whatever value) regardless of low level or high level?

I see two forces at work. On one side, mechanical complexity tends to combats being longer, true. On the other side, from a campaign design and prep perspective, a 17th-level session looks radically different than a 5th-level session: fewer bump-in-the-road, attrition like encounters, and more of the deliberately designed, set piece encounters with tricky objectives that aren't necessarily "kill the bad guy" (as previously discussed).

This change happens for a couple reasons I can think of. First, resource-drain encounters seem insulting to the players at this level, partly because the encounters-per-day baseline has basically fallen apart by this point in their progression, but also because the PCs have too many tricks, and the players have exponentially more imaginative freedom. Second, any combat encounter at this kind of level can be a knife edge. We're rolling dice, after all. A bad save against a finger of death or a plane shift, and that's all she wrote for that PC, and then potentially the party. I intrinsically dislike the idea of ending a long campaign with an encounter I threw in at a moment's notice. or spent 5 minutes designing. So, that's a potentially interesting DM psychological mechanic at play (something I think is often overlooked when discussing the game).

I admit – due to my lack of experience with high level play – I have a hard time separating "this is what makes a good high level adventure" vs. just "this is what makes a good adventure period." For example, when I'm presenting challenges/obstacles to the players, even with a random encounter (what I think you meant by "bump in the road"), they're always serving double or triple duty – maybe foreshadowing, maybe providing a clue, maybe illuminating some worldbuilding, maybe hooking a specific PC, maybe draining resources too. So that line between this is just good practice VS this is a change to make in your approach to high level... is muddy for me.

I notice when you mention the knife's edge swinginess of high level play, you cited two spells. I wonder, in your experience, is the swinginess of high level MAINLY associated with specific save-or-suck spells? (i.e. and not other PC or monster features) Could your group enjoy high-level without those save-or-suck spells being implemented in such a swingy way? Or is it precisely that swinginess that they enjoy?

But back to your question, the largest factor at our table is decision paralysis, on both sides of the screen. Lots of reasons for this:

• So many spells! As I mentioned, wish is a big contributor to this.

If wish could not emulate an existing spell, would that help address this issue? Or is that just a pebble in the oceanic problem of "so many spells"? And is it a problem during character level up OR is it a problem during play scanning their spell list like @Shardstone mentioned?

• When players know they're facing Legendary Resistance, they want to strategise more thoroughly. Lots of discussion. I know it's in my gift to curtail this stuff, but if the players are enjoying themselves, I don't feel inclined to. The only rule for how long an encounter should take is when it stops being fun.

Sorry for bombarding you with questions. Are you specifically saying that the Legendary Resistances mechanic triggers your players to strategize more intently/slowly in order to push through the monster's auto-saving throws? Or are you saying more generally when they know they're facing a boss/legendary monster – the thing they've been saving their powers up for – they then strategize to optimize their effectiveness more (irrespective of it actually having Legendary Resistances)?

What I'm driving at – does the Legendary Resistances mechanic become (more) problematic at high level by contributing to longer combat times due to an "add on" effect of triggering player careful/slow strategizing?

• High cost of failure. A single wrong move can disadvantage the whole party. No-one wants to be the one that caused the TPK (especially of a long-running campaign). Even experienced players start couching their actions in terms of a questions, not statements.

I'm curious is this basically restating the "spells that save-or-suck" problem"? Or is there more to the High Cost of Failure that's unique or more pronounced at high-level? For example, are you talking about a specific experience with the stunned condition being more common among higher tier monsters?

What I'm driving at – How much of this "excessive risk aversion at high level" is normal emotional attachment after playing with a group for a while? Versus how much is a construct of 5e's mechanics?

 

[J-H]

I wrote, tested/ran, and published a 13-20 campaign called Against the Idol of the Sun. Here's the campaign log if you want to read it (it's long!).

-The 5-8 encounter adventuring day definitely went away. 1-2 encounters per day, tops, even with overland travel.
-Most combats had at least one objective besides "beat the enemy." For the set-piece attacks on enemy cities, this was "Do X to destroy the altar and set back their plans for the enemy BBEG (a god) to gain power to manifest on the Prime Material Plane in person." For travel encounters, it was often "steal an air-skiff" or "make sure none of the Aarakocra fly away and tell the others where we are."
-More and better magic items are good. I raised the attunement limit to 5.
-I only had one full caster by the end (players dropping/joining), a Warlock. Wish was pivotal in the final fight - he had it from a magic item.

Long combats did take 3-5 hours. How long would you expect it to take for a high-level group (any system) to assault, say, the home temple of an earth goddess in the middle of a city, guarded by about two dozen mundane guards, 4 priests, a high priest(ess), and a divinely empowered huge crocodile beast with Earth Glide and a half-dozen mouths, with the altar they have to destroy causing fissures to open under a target every round (save or fall in, fissures close next round and entomb you if you don't get out)?
I don't think ANY system is going to run set-piece battles like that quickly. The difference at high level is that the players are capable of surviving and winning those scenarios, where an 8th level party just doesn't have sufficient resources unless ALL the enemies are low power / low HP / don't have exotic effects going on.

For my current campaign (BG2 in 5e), I am capping full HP growth at level 10. Beyond that, they get 3, 2, or 1 hp per level. This will let me scale back HP bloat on both sides of the screen. By 20th level, Fireball was a nothingburger to them (except the time they took 16 Fireballs at once). That's my big takeaway and change.

 

[Shardstone]

I thought it was interesting both you and @wedgeski call out scanning long spell lists as contributing to longer combat time. It actually sounds like this is two separate issues that when combined become a more noticeable problem...

The first issue is what you say - long spell lists. The second issue is the 5e default initiative sequence rules. I wonder if initiative were structured different, could it reduce the "waiting for spellcaster to choose" & "oh no wait I want to cast a different spell" effect?

And would such a change offer meaningful reduction in the time it takes to run through the combat?

I think you are right that typical initiative is a problem. I'm going to be experimenting with Daggerheart-style initiative and Action Trackers in the future.

 

[TheSword]

To be clear. High level magic hasn’t been a slowing influence for us. But we have one more wizard, and one cleric and they don’t use spells like wish. It’s more the volume of choices even before you get to spells for both enemies and PCs.

 

[GrimCo]

One thing that drags on combats, is too many creatures, all taking their turns. High level party of 3-4 pc vs 1-2 opponent takes just slightly more time at level 15-20 than on lower levels. It runs even faster if players know their characters well and have decent system mastery.