Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/03/dds-latest-module-vecna-eve-of-ruin-and-the-trouble-with-high-level-adventures.html
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Oo, does the party find the Head of Vecna?
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I’m working on a conversion of this module to the Scooby Doo universe, titled
Velma: Eve of Ruin
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Back when I played in the '80’s I remember someone wrote a short scenario that forced high-level characters into retirement. It was pretty well understood that god-like powers just weren’t that fun to play.
I played a really fun series of games once where all our characters started at Level 0–basically peasants, and after falling into a few short and light adventures we chose our professions based on whatever skills we’d developed.
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He argues that truly exciting and challenging narratives can emerge at any level of play, driven by personal stakes and character-driven plots.
Back when I used to DM, by far the things the players enjoyed more was the world building stuff than the actual combat, and in some cases, the dungeon diving. One player was basically only motivated by a “go in, save person, get out” mentality when it came to dungeoning, which was fine, because at that time in my life I was deep into creative writing. It worked out well for both of us - he needed an escape from what I later learned was a bad home situation and I got a chance to do something I was interested in and having fun with.
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I have been playing, and DMing dungeons & Dragons since 1985. Only recently, we finished in 2021, have I ever been involved with a high level campaign. It had been a goal of mine to take characters from level 1 all the way to level 20 and beyond in a campaign. I was the dungeon master for this campaign that spanned from D&D 3.5, to D&D 4, a brief foray into dungeon world before D&D 5.0 came out, and finally finishing up with D&D 5.0. The entire campaign lasted 7 years in real time. The group of guys I played with were from all over the United States and we played over zoom. I will absolutely agree that balance becomes a huge issue at higher levels. I remarked my players on a number of occasions that I didn’t believe there had been much playtesting of dungeons & Dragons done at level 13 and above. The challenge ratings and difficulties of supposed boss monsters I found to be way off. For example, if a monster had a challenge rating of 21 and it said it would be a difficult to deadly encounter for my group of players, most often I would see that monster go down in 1 to 2 rounds. The players were blowing through boss encounters easily. In order to try to make the encounters more challenging I would usually have to double the monsters hit points and increase armor class as well as throwing in extra goons. It was still fun, but it definitely was more work for the dungeon master, myself, to make sure that the players still felt challenged. If anyone is interested in watching this group of veteran role players, we are on discord and YouTube as The Critical Fail.
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Yeah, CR is kinda fucked in 5e. Has to do with a stated design objective of “landing hits feels good”, so players hit enemies faaaaar more frequently than in earlier editions. Add on full hit points from long rests, and how you’re supposed to throw 5-8 encounter at PCs per game day, and it becomes a real slog to tweak every encounter (not to mention running every piddly encounter).
I’ve had some luck by doing the “gritty realism” alternate healing rules from the DMG, though. Basically a short rest only regenerates short rest abilities (like with warlock), and a long rest regenerates health equal to a short rest (while still reseting spells of course). Players have to spend a full week relaxing to get the full health regeneration effects, also. It’s made a healer more necessary, and i don’t feel like I have to cram a bunch of encounters in to whittle down the party, either.
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Ive just finished dming an adventure for level 17 characters, and I had to use every trick I could think of to provide some challenge. It was essentially a dungeon crawl but with a time limit. It worked quite well, it stopped the players from over analysing and long resting their way through problems. For combat encounters I try and ensure more than one think is happening at once so players attention is split and level design for combat is really important to force decisions on the players. If I use premade modules I usually modify them quite a bit. Does any one else feel a lot of the rules need a rewrite? There’s some instances where it’s really unclear whats intended.
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I was watching a video recently about a campaign for Dungeon Crawl Classics based along those lines, called Precipice of Corruption
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/343571/the-precipice-of-corruption-bpx-dc001
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Thanks for sharing!
I no longer P&P game (for both time and can’t find anyone reasons), but I still enjoy reading books on it. I actually bought a book of dungeons just to read about them. I like this idea of immortals rules as a fun read.
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I just finished a four year 5e campaign that ended at level 18 or so and I can absolutely agree that high level D&D - basically anything past level 10 frankly - is an absolute mess. We had some homebrew stuff in the campaign, but all of the most busted stuff was core D&D ruleset like Life Clerics and magic items/etc.
Frankly put, by the end there wasn’t any reasonable way to challenge the party without totally breaking the rules of D&D - I don’t think that there’s anything RAW that would actually do it.
I’m talking villains with regenerating legendary resistances, multiple turns per round, etc - that’s what it took to like start to make players sweat.
We had a full party of six in almost every encounter so that’s probably a lot of it; but I think the major problems are that players simply have far too many options compared to enemies, and they scale faster, and unless you start popping out multiple turns for your villains, it’s very easy for the boss to basically have all of his actions negated by the players (heal, counterspell, let alone just failing to hit), while they still have 4 of 6 actions left to hurt him or setup future turns. All of this is amplified by having so much stuff for everyone to memorize and figure out how to use. My group was a mix of minmaxers and normal folks, so it wasn’t like we had a totally kitted out crew 24x7, and nobody was doing anything patently insane, just synergistic builds.
It was still a fun campaign, but the ending wasn’t a big serious battle because it just couldn’t have been and still been fun, so instead it became more of a victory lap sort of deal. I don’t see myself ever playing something seriously over level 12 in the future.
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I’m 49 years old and first started playing D&D with friends back in circa 1986. My interest waned but one of my closest friends from that time continued until this day. He is still playing a campaign that he started with his college buddies in ~1995… Their characters have all maxed out at level 20 and I think some of them have even passed that theoretical level limit. Curious to get his take on this module, as he was saying that gameplay gets pretty limited once characters reach such high levels.
Over the years, he’s evolved from a mythical figure into a fully fleshed-out antagonist…
How “fully fleshed-out” can he get? He’s a lich, after all.
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I never played much D&D. Somehow I just didn’t like it, though I can’t articulate why. Instead I played a lot of RuneQuest 2nd edition with a group of friends at university.
In 3 years we got our best characters from the equivalent of level 1 up to Runelord-Priests, which is about the most powerful a character can be in RuneQuest. It was a lot of hard work because the game master was deliberately stingy with the rewards for a successful job, but this made advancement even more fun.
Even at that high “level”, our characters were merely powerful and competent rather than god-like. RQ didn’t inflate character abilities like D&D does. You don’t get a lot more hit-points, heaps more powerful magic and the like. It’s quite a grind, and the rewards are smaller.
I’m not saying that RQ is a better game. It’s just different in terms of its mechanics.
Anyway, often in RP the journey is better than the arrival.
So I started reading this Immortal guide yesterday. It is freely available with minimal normal searching and it is really an interesting time capsule.
I also found out last night that my last foray into P&P gaming was AD&D first edition. I recall 2nd edition, but I guess it was just coming out when I stopped. I vaguely remember THAC0 and how it made the many tables in my DM guide much easier.
I think when I’m an empty nester I might try P&P gaming again - anyone aware of a good online resource to find local gaming? Around me, the big gaming places seem to focus on Warhammer.
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