Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hastur_nz" data-source="post: 7139458" data-attributes="member: 40592">I've DM'd 3.5 to level 23, 4e to level 30+, and 5e to level 22 or thereabouts, i.e. every one of them I've run up to the top-end of the chart, maybe a little over with Epic add-ons.  I certainly never got anywhere near that in my AD&D or 2E days.Anything is possible.  But it's not easy, the higher you get the harder it is for the DM to keep things flowing and interesting enough.  Certainly I've only ever used pre-published Adventure Paths for these campaigns, all 3.5 rules in fact, as that gives me most of the "plot" and I mainly have to adjust and/or convert monster stats, traps, and so on.  As you get more into the Epic Tier, the harder it gets to keep things flowing and challenging, but it is possible.  It's just quite a lot of work.  To be honest, the one I think worked the best was Savage Tide, I ran it in Eberron and under 4e rules, and everything seemed quite sensible and made sense in the 4e world right down to the three tiers of play.  But it was increasingly difficult to run, and I had to go further and further away from the published rules to keep it flowing and keep it interesting - Paragon Tier was a real power-up but didn't slow down too much; Epic Tier got crazy so I could throw down all kinds of crazy demonic foes with abyssal terrain effects and so on to try and slow down the virtually un-killable PC's.And that's why pre-published material these days doesn't go that high in levels - not only is it hard to come up with cool plots that work for Epic level tier PC's, it's just too hard to publish something for Epic Tier PC's that can hit the sweet spot of difficulty, as every group of players and their PC's will be vastly different by the time they get that high in level, so the DM has to do a lot of work to make it workable.So... for 5e, yes the suggestions here are all good.  I found the endgame of 5e to be similar to 4e, but not as bad.  To make it work, I had to...Forget whatever the rules say in terms of monster stats, encounters etc, and just run with my gut.  Give monsters better saves, harder DC's, better AC, etc - don't make them unbeatable, but make them vaguely similar to PC's (the monster manual etc ones are not).  Borrow from 4e Solo ideas, and make your 'boss monsters' way cooler and tougher.  Think big - for example in Age of Worms (which I ran twice; 3.5 and 5e), a city of giants is invaded by a hoarde of dragons, and the PC's are caught in the middle - and that's only about 3/4 of the way to the end-game!  If slowness gets too much, I usually move to Average Damage, for DM as well as Players, and get people to pre-calculate it.  That certainly saves loads of time wasted on counting, rolling, and adding up handfulls of dice.</blockquote>

Verification