Title pretty much spells it out.  I was talking to our DM the other night, as part of deciding if multi-class or maybe a switch of tradition was viable for my Monk.  He said he generally doesn't like doing anything much past 10, as the characters are by then "God-like" and finding challenging combat is near impossible.  Now my thoughts are that around 10, our characters are really getting into the "good stuff" and it's a chance to really show what we got.  Being denied this is disappointing, IMO, as a part of my reasoning for choosing the Monk and his tradition was for access to the highest end stuff.

I also DM a bit and in doing so (I am a n00b DM by the way) found the characters out-leveled the content I had planned for the one-shot dungeon crawl.  It was basically just a crawl through the caves, slaying room after room of foes, pure, raw fun.  As they started easily crushing their foes, I did the simplest fix, added HP and some AC (where it made sense) which helped balance the fights a bit better.  As they progressed, some foes unexpectedly cast spells, healed allies and seemed to arrive in larger groups.  This all managed to keep the challenge level of fights a bit more in line with what I had intended.  Now with a break, I am reworking the rest, to add tougher enemies, many with special abilities or resistances, that will further challenge the group.

From my perspective, a campaign CAN run as long as the DM and players want and the challenges can be puzzles, timed situations, NPC interactions (need to make Cha checks or something) as well as combat.  Mind you the combat is my favorite bit, from ether side of the table, so again, some effort in researching the monster guides, maybe some tweaking of stats to make the foes a true challenge.  In all, my opinion is that things can be as challenging as one wants, if the effort is put in.

Wondering what the veterans feel, though.  Do you think it's better to wrap it up before the characters get godly, or do you prefer the rewards of being mega-badass? (or watching the group do so, if you are DM)

I am currently doing my first DMing stint since AD&D, and GMing since the 1990s, and my party is nearing 6, so I can't personally speak to high level content. However, I will make the following observations:

First, the majority of published work does not go past level 13 or so (a spare few go to 15) -- the majority are 1-10 or 1-12. Therefore, any DM who wants to use published materials, unless wanting to use Mad Mage, can't do higher level content unless they are planning to massively mod the adventure. Anyone who is "following the book" is going to be stopping the campaign by level 12 or so. Because that's what all the books do. Consequently, there are few published examples out there, again other than the Mad Mage which is just a dungeon crawl, to show other DMs how to do high level content. Without anything to draw from, it makes sense that many DMs would be hesitant to go into uncharted waters. This is a major factor in why many DMs stop before the truly high level game.

Second, you mention a 1-shot that you had to up-scale. What level did you up-scale them into? Were they level 3s who got to level 4 unexpectedly? There is a HUGE difference between upscaling level 3 content to level 5, and upscaling level 7 content to level 17. The types of things you report doing, like raising HP and AC, are not going to help against Wish, Banishment, Plane Shift, and the like that come into the high level game. 

Third, some of the "other challenges" you mention are going to be completely negated by high level spells. That maze you created for them to wander through isn't going to work when they can just use Teleport to get to the end of it in one shot. The timed situation may not work so well if the Wizard can cast Time Stop and just act for free while everyone else is frozen. And making them do Cha checks doesn't work so well when the NPC has been hit with Dominate Person.

The number and magnitude of abilities that come into play in the high-level game make it so that many of the challenges that work in the single-digit levels can be "spell casted" or "special ability'ed" away quite easily. And although it is certainly possible to continue to make challenges at the upper level, these are no easy things to invent. It's MUCH easier to think up problem-solving challenges for low level PCs.

Even my group, at 5th level... eying what they will get by 7th level, I'm already starting to think man, how I am going to keep challenging these guys? Combat challenges you can do, to some degree, if you throw enough battles at them and prevent long rests. Eventually they will run out of high level spell slots and uber-abilities and you can force a more conventional battle. But even there, you are doing an awful lot of work to make them fight a conventional battle the way a 3rd level party would... vs. just having a conventional battle set up against a level 3 party. And that's at 7th level. I dunno what's going to happen at 17th...

I think level 10 is a little low for a cut-off but DND definitely becomes completely unbalanced at anything above 15th and that's because CR is so messed up as a system. A cr: 30 Tarrasque or Tiamat which by the CR calculations in the DMG should be a very deadly encounter for 5 level 20 characters is a cakewalk. The issue with high-level play is that by the calculations in the DMG high-level play doesn't provide any challenges at all and if you go by Xanathar's guide it's even worse as they recommend a CR: 23 for a challenge for 5 level 20 characters. Therefore running high-level games requires you to eyeball everything which means if you air on the side of caution your encounters are going to be easy and if you don't then it's either going to be too hard or too easy. It can be done but it makes it so much harder on the DM that most DMs just don't want to play at that level. 

I've had an experience with a good level 20 oneshot and even then it wasn't as good as it could have been because in order to challenge us there was a puzzle which forced us to take over 100 damage each to pass which was BS and made us mad, the DM had to minimize kiting possibilities because we had one character who made a broken kite build (which made their character way weaker than everyone else's which didn't help the mood), and even then the final boss was a cakewalk and the guardian creature almost TPKed us do to my character being stunned due to temporary madness (we were trying to kill Orcus in his home plane) and the guardian creature casting imprisonment on everyone else but the kite character. Making high-level play challenging isn't fun for the DM and other than the power fantasy it's not fun for the players either. 

The difficulty of balancing high level isn’t the problem for me; it’s more practical aspects. 
For one, players start to get tired of their characters. Couple that with the stream of new subclasses and races — at least a couple every years — and a lot of people get antsy to try new stuff. 
The other issue is pacing. If you start with the idea of going 1-20, you can end up with times when you’re basically out of story and just grinding up levels. Or you end up like a TV show with 9 episodes worth of plot stretched out over 23 episodes season, so you get these unsatisfying filler arcs just to fill space. 

Third, some of the "other challenges" you mention are going to be completely negated by high level spells. That maze you created for them to wander through isn't going to work when they can just use Teleport to get to the end of it in one shot. The timed situation may not work so well if the Wizard can cast Time Stop and just act for free while everyone else is frozen. And making them do Cha checks doesn't work so well when the NPC has been hit with Dominate Person.

This has been the greatest challenge for our group. Combat is actually the easiest thing to scale up to maintain challenge. High level spells were made with the express intent of bypassing many kinds of social and exploration challenges. You basically have to learn all the spells and craft things that specifically cannot be solved by them, which is tedious, restricting and kind of against one of my beliefs that a DM should not specifically and intentionally confound player abilities. The other thing you can do is have really long adventuring days to wear down those spell slots, but long days have different effects on different classes and this can feel a bit unfair to those impacted the hardest.

Hey there,

In one of the current campaigns I run, the characters are level 11.  We are almost to 40 sessions and started at level 5.

I was talking to our DM the other night, as part of deciding if multi-class or maybe a switch of tradition was viable for my Monk.  He said he generally doesn't like doing anything much past 10, as the characters are by then "God-like" and finding challenging combat is near impossible.  Now my thoughts are that around 10, our characters are really getting into the "good stuff" and it's a chance to really show what we got. 

First of all, it is GREAT to talk to your DM about these things during character creation etc, even in a session 0.    Planning a great build for level 10 only to find out that the campaign is planning on ending around level 8 is a bummer.

Here's my advice for higher level games.

• Use the time the party spends leveling to work on various aspects of your GMing :)
• Throw encounter rating out of the window. Also throw out the concept of 4-6 resource-draining encounters per adventuring day.  Use the leveling up process to develop your intuition as to what challenges the characters.
• Accept that some encounters that you carefully planned are going to get destroyed by a single spell.  Relax and let those moments shine. As an example, in a session, the characters were slightly off the prime material plane, in my version of Shadowfell.  They got  the item they needed and needed to get it to safety asap while in the middle of a heated battle with a shadow dragon and it's allies.  In a potential sacrifice for the team, the cleric banishment the character with the item, sending them safely back to the prime material plane, and thwarting the big bad boss (the other characters had to complete the combat and escape, but they knew they had succeeded their mission).
• The game changes from CAN  the party do something (ie close this portal in the mountain) to SHOULD they do something (wait, if we close this portal, that means these other adversaries will have more of an advantage).
• Be developing your improv skills.  High level spells and abilities provide the party with incredible narrative control.  This is where understanding your antagonists, and your situations is critical.  As MCDM (paraphrased) says,  "You don't have to have any idea how the characters will react, sit back and watch and let this be a blank space that they fill in with their goals and motivations."
• You don't have to have any idea how the party will solve whatever problem. You don't even really need a solution.   Let them use their creativity and abilities and then go with what seems interesting as fun.   You just have to be consistent.
• For scaling monsters, you'll definitely want to add HP and possible resistances/immunities,  but more than that,  you'll need ways to even out the action economy without just resorting to Counterspell spam.   Playing the counterspell game regularly quickly becomes unfun (at least to me).  For more complex encounters,  I like viewing them in phases, not dissimilar to a world of warcraft boss.  The key here is to be flexible on the trigger conditions and don't be afraid to just really bump up health on the monster so that the phases happen.  Only you know how much health the opponents have.
• Have one shots or play some other games from time to time.   Let the players experience some different character/class combos so they don't get burned out playing the same character for so many sessions.

If I were planning a high level campaign, I would probably start the characters around level 8/9 and have a few sessions there where you can better figure out how the group plays and what the various interests/motivations are.  Starting from level 1 can be quite an investment in time.

Hope some of the above helps :) 

To the OP... I'd say, don't knock the decision not to do the higher level game till you've tried to DM it yourself and seen what happens.

I have not yet tried it... I am planning for my campaign to "go all the way" (to or near 20), depending on what the PCs do and presuming we all stay together to play the game every 2 weeks the way we have been since March. One never knows if a campaign will go the distance. I'm planning and trying to... but it will be a huge amount of work and I am not sure I will be able to keep it up. The story can theoretically go for another in-game year or so... we'll just have to see what happens.

But I would not knock a DM for saying he or she wants to stop at 10 or 12 or something. I can totally understand why one would. And I readily acknowledge I might want to myself, as we get to that range. I'll let you know when it happens -- see you in another 6 months or so, LOL.

To be honest, speaking of the next 6 months, what I really wanted was a campaign that would last a really long time IRL, so that we could play D&D together and really sink our teeth into characters and world. We have done that already, and more is on the way. So if we went say another 6 months and stopped at level 9, I would not shed that many tears, since we'll have accomplished what I wanted and run a year+ long campaign. Anything more than that is gravy.

Not specific to D&D, but I've seen that the best way to hamper a high-level party is through role-play - get them to decide that they have to take the "hard" route to a solution because of their own beliefs or existing relationships.

However, this obviously doesn't work for the RP-light groups.

One of my games started at level 5 and is currently level 16-18.

It isn't really any different from any other game. Only now the PCs have the desire to go and establish strongholds and such. Building up the money and resources or looking for an abandoned keep have been some themes. 

The numbers get bigger but you get a lot more flex as far as encounters go. The higher the level, the more pages you can use from the bestiary. 

In general the problem with high level D&D is that high level magic is incredibly disruptive; pretty much the only edition of D&D that scaled well past level 10 was 4th edition (though it still bogged down in the upper teens), and that's because it used a totally different paradigm.

No. I personally just loathe the extra complexity that comes with high levels, and I find the low-magic, street-level stories of low levels more compelling. Not to mention the lethality! Some of my more power-gamey players start to totally outshine everyone else given enough time, and there's no real threat of death. While I've done up to level 10 for a group or two who really wanted to, I prefer to cut it off around level 5.

I love campaigns more 10-20 than 1-10.  1-10 is the same old garbage everyone ever talks about, 11+ is when your characters really shine.  The monsters scale perfectly well, the problem is DMs not understanding the monsters well enough to play them properly.  Some things that come to mind:

- Banishment works both ways. If the PCs are on another plane, suddenly you get to turn it against them.

- Moral quandaries - choices that require PCs to evaluate 2 evils, is great.  Then make them live with the consequences.  They might make enemies of entire cities.

- Always *always* have minions in every battle.  A Lich without an army of Undead and traps?  An ancient dragon without a cult protecting them?  Preposterous. 

- Play smart.  Counterspells, legendary reactions at the perfect times, legendary saves for the right spells. Swarm one player, don’t spread it out.  

- Please for the love of all that is holy, hit PCs when they’re down relentlessly from level 1-10 or you’ll end up with coddled PCs at 11. 

- Don’t be silly handing out hordes of wealth and magic items from level 1-10 either.  Houses, downtime, wars, equipment, magic items, high level spells, crafting all cost money and upkeep - gold is a great balancing act that pays off by creating a more economy-driven campaign later on for those players interested.

I’ll add more as I think of them. 

Quote from Lyxen >>

Quote from Pantagruel666 >>

In general the problem with high level D&D is that high level magic is incredibly disruptive; pretty much the only edition of D&D that scaled well past level 10 was 4th edition (though it still bogged down in the upper teens), and that's because it used a totally different paradigm.

 
While I agree with what you said about 4e, I don’t necessarily agree about the game not scaling well. I have played at really high level including epic levels for decades using every edition and all of them scaled properly if you had the right players and were willing to do two things:

1. Refuse to allow disrupting options into the game: the core always scales fairly well, it’s almost always the options and combinations of additional options that create problems.

 Plenty of super disruptive stuff is core. There's ways of compensating for the various 'destroy plot' and 'bypass all obstacles to directly gank the boss' that's present in high level D&D, but it's a bunch of work and basically means all credible opposition is spellcasters.

Quote from NaivaraArnuanna >>

While I've done up to level 10 for a group or two who really wanted to, I prefer to cut it off around level 5.

You are really missing out.

You are leaving out a slew of things that your parties will never see if they only go to 5. 

 Plenty of super disruptive stuff is core. There's ways of compensating for the various 'destroy plot' and 'bypass all obstacles to directly gank the boss' that's present in high level D&D, but it's a bunch of work and basically means all credible opposition is spellcasters.

Yes and I have to say, I am concerned about how this is all going to play out in my campaign at the upper levels. I know one player in particular desperately wants to get into the high-level game, but I have the feeling that I'm either going to have to introduce a bunch of "plot armor" type contrivances to make it possible to even challenge them once they get to 7th+ level spells, or it's going to all have to be RP challenges, which kind of defeats the point of being high level. After all, you've got the high level spells now, you want to use them (and have them work) -- else why have them?

Yet allowing some of them to work is going to break many plots... and I am not sure the plots I have in mind will be resilient to those plot-destroying features.

I find that the DM has to be on their game more to run high level content well. The DM needs to have a reasonable idea of what the players can do as levels progress and the options available to them so that they can create fun and exciting encounters. However, the complexity and interactions increase almost exponentially when each class gains new abilities and there are multiple players in a game. This makes it tougher for the DM to track everything.

However, perfect tracking isn't required. Each scene the DM sets isn't the final one - there can always be something more. If the players come up with a neat trick or spell that unexpectedly "solves" a situation then the players usually cheer and have a lot of fun - which is the point of the game. If every encounter is like that then the DM is not doing their job, but with a reasonable idea of what the players can do, the DM will have 50-75% of encounters work out more or less as intended.

My highest level character is level 17. I have a level 16 and two or three other tier 3 characters as well as many tier 2 and tier 1 characters. Game play can be loads of fun in each tier of play in 5e.

However, one of the groups I am running are some friends I've known for decades who all started on AD&D when (I have to admit) higher level campaigns seemed much more difficult to run. Character balance and contributions from individual characters could be all over the place and typically balanced out only based on whatever magic items the DM threw their way. These folks are used to very slow level progression that was common in AD&D as DMs often didn't like running higher level content for some of the reasons expressed in this thread. So far I have found 5e suffers much less from these issues than previous editions (though I didn't play 4e - so no comment on that one).

Anyway, having started with AD&D myself, I find 5e to combine most of the good things from the "old days" with a better balanced system that should easily allow fun play through the end of tier 3 and likely into tier 4 as long as the DM prevents abuses like coffeelocks or "misuse" of simulacrum. I haven't run much higher level content myself though, the party I am running in another campaign has only reached level 11 and I am adjusting the difficulty of content in that published campaign to match the character levels a bit. So we will see how it goes but overall either playing or DMing  at higher levels hasn't been an issue so far in 5e (not like previous versions).

I believe that to be a good dm you have to not only do starter level campaigns but higher level campaigns so that your characters get a good healthy balance of both. Also it is incredibly funny to watch players make extremely dumb moves with there new found power.

So, did you?

Quote from Lyxen >>

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Quote from NaivaraArnuanna >>

While I've done up to level 10 for a group or two who really wanted to, I prefer to cut it off around level 5.

 
You are really missing out.

You are leaving out a slew of things that your parties will never see if they only go to 5.

 
Some people prefer it that way, and why not if that's what their table wants (although I think that if it's danger and low fantasy intrigue that you want, other systems are much better to play that way), but I completely agree with you that a huge part of what the game could be is left out. The thing is that, however, to bring it out, it requires quite a bit of work as well.

 I could never get all my player stories told in that short a time, I slow burn and build, dropping hints and letting story breathe. Finishing a campaign at level 5 feels like I have barely got Frodo to Rivendell :) 

As long as this Thread is getting necro’ed I’ll give 2 copper.

I definitely agree with what Xalthu and Brewsky were saying, your DM honestly just has to know what they’re doing, if they mindlessly follow the crud Xanathar’s  is telling ’em and give a 11th level party CR 12 or 13 monster with only 95 HP, Yeah, they’re gonna wipe it out in a round or two.

Play to the player’s weaknesses, the melee monk will have tough time with that venom Troll that sprays flesh-searing acid at him every time he lands a punch.

CR is a wack system that will not always be right, always check the Monster’s HP/Damage/Number of attacks before you use it to make sure it will pose a threat.