D&D General So what is high level play like?

[Vael]

... And how often have you played at higher levels?

Because TBH, while I have played DnD since 3.5, it was only 4e that got to upper levels, as I had a campaign get to mid-Paragon Tier, and we played a few Epic One-shots. And even there, since I did a lot of Organized play in 4e ... I'd say the vast majority of my time playing DnD 4e was below 5th level.

I never got to play past level 6 in 3.5, and I've gotten to 9th or 10th level in 5e twice (Curse of Strahd and Descent into Avernus) before those campaigns wrapped up.

And I wouldn't call myself an irregular player, I've had a stable RPG group that's managed to play mostly weekly for over 5 years now. But between changing campaigns/DMs/Systems ... high level play is something I've not done.

So, first ... is this a common experience? Do you play primarily at low or high levels? How is higher level play different?

 

[nevin]

I've run High level play off and on the hard part is keeping track of everyone's abilities. Including the bad guys. You just have to lean in to it and forget normal. At this point you are effectively running games with PC's nearing Demigod Status. At this point every character has some way to flip your narrative or change the arc of the story. You either roll with that or go crazy.

 

[darjr]

I e run a lot of high level play. Mostly in AL where PCs can be very powerful. I kinda love it. As a DM I can take my foot off any breaks and put a brick on the gas.

The most dangerous thing to PCs is still other PCs. For ex one game I ran had eight level 20 characters, four of them had been level twenty for years in AL, one had Black Razor grandfathered in. A tiny collection of intellect devourers managed to go ignored and one took over the Barbarian, over and over.

One game the players faced a literal mountain that started attacking them six miles out. They had nothing to fight back except meteor swarm, one by the wizard and another by his simulacrum, who didn’t survive long. Lots of wild long range teleporting and flight and one PC dead dead and they still managed to lose the city. But saved the Queen.

 

[Celebrim]

It very much depends on the DM.

There are lots of variations but there are two basic approaches.

First, what you might call the World of Warcraft approach whereas you level up the numbers get bigger but the fundamentally the game play doesn't change. You at high levels might fight Orcus and his court, but fundamentally that would be little different than fighting a goblin chieftain and his bodygaurds just with bigger numbers. It would be entirely up to the GM to try to invoke the flavor of epic scale through description.

The notion of the 1-20 "Adventure Path" is inherently tied to this idea with only small divergences when the writers provide hopefully engrossing minigames like the colony building episode in the middle of 'Savage Tide'. Fourth Edition embraced this model of high-level play wholeheartedly, with even 30th level being mechanically not that different from 3rd level.

The second approach is that as you level up, the focus of the campaign gradually shifts. As the players ability to influence events widen, they more and more become involved in shaping their destiny and the destiny of the world around them, and are less and less worried about tactical combat because tactical problems that would trouble them become rarer and rarer in their lives. The game slows down, even to the point of becoming dynastic - PC's start families, build empires of various sorts, and take their place on a political stage. Adventures of great import occasionally come along, but the sort of matters that previously occupied their attention are now beneath them and are delegated to lower level characters. Very high-level characters might enter semi-retirement, and players take up playing their main PCs retainers and henchmen. If the campaign goes long enough, the material plane becomes too small of a field of endeavor for such mighty characters, and they may begin to influence not just their world's politics but even their world's cosmology - becoming mighty figures of legend and song.

It's that later game that is implied by 1e AD&D, where anything beyond 10th level is considered "high level".

As for my own experience, meeting regularly it might take 3 to 6 months to gain a level. Even with new PC's introduced at close to the highest level of PC in play, it might take years to reach high level play. My recent seven yearlong campaign took a hiatus at 10th level. I would imagine very few people reach super high levels without deliberately rushing through levels simply to reach the higher levels as if leveling up was the goal of play, and if they do that and then whine about how high-level play isn't that fun, well I don't have much sympathy for them.

The biggest difficulty with high level play is figuring out how to balance it so that combat or any other challenge is meaningful. There are some inherent limitations imposed by any fortune system once characters are skillful at something in that the range of skill between party members diverges over time. At low levels a character might be more skilled at something than another character, but every character can be challenged to some degree by the same problem. At high levels, whatever would challenge the skilled member of the party is basically impossible for anyone else in the party. This means it's hard to have situations where everyone is contributing and challenged without risking squishing some member of the party on a single bad roll or unfavorable fictional positioning.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It very much depends on the DM.

There are lots of variations but there are two basic approaches.

First, what you might call the World of Warcraft approach whereas you level up the numbers get bigger but the fundamentally the game play doesn't change. You at high levels might fight Orcus and his court, but fundamentally that would be little different than fighting a goblin chieftain and his bodygaurds just with bigger numbers. It would be entirely up to the GM to try to invoke the flavor of epic scale through description.

The notion of the 1-20 "Adventure Path" is inherently tied to this idea with only small divergences when the writers provide hopefully engrossing minigames like the colony building episode in the middle of 'Savage Tide'. Fourth Edition embraced this model of high-level play wholeheartedly, with even 30th level being mechanically not that different from 3rd level.

The second approach is that as you level up, the focus of the campaign gradually shifts. As the players ability to influence events widen, they more and more become involved in shaping their destiny and the destiny of the world around them, and are less and less worried about tactical combat because tactical problems that would trouble them become rarer and rarer in their lives. The game slows down, even to the point of becoming dynastic - PC's start families, build empires of various sorts, and take their place on a political stage. Adventures of great import occasionally come along, but the sort of matters that previously occupied their attention are now beneath them and are delegated to lower level characters. Very high-level characters might enter semi-retirement, and players take up playing their main PCs retainers and henchmen. If the campaign goes long enough, the material plane becomes too small of a field of endeavor for such mighty characters, and they may begin to influence not just their world's politics but even their world's cosmology - becoming mighty figures of legend and song.

It's that later game that is implied by 1e AD&D, where anything beyond 10th level is considered "high level".

As for my own experience, meeting regularly it might take 3 to 6 months to gain a level. Even with new PC's introduced at close to the highest level of PC in play, it might take years to reach high level play. My recent seven yearlong campaign took a hiatus at 10th level. I would imagine very few people reach super high levels without deliberately rushing through levels simply to reach the higher levels as if leveling up was the goal of play, and if they do that and then whine about how high-level play isn't that fun, well I don't have much sympathy for them.

The biggest difficulty with high level play is figuring out how to balance it so that combat or any other challenge is meaningful. There are some inherent limitations imposed by any fortune system once characters are skillful at something in that the range of skill between party members diverges over time. At low levels a character might be more skilled at something than another character, but every character can be challenged to some degree by the same problem. At high levels, whatever would challenge the skilled member of the party is basically impossible for anyone else in the party. This means it's hard to have situations where everyone is contributing and challenged without risking squishing some member of the party on a single bad roll or unfavorable fictional positioning.

Exactly. My preference is option 2, but option 1 is a perfectly viable style of play, and obviously very popular.

 

[Immoralkickass]

If you're talking just combat, you can experience it with high level one shots. They do work somewhat, but the balance is very wonky and requires effort from the DM to make it not broken.

If you're talking about a long campaign that is at the tail end, its really gonzo by level 14+, and basically does not work without lots of homebrew. By that time, everyone in the party has been through so much naughty word, like the Fighter is basically a Chosen of a god, the Wizard is running his own school, the Cleric has his god on speed dial and is running an underground operation, and the Mystic has discovered her hidden past that changed her forever. And thats without mentioning all the allies, enemies and frenemies you'd made along the way.

IMO high level play is different in the way that it just isn't fun for some people, whereas low level play is more accessible and enjoyable for most people.

 

[Dioltach]

We never got very high level in our 1E/2E AD&D campaigns (most of which fizzled away before too long),

Yup. In 2E, level 11-13 was about the max before the XP requirements became so awful that you'd play for two years before advancing.

I've DM'd up to around level 16-17 in 3.5, and that required more effort than I cared to put into the game. Our group's other DM absolutely loves high levels, and he does it with flair. We're having a blast with our overpowered "save the multiverse" campaign that he's running.

In Star Wars d20, I found that the PCs became overpowered, and the game unmanageable, around level 12.

 

[S'mon]

I've run a lot of high level play across most D&D editions. 3e/PF1 is the only one where I really didn't enjoy it. 4e gets painfully slow from about 24th level and the PCs tend to outstrip the monsters a bit, but it's still workable, nothing like 3e/PF. 5e has a shallower power gradient and works fine up to 20th. The level 20 capstone abilities vary rather a lot in efficacy, and there aren't many published monsters to challenge a level 20 group, but it's certainly playable.

Edit: One thing I did was to run 1e PF Rise of the Runelords & Shattered Star mashed together & converted to 5e; PF's assumed higher power level works well with 5e D&D.

 

[S'mon]

I've run a few high level 5e campaigns over the years. I love them and I love the scope and scale of the story. I think it's awesome to see paladins in hell facing balors.

But mechanically it's really hard. It's so much easier to run games for 3rd level characters than 17th level characters. They have so many capabilities, so many combinations, so many tools at their disposal that keeping up is really tough. I was talking to my wife last night about how the whole game changes when characters have access to banish and polymorph. Suddenly no single creature, no matter how big it is or how much damage it does, is much of a threat if it fails a single saving throw. Later on with spells like force cage and wall of force, it's even worse because even legendary resistance doesn't help.

I've started working on some "house rules" to help account for this sort of thing. Instead of directly nerfing spells, I'm trying an approach of "bosses are different". Here's what I have:

This is trying to take an approach of saying "yeah, I know what the spell says, but that doesn't work like you think on 'boss' monsters.". I don't really know if its a great idea or not yet.

I think if you are running high level 5e, it is best to accept that the PCs will sometimes deploy "I win" buttons and trivialise encounters. If you want to be able to guarantee an Epic Boss Battle, 4e D&D does that much better. I find 5e works best if treated a lot like 1e AD&D, with a high level focus frequently on things other than character builds and set-piece battles. Exploration & Social, politics & war - this stuff all works well in 5e I find.

 

[S'mon]

It's that later game that is implied by 1e AD&D, where anything beyond 10th level is considered "high level".

As for my own experience, meeting regularly it might take 3 to 6 months to gain a level. Even with new PC's introduced at close to the highest level of PC in play, it might take years to reach high level play. My recent seven yearlong campaign took a hiatus at 10th level. I would imagine very few people reach super high levels without deliberately rushing through levels simply to reach the higher levels as if leveling up was the goal of play, and if they do that and then whine about how high-level play isn't that fun, well I don't have much sympathy for them.

5e D&D is a bit tricky in that it deliberately speeds up progression 11-20 compared to 5-10. 5-10 in 5e plays fairly similarly to 5-10 in BECMI or roughly 5-8 in 1e AD&D, the traditional 'sweet spot'. Mearls and co made a deliberate choice to speed up high level progression where 1e-2e AD&D wants it slow. Having GM'd 4e D&D from 1-29 (reaching 30 at end of last session) I can see why they did what they did, 4e's Epic Tier felt very drawn-out to me. I think with 5e it's probably best to think of levels 11-20 as more equivalent to 1e ca 11-15, certainly progression is at least twice as fast unless the 1e DM is handing out hundreds of thousands of gp in loot/XP.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I've played and DM'd a number of high level (19+) campaigns in 5e (and 3e).

The biggest problem I've seen is when the DM needs to always feel in control. For example, it's much harder to railroad a high level party; it requires a much heavier hand than a low level party, and effectively removes any real ability for such a DM to claim plausible neutrality.

IME, the best high level DMs don't try to control everything, but instead let their imaginations run amuck. High level is gonzo, and the game works far better if you lean into this and embrace it, rather than trying to fight against it. If you have plans, expect that the players will derail them in unexpected ways. The best approach I've found is actually to plan as little as possible. Create challenges, not solutions, and trust that the players will figure out a solution (because odds are, they will, and seeing what they come up with is part of the fun). And don't get upset if they figure out a way to easily overcome a challenge. The challenge essentially exists to be overcome and you effectively have infinite challenges at your disposal.

I wouldn't want to run/play high levels exclusively, but I genuinely enjoy it when I do.