D&D 5E Why Do Higher Levels Get Less Play?

[Mort]

There's no mystery here. Mathematically speaking, it's inevitable.

You can always start at high levels, of course. But most campaigns don't. So getting there takes significant time and commitment, which means a lot of different opportunities for attrition. The game is designed such that, if you don't skip ahead, few campaigns will reach high levels just because of natural attrition.

Starting at high level has it's own issues.

My online group kept asking to try high level (when I joined group was 5-6th and hadn't ever done higher then that), DM didn't want to do it, so I ran a multi session 15+ level adventure.

I offered either they could make their own character or I'll make pre-gens. They all chose pre-gens. I told them to FULLY familiarize themselves with their characters, especially the casters. They had two weeks before the first session.

At the first session, it became immediately apparent that 4/5 had no idea what their characters could do. It was particularly tough for me because not only did I have to know what was going on on my end (more challenging because high level stuff), I had to constantly field questions about their characters. Made it through and they seemed to (eventually) have a blast, but it was pretty rough on my end (still not as rough as running high level 3e/3.5 though).

Point being, even though 5e isn't THAT crunchy, jumping directly into high level with no experience is tough for most.

It's why we're so impressed by campaigns that last for decades.

It doesn't have to be that way. World of Warcraft makes levelling relatively fast and easy, and then puts most of the effort into the end game experience. That approach seems to work out better for a video game than for a TTRPG.

Yeah, I'm running the group through the Planescape adventure, which has very fast leveling. They're enjoying it, but complaining that it's actually TOO fast. It also has a level jump (to 17th) and this time I'm making SURE they're prepared, honestly considering doing a pre-session Q&A/tutorial!

 

[GrimCo]

I ran decent amount of 5e high level adventures.

First off, characters are powerful. Real powerful. Creating chalenging encounters starts to be problem. If you throw one or two high CR monsters, if party is decently optimized, they can wipe it first round, eventually 2 rounds. What usually works is massive amount of lower cr monsters, and by that i mean 3-4 opponents per 1 PC. But when i did that, it starts to eat time. It's not as bad as PF1 when one encounter could take 60-90 minutes, but it takes at least half an hour and can start to feel like grind fest.

Threats need to be on very big scale. We are talking world threatening or even plane threatening.

Motivation. Why would characters go on adventure? They are among most powerful creatures in the world. What makes it worth their time to bother with it? King asks them? They can tell king to go pound sand if they don't feel like bothering with his problems.

Time. If you start at low level, it takes time to get to teen levels. Unless you speed run it and level up every or every other session. But if you do that, players don't have enough time to really know what their characters do and worse, DM doesn't have time to see how strong party is so he can adjust encounters.

Starting with high level characters. If players aren't experienced and have very solid system mastery, they can become overwhelmed with amount of options their characters have. When you leveling from low levels, you incrementally get powers and learn them as you go.

 

[Raith5]

High level play was supported and worked well in 4e. We played up to 30th level in 4e and the maths had crazy high numbers, spells were not overpowered showstoppers, there were extremly long combats, and the DM had to do a lot of work - but it was fun.

The main thing that inhibits high level play is not designing the game for high level play and leaving challenges and spaces for high level characters. For example, if 8th PCs can defeat monsters like giants and then you are not leaving space for future challenges. So monster design and strategy is so important.

 

[GuardianLurker]

It's long been established that the length of the average campaign is approximately 6 months. Or, if meeting every week, 24 sessions. At a 4 session/level pace (which is what's recommended), that's 6 levels. That's simply just not enough time to climb up to the higher levels.

Now, I don't believe that the reasons for that short campaign length were ever established. But in addition to the "lost interest" reasons, we also have the GOAT of "schedule/RL conflicts". I'm sure other reasons for short campaign lengths come to mind.

But really, I think that's the single biggest constraint.

 

[Mort]

It's long been established that the length of the average campaign is approximately 6 months. Or, if meeting every week, 24 sessions. At a 4 session/level pace (which is what's recommended), that's 6 levels. That's simply just not enough time to climb up to the higher levels.

Now, I don't believe that the reasons for that short campaign length were ever established. But in addition to the "lost interest" reasons, we also have the GOAT of "schedule/RL conflicts". I'm sure other reasons for short campaign lengths come to mind.

But really, I think that's the single biggest constraint.

Was this codified anywhere?

The recent WoTC adventures (the Planescape and Spelljammer ones come to mind) have advancement at 1 level per 1-2 sessions - Much faster than this pace.

 

[tetrasodium]

It's already common knowledge around here that higher levels don't get much use. Instead of asking if we need those higher levels, I'd rather ask what it is about those higher levels than is making them less utilized to see if these are problems that can be remedied to make higher level play more appealing or not.

It's a combination of many factors that have somewhat grown in 5e. There are many reasons why a group might choose to continue advancing through or stop before higher levels for a given edition.


One of the various reasons might be things like finding joy in the active world building through a retired PC who might not be directly playing but is still taking world shaping actions in the world that frequently gives active PCs things to do in old editions. While another night be things like the horizontal growth through magic item accumulation needed to reach specific goals or continue overcoming specific foes with needs that make older powerful gear less of an option than new weaker gear that checks the right box (or cold iron or whatever).

There are almost certainly many more but for better or worse 5e makes a lot of choices to minimize just about all of the reasons to continue other than finding joy in MOAR POWAH and that particular reason has lots of reasons to quickly say no to as the system starts breaking down. Taken a step further 5e exacerbates that by simplifying away many elements that would have previously sides the GM in keeping the wheels on and spinning even as high level play is causing the system to progressively break down even while attempting to make the few it keeps vestigial elements that can only matter with much gm head butting .

 

[Smackpixi]

I think the main issue is that high level play gets too far divorced from reality. Sure, there’s campaign burnout, but really, I think most people want to play in reality (material plane) or tweaked reality (faewild, shadowfell) but to do high level play, you really need to leave those confines and go SOMEWHERE ELSE. Because, while things like giants and dragons may exist, for the regular world to make sense at lower levels, they have to be rare and hidden and then it’s really kinda logic breaking to have mooks for a 14th level party because why don’t those mooks just take over the world. So they’re buried deep in a dungeon, in some artificial construction, or only revealed in some world breaking occurrence. High level play has to just be boss fight monster hunting in any sensible plane.

The Other Places where high level play makes sense, The Abyss, Nine Hells, or Astral Plane don’t make common sense for the average player. Ok to visit, but not part of their character’s reality, or a place to stay and adventure in, too other. But those other places are where plenty of high level mooks can exist.

 

[MerricB]

People "just" aren't used to it. They find the levels they're happy running at. They have their campaigns end early. They don't have stories to tell that need higher levels.

Me? I saw the H1-4 AD&D Bloodstone Pass adventures as a teenager and took them as a goal.

Still haven't run them! But I have run two 4E campaigns to level 30, am currently on my third 5E campaign that will reach level 20, and ran 3E to level 21. I also have a Mithral-selling Tier 4 adventure on the DMs Guild. (I am not all that happy with it, but it's reviewed moderately well).

Both 4E and 5E have proved pretty easy to run high-level content in. 3E was much more of a pain, mainly due to the involved maths and the really annoying iterative attacks. (With Power Attack, as well. Our last campaign of 3.5E was spreadsheet-asssisted; high level got very unwieldy).

But I'm also someone lucky in having a group that enjoys playing at high level, and less with making my life hell!

My final 4E campaign used Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, upscaled to an Epic Tier campaign. The party got to almost the final encounter and found the Deck of Many Things. One PC drew the Void, another drew the Donjon. Next session, the party took a break from defeating Tharizdun to find their companions - the Donjon turned out to be in the Vault of the Drow, so they went all the way down there to rescue him, and from there to the Demonweb Pits where the soul of the other was imprisoned, and Lolth, once they explained the situation, was more thean happy to NOT let THarizdun destroy the universe.

I've run high-level stuff from published adventures and high-level stuff from my own imagination. Both work or fail, deponding. I ran Vecna: Eve of Ruin to level 20, and thes was not an adventure I liked, but the party still reached level 20 and defeeated Vecna. The ending wasn't as good as I'd like. OTOH, I really liked the penultimate chapter, which had a bit more of the free-wheeling epicness I enjoy.

I challenged my 5E level 16 party with ten CR 7s last month. It was very close to a TPK. The official encounter guidelines mean little compared to the DM's personal understanding of the system and their group.

People who can only play D&D for 3-6 months before they start a new campaign? Awesome! D&D isn't just one thing.

But I love my level 1-20 campaigns. I do stop at level 20, though. About that time, my mind starts thinking "What's the next campaign I could run?" I think that other DMs and players just start thinking that earlier!

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

double post.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The biggest reasons were left off the poll.

First, WotC doesn't provide enough support or content for those levels, so there isn't any interest in playing them. If there were a campaign that started at 10th and ran to 20th, I'm pretty sure there would be an audience for it, if only because it would be the only thing WotC had ever published for 5e that did that thing. Especially if said campaign were published alongside setting-lore and player-facing options? Yeah, I could see a product like that selling reasonably well, again simply because it's such a rarity.

Players may "get bored" with a given character (though frankly I think that sort of stance is almost exclusively an early-edition-fan thing; I've never seen that happen with 3e/PF1e nor 4e groups), but the bigger issue is having challenges and environments that are interesting and worthwhile to adventure through at these levels. Despite the Great Wheel having so many allegedly-super-adventure-able planes, I find little to nothing is ever DONE with them, making them adventure-able in name only.

Secondly, even the edition that went out of its way to actually test things and iterate on them until they achieved the design-goals for which they were intended had some issues here and there. 5.0's design is akin to 3e's in this regard: it was tested quite a bit at levels 1-5, somewhat at levels 6-11ish, and only very minimally tested at high levels. The changes made in 5.5e are pretty reflective of discovering that patterns they expected to hold, patterns that do exist at the lowest levels, don't actually hold when you get into the teens. This isn't a matter of it being "overwhelming" for players or being difficult for DMs to handle--though IMO the latter is also a problem--but rather a matter of the game starts to go so thoroughly off the rails, it no longer delivers the expected range of outputs for a lot of players. It turns out, it's not actually guaranteed that a pattern that held for the first third of a game's designed play-range actually will hold for the 2/3 its makers didn't really bother checking.

If D&D were designed more rigorously, such that they actually DID test and refine and iterate all 20 levels to the same standards that the first third to half get, I guarantee that higher levels would be played more. I don't think they would be played as much as low levels, for some of the reasons listed in the poll (lack of interest, some groups' need to play through all of the low levels first but IRL issues often ending campaigns before they get there, etc.) That is a pretty obvious given IMO. But they would be played a lot more than they are. If that were coupled with actually doing things to help players and DMs do such gaming, even just one or two prepared adventures, you'd see a lot more there, as well.

Both ENWorld Publishing and Paizo have made bank on campaigns that do, in fact, expect to get into the uppermost levels (e.g. Zeitgeist is a full 1-30 4e path, or 1-20 in its PF1e version and its 5e version.) 4e's Scales of War AP similarly went into epic levels and got people playing it enough to critique its good and bad points (with the net consensus being "pretty good with some glaring flaws", AIUI). Anyone claiming that there just isn't any interest in high-level adventures has to explain the success of these products; note that this is NOT merely a "it sold well so everything it did must have been great" thing, because the 1-to-max-level nature of ENW and Paizo (and some WotC) offerings is an explicit and key part of the product, a core selling point rather than an incidental element that may or may not have any impact on the final result. People clearly DID buy many APs over the past 15+ years that were geared to grow from the lowest levels to the highest levels.