How (and Why ) to run High-Level D&D
Everyone knows D&D breaks down at levels and is basically unplayable, right? After completing three campaigns going from levels 1-20, I feel strongly that high-level D&D is an awesome experience that everyone should experience at least once.
Lessons Learned: High-Level D&D
Having run three campaigns from level 1 to 20 (and two that went to level 16), I would say that I’ve had my fair share of experience with high-level play and have some observations that I think others may be interested in. Before we start, I should note that my games tend to have a lot of powerful magic items and special abilities that make characters more powerful than just their level. I balance this by running a very deadly and combat-heavy game.
Summary
Overall, I don’t think high-level D&D is that different from low-level D&D. The biggest difference is in the story and the world-shaking consequences the party is dealing with. Combat takes longer and is a little harder to balance, but the core game and dynamics stay the same. Aaron’s turn still takes forever and Ella’s awesome crit still makes the entire table jump up. Despite the issues, I’ve found low-level play doesn’t compare when it comes to the crazy what-the-fuck moments where I need to step away from the table to think about what happens next. Those moments combined with the thrill of running iconic D&D bad guys are just too exciting.
My best advice:
- Think about your desired pace and set up a leveling system that keeps the group on track.
- Engage with your players frequently about what their plans are to avoid being surprised
- Give your players very difficult encounters that they can avoid or escape from. Make them responsible for balancing the fights against their resources and abilities.
- If you don’t enjoy homebrewing and reskinning monsters, grab a 3rd party supplement of high CR bad guys.
- Use multiple session adventures that only take up a day or two of in-game time.
How to get a group to level 20
Obviously, the first thing you need is a group that meets regularly. There is plenty of advice online about how to keep a group together. My method (beyond getting lucky with great players) is to have a large party and play without people. My normal group is 7 people and we play just about every week unless we’re missing 3 people. Not only does this mean we play often and get to advance through adventures at a decent pace, but it also means the group is less likely to dissolve thanks to momentum.
Now for the actual game advice, try to spend only 2-3 sessions per level. I often see stories online about groups that have been playing weekly for 4 months and are only level 5. Of course, people have different pacing preferences, but if you want to get all the way to Tier 4 (levels 16+) play, you really need to keep moving.
Now you may be asking “Matthew, how do you level up your players every other session?”
Great question. I’ve found that having a few large combats tends to work better than lots of smaller fights. My players usually spend at least 15 minutes after a fight talking about healing, what to do next, general table talk, etc. Having fewer fights minimizes time spent on this and maximizes time actually engaging in combats and meaningful roleplaying time. Before anyone brings up the adventuring day, my high-level sessions tend to only cover a few hours of in-game time. An adventuring day is usually 3-4 very hard encounters with a short rest or two.
Milestone vs Experience points
Milestone leveling has become increasingly popular in recent years, but I think experience points create a better sense of accomplishment for players. If I award a large amount of quest XP, which is all milestone leveling really is, my players tend to find the level-up less earned than if they get the experience from completing an epic battle. GMs also tend to overestimate how much the party can get done in a session, so using milestone leveling can sometimes cause the levels to drag by.
This isn’t to say that experience is objectively better than milestone leveling. Milestone leveling has its own advantages. For example, it offers more control to the DM, and depending on the group, maybe a greater sense of pride and accomplishment to the players.
Again, it all depends on how quickly you want to progress. I would encourage you to think about your story, decide how quickly you want the group to level up, and then use the system that best fits your pace. Just make sure your level-ups feel earned and not rushed.
The Good
At high levels, you can get some really awesome moments for both the players and the DM. There have been countless times I have presented the party with an impossible task (for example saving the cleric’s God from dying) and they have pulled out a brand-new spell and combined it with an item from 7 levels ago that no one remembers to save the day. Obviously this can happen at all levels of D&D, but spell casters tend to have less impactful spells at low levels. On the martial side, the maximum damage these classes can do at high levels is crazy, but they’re very unlikely to actually do it. This means that when the fighter finally lands 3 crits in one turn dealing 100 damage, and then action surges, the whole table goes crazy. At lower levels, there is less variance (fewer attacks and damage dice) so a fighter is more likely to reach their full potential for that level which makes the maximum less exciting.
Another benefit of high-level games is that you have more player investment. Some players may grow bored with a character if they have played them for a while, but by the time you’ve reached high-level play, there is usually a clear endpoint to the campaign that they want to see their character through to. For example, if the players know that once they kill Vecna they get to make a new character and play something different, they may be more willing to hold on to their current characters, especially if their character has a personal interest in killing the bad guy. Investment in the story and campaign means that a group is less likely to get tired and want to try a new campaign or even drop the game (you do need to get to high-level play first though.)
The Bad
The worst part about high-level play is without a doubt the time it takes a single turn to happen. Not only do monsters and PCs get more abilities, but they also tend to be more complex. To make things worse, defensive abilities start to be more common. So not only do you need to resolve the action but then resolve the defensive reaction(s) to that action. A great example of this is the fighter’s indomitable feature. I have everyone roll a Dex save and the fighter rolls a 10. He now needs to debate if wants to roll again to try and get the 15 he needs to pass. By the time he decides, everyone has forgotten how much damage the attack did and we need to either find it or roll again.
Another issue is that you do need to spend more time homebrewing monsters. There are more options for low CR monsters, as there should be, but this can make finding the right monster a challenge.
This isn’t that difficult since 5e monster design is pretty basic, but you can rarely just pull straight out the Monster Manual and find an appropriate creature for the adventure you’re planning. Reskinning is huge here, but it can only do much.
High-Level Villains
Playing high-level villains is definitely something I struggle with and I’m guessing you might as well. It’s somewhat easy to put yourself in the shoes of an evil wizard seeking world domination or a knight on a quest for revenge. Those are human ideas that we are able to connect with on some level. But how do you think like Orcus or Vecna? How can we understand Orcus’s drive to turn the whole world into zombies or some such nonsense? There are two parts to this: the villain’s plots and their motivations.
As far as plotting goes, no one expects you to plan and plot like Vecna. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to pull your punches or give your players a knockoff Vecna experience. There are a fair number of ways to make your enemies mechanically challenging and awesome. One method I have used in the past is making the villain’s end goal incomprehensible to the players. The plan may appear simple, and the players may initially believe that they understand it, but they don’t. Maybe your big bad guy is fighting against a hidden god and he needs to kill millions of people to fuel his war. This gives him a plan that the heroes want to stop (killing people) but also gives you tools to change the story as you see fit (if they stop him from killing people maybe now he is seeking an item to kill the god).
Determining villain motivation is something I still haven’t found a great answer to. Like most of D&D, stealing from other media is a great tool, but it’s hard to give an evil goddess complexity when she thinks in alien ways. If you have any ideas, let me know!
Other Questions
There is a lot to talk about regarding high-level D&d and rather than ask you to read a collection of my random thoughts, I have decided to comment on some of the most common questions and concerns I see.
High-Level Combat & Balance
One big concern I see people bring up when talking about high-level D&D is how difficult it is to balance combat. My general approach is to create very difficult encounters (2-3x deadly using experience budgets) and then allow the party to self-balance by using their resources. At this point in the game, the party should have plenty of powerful magic items or ways to either escape combat or safely rest after a battle. This means I can prepare four deadly encounters and if the party is low on HP and resources after the second battle, they can burn a high-level spell to get to safety and rest before the next encounter. The trick is to give them a reason not to do this after every encounter. My go-to is the threat that the bad guys will also prepare for the next encounter with the heroes. This is my preferred method because while it is a costly price, the party can usually afford it. If the threat is too urgent, (e.g. an NPC’s life is in danger) they might push on past the point of safety and get in over their heads. That can be dramatic and awesome but I wouldn’t recommend doing it every adventure.
Martial Classes vs Spellcasters
Another common topic is the power of spellcasters at higher levels compared to martial characters. I don’t think this is a real problem. In my experience, the players playing martial classes always enjoy the high-level play because of how much damage they get to do. Between legendary resistances and magic resistance, spell casters struggle to match martials when it comes to damage per round. One way I encourage and support this is by giving martial characters awesome magic items that increase their damage and giving spell casters magic items that help them regain spell slots (e.g. rod of the pact keeper or other homebrewed items). This means they get to cast more spells, which is the point of playing a spellcaster, but their spells aren’t any more powerful so they still are balanced with the martials.
Adventure Design and In-Game Time
Let’s revisit the issue of pacing. It’s very easy for a farmer’s son with some sword skill to become the greatest swordsman in the land over the course of a few weeks. It doesn’t take that many “adventuring days” to level up in 5e. This isn’t an issue if you’re going from a local hero to dragon slayer and the campaign ends, but can the whole world really be saved by someone who was struggling to cast a basic spell two months ago?
When I run a high-level game, I try to make it take two to three years of in-game time to reach level 20. This exact amount of time isn’t important and is really just a personal preference. The important advice here is downtime.
I like to use downtime whenever possible to give the players a chance to do epic things and extend the in-game passage of time. At high levels, this gets tricky. If you offer a year of downtime, an 18th-level wizard might decide to cast true polymorph once a day for 350 days to create an army of treants. For this reason, I decrease the amount of downtime players get at high levels.
If you compare my low-level and high-level adventure designs, you’ll see some significant differences. At lower levels, I typically focus on long drawn-out quests that send the party to different parts of the setting making allies, getting loot, and generally doing typical D&D stuff. At higher levels, say 15-20, I shift to focus more on the villain’s Big Plan. I like to give the party a time-sensitive goal with no obvious solution (like stopping the approaching undead army). Something that keeps the heroes busy and makes them feel awesome and distinct from one another. Different party members should be contributing in different ways. Finally, I introduce a short-term threat or opportunity that they rush off to deal with, usually using teleportation magic. Whatever the situation is, it usually takes 2-3 sessions, but should only cover about a day of in-game time.
World Bending Magic
One intimidating aspect of high-level play is how powerful spellcasters become. This causes two issues: it gives the players huge amounts of control over the world and it can be hard to plan for. I’ll start with the world-building piece. What happens when a level 20 wizard says he wants to take over the country and declare himself the king? What peasant wouldn’t want such a powerful person protecting them from the bugbears at their borders? And more importantly, who’s going to tell the wizard that can meteor swarm their city to ashes no?
There is no way around the epic power of high-level D&D spellcasters and you need to accept that they can break your world. If you don’t want your players to have that kind of power, I would suggest avoiding high levels or making level 20 NPCs more commonplace to balance the players out (though this does open up a whole other can of worms). In my setting, level 20 characters are basically unheard of except for the PCs. This means that when we get to high-level play, the players start to wield magic far beyond what’s ordinary for the setting.
If we accept that players have world-bending magic, how do we plan for it? How do we create adventures that aren’t easily sidestepped by a few spells? The best advice I have is to ask your players what they want to do. Give them the problem statement (there is a planar rift in the mountains) and ask what they plan to do to fix it (wind walk to the mountains and do magic). If you ask them at the end of the session, you can spend time between sessions preparing for their plan. For some DMs, this might be the normal way you run D&D, but if you (or your players) prefer to have more DM-driven adventures this might be a new idea. I like this method because it allows you to avoid preparing a journey through the mountains only for the party to use wind walk and just get there. You can also ask them to let you know if they change their plans.
Now I don’t want to mislead anybody; this only does so much. Things still come up mid-session and I need to wing stuff all the time. This is just what’s worked well for me. One tactic I haven’t deployed yet but have considered using is retconning. If the party does something you weren’t prepared for and forced you to make a snap judgment, I think it’s fair for you to say “Hold on guys, what I said the last session is wrong. It’s actually like this.”
Try to avoid invalidating their actions and achievements, but in my experience, most players are understanding if you meet them halfway. Maybe instead of the wizard being king, they can control the capital and will have to make peace with or destroy the heir to the throne who has gone to get allies in the west. This lets them feel accomplished, but lets you keep some of the order of your world.
Is High-Level Play Worth Doing Twice?
When I was halfway through my second 1-20 campaign I started to wonder if this one would be as cool. We already saw high-level play, what else is there to do? Would wishes, banishing smites, and power word: kills be less exciting this time around? I can now say, after running 3 different games at level 20, that it is just as cool the last time as the first time. With so much time spent with the characters and seeing them struggle at low levels, getting to experience them breaking the world is awesome. Fighting classic D&D monsters like Vecna and Orcus isn’t something you get used to.