I have a party that I had originally intended to go to lvl 20. The party consists of a cleric, fighter, and ranger. I have heard that going to lvl 20 is not good, but do not understand the reasoning why, can someone explain why?
Balance goes out the window. There’s not as many monsters or as much content in the books, so you’ll be doing a lot of homebrew, and player characters have so many tricks it’s nearly impossible to create a situation that challenges them. Plus, players get bored, stories drag, and the impact is lost. I personally don’t run campaigns past level 11, and honestly prefer to stop around level 5.
Most complaints I see revolve around higher level play being difficult because it gets really hard to challenge the characters. They start ending up with just incredible level of power, and the monster manual really doesn't keep up. I mean, how many times can you fight Tiamat riding the Tarrasque before it just gets old?
While that's an issue, personally, I think the bigger problem is how long it takes to get there. In just real-world terms, if you start at level 1, it can take a lot, lot of sessions to get to 20. Pace of leveling is, obviously, up to the DM, and the other variable is how often you play, but realistically, you are looking at multiple years. It's a long time to play the same character, especially when WotC keeps releasing new options a few times every year.
Additionally, deciding the length beforehand makes it very difficult to tell a proper story. It can force you to drag out parts just to give the characters more time to level up, or the opposite, shorten and cut interesting things because they are moving too quickly. The analogy I like to use is when a TV show has about nine episodes worth of story but a 23-episode season, so they just have to lots of filler episodes to fill out the count. Sometimes they're fun, sometimes not, but if you missed them, you haven't missed anything.
My advice is not to start with the arbitrary goal of playing to level 20, and instead say you're going to keep playing for as long as it takes to resolve the story (and whatever side plots might be involved). Plot out a long story. If they hit 20, great. But if you run out of story when they're level 17 or 13 or 9, just end it, instead of bolting on boring arcs to fill space.
Ninja'd by Naivara. And they were much more concise on top of it.
Also, the level 20 abilities of most classes are pretty underwhelming, so there is very little motivation to reach that level.
Most of the best/most useful abilities and spells are front loaded at the lower levels. For example, (IMO), there are more desirable/useful 3rd level wizard spells vs. the 4th level ones. Bang for your buck seems to decline after third level. (diminishing returns).
I'm sure it was intentionally designed that way.
I would love for WoTC to publish a high level monster manual, but I doubt that will ever happen.
The usual complaint is "It's impossible to challenge the players!", which is strictly untrue. 5e has a terrible habit of giving gods, Archdevils, and other high-level creatures absolutely useless stat blocks, which means the players can absolutely roll over them. High-level players are as powerful as the DM allows them to be - they have more hit points, they have more tools and options, but they're only "invincible demigods" if a DM falls for the hype. It's especially baffling because so much D&D occurs in the United States, where there's a century-old Superheroes genre of entertainment media just...right there. If authors can find ways to challenge Superman for a hundred years, a DM can find ways to challenge people who would barely rate a D- on the DC Bullshit Scale.
It does involve copious homebrew since the base 5e rules and systems so fundamentally fail at this, but there's absolutely no reason level 20 characters are any significantly harder to challenge than level 5 ones. It's nothing but numbers, and any DM can juice numbers however hard they need to.
The other, generally more insidious downside of level 20 is that the players are no longer allowed to progress through normal means. They cannot gain levels, they cannot gain new abilities or talents outside so-called 'Epic Boons'. They've reached the zenith of their power, and as much as it's awesome to play at and experience that zenith, if it drags on for too long some players do get tired of stagnation. That can be avoided by offering rewards, growth, and development in other ways, whether it be via their reputation with nations or organizations or by seeking out new and novel avenues of power. Your sorcerer player may be level 20, but is he a dragon yet? No? Perhaps that's his next quest.
There's ways to do it if your table wants to do it, but traditionally it takes a long time to get to, yes. And the whole "level 20 is a trap, don't do it!" is a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecy, because everybody gets to 20 expecting it to suck, the DM is unprepared to make it awesome instead because 5e is terrible at preparing them for it so it sucks, and even though it's perfectly reasonable to play cool-ass games at 20th level, people assume it's the levels that made their game suck and not other failures in the system.
There's a lot of ways of making level 20 a fine and splendid goal again, but you have to be ready to put in the extra work.
Yeah, it gets boring, especially if your class isn’t consistently giving you interesting features, ( Barbarian I’m looking at you. ), and the players may very well play 2 or 3 different characters throughout the campaign due to being bored with the same-old-same-old, and sure, and high tiers get kinda underwhelming as others have stated, and sure, the Monk can kill someone in one punch, the Rogue has insane skill bonuses, and the Wizard can do some whacky stuff with their subclass capstone, but Waaaaaaaaaaay too many things kinda feel boring at high levels.
For a good campaign, somewhere in tier 4 is where I personally would stop, but early tier 3 or late tier 2 is where I would stop a campaign otherwise, but you can develop your own theories. I guess just go for it and see how it pans out, and don’t forget to have fun :).
As others have said once you reach level 20 WHAT NOW? yes some of the published realms have NPCs that are higher levels (Elminster I'm looking at you) but they are holdovers from earlier versions where levels were unlimited or some effort was put into thinking and designing epic level possibilities. could you create new subclasses or extensions of classes (anyone for an Epic Archmage subclass) but there is just no real non homebrew content. If you have the older editions its somewhat easier to homebrew if you have the time and energy but its a ton of work and most DMs don't have THAT much free time.
I enjoy high level play quite a lot, but it definitely requires homebrewed enemies and a savvy DM to continue challenging the party. CR goes out the window, and you need to tailor specifically to party makeup and abilities. Something that is steamrolled by a Paladin/Druid/Monk/Bard might TPK a Fighter/Cleric/Wizard/Ranger.
Definitely a lot of work on the DM's end, but we've had some truly epic fights that you just can't do at lower levels. D&D would be a lot less interesting to me if it ended at 11.
It definitely requires more work by the DM, and that DM has to fully understand the mechanics of the game (pretty much all of the mechanics) but it is very possible to challenge high level parties. An excellent example is the first campaign of Not Another D&D Podcast (just Google NADDPOD) which went all the way from level one to twenty over the course of 100 episodes, each about two hours long. That translates to about 2 years weekly gaming or one if you're playing four hour sessions and they averaged about five sessions or ten hours of play time at each level. Pacing is also dependent on story development and how fast the DM wants the party to level; if players get bored if they don't get new tricks every session they're either going to lose interest or the DM is going to condense things into fewer sessions. With the NADDPOD example, there was a lot of roleplaying and story progression but they also got into at least one fight almost every session, sometimes several (fights were a bit quicker in general due to the main party being only 3 members plus an NPC for most of it aside from occasional guest players).
It's definitely worth pointing out that Murph from NADDPOD is an absolute top tier professional DM. By "professional" I mean that podcast is a primary source of income for him and his wife, who is one of the players, and they make that income because his story and battles are freaking epic and the players are awesome roleplayers who get heavily invested in their characters and the story, with the result being something that a lot of people want to listen to on a weekly basis. He obviously spends a lot of time prepping everything, from molding the story to the characters' actions to speccing out a ton of monsters and very often NPCs that are pretty much built-from-scratch PCs that he plays as the bad guys. He knows his players styles and their characters abilities intimately and is able to customize the game to fit them with fairly balanced and exciting challenges each session, which often include adapting on the fly when the players manage to surprise him with various shenanigans.
So it's definitely possible to run an engaging and balanced high level game, it just takes dedication, practice, and a lot of effort. Mostly by the DM, but also by the players because the best DM in the world will have trouble keeping things exciting for uncreative and/or poorly motivated players. If done well it can be pretty awesome.
I know you were asking for downsides of level 20, but to answer like others have - level 20 can be just as fun as any other level! It can be different, however. At least in my last campaign that went all the way from 1 to 20, there were some mindset changes that at least worked for me for all high-level play:
It was less about whether the PCs would win/survive a given battle, and more about what prep they need to do for the battle. Honestly, there was hardly a battle they didn't stand an extremely good chance of winning towards the end (although as Yurei1453 says, it's all just numbers that can be upped), but every win felt earned because of everything they had to do pre-battle. Researching their enemy, finding the special item that will allow them to get into the extraplanar lair, making the allies that will handle the minions, etc. The challenge of the combat didn't start with the initiative roll, but sessions earlier.
At that level, whether the PCs live or die is hardly a question, but if they don't defeat evil necromancer whoever, the undead legion will overrun their hometown, and all those NPCs they know and love will be slaughtered. Death can still be a very real threat even when the PCs themselves are, for all practical purposes, immortal.
I actually found high-level freeing as a DM, because I could create challenges that I had no idea how they could be overcome. At lower levels, I made sure to plan preferably a couple ways the PCs could overcome a challenge or dire situation. By high level, however, they had so many tools and resources at their disposal, that as long as it wasn't literally impossible, I could make up any challenge whatsoever and not worry a bit about trying to think of how it could be overcome. The players would always find a way. It was like going from designing an escape room carefully so that it wouldn't be too difficult, to being able to just throw a ton of obstacles out there and sitting back to let the players surprise me. It was really fun and enjoyable!
Reminds me of the gorilla cage the folks at Yorkers were supposed to have designed back in the 1950s. They were supposed to be trying to measure gorilla intelligence and designed it with 4 different escape routes of increasing difficulty to see where the gorilla got stumped. So, the first gorilla they put in is supposed to have found a fifth way out the scientists hadn’t recognized. So much for that test 😳
So far everyone has been talking about using Homebrew to challenge your party. What is the difference of sending a ancient dragon or a tarrasque to attack your party compared to a homebrew monsters. I had the understanding that those creatures were meant to be incredible challenging. Am not understanding some sort of mechanic?
So far everyone has been talking about using Homebrew to challenge your party. What is the difference of sending a ancient dragon or a tarrasque to attack your party compared to a homebrew monsters. I had the understanding that those creatures were meant to be incredible challenging. Am not understanding some sort of mechanic?
You can always simply Add More, rather than resort to homebrew. Challenging the PCs doesn't have to be an issue regardless. In my case (likely different for many tables) though, tier 4 games aren't really about tracking down and defeating whatever big baddy wants to square off. By that level the PCs are movers and shakers who can mobilize armies, run small countries or lead world-spanning organisations - what I put them up against are similar powers, not the biggest monster I can find in the MM or create myself. And those kinds of antagonists are homebrew pretty much by default.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Most "ancient dragons" and other high-level DMG/MM enemies have far fewer HP than they should. Wizards balanced the game such that a team of absolute numbskulls using absolutely no class resources could still beat high-level encounters just by spamming the Attack action and/or their basic fight cantrip, which means that any team of actual human beings who've successfully made it to high-level play are able to burn down the stock critters the MM gives people in two and a half rounds without any real threat. That and there's only so many times you can surprise a party with Suddenly Ancient Dragon before it becomes boring.
It's why knowing your own table is so important for high-level play - you have to tune challenges to the table far more so at higher levels than lower ones. I do not and never will subscribe to the idea that high-level PCs are Nigh-Immortal Demigods, or even 'movers and shakers' as Pang suggests. They can be if the play their cards well, but a team of players who enjoy adventuring, seeing the world and tasting of both its dangers and its riches aren't necessarily going to stop and start being a bunch of jumped-up bureaucrats because they dinged a few extra times. They'll seek out greater threats and sweeter treasures, or other people will start becoming envious of them and acting against the party.
I will add: if you insta-level a team to level 20 and give them random or chosen magical items… you will not be able to challenge your players.
However - if you instead level them from level 10 (or lower) onwards, balance won’t be an issue. You’ll know exactly what they can and can’t handle as a DM. That, and the DM has to be super spicy on the rules here - your encounters have to be large, include minions, environmental effects, everything. A DM should not throw the team against a Tarrasque and say “lol level 20 is too easy”.
A Tarrasque-worshipping doomsday cult should be paving the way for the Tarrasque’s destruction, subverting city defenses and subjugating the heroes before the Tarrasque attacks. It should feature a multi-pronged assault featuring high level cultist mages, countless minions, multiple cities to defend at the same time, setting up defenses, parlaying with nearby allies to send help, a betrayal from the highest ranks of the alliance… you get what I mean.
Forget about CR at high levels. You need to design your games differently at higher tiers and some DMs just aren’t good at it.
I've noticed that the higher the level of the characters, the harder it is to have meaningless combats. This wouldn't be a problem but the game balance is designed around a large number of fights that individually are little challenge to the party.
I have a party that I had originally intended to go to lvl 20. The party consists of a cleric, fighter, and ranger. I have heard that going to lvl 20 is not good, but do not understand the reasoning why, can someone explain why?
A New DM up against the World
Balance goes out the window. There’s not as many monsters or as much content in the books, so you’ll be doing a lot of homebrew, and player characters have so many tricks it’s nearly impossible to create a situation that challenges them. Plus, players get bored, stories drag, and the impact is lost. I personally don’t run campaigns past level 11, and honestly prefer to stop around level 5.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Most complaints I see revolve around higher level play being difficult because it gets really hard to challenge the characters. They start ending up with just incredible level of power, and the monster manual really doesn't keep up. I mean, how many times can you fight Tiamat riding the Tarrasque before it just gets old?
While that's an issue, personally, I think the bigger problem is how long it takes to get there. In just real-world terms, if you start at level 1, it can take a lot, lot of sessions to get to 20. Pace of leveling is, obviously, up to the DM, and the other variable is how often you play, but realistically, you are looking at multiple years. It's a long time to play the same character, especially when WotC keeps releasing new options a few times every year.
Additionally, deciding the length beforehand makes it very difficult to tell a proper story. It can force you to drag out parts just to give the characters more time to level up, or the opposite, shorten and cut interesting things because they are moving too quickly. The analogy I like to use is when a TV show has about nine episodes worth of story but a 23-episode season, so they just have to lots of filler episodes to fill out the count. Sometimes they're fun, sometimes not, but if you missed them, you haven't missed anything.
My advice is not to start with the arbitrary goal of playing to level 20, and instead say you're going to keep playing for as long as it takes to resolve the story (and whatever side plots might be involved). Plot out a long story. If they hit 20, great. But if you run out of story when they're level 17 or 13 or 9, just end it, instead of bolting on boring arcs to fill space.
Ninja'd by Naivara. And they were much more concise on top of it.
Also, the level 20 abilities of most classes are pretty underwhelming, so there is very little motivation to reach that level.
Most of the best/most useful abilities and spells are front loaded at the lower levels. For example, (IMO), there are more desirable/useful 3rd level wizard spells vs. the 4th level ones. Bang for your buck seems to decline after third level. (diminishing returns).
I'm sure it was intentionally designed that way.
I would love for WoTC to publish a high level monster manual, but I doubt that will ever happen.
The usual complaint is "It's impossible to challenge the players!", which is strictly untrue. 5e has a terrible habit of giving gods, Archdevils, and other high-level creatures absolutely useless stat blocks, which means the players can absolutely roll over them. High-level players are as powerful as the DM allows them to be - they have more hit points, they have more tools and options, but they're only "invincible demigods" if a DM falls for the hype. It's especially baffling because so much D&D occurs in the United States, where there's a century-old Superheroes genre of entertainment media just...right there. If authors can find ways to challenge Superman for a hundred years, a DM can find ways to challenge people who would barely rate a D- on the DC Bullshit Scale.
It does involve copious homebrew since the base 5e rules and systems so fundamentally fail at this, but there's absolutely no reason level 20 characters are any significantly harder to challenge than level 5 ones. It's nothing but numbers, and any DM can juice numbers however hard they need to.
The other, generally more insidious downside of level 20 is that the players are no longer allowed to progress through normal means. They cannot gain levels, they cannot gain new abilities or talents outside so-called 'Epic Boons'. They've reached the zenith of their power, and as much as it's awesome to play at and experience that zenith, if it drags on for too long some players do get tired of stagnation. That can be avoided by offering rewards, growth, and development in other ways, whether it be via their reputation with nations or organizations or by seeking out new and novel avenues of power. Your sorcerer player may be level 20, but is he a dragon yet? No? Perhaps that's his next quest.
There's ways to do it if your table wants to do it, but traditionally it takes a long time to get to, yes. And the whole "level 20 is a trap, don't do it!" is a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecy, because everybody gets to 20 expecting it to suck, the DM is unprepared to make it awesome instead because 5e is terrible at preparing them for it so it sucks, and even though it's perfectly reasonable to play cool-ass games at 20th level, people assume it's the levels that made their game suck and not other failures in the system.
There's a lot of ways of making level 20 a fine and splendid goal again, but you have to be ready to put in the extra work.
Please do not contact or message me.
It doesn't have to be a slog. We played Prince of the Apocalypse up to 18th level, and it was almost always challenging.
Yeah, it gets boring, especially if your class isn’t consistently giving you interesting features, ( Barbarian I’m looking at you. ), and the players may very well play 2 or 3 different characters throughout the campaign due to being bored with the same-old-same-old, and sure, and high tiers get kinda underwhelming as others have stated, and sure, the Monk can kill someone in one punch, the Rogue has insane skill bonuses, and the Wizard can do some whacky stuff with their subclass capstone, but Waaaaaaaaaaay too many things kinda feel boring at high levels.
For a good campaign, somewhere in tier 4 is where I personally would stop, but early tier 3 or late tier 2 is where I would stop a campaign otherwise, but you can develop your own theories.
I guess just go for it and see how it pans out, and don’t forget to have fun :).
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
As others have said once you reach level 20 WHAT NOW? yes some of the published realms have NPCs that are higher levels (Elminster I'm looking at you) but they are holdovers from earlier versions where levels were unlimited or some effort was put into thinking and designing epic level possibilities. could you create new subclasses or extensions of classes (anyone for an Epic Archmage subclass) but there is just no real non homebrew content. If you have the older editions its somewhat easier to homebrew if you have the time and energy but its a ton of work and most DMs don't have THAT much free time.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
I enjoy high level play quite a lot, but it definitely requires homebrewed enemies and a savvy DM to continue challenging the party. CR goes out the window, and you need to tailor specifically to party makeup and abilities. Something that is steamrolled by a Paladin/Druid/Monk/Bard might TPK a Fighter/Cleric/Wizard/Ranger.
Definitely a lot of work on the DM's end, but we've had some truly epic fights that you just can't do at lower levels. D&D would be a lot less interesting to me if it ended at 11.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I take offense
It definitely requires more work by the DM, and that DM has to fully understand the mechanics of the game (pretty much all of the mechanics) but it is very possible to challenge high level parties. An excellent example is the first campaign of Not Another D&D Podcast (just Google NADDPOD) which went all the way from level one to twenty over the course of 100 episodes, each about two hours long. That translates to about 2 years weekly gaming or one if you're playing four hour sessions and they averaged about five sessions or ten hours of play time at each level. Pacing is also dependent on story development and how fast the DM wants the party to level; if players get bored if they don't get new tricks every session they're either going to lose interest or the DM is going to condense things into fewer sessions. With the NADDPOD example, there was a lot of roleplaying and story progression but they also got into at least one fight almost every session, sometimes several (fights were a bit quicker in general due to the main party being only 3 members plus an NPC for most of it aside from occasional guest players).
It's definitely worth pointing out that Murph from NADDPOD is an absolute top tier professional DM. By "professional" I mean that podcast is a primary source of income for him and his wife, who is one of the players, and they make that income because his story and battles are freaking epic and the players are awesome roleplayers who get heavily invested in their characters and the story, with the result being something that a lot of people want to listen to on a weekly basis. He obviously spends a lot of time prepping everything, from molding the story to the characters' actions to speccing out a ton of monsters and very often NPCs that are pretty much built-from-scratch PCs that he plays as the bad guys. He knows his players styles and their characters abilities intimately and is able to customize the game to fit them with fairly balanced and exciting challenges each session, which often include adapting on the fly when the players manage to surprise him with various shenanigans.
So it's definitely possible to run an engaging and balanced high level game, it just takes dedication, practice, and a lot of effort. Mostly by the DM, but also by the players because the best DM in the world will have trouble keeping things exciting for uncreative and/or poorly motivated players. If done well it can be pretty awesome.
I know you were asking for downsides of level 20, but to answer like others have - level 20 can be just as fun as any other level! It can be different, however. At least in my last campaign that went all the way from 1 to 20, there were some mindset changes that at least worked for me for all high-level play:
Reminds me of the gorilla cage the folks at Yorkers were supposed to have designed back in the 1950s. They were supposed to be trying to measure gorilla intelligence and designed it with 4 different escape routes of increasing difficulty to see where the gorilla got stumped. So, the first gorilla they put in is supposed to have found a fifth way out the scientists hadn’t recognized. So much for that test 😳
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
So far everyone has been talking about using Homebrew to challenge your party. What is the difference of sending a ancient dragon or a tarrasque to attack your party compared to a homebrew monsters. I had the understanding that those creatures were meant to be incredible challenging. Am not understanding some sort of mechanic?
A New DM up against the World
You can always simply Add More, rather than resort to homebrew. Challenging the PCs doesn't have to be an issue regardless. In my case (likely different for many tables) though, tier 4 games aren't really about tracking down and defeating whatever big baddy wants to square off. By that level the PCs are movers and shakers who can mobilize armies, run small countries or lead world-spanning organisations - what I put them up against are similar powers, not the biggest monster I can find in the MM or create myself. And those kinds of antagonists are homebrew pretty much by default.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Most "ancient dragons" and other high-level DMG/MM enemies have far fewer HP than they should. Wizards balanced the game such that a team of absolute numbskulls using absolutely no class resources could still beat high-level encounters just by spamming the Attack action and/or their basic fight cantrip, which means that any team of actual human beings who've successfully made it to high-level play are able to burn down the stock critters the MM gives people in two and a half rounds without any real threat. That and there's only so many times you can surprise a party with Suddenly Ancient Dragon before it becomes boring.
It's why knowing your own table is so important for high-level play - you have to tune challenges to the table far more so at higher levels than lower ones. I do not and never will subscribe to the idea that high-level PCs are Nigh-Immortal Demigods, or even 'movers and shakers' as Pang suggests. They can be if the play their cards well, but a team of players who enjoy adventuring, seeing the world and tasting of both its dangers and its riches aren't necessarily going to stop and start being a bunch of jumped-up bureaucrats because they dinged a few extra times. They'll seek out greater threats and sweeter treasures, or other people will start becoming envious of them and acting against the party.
Please do not contact or message me.
I will add: if you insta-level a team to level 20 and give them random or chosen magical items… you will not be able to challenge your players.
However - if you instead level them from level 10 (or lower) onwards, balance won’t be an issue. You’ll know exactly what they can and can’t handle as a DM. That, and the DM has to be super spicy on the rules here - your encounters have to be large, include minions, environmental effects, everything. A DM should not throw the team against a Tarrasque and say “lol level 20 is too easy”.
A Tarrasque-worshipping doomsday cult should be paving the way for the Tarrasque’s destruction, subverting city defenses and subjugating the heroes before the Tarrasque attacks. It should feature a multi-pronged assault featuring high level cultist mages, countless minions, multiple cities to defend at the same time, setting up defenses, parlaying with nearby allies to send help, a betrayal from the highest ranks of the alliance… you get what I mean.
Forget about CR at high levels. You need to design your games differently at higher tiers and some DMs just aren’t good at it.
I've noticed that the higher the level of the characters, the harder it is to have meaningless combats. This wouldn't be a problem but the game balance is designed around a large number of fights that individually are little challenge to the party.
That's fine. The explicit "in my case (likely different for many tables)" clause was put in there for good reason.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Cindrellic! MY DM, Can't wait to mop the floor with all your HB high-level monsters ;)
- The Ranger in the group