D&D 5E The challenges of high level adventure design.

[J-H]

One thing that helps high level play be fun is to not be stingy with magical items.

A level 20 samurai has almost the same capabilities as a level 7 samurai, except he hits things more often, slightly harder, and is tougher to kill. Magic items make a huge difference for martials.
The just-hit 20 samurai in my game has:
-A +3 greatsword that lets him roll to intercept single-target visible spells (as I mentioned earlier) aimed at him. He can literally block Disintegrate. They had to solve a complicated fey riddle to get this. Two characters had to save or die doing so, as they used themselves as material components for some of the solutions.
-A Helm of Teleportation. He is now the party's taxi. They've started collecting rocks as Teleport focuses.
-An Amulet of Protection from Detection and Location. Everyone picked these up when they realized they were being tracked (artificer + found crafter at right time).
-A Broom of Flying

And a few other things like +2 Full Plate and two other nice two-handed weapons. He has strategic mobility, tactical mobility, and antimagic defenses as a result of his items. If he had "One very rare, one rare, two uncommons" for his magic items, he'd have a lot fewer options.

 

[Flamestrike]

So what are those?

What are the easy ideas that don't become stale over multiple scenarios to get from level 15 to 20?

15th level parties should be dealing with existential threats to the entire realm. These are people that can go toe to toe with primal Demon Lords and expect to win. Think planar travel, artifacts and similar things being features, with the fate of the world in the PCs hands.

You can expect warriors to down multiple T-Rexes with nothing but a rusty butter knife (of course they'll be armed with some kind of Mjolnir like weapon) and be able to fall from skyscrapers and survive. Spellcasters can deal with things like instantly bringing someone back from the dead, teleporting the party to the other side of the planet, or other realms of existence a simple matter of expending a daily class feature akin to a click of the fingers. They can converse with (and call on the favor of) literal Gods. All of them can probably fly.

Treat them like the Avengers. That's how they're viewed in the world, and that's the sort of power they wield.

Don't sit there and design some simple 'enter the dungeon and slay the BBEG' that you can get away with at Tiers 1 and 2. By this level they can teleport, walk through walls, fly, flood the dungeon with water, disintegrate the dungeon, ethereally bypass it and a million other tricks.

When you think big, it opens you up to concepts that are not easily defeated by most of the above. An adventure set on a Demiplane or involving a specific artifact (only destroyed in a certain way), antagonists that are familiar with high level shenanigans (having dealt with high level PCs before).

Once you (the DM) are familiar with how high-level PCs operate (and the sort of tricks they can pull) you can factor those tricks into your adventure design, designing adventures that require those high-level tricks for success.

 

[Blue]

-Having a pre-populated area with multiple viable goals at any given time means the players can choose "whatever" and all I have to do is look up the right page(s)
[...]
-In fact, most things aren't going to seriously exercise the players and put their characters in danger. Instead of "is what's around the corner going to kill me?" it has become "How do we provide evidence to get the Giants on-side so that when we go up against a god's avatar, we're bringing two polities, a kraken, and a nascent god-sword to the fight?" along with "Do we want to try to trap these CR 5 carnivores and try to let 100 of them loose in the enemy city? If so, how?"

These are both really useful. Trying to design a more linear or even traditional location based adventure often can be sidesteped by high level characters.

-Not every random encounter has to challenge the party. The 19th level monk has made notes of a giant honey tree (lots of bees) for a return trip. As a combat encounter, it'd be challenging for maybe...2nd level players?

Taking inspiration from 13th Age, when the party comes across a challenge they can curbstomp with no/minimal use of resources I just do a montage around the table of each player describing one cool thing their character did to overcome the foes. Takes very little time, makes them feel cool.

High level D&D characters, particularly spellcasters, have the ability to survive almost anything, deal massive amounts of damage, and reshape the battlefield in a round or two. At 5th level, a Fireball at the wrong time can cause a TPK. At 15th level, a DEX-heavy party can shrug off 3 Fireballs and a Prismatic Spray with no ill effects.

In combat, this means that the DM is free to throw lots of firepower at the PCs, and trust that they will be able to dismantle it in a few rounds. Reviewing the included Campaign Log will show a typical party handle an invisible ancient dragon with ease, teleport to an enemy airship and wipe out its crew, drop into an enemy temple and kill the high priest, desecrate the altar, then leave, or even split up to conduct hit-and-run raids with a Hasted Monk who can literally outrun the enemy. This may seem like a challenge to DM, but the DM’s job is not to conduct the party’s strategy or tactics – simply to make a good effort at defeating them with the resources on hand. Sometimes, the enemy will scare the PCs or chase them off. Sometimes, the players will get good rolls and will cut through 60 CR worth of opponents like a +3 Flaming Dagger versus warm butter.

Out of combat, high level players have access to extreme strategic mobility, including Scrying, Teleport, and Transport Via Plants. This may seem hard to plan for, but that’s the advantage of a large, pre-populated map. The Aarocokra also have the benefit of a Scrying chamber at every temple, and can be assumed to have good, but not perfect, ability to track the party unless or until Scrying is blocked. The players again do most of the work; the DM simply decides when the players should be attacked, what reasonable steps the enemy is taking in the background, and what additional reinforcements have been dispatched to temples.

The hardest part, in the author’s experience, is choosing quickly what actions enemy should take in large battles (10+ foes vs. the party). Spell selections presented in the Bestiary are typically abbreviated and categorized to help; beyond this – pick a few default actions and use those. Low-level divine casters can’t go wrong with Sacred Flame or Guiding Bolt, and high level casters are likely to use their high-level spells first.

The players do not see what happens behind the screen. Sometimes the DM will forget a creature’s special abilities or make sub-optimal choices. Most of the time, the players will never even know, and that’s okay.

I really like this. Reminders about the strategic mobility is one of the key things. One of the other parts that links into that is easy access to divination. A cleric ritual casting Commune and Divination on a regular basis can give PCs information that they would not have access to (yet), and that with what you mentioned allows short-circuiting many adventures.

-The 5-8 encounter adventuring day DEFINITELY breaks down. I'm seeing one big fight every couple of in-game weeks. Those in-game fights are big and involve multiple enemies with 7th-9th level spells, and time pressure where the party has 6-8 rounds before reinforcements flood the area. Power Word Kill, Finger of Death, Prismatic Wall, Earthquake, etc. are all on the table. Usually I get 1-3 PCs down to 0hp during these fights, but they don't die.

Does a non-nova party have any chance in these? If you run through with a rogue, monk, fighter, barbarian and ranger do you expect the same results as with a more balanced or caster-heavy party?

One of the issues with few-encounters-per-day is that the balance between the classes is thrown off. Throwing off class balance with too few encounters per day is a problem starting tier 2, and in tier 3 & 4 seems like it makes some characters second string contributors. This also seems to make restricted time a ridiculously heavy penalty against any class who aren't designed to nova.

How do you get around this?

 

[Mort]

Passwall makes doors and walls redundant.

Only if the walls and doors are made of stone, wood or plaster. And while that describes most, high level play should certainly involve many situations where materials are different.

Further, even a 20th level caster only gets three 5th level spells. Using one for passwall means you are devoting limited resources that can't be used somewhere else

 

[dave2008]

15th level parties should be dealing with existential threats to the entire realm. These are people that can go toe to toe with primal Demon Lords and expect to win. Think planar travel, artifacts and similar things being features, with the fate of the world in the PCs hands.

You can expect warriors to down multiple T-Rexes with nothing but a rusty butter knife (of course they'll be armed with some kind of Mjolnir like weapon) and be able to fall from skyscrapers and survive. Spellcasters can deal with things like instantly bringing someone back from the dead, teleporting the party to the other side of the planet, or other realms of existence a simple matter of expending a daily class feature akin to a click of the fingers. They can converse with (and call on the favor of) literal Gods. All of them can probably fly.

Treat them like the Avengers. That's how they're viewed in the world, and that's the sort of power they wield.

Don't sit there and design some simple 'enter the dungeon and slay the BBEG' that you can get away with at Tiers 1 and 2. By this level they can teleport, walk through walls, fly, flood the dungeon with water, disintegrate the dungeon, ethereally bypass it and a million other tricks.

When you think big, it opens you up to concepts that are not easily defeated by most of the above. An adventure set on a Demiplane or involving a specific artifact (only destroyed in a certain way), antagonists that are familiar with high level shenanigans (having dealt with high level PCs before).

Once you (the DM) are familiar with how high-level PCs operate (and the sort of tricks they can pull) you can factor those tricks into your adventure design, designing adventures that require those high-level tricks for success.

You wrote a lot, without saying much. I mean, all you are really saying is: "Release the Kraken!" Which I feel is kind of obvious. I thought you would have more concrete examples. It is cool if you don't, that was just the impression you gave (IMO).

 

[J-H]

Taking inspiration from 13th Age, when the party comes across a challenge they can curbstomp with no/minimal use of resources I just do a montage around the table of each player describing one cool thing their character did to overcome the foes. Takes very little time, makes them feel cool.

Does a non-nova party have any chance in these? If you run through with a rogue, monk, fighter, barbarian and ranger do you expect the same results as with a more balanced or caster-heavy party?

One of the issues with few-encounters-per-day is that the balance between the classes is thrown off. Throwing off class balance with too few encounters per day is a problem starting tier 2, and in tier 3 & 4 seems like it makes some characters second string contributors. This also seems to make restricted time a ridiculously heavy penalty against any class who aren't designed to nova.

How do you get around this?

I like the narration idea.

My current party (session 30-something, a bit over 2 years RL, we've had some turnover) is a fighter, a warlock, a monk, and a paladin, so 50/50 short rest/long rest classes. They're fine. A warlock has, what, 8-9 leveled spells he can cast? That's fewer than the number of combat rounds, usually.

The barbarian we lost was the strongest character in the party...zealot barbarians are extremely hard to actually kill even at 0hp, he was still dishing out tons of damage, and he would get brought along whenever the paladin cast Dimension Door. For times when he couldn't get to melee, he had a returning greataxe (max range like 30'?) they picked up back in Castle Dracula.

 

[dave2008]

My players are level 15, so pretty high level, but our game is unique enough that I don't know that my experience is helpful. We only have one spellcaster, no reliable healing outside HD, and a low magic setting. That, with some house rules, means our high level adventures are not that different from our low level ones when it comes to the PC capabilities.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Well then if you get to a certain level you have to stop playing.

Essentially when PCs become powerful enough to mold the world, you need to have built a world for them to mold.

Which brings us back to the start: 5e can't do high level ADVENTURES. It might be able to do a high level sandbox campaign, but an actual adventure - something WotC could print in a book for example, just doesn't work.

 

[John R Davis]

This thread has made me look again at the final part of my 6 part epic i kickstarted a few years back. The final module is for level 17 characters. combat wise its likely a bit easy but i think the thing is to keep it interesting with regard to what the PCs learn, do, tricks, social, lore etc and kinda hope the combats aren't an absolute breeze or an utter nightmare to run/play.
The BBEG was a most blessed fey queen / demi-goddess who was granted 13 wishes at her birth to help her rule wisely. She obviously abused the power and wanted more. Over the course of her existence she has used 10 so has 3 left come the final module.
It was a fun campaign to create, and run, so very proud I got in done and published.
My next KS adventure firmly starts at level 1.

 

[Minigiant]

Which brings us back to the start: 5e can't do high level ADVENTURES. It might be able to do a high level sandbox campaign, but an actual adventure - something WotC could print in a book for example, just doesn't work.

It can.

5e cant do high level dungeon style adventures.