D&D 5e: Final Thoughts on High Level Adventuring

Whew! Level 20 and beyond.

In the out-of-context words of Jerry Seinfeld, "They did it! It's done. We have it now."

If you haven't seen my thoughts on the start of this high level campaign and wanted to start at the beginning you may want to check out my initial thoughts and my continued thoughts before reading on.

When I set out, I wanted to tackle the challenge of a running my first high level campaign by achieving the three goals of synergy (bringing together Out of the Abyss and Tyranny of Dragons), character (continuing to let my players' character develop and grow beyond being just murder-hobos), and consistency (staying true to the intention/mood of the modules I was adapting).  

PAST THIS POINT, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR BOTH OUT OF THE ABYSS AND TYRANNY OF DRAGONS. You've been warned!

1. Synergy: The modules I chose were well-suited to the task at hand; each one was thematically including dragons and demons without me having to change a thing. By upgrading the draconic threat to a vengeful Tiamat and by shifting some motivations for Demogorgon as a demon lord, this went smoothly through all five-to-six levels (15-20).
2. Character: This was, perhaps, a weak point. My players and I have all grown somewhat lax in the roleplaying department, and there are so many abilities on high level characters' sheets, and  so many intersections between them and the campaign world that it became a chore to keep them all developing at the same rate they did all the way back in levels 1-4. On the flip side, I was able to include a wide range of NPCs from their past. For example, at one point the party infiltrated a fiendish forge on a floating cube on the plane of Acheron. There, they discovered the enslaved souls of many dwarves and forgemasters they had met, lost, or even killed over the course of their adventures! Here was the cleric's cousin who didn't accept a resurrection; here was the near-immortal and ancient forgemaster who died after you helped him destroy an ancient evil; here was a legendary armor-smith whose work was so well-known he was believed a myth more than a man! These tie-ins let my players know that all of their exploits were going somewhere, and that their actions had lasting ramifications throughout Faerun. 
3. Consistency: This was the one I worried about the most. Conversion became harder and harder the more esoteric and high-level the enemies became. Third edition terms like "power-up suite" and "monster template" have little-to-no meaning in fifth edition, and the current Monster Manual is a bit light on the flavorful high level threats that plagued third edition's adventuring parties. As such, I had my work cut out for me finding and re-skinning existing monsters to fit the flavor of the modules. Some spells and abilities just flat-out don't exist in fifth edition, and a lot of the fights--particularly in the final dungeon--needed to be reworked entirely to make sense. Doing all of this without a proper understanding of what a party of third-and-fourth-tier fifth-edition heroes can do or survive or be challenged by involved a lot of intuition and a fair amount of math. In the end, I think I mostly guessed well. There were a few fights I felt I could have made more challenging and a few that I thought were too easy, but on the whole it evened out.

 As we moved through those first levels past 15, I realized that some things were very, very different at high levels of play. In my last blog post, I considered travel, rest, combat resolution variability ("swingy-ness"), and uncertainty.

1. Travel: It's shocking how quickly interplanar and teleport-based travel becomes the new normal. The only time "wandering monsters" or "travel encounters" are even a possibility is within a high-level dungeon--somewhere that clamps down on divinations and magical transportation spells. For example, as the PCs approached the final boss fight of the campaign, they stumbled onto some gigantic soul-sucking manta-ray-like extra-planar creatures. The warlock, sensing the danger she was in, cast blink. This has become common--and usually wise--practice from this character. In this case? The location of the dungeon was so exotic that there was no connection to the ethereal plane. Just like that, our warlock had wasted a turn in combat trying to escape without any effect. The greater the danger and the stranger the dungeon, the more high-level magical restrictions tamp down on the ability of the PCs to use their crazy abilities to circumvent dangers or succeed too easily.
2. Rest: My--and others'--thoughts on how short and long rests should be meaningful takes on a whole new meaning when PCs can often take shelter in invincible or inaccessible portable places (or even palaces).  My earlier intuition was correct. To make encounters meaningful, they either had to be so overwhelmingly strong as to challenge a party at full strength or else they had to be encountered in such a place or at such a time that it would be unwise or even impossible to retreat to a safe place afterward. The general was to accomplish this was with a time crunch: the longer the PCs delay, the stronger the bad guy gets or the more likely the PCs will be too late to stop the bad guy. Occasionally, creating a location that rewards going forward but punishes going back can be similarly challenging. I tried to employ both of these methods to keep things interesting for the party. 
3. Variability: I confess. Life domain clerics are, to use the old-school vernacular, "broken." The idea that a standard high level cleric character can pop a heal spell in an action that grants seven hundred hit points in an area effect heal is incredible. When you add onto that a cleric whose every heal spell does maximum healing, you're talking about a character who--as long as he's conscious--makes everyone else immortal for as long as he has spell slots. My PCs used every trick in the book and pulled out all the stops for the final fight--drinking potion cocktails, using concentration-buffs, and having expendable magic items at the ready--but I'm convinced that having a life domain cleric would have rendered the final fight less dangerous regardless. Looking back, the raw damage output from the final boss may have been too much for any other healer to keep up with! It certainly would have required a lot more cleverness and possibly even sacrifices from the PCs. In the end, the variability factor played a big role, but that role could have been much bigger without the party cleric!
4. Uncertainty: As I alluded to when discussing travel, I was shocked at how quickly high-level spells and abilities became the new normal (and our warlock's player would probably tell you how they never get tired of exploding bad guys' heads). Though there was still some tentativeness as the players felt out the extent of their abilities, as it became clear just how powerful they really were, they took to it like fish to water. Divine intervention? Sure! God can help us with this. Holy nimbus? That'll look nice when were crushing a dragon goddess! Stroke of luck? Use it early and "often" to achieve maximum criticals--especially when assassinating a mid-level enemy healer who had no idea she was going to die in one hit! And what's scarier than a warlock at level 20? An Eldritch Master who has twice as many spell slots. 

Overall, it was a really exciting ride. My players and I had a great time; I have no qualms about recommending this path to groups who finish a published adventure and want to go farther!

In fact, now that we've done it, I really don't understand Wizards' decision to not have at least one campaign that addresses these higher levels. I believe that a campaign written for, say, levels 11-20 or even 15-20 would be a rousing success! Maybe someday they'll give it a go. For now, we'll just have to rely on the Dungeon Masters' Guild to fill the void.

In the wake of this, I've been working on my own homebrew campaign (one teaser of which is already up on the Dungeon Masters' Guild). I haven't run a full homebrew in almost 10 years; as I attempt to bring back that style of DMing, I'll also be attempting to polish my personal notes into something that others can use. The success of The Vault of Eternity (at the time of this writing, it's hit silver!) has taught me that others value what I'm working on at least enough to put it out there.

Until next time, happy gaming!

D&D 5e: Continued Thoughts on High Level Adventuring

What a weird ride! My players have now conquered the first half of their post-15 campaign (i.e. they've completed one of the two modules I updated). (For my initial thoughts, check out the first post in this series.)

There are some very sharp contrasts between running adventures below 15th, and running adventures after 15th. Here are a few of the things I've noticed:

1. Travel is completely different. When PCs have daily or routine access to teleportation items, plane shift, and eventually gate, travel is no longer an issue. (For example, even if you don't have access to a teleport spell, two plane shifts or two gates can serve the same function! Yes, it takes two higher level spell slots, but these PCs have those slots!) This changes how PCs conceive of an adventure--and certainly how the DM needs to. No longer is distance in any way related to the number of encounters or the time it takes to journey; characters looking at going from their mountain stronghold into a nearby city and characters looking to travel from that same stronghold to a city on a different continent are likely to consider exactly the same magical--and instant--forms of travel to get there. Even if the characters don't know where they want to go, they have access to a whole bevy of new spells (and/or items and/or NPC contacts) who do know: legend lore, scrying, commune, contact other plane, divination, find the path--each offers another window into the unknown, and having access to a combination of them solves a lot of riddles and mysteries without ever leaving home! The end result is that even if they didn't know where they needed a to go, one hint or clue can lead them to the right place to begin their investigations in earnest within perhaps an hour of game-world time. Gone are the early adventuring days where a single clue would form the basis of a month's adventure to a distant hermit to find an answer to a long-forgotten problem.
2. Rests are completely different. This is somewhat a corollary to the ideas on travel: because PCs are so incredibly mobile, there are very few times when the right move is not to simply retreat to their magically fortified (and possibly well-staffed) home base whenever they need to rest and recharge. Even if going all the way home is not an option, the PCs may have access to spells or items which are even better than going home. Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (level 8) presents an opulent version of a home away from home, but even a Leomund's Tiny Hut (level 3) can get the job done, offering PCs time to rest and recharge for either a short or a long rest. In addition to the travel changes removing a lot of the "random encounters" on the road, the rest protection options remove many of the dangers of "taking a rest." Only time remains to consistently work against these high level PCs!
   
3. Fights are extremely swingy. High level monsters hit often and they hit hard. High level PCs
   
   do the same. Similar to the first few levels of adventuring, it becomes really important that the party tanks (or those with high hp) are taking the hits, while the squishier members of the party are free to control the field or deal damage. Spells that cause an opponent to lose an action or which limit the kind of actions they can take become useful (in my opinion) for the first time. Causing a goblin boss in a low level fight to sacrifice an action is no big deal; an action may have done some damage, but realistically he probably has surrounded himself with a horde of lower level goblins who can deal almost as much damage in a round! On the other hand, causing a dragon, an eight-armed sword-fighter, a high level warlord, or a wizard with 9th level spells to lose an action is tremendous. Each one can do a tremendous amount of damage (or exert a lot of control) in a single round, and forcing a delay tilts the action economy into the hands of the PCs rather nicely. PCs at this level are even more resilient than I had first believed they would be; even when fighting a variety of opponents--each of whom, on their own, would be a worthy challenge for the PCs--the wide range of abilities and synergies the party has access to made them incredibly powerful. The big boss fight at the end of the adventure was spectacular, but when the dust settled, the PCs could probably have done another fight of equal caliber and survived. Then again, it's possible that the PCs could have made one poor choice and the whole fight would have become a rout.
   
4. Even experienced players (and DMs) feel uncertainty. A D&D player from any edition knows what to do when they encounter magic missile, cure light wounds, a locked door, or a new +1 longsword. They've seen all of this before in a dozen, even a hundred iterations. But how many times have players had access to wish? When you're dealing with entirely virgin territory, it's natural for all people involved to feel a bit uncertain. This is both the fun and the terror of the high level campaign. All of my players made some amazing choices and did some epic, heroic feats over the course of the adventure. One that sticks in my mind is when our cleric prayed to his god (Moradin) for intercession to resist the heat of the unholy furnace the party was headed into. Because his character is such a high level, the odds were significantly better than they would have been normally, and a good roll meant that Moradin granted the prayer! The fire resistance the party picked up was (in my opinion) the difference between an easy boss fight and a potentially deadly one. Without a wizard, this party managed to magically solve a problem they didn't legitimately have a spell or a magic item for. That is high level adventuring at its finest.

As this party of characters moves into what will likely be their final adventure together, they're all
level 18. Those high level abilities most players only dream about their characters having are a reality--or just one or two short levels away. For me, it's going to be a challenge to challenge them. High level encounters each have to be set pieces; no more random bandits or wandering monsters, no more minor problems or careless issues. For these characters to be involved, the threat to the world has to be real, imminent, and disastrous!

And it is.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on high level adventuring as my players take their characters to the brink and maybe a bit beyond!