In my current campaign I'm creating a set of bosses for my party to face that are going to be extremely powerful disciples of a God they are fighting against. I was interesting is just making the Disciples level 20 Characters with all the feats of that class/subclass (like a lv. 20 Eldritch Fighter and a lv. 20 Bear Totem Barbarian). My question is how tough of a fight would that be for a party to take on one, and what level would they need to be for it to be a hard fight? There are 6 players in my party total but i'm assuming not all of them will be there every session (such is the curse of DnD). I'm also thinking of mixing some additional feats into their characters and raising some of their stats above a 20 since they've been around for hundreds of years (They're kind of undead). I'd also be willing to add some additional monsters if that will balance it out. I just don't have enough knowledge to know how powerful a level 20 Character is for a party and I don't want to make something way too strong or too weak. I'm interested to hear what some of you think.
While you can do this, 5e is not really balanced around character versus character fights. Disconnects between character damage output and character health pools make the balancing a bit hard—a difficulty that will be compounded by action economy problems when in an 6v1 fight.
Increasing the level 20’s health pool, giving them legendary actions and legendary resistance, and adding some lair actions are all ways you could make the fight more fair.
There also is a bit of a practical issue - a level 20 character has a lot going for them, and if you are not intimately familiar with the character sheet, it can be slow to run or end up being run in an inefficient manner. That is not an insurmountable obstacle, but you would have to balance your own desire to study a character being used for one fight against the risks of slow play, while balancing that against “is the risk worth the incremental increase of enjoyment over just running a complex monster?”
When making a npc equivalent of a level 20 character, I've tended to use the 'Monsters with Class Levels' rule in the DMG. The simplest method is to just increase the number of hit dice by 20 and add a few class features to the statblock. Ideally you want a boss with these class levels to be tankier than a normal player character, otherwise you don't get to show off the class features. The important thing to do is also keep the statblock as simple as possible, in order to make sure combat runs smoothly. I put my party of 4 level 10's against a Kobold with 20 levels of Rune Knight fighter and they handled it fine.
If you want to be even lazier, the Archmage, Archdruid, Warlord and Warlock of the Fiend can roughly represent a level 20 Wizard, Druid, Fighter and Warlock respectively with very minor tweaks needed.
A level 20, depending on build and gear, will probably kill a tier 1 party and be a major threat to a tier 2. However, it generally won't make for a good boss fight -- it will basically be "he one-shots one or more PCs, and then the rest of the PCs whale on him; repeat until one side or the other is dead".
I'd suggest heavily modifying the bosses so that they are simpler and more streamlined if you are going to run them for an encounter. Using the dungeons master's manual guide to monster creation you can create monster above CR 20 that use a lot of character abilities. This is kind of like how WOTC has a stat block for a bunch of different wizard types, which is also something a player can play as.
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In my current campaign I'm creating a set of bosses for my party to face that are going to be extremely powerful disciples of a God they are fighting against. I was interesting is just making the Disciples level 20 Characters with all the feats of that class/subclass (like a lv. 20 Eldritch Fighter and a lv. 20 Bear Totem Barbarian). My question is how tough of a fight would that be for a party to take on one, and what level would they need to be for it to be a hard fight? There are 6 players in my party total but i'm assuming not all of them will be there every session (such is the curse of DnD). I'm also thinking of mixing some additional feats into their characters and raising some of their stats above a 20 since they've been around for hundreds of years (They're kind of undead). I'd also be willing to add some additional monsters if that will balance it out. I just don't have enough knowledge to know how powerful a level 20 Character is for a party and I don't want to make something way too strong or too weak. I'm interested to hear what some of you think.
I’m not sure what the exact numbers would be but it would really depend on what level your party is.
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While you can do this, 5e is not really balanced around character versus character fights. Disconnects between character damage output and character health pools make the balancing a bit hard—a difficulty that will be compounded by action economy problems when in an 6v1 fight.
Increasing the level 20’s health pool, giving them legendary actions and legendary resistance, and adding some lair actions are all ways you could make the fight more fair.
There also is a bit of a practical issue - a level 20 character has a lot going for them, and if you are not intimately familiar with the character sheet, it can be slow to run or end up being run in an inefficient manner. That is not an insurmountable obstacle, but you would have to balance your own desire to study a character being used for one fight against the risks of slow play, while balancing that against “is the risk worth the incremental increase of enjoyment over just running a complex monster?”
When making a npc equivalent of a level 20 character, I've tended to use the 'Monsters with Class Levels' rule in the DMG. The simplest method is to just increase the number of hit dice by 20 and add a few class features to the statblock. Ideally you want a boss with these class levels to be tankier than a normal player character, otherwise you don't get to show off the class features. The important thing to do is also keep the statblock as simple as possible, in order to make sure combat runs smoothly. I put my party of 4 level 10's against a Kobold with 20 levels of Rune Knight fighter and they handled it fine.
If you want to be even lazier, the Archmage, Archdruid, Warlord and Warlock of the Fiend can roughly represent a level 20 Wizard, Druid, Fighter and Warlock respectively with very minor tweaks needed.
A level 20, depending on build and gear, will probably kill a tier 1 party and be a major threat to a tier 2. However, it generally won't make for a good boss fight -- it will basically be "he one-shots one or more PCs, and then the rest of the PCs whale on him; repeat until one side or the other is dead".
D&D is usually not balanced for pvp combat, and pvp suffers especially from action economy.
I'd suggest heavily modifying the bosses so that they are simpler and more streamlined if you are going to run them for an encounter. Using the dungeons master's manual guide to monster creation you can create monster above CR 20 that use a lot of character abilities. This is kind of like how WOTC has a stat block for a bunch of different wizard types, which is also something a player can play as.
Quokkas are objectively the best animal, anyone who disagrees needs a psychiatric evaluation