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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9595968" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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.</blockquote>

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