this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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I've heard that high level D&D sucks ever since I got into D&D back in 2e, so I don't know if 5e truly sucks, or it's just continued player sentiment toward something that's always been, IMO, misunderstood.
Personally, I fucking love epic level shit. Starting at 20 and using the epic level book to go further is awesome. The problem I see, though, is DMs quite often don't think epic enough. They think too small scale and it sucks for everyone because
5e at high level sucks because WOTC didn't bother to actually test any of it. They admitted they didn't test past level 10 and their inclusion of magic items is so bad that the recommendations for how many to include show the devs are terrified of them; you get so very few by official recommendations.
Save or Suck spells make higher level 5e (and 5e in general) a huge PITA to plan encounters for when players can just get lucky and end things outright. Magic items don't have a power level listing, just a rarity doing double duty that is wildly inaccurate. Class balance is shit: martials are boring. All they do is swing the weapon most of the time and very few class abilities really alleviate that. Spellcasters are so vastly more powerful and fun that multiclassing is way more popular than it should be.
Monsters in 5e are boring. Most of them are just bags of hit points that swing. Very few have bonus actions or reactions and the ones that do are often just "parry: increase AC once". They came out with gem dragons 2yr ago and they gave them all the SAME bonus actions: shapeshift and misty step. It's like they don't even bother to try, which is evident in recent releases.
/rant. But seriously, I love high level D&D. You can really raise the stakes. I'm DMing a level 12 5e campaign now and my primary way to make encounters interesting is two-fold: firstly is 3rd party content to get monsters that are actually interesting. Secondly I create objectives that aren't just "murder monster". I just had a bunch of literal street children hit my party with a net trap and arrow that makes them drop their items that said children tried to steal and run away with. 2 got away but they were able to find the hideout and defeat the boss. Actual stakes besides just getting killed.
Epic narratives have their place, but if you follow the 5E rules they don't work well mechanically.
Fighting actual Gods in D&D should be fairly comfortable for a party of level 20 characters, which is part of the problem. The way the scaling of character power compared to enemy power works, fighting a group of goblins on the dirt road as a level 1 party is magnitudes more challenging than fighting an actual God as a level 20 party.
Is that not the point? To go from struggling against the lowest foes to being equal to the toughest? Sometimes I wonder if the disconnect is between the game and the narrative. I'm in the, seemingly, minority camp of favoring the game side. The narrative is merely the vessel allows the game to flow and not the other way around. I construct sandboxes rather than linear stories. The stories come from the players and how they want to interact with the world, the consequences of their actions, and so on. As a DM, I provide the world at large, what's currently happening in that world, and the moderation of the rules to facilitate the players telling their own stories, instead of having one I am merely telling them. I personally think this brings more life to the game. Players can become immersed more easily when they are thinking about what they are trying to do, and the dynamics of multiple players pulling the story this way and that just makes for a more compelling narrative.
It sounds like 5e is also just not balanced on the game side. Which was my problem with 4e, too and why I haven't really tried 5.
Usually it is the vast variance in magic items from one DM to the next that makes it very hard the rules set. Then of course the DM must work out what to do about the magic items they gave out. And of course the variance in skill and style of the players...
Min/Max players are crap at higher level. Role Players are great at any level. DMing at low level is fairly easy. DMing at high level is a bitch at best.