Why is it so hard to find DM's to run high level / epic games. I run 3 high level games myself, replete with homebrew gear, feats etc. Its fun the players enjoy it (just ask my rogue that has a set of +3 daggers that do 5d4+3 that can cast disintegrate once per long rest as a bonus action ..... omg when he gets a crit + sneak attack + disintegrate he's happy as happy can be!) and the DM has to be on their toes or that kind of shenanigans will break your encounter.
I do not get the aversion to this. After you have been playing a while its the next logical step - how many times can you find - "you go in the sewers and see mean rats" interesting? "O wait a min now your level 3 you have this amazing +1 short sword ... lets make sure we get the math right." (sarcasm)
Or is it just because the rules get complicated - the math gets complicated - and the players that tend to like those games will always argue if there is any grey area in their favor in the way a rule could be read.
I read someplace that most players don't often get beyond level 12 - that's almost 1/2 the game they are missing.
We need more DM's running high level stuff - starting with heroic stat array - and a willingness to homebrew. - imo. -
Do not even get me started on the difficulty of finding a decent epic game.
Two problems: 1) they are hard to balance and 2) many challenges that people like in DnD games are no longer able to challenge the players.
1) At higher levels different builds will have insanely different power levels. That can make it frustrating for players, and also hard for the DM to design encounters and dungeons that pose an appropriate challenge for the group.
2) Unless you put high level players into a world where everyone is insanely powerful, they will never be threatened by NPCs or the law because they'll just overpower everyone. Traps, locked doors, locked chests, hidden secrets, environmental puzzles, traveling, ... high level players probably have 10 spells and plenty of slots to bypass them all. Basically, combat against insanely powerful monsters is pretty much the main way you will challenge them, and finding other ways to challenge them and make them use their skills will be hard.
None of that is to say that you can't have a good high level campaign, though. But I think it shows why they are rare.
I think the main reason is campaign length and the general longevity of campaigns (how long they last).
Generally, I find players like high-level games, but they want to "earn" the levels and get there using a character they played and developed over a nice long healthy campaign. I think the aversion is to starting with high-level characters and that is the same for DM's, I think most DM's don't necessarily have a problem with high-level play per say, but they don't want to start a campaign there.
There is the issue of D&D becoming a Power Fantasy after around level 12+ and that does create some perceived balance issues, but it's not really a "fact" that there are balance issues, this is just the perception you could say (in my opinion). High-Level play is about characters who are complete bad asses and they are not bound to the same abstract reality as low level characters. Essentially by level 12+, you are Marvel Super Hero level power (power fantasy) and that is actually almost an entirely different style of play.
I think its fun and i agree with you, I don't think there is anything inherently problematic with high-level games, balance is a fleeting concept at best and there is an illusion that the game is more balanced when the "numbers" are smaller, but wether you have 100 hit points and monsters do 20-50 damage per hit or you have 10 hit points and the monsters do 2-5 damage, the game is pretty much the same. In fact, i would even argue that higher-level games are far more lethal simply because you more often take "big hits" that can one-shot you in higher-level play.
Usually when I create campaigns I think in terms of the prescribed Tiers of play, thought I see Tiers 3 and 4 a bit differently. Tier 3, Masters of the Realm I see as players taking on the roles of kingdom builders. This often when I will introduce player land ownership, dominion, building castles, becoming rulers and dealing with politics, mass combat stuff like that. Tier 4, I see sort of as "End Game" stories, this is where I will usually introduce a world ending story, some epic level story involving demons, demi-gods or something like that where the players have to essentially save the world. Usually it involves the player characters coming out of adventuring retirement and going on one final quest to save the world.
Its not an exact formula, but its kind of the general way this goes down. In terms of "time spent" though. Tiers 1-3 take up most of the campaign, Tier 4 is usually quite short, generally a big build up to a final confrontation, so it tends to amount to 3-4 sessions of play in the final moments of the campaign.
I know in my groups by the time we get to about level 10 everyone is starting to get a bit bored and wants a new character and new story so there's just not an appetite to go any higher than that
balance is a fleeting concept at best and there is an illusion that the game is more balanced when the "numbers" are smaller, but wether you have 100 hit points and monsters do 20-50 damage per hit or you have 10 hit points and the monsters do 2-5 damage, the game is pretty much the same. In fact, i would even argue that higher-level games are far more lethal simply because you more often take "big hits" that can one-shot you in higher-level play.
Great comment all around and I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. I just wanted to add something to this part:
The reason why I say that higher level play is harder to balance is not only because the numbers are bigger, but because the variance is bigger too. To use your example, in low level play those 2-5 damage are most likely to weakest character doing 2-3 damage and the strongest doing 3-5 damage. In the high level campaign, there is a good chance that the 20-50 damage come from the weakest player doing 10-20 damage and the strongest player doing 50-70 damage. That means that the players may feel very different in power. Also, party composition matters more, which means the DM has to really tailor the encounters to the party, which is less necessary in lower levels.
Again, doesn't meant high level play isn't feasible, just a bit harder for the DM to make fun.
It took a trip to a level of Hell to challenge our party of six 20th level characters in 2014 edition. DM was having a hard time balancing out the power of the monsters and the choices were getting pretty slim. It was either a cake walk for us or we ran the very real possibility of TPK depending on dice rolls.
1. Lots of people, myself included, don't care to play out a power fantasy, have no interest in pretending to be superman or demi-gods. I much prefer more grounded games that are mirrors to real life just with all the boring bits like doing laundry or taxes cut out. IMO this is especially common at older tables, as there is a definite shift in psychology as people age with the super-hero fantasy being much more a youth mentality. Since older players now make up about 50% of D&D's market there is a significant number of such tables.
2. Games made up of younger players often don't last long enough to reach high levels. Campaigns at highschools or universities often fall apart as members graduate and move on to other things. Now the rise in virtual play slightly mitigates that, but still coordinating a game across 3 different timezones is pretty challenging.
3. Combat isn't that fun in D&D. The vast majority of a player's time during combat is them sitting there waiting while it is someone else's turn. That's usually not very fun. As characters and combats get more and more complex people take longer and longer turns as they have more abilities to choose between, and those abilities take longer to adjudicate. Longer turns == more boring combat.
4. Designing encounters & monsters gets to be more and more work which busy, working DMs don't have time to do. You can't just throw a RAW CR 20 monster against a party of level 20 characters and expect a satisfying encounter. Being required to HB absolutely everything is a ton of work that lots of DMs don't have time to do.
Just relative to high level combat -- I guess I see it a bit differently - its not about HB everything its about taking stock monsters and just making them hit harder or giving them a few lair skills or having the terrain also become the enemy. Combat when done correctly is not about sitting around waiting for your turn - often times its about figuring out the best thing to do on your turn given the 5 different things threatening the group. perfect example I had a DM in my epic game start us 300ft from the encounter the valley was an anti teleport zone so no DD no teleport no misty step etc. We had to use terrain for cover when possible or take huge ballista attacks off the castle walls before the fight even started (L25 game)
The group thoroughly enjoyed the encounter and at the end of the session when we thought we won the castle came alive and we learned it was a sentient structure that was now going to try and kills us - mind you this is after a lot of heavy duty spells where blown on the 2 mini bosses that where resistant to basically everything in the courtyard (while we where killing groups of soldiers and destroying ballista's on the castle walls). So next session we are starting at below 50% spells slots and trying to kill a sentient castle to save a princess. Fun times.
Yes I am sure the DM put a lot of work into that - but I also put a lot of work into my encounters to make them tactical and fun. So I really appreciate when I am in a game and the DM takes that extra effort. I honestly find it one of the best parts of DM'img (coming up with tactically fun encounters that are skewed 55-45 in the players favor but can and have gone the other way depending on the dice)
check out the epic level handbook. its a little outdated but still a good read ifn you want to port those titans from 3.5 to 5e
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I had a DM in my epic game start us 300ft from the encounter the valley was an anti teleport zone so no DD no teleport no misty step etc. We had to use terrain for cover when possible or take huge ballista attacks off the castle walls before the fight even started (L25 game)
Or you just walk a little ways away and the Druid uses Wind Walk and Pass without Trace and you fly past the combat up in the sky effectively hiding amongst the clouds and sneak down to change back in a dark corner of the castle hidden by Pass without Trace. Or you all step back, they cast Conjure Animals to give you all mounts with 80ft movement speeds that can Dash every round to get you there in 2 turns. Or they use Animal Shapes to turn you all into inconspicuous mice and you just run up to the walls and through a sewer pipe into the castle.
Or the Wizard/Sorcerer/Bard/Warlock turns the whole party invisible, you walk through the valley undetected and sneak in a back door. (bonus points for Fly + Invisibility on the whole party if you have two such casters so you don't even need to use a door). Or they use Seeming to disguise all of you as inconspicuous travellers / merchants / soldiers of the castle and you walk up without getting attacked.
Or you just have a sniper duel with long range spells and ranged attacks: fall prone to give the ballista DA behind a rock so you have 3/4 cover, then stand up, fire EB with the extended range invocation/feat or a longbow with SS, or spells like ice storm.
It's not really "high level play" if the DM just arbitrarily bans all the high level abilities that trivialize the encounter. That's just playing low level D&D with bigger numbers.
The same can be said for: "mind you this is after a lot of heavy duty spells where blown on the 2 mini bosses that where resistant to basically everything in the courtyard", ooh wow you deal twice as much damage as a 10th level character so now the bosses just take 1/2 damage and deal 2x as much damage as their 10th level counter parts - that's just Red-Queening. Combat is not more exciting if the enemies deal 100 damage vs your 1000 hit point than if they deal 10 damage vs your 100 hit points or 1 damage vs 10 hit points.
The group thoroughly enjoyed the encounter and at the end of the session when we thought we won the castle came alive and we learned it was a sentient structure that was now going to try and kills us. So next session we are starting at below 50% spells slots and trying to kill a sentient castle to save a princess.
Don't you find that immersion breaking? If the castle was sentient why did it wait to do anything until after you killed all the other creatures inside of it? Why would the castle favour the current occupants over your party? Rather than trying to kill the castle your party should just talk to it if it is sentient and convince it to leave you alone, at level 25 you should easily be able to succeed on a DC 30 Persuasion check. Or just cast Charm Monster or Suggestion on it.
Also doesn't seem like raiding that entire castle was actually a challenge despite you guys seeming to do it the hardest possible way if you're only down 50% of your spell slots.
I would note that part of the reason for wanting to level up characters organically (which means the game often ends before it reaches very high level) is because D&D by design gets more complex as level increases, and a gradual advancement process lets you learn the complexity gradually. However, high level D&D also has a bunch of stuff (all related to high level spellcasters) that, if taken literally, requires this massive chess game of offense vs defense that's a big headache for the DM and boring to any players who don't like that particular style of play, so most of the time you need a tacit agreement to leave the gamebreaking stuff to outside-of-game thought experiments.
At which point you just run into the problem that high level D&D has messed up scaling, so legit high level challenges are enormous slogs (up through level 5 most PCs are glass cannons, but after that level defense generally outscales offense, and people's actions also get more complex, so tier 4 combat is just going to take a lot longer than tier 2).
Right now if somehow my level 5 party would win initiative against an adult white dragon, the dragon would be dead in two rounds. That isn't factoring in the New Weapon Masteries. If the players can position themselves where the breath weapon only takes one or two of them out, they are good. But the breath weapon can do anywhere from 12-96. Its breath weapon is its only attack that would scare my level 5 party. They will kill the dragon long before it has any chance of killing them. To limit the breath weapon you only need to be circling the dragon up close. Weapon Masteries could prevent the dragon from flying away.
So a CR 13 creature can be killed by level 5 PCs with almost no magic items. (They have like a +1 weapon). While in an actual game, its unlikely all the PCs will go before the dragon. I think it still illustrates the problem, that PCs quickly become more powerful than the monsters they are going to be facing. Which means, more monsters are needed. at Level 11 or 12, I had an encounter go all 4 hours of the game session. So with only 4 hours to play, if we did the 6-8 encounters per day, we would be looking at probably an entire month of play that is still just combat encounters.
The game is designed for Dungeon Crawls, and selling books. So player options become more and more powerful, which the new 5e makes even worse. and the solution is to have more and more encounters to remove player resources. which works great for dungeon crawls. Doesn't work so great when you are taking on a singular dragon or in a location that really can't or shouldn't have 8 encounters.
Right now if somehow my level 5 party would win initiative against an adult white dragon, the dragon would be dead in two rounds. That isn't factoring in the New Weapon Masteries. If the players can position themselves where the breath weapon only takes one or two of them out, they are good. But the breath weapon can do anywhere from 12-96. Its breath weapon is its only attack that would scare my level 5 party. They will kill the dragon long before it has any chance of killing them. To limit the breath weapon you only need to be circling the dragon up close. Weapon Masteries could prevent the dragon from flying away.
So a CR 13 creature can be killed by level 5 PCs with almost no magic items. (They have like a +1 weapon). While in an actual game, its unlikely all the PCs will go before the dragon. I think it still illustrates the problem, that PCs quickly become more powerful than the monsters they are going to be facing. Which means, more monsters are needed. at Level 11 or 12, I had an encounter go all 4 hours of the game session. So with only 4 hours to play, if we did the 6-8 encounters per day, we would be looking at probably an entire month of play that is still just combat encounters.
The game is designed for Dungeon Crawls, and selling books. So player options become more and more powerful, which the new 5e makes even worse. and the solution is to have more and more encounters to remove player resources. which works great for dungeon crawls. Doesn't work so great when you are taking on a singular dragon or in a location that really can't or shouldn't have 8 encounters.
5e has a monster design problem, mainly with how the action economy works among other things. This problem was identified a long time ago, but this edition of the game is going on 10 years with little response from WotC on it. I hope Wizards of the Coast has learned a thing or two about monster design in that time and produces a better Monster book, but the good news is that there is MCDM's Flee Mortals.
This book addresses the three key design issues with the official D&D monster manual.
* Singular monster action economy problems * Boring bags of hit points problem * Key word reference problem
It does this by creating action-oriented monsters, eliminating keywords and giving you executable powers right with the stat block and creating diverse versions of monsters so you always have several Goblins, Orcs... etc.. to pick from. oh and minions, thank god for minions!
I can honestly say that this book, saved 5e D&D. It makes fighting monsters fun again.
The monsters are tough as hell too. A CR 13 Dragon in Fleet Mortals you might be able to defeat if you have a party of 4 13th level characters... maybe... if they are hyper-optimized and play super tactical. A 5th level party might not even get to act before they are all killed even if they win the initiative.
5e has a monster design problem, mainly with how the action economy works among other things.
Action economy is grossly overestimated as as problem. The main problems are just bad numbers (damage and durability don't go up fast enough with CR) and abilities that make damage/toughness irrelevant because it's unable to engage (e.g. all the schemes for killing the Tarrasque at low levels).
5e has a monster design problem, mainly with how the action economy works among other things.
Action economy is grossly overestimated as as problem. The main problems are just bad numbers (damage and durability don't go up fast enough with CR) and abilities that make damage/toughness irrelevant because it's unable to engage (e.g. all the schemes for killing the Tarrasque at low levels).
CR is fine if you are playing at an average table with no magic items. The problem is that people don't understand that that is what CR represents and then they try to use CR as it is against hyper-optimized characters with half a dozen Very Rare or Legendary magic items and then complain it isn't challenging. No it isn't and it isn't supposed to be for that use case.
5e was designed around the principal that magic items are entirely optional and if your character gets one they will be more powerful and find the game easier than if they didn't have them. Likewise, CR was designed for new players and new DMs playing for the first time and not having their unoptimized basic characters get murdered in the first encounter.
CR works fine at what it was designed to do. It's just that people want it to do something other than what it was designed for.
My answer would be that as the power levels increase, so do the levels of book keeping, management, even bureaucracy. The game get's bogged down in 5 players staring for 30 minutes each at their sheet, trying to come up with how to best utilise their bajillion options. No one can really remember all the things they can do.
Bottom line: It's boring. All the things I love about RPG's sort of fade out from levels 7 to 11 or so, and beyond that, it's just a different game that I don't want to play.
This may be somewhat of a minority view, by the way? My group mostly works that way, and the PbP games I see also do, but my group has been together for 30+ years, and it makes sense for us to have similar tastes - and PbP games just seem to carry high levels poorly.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
CR is fine if you are playing at an average table with no magic items.
CR is fine if you're playing with no magic items or spellcasters. That's not an average table.
By "Spellcasters" I think you mean Wizards. Because druids, clerics, warlocks and sorcerers really aren't a problem, there's a handful of broken spells most of which are exclusive Wizard spell list. But things like Simulacrum, Planar Binding aren't cast at average tables, nor are the broken combos of things like Forcecage + Sickening Radiance, or Prismatic Wall + Reverse Gravity. Regular players don't set out to try to break the game, so most of them don't find those combos.
CR is fine if you are playing at an average table with no magic items.
CR is fine if you're playing with no magic items or spellcasters. That's not an average table.
By "Spellcasters" I think you mean Wizards. Because druids, clerics, warlocks and sorcerers really aren't a problem, there's a handful of broken spells most of which are exclusive Wizard spell list. But things like Simulacrum, Planar Binding aren't cast at average tables, nor are the broken combos of things like Forcecage + Sickening Radiance, or Prismatic Wall + Reverse Gravity. Regular players don't set out to try to break the game, so most of them don't find those combos.
Or the players do find the spells but don't bother with the super broken combos because that's not their idea of fun.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I don't; in fact, they're not the problem as far as numbers go (they are often the problem as far as making the numbers irrelevant). The problem is the scaling of healing; a level 20 party is around 3x the offense of a level 5 (which is about right for CR) but around 10x the defense, and that's mostly because of healing.
Why is it so hard to find DM's to run high level / epic games. I run 3 high level games myself, replete with homebrew gear, feats etc. Its fun the players enjoy it (just ask my rogue that has a set of +3 daggers that do 5d4+3 that can cast disintegrate once per long rest as a bonus action ..... omg when he gets a crit + sneak attack + disintegrate he's happy as happy can be!) and the DM has to be on their toes or that kind of shenanigans will break your encounter.
I do not get the aversion to this. After you have been playing a while its the next logical step - how many times can you find - "you go in the sewers and see mean rats" interesting? "O wait a min now your level 3 you have this amazing +1 short sword ... lets make sure we get the math right." (sarcasm)
Or is it just because the rules get complicated - the math gets complicated - and the players that tend to like those games will always argue if there is any grey area in their favor in the way a rule could be read.
I read someplace that most players don't often get beyond level 12 - that's almost 1/2 the game they are missing.
We need more DM's running high level stuff - starting with heroic stat array - and a willingness to homebrew. - imo. -
Do not even get me started on the difficulty of finding a decent epic game.
Two problems: 1) they are hard to balance and 2) many challenges that people like in DnD games are no longer able to challenge the players.
1) At higher levels different builds will have insanely different power levels. That can make it frustrating for players, and also hard for the DM to design encounters and dungeons that pose an appropriate challenge for the group.
2) Unless you put high level players into a world where everyone is insanely powerful, they will never be threatened by NPCs or the law because they'll just overpower everyone. Traps, locked doors, locked chests, hidden secrets, environmental puzzles, traveling, ... high level players probably have 10 spells and plenty of slots to bypass them all. Basically, combat against insanely powerful monsters is pretty much the main way you will challenge them, and finding other ways to challenge them and make them use their skills will be hard.
None of that is to say that you can't have a good high level campaign, though. But I think it shows why they are rare.
I think the main reason is campaign length and the general longevity of campaigns (how long they last).
Generally, I find players like high-level games, but they want to "earn" the levels and get there using a character they played and developed over a nice long healthy campaign. I think the aversion is to starting with high-level characters and that is the same for DM's, I think most DM's don't necessarily have a problem with high-level play per say, but they don't want to start a campaign there.
There is the issue of D&D becoming a Power Fantasy after around level 12+ and that does create some perceived balance issues, but it's not really a "fact" that there are balance issues, this is just the perception you could say (in my opinion). High-Level play is about characters who are complete bad asses and they are not bound to the same abstract reality as low level characters. Essentially by level 12+, you are Marvel Super Hero level power (power fantasy) and that is actually almost an entirely different style of play.
I think its fun and i agree with you, I don't think there is anything inherently problematic with high-level games, balance is a fleeting concept at best and there is an illusion that the game is more balanced when the "numbers" are smaller, but wether you have 100 hit points and monsters do 20-50 damage per hit or you have 10 hit points and the monsters do 2-5 damage, the game is pretty much the same. In fact, i would even argue that higher-level games are far more lethal simply because you more often take "big hits" that can one-shot you in higher-level play.
Usually when I create campaigns I think in terms of the prescribed Tiers of play, thought I see Tiers 3 and 4 a bit differently. Tier 3, Masters of the Realm I see as players taking on the roles of kingdom builders. This often when I will introduce player land ownership, dominion, building castles, becoming rulers and dealing with politics, mass combat stuff like that. Tier 4, I see sort of as "End Game" stories, this is where I will usually introduce a world ending story, some epic level story involving demons, demi-gods or something like that where the players have to essentially save the world. Usually it involves the player characters coming out of adventuring retirement and going on one final quest to save the world.
Its not an exact formula, but its kind of the general way this goes down. In terms of "time spent" though. Tiers 1-3 take up most of the campaign, Tier 4 is usually quite short, generally a big build up to a final confrontation, so it tends to amount to 3-4 sessions of play in the final moments of the campaign.
I know in my groups by the time we get to about level 10 everyone is starting to get a bit bored and wants a new character and new story so there's just not an appetite to go any higher than that
Great comment all around and I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. I just wanted to add something to this part:
The reason why I say that higher level play is harder to balance is not only because the numbers are bigger, but because the variance is bigger too. To use your example, in low level play those 2-5 damage are most likely to weakest character doing 2-3 damage and the strongest doing 3-5 damage. In the high level campaign, there is a good chance that the 20-50 damage come from the weakest player doing 10-20 damage and the strongest player doing 50-70 damage. That means that the players may feel very different in power. Also, party composition matters more, which means the DM has to really tailor the encounters to the party, which is less necessary in lower levels.
Again, doesn't meant high level play isn't feasible, just a bit harder for the DM to make fun.
It took a trip to a level of Hell to challenge our party of six 20th level characters in 2014 edition. DM was having a hard time balancing out the power of the monsters and the choices were getting pretty slim. It was either a cake walk for us or we ran the very real possibility of TPK depending on dice rolls.
Many reasons:
1. Lots of people, myself included, don't care to play out a power fantasy, have no interest in pretending to be superman or demi-gods. I much prefer more grounded games that are mirrors to real life just with all the boring bits like doing laundry or taxes cut out. IMO this is especially common at older tables, as there is a definite shift in psychology as people age with the super-hero fantasy being much more a youth mentality. Since older players now make up about 50% of D&D's market there is a significant number of such tables.
2. Games made up of younger players often don't last long enough to reach high levels. Campaigns at highschools or universities often fall apart as members graduate and move on to other things. Now the rise in virtual play slightly mitigates that, but still coordinating a game across 3 different timezones is pretty challenging.
3. Combat isn't that fun in D&D. The vast majority of a player's time during combat is them sitting there waiting while it is someone else's turn. That's usually not very fun. As characters and combats get more and more complex people take longer and longer turns as they have more abilities to choose between, and those abilities take longer to adjudicate. Longer turns == more boring combat.
4. Designing encounters & monsters gets to be more and more work which busy, working DMs don't have time to do. You can't just throw a RAW CR 20 monster against a party of level 20 characters and expect a satisfying encounter. Being required to HB absolutely everything is a ton of work that lots of DMs don't have time to do.
Just relative to high level combat -- I guess I see it a bit differently - its not about HB everything its about taking stock monsters and just making them hit harder or giving them a few lair skills or having the terrain also become the enemy. Combat when done correctly is not about sitting around waiting for your turn - often times its about figuring out the best thing to do on your turn given the 5 different things threatening the group. perfect example I had a DM in my epic game start us 300ft from the encounter the valley was an anti teleport zone so no DD no teleport no misty step etc. We had to use terrain for cover when possible or take huge ballista attacks off the castle walls before the fight even started (L25 game)
The group thoroughly enjoyed the encounter and at the end of the session when we thought we won the castle came alive and we learned it was a sentient structure that was now going to try and kills us - mind you this is after a lot of heavy duty spells where blown on the 2 mini bosses that where resistant to basically everything in the courtyard (while we where killing groups of soldiers and destroying ballista's on the castle walls). So next session we are starting at below 50% spells slots and trying to kill a sentient castle to save a princess. Fun times.
Yes I am sure the DM put a lot of work into that - but I also put a lot of work into my encounters to make them tactical and fun. So I really appreciate when I am in a game and the DM takes that extra effort. I honestly find it one of the best parts of DM'img (coming up with tactically fun encounters that are skewed 55-45 in the players favor but can and have gone the other way depending on the dice)
check out the epic level handbook. its a little outdated but still a good read ifn you want to port those titans from 3.5 to 5e
Pronouns: Any/All
About Me: Godless monster in human form bent on extending their natural life to unnatural extremes /general of the goose horde /Moderator of Vinstreb School for the Gifted /holder of the evil storyteller badge of no honor /king of madness /The FBI/ The Archmage of I CAST...!
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Fun Fact: i gain more power the more you post on my forum threads. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
Or you just walk a little ways away and the Druid uses Wind Walk and Pass without Trace and you fly past the combat up in the sky effectively hiding amongst the clouds and sneak down to change back in a dark corner of the castle hidden by Pass without Trace. Or you all step back, they cast Conjure Animals to give you all mounts with 80ft movement speeds that can Dash every round to get you there in 2 turns. Or they use Animal Shapes to turn you all into inconspicuous mice and you just run up to the walls and through a sewer pipe into the castle.
Or the Wizard/Sorcerer/Bard/Warlock turns the whole party invisible, you walk through the valley undetected and sneak in a back door. (bonus points for Fly + Invisibility on the whole party if you have two such casters so you don't even need to use a door). Or they use Seeming to disguise all of you as inconspicuous travellers / merchants / soldiers of the castle and you walk up without getting attacked.
Or you just have a sniper duel with long range spells and ranged attacks: fall prone to give the ballista DA behind a rock so you have 3/4 cover, then stand up, fire EB with the extended range invocation/feat or a longbow with SS, or spells like ice storm.
It's not really "high level play" if the DM just arbitrarily bans all the high level abilities that trivialize the encounter. That's just playing low level D&D with bigger numbers.
The same can be said for: "mind you this is after a lot of heavy duty spells where blown on the 2 mini bosses that where resistant to basically everything in the courtyard", ooh wow you deal twice as much damage as a 10th level character so now the bosses just take 1/2 damage and deal 2x as much damage as their 10th level counter parts - that's just Red-Queening. Combat is not more exciting if the enemies deal 100 damage vs your 1000 hit point than if they deal 10 damage vs your 100 hit points or 1 damage vs 10 hit points.
Don't you find that immersion breaking? If the castle was sentient why did it wait to do anything until after you killed all the other creatures inside of it? Why would the castle favour the current occupants over your party? Rather than trying to kill the castle your party should just talk to it if it is sentient and convince it to leave you alone, at level 25 you should easily be able to succeed on a DC 30 Persuasion check. Or just cast Charm Monster or Suggestion on it.
Also doesn't seem like raiding that entire castle was actually a challenge despite you guys seeming to do it the hardest possible way if you're only down 50% of your spell slots.
I would note that part of the reason for wanting to level up characters organically (which means the game often ends before it reaches very high level) is because D&D by design gets more complex as level increases, and a gradual advancement process lets you learn the complexity gradually. However, high level D&D also has a bunch of stuff (all related to high level spellcasters) that, if taken literally, requires this massive chess game of offense vs defense that's a big headache for the DM and boring to any players who don't like that particular style of play, so most of the time you need a tacit agreement to leave the gamebreaking stuff to outside-of-game thought experiments.
At which point you just run into the problem that high level D&D has messed up scaling, so legit high level challenges are enormous slogs (up through level 5 most PCs are glass cannons, but after that level defense generally outscales offense, and people's actions also get more complex, so tier 4 combat is just going to take a lot longer than tier 2).
One word
Combat
Right now if somehow my level 5 party would win initiative against an adult white dragon, the dragon would be dead in two rounds. That isn't factoring in the New Weapon Masteries. If the players can position themselves where the breath weapon only takes one or two of them out, they are good. But the breath weapon can do anywhere from 12-96. Its breath weapon is its only attack that would scare my level 5 party. They will kill the dragon long before it has any chance of killing them. To limit the breath weapon you only need to be circling the dragon up close. Weapon Masteries could prevent the dragon from flying away.
So a CR 13 creature can be killed by level 5 PCs with almost no magic items. (They have like a +1 weapon). While in an actual game, its unlikely all the PCs will go before the dragon. I think it still illustrates the problem, that PCs quickly become more powerful than the monsters they are going to be facing. Which means, more monsters are needed. at Level 11 or 12, I had an encounter go all 4 hours of the game session. So with only 4 hours to play, if we did the 6-8 encounters per day, we would be looking at probably an entire month of play that is still just combat encounters.
The game is designed for Dungeon Crawls, and selling books. So player options become more and more powerful, which the new 5e makes even worse. and the solution is to have more and more encounters to remove player resources. which works great for dungeon crawls. Doesn't work so great when you are taking on a singular dragon or in a location that really can't or shouldn't have 8 encounters.
5e has a monster design problem, mainly with how the action economy works among other things. This problem was identified a long time ago, but this edition of the game is going on 10 years with little response from WotC on it. I hope Wizards of the Coast has learned a thing or two about monster design in that time and produces a better Monster book, but the good news is that there is MCDM's Flee Mortals.
This book addresses the three key design issues with the official D&D monster manual.
* Singular monster action economy problems
* Boring bags of hit points problem
* Key word reference problem
It does this by creating action-oriented monsters, eliminating keywords and giving you executable powers right with the stat block and creating diverse versions of monsters so you always have several Goblins, Orcs... etc.. to pick from. oh and minions, thank god for minions!
I can honestly say that this book, saved 5e D&D. It makes fighting monsters fun again.
The monsters are tough as hell too. A CR 13 Dragon in Fleet Mortals you might be able to defeat if you have a party of 4 13th level characters... maybe... if they are hyper-optimized and play super tactical. A 5th level party might not even get to act before they are all killed even if they win the initiative.
Action economy is grossly overestimated as as problem. The main problems are just bad numbers (damage and durability don't go up fast enough with CR) and abilities that make damage/toughness irrelevant because it's unable to engage (e.g. all the schemes for killing the Tarrasque at low levels).
CR is fine if you are playing at an average table with no magic items. The problem is that people don't understand that that is what CR represents and then they try to use CR as it is against hyper-optimized characters with half a dozen Very Rare or Legendary magic items and then complain it isn't challenging. No it isn't and it isn't supposed to be for that use case.
5e was designed around the principal that magic items are entirely optional and if your character gets one they will be more powerful and find the game easier than if they didn't have them. Likewise, CR was designed for new players and new DMs playing for the first time and not having their unoptimized basic characters get murdered in the first encounter.
CR works fine at what it was designed to do. It's just that people want it to do something other than what it was designed for.
CR is fine if you're playing with no magic items or spellcasters. That's not an average table.
My answer would be that as the power levels increase, so do the levels of book keeping, management, even bureaucracy. The game get's bogged down in 5 players staring for 30 minutes each at their sheet, trying to come up with how to best utilise their bajillion options. No one can really remember all the things they can do.
Bottom line: It's boring. All the things I love about RPG's sort of fade out from levels 7 to 11 or so, and beyond that, it's just a different game that I don't want to play.
This may be somewhat of a minority view, by the way? My group mostly works that way, and the PbP games I see also do, but my group has been together for 30+ years, and it makes sense for us to have similar tastes - and PbP games just seem to carry high levels poorly.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
By "Spellcasters" I think you mean Wizards. Because druids, clerics, warlocks and sorcerers really aren't a problem, there's a handful of broken spells most of which are exclusive Wizard spell list. But things like Simulacrum, Planar Binding aren't cast at average tables, nor are the broken combos of things like Forcecage + Sickening Radiance, or Prismatic Wall + Reverse Gravity. Regular players don't set out to try to break the game, so most of them don't find those combos.
Or the players do find the spells but don't bother with the super broken combos because that's not their idea of fun.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I don't; in fact, they're not the problem as far as numbers go (they are often the problem as far as making the numbers irrelevant). The problem is the scaling of healing; a level 20 party is around 3x the offense of a level 5 (which is about right for CR) but around 10x the defense, and that's mostly because of healing.