10 Reasons No One Plays High-Level D&D

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At the end of a level 21 session just last night, when I thanked the GM for all his hard work (traditional in our group), I commented that it must be pretty hard for him to come up with scenarios for us at this level. He laughed and said no, it was actually easier, because he was no longer worried about accidentally killing us all off.

Once I DM a party from level 6th to 30th, it was a Drow campaign that ended up with three characters achieving godhood status, it was played with 3E/3.5E rules, and the Epic Level Manual. This campaign took us almost two years of playing, and up to this day is the most memorable story we ever played.

I think the secret to running high level adventures lies in the transition from low to high fantasy. Individual encounters may be trivial but there are plots that go beyond CR numbers. Destroy a dangerous artifact, negotiate peace between warring kingdoms, fight off an invasion force from a different plane or world (Dark Sun invades Forgotten Realms, imagine the power of defilers' magic!), create and rule your own city or kingdom, defeat an overpowering threat like a lich, demon lord or a god... If you shift the focus beyond killing monsters and gathering loot there are countless possibilities that are beyond the capabilities of mere single-digit-level adventurers. Maybe it's because I played back in the 1st/2nd Edition days but it seems like the published adventures are just the starting point for the game. Each DM and group of players has to expand and flesh out the world into their own unique collection of stories. This is how the game has thrived for the last 50 years. Look at the campaign begun in the Against the Giants series. What looks like a simple dungeon crawl can become a stealth assault against increasingly physically superior foes. This leads to the Underdark and an expedition into an alien realm where the PCs do not have easy access to support or supplies and infiltrate an entire city of hostile drow (both new content introduced into the game). Then they travel to a completely alien realm, the Abyss, to defeat or even kill a demon lord/goddess preparing to invade their home world. Oh, and remember: it's not a (D&D) party until the Raise Dead scrolls are tapped.

Dm'ing at a high level can be tricky, but there's a few things to remember to make it much more manageable: 1. The stakes are higher than just adventure for the sake of adventure and complex enough that you can't just wish them away. Levels 15+ is the point where you can absolutely threaten entire nations or the entire world, and while a wish might be able to delay the artifact-powered portal from the Abyss opening for a day, they still have to address the root cause of the issue. 2. If you want to challenge the party, make them fight on your terms. Whenever given the opportunity, a competent party that knows what they're up against will prepare accordingly and likely punch well above their already considerable weight. Your parties will carry a reputation by their deeds and actions, and a potential foe can reasonably know about their residences, servants, common tactics, and so on. Using spells to obsfucate identities, locations, and other information where it would make sense to do so also helps avoid parties shortcutting things too hard. 3. Look to previous editions for additional high level content, particularly 2e and 3e. A personal favorite I reccommend for any prospective DM is 3.5's Elder Evils, a compendium of cosmic horrors that will threaten the stability of any setting they happen to wander into. You'll have to do some legwork with conversions and the fine details of the plot, but the concepts and setpieces provided can make even a 20th level party sweat. 4. Always remember: There are fates far worse than death.

when you have two different group of players, it becomes crystal clear that you can't trust the encounter calculators. You'll soon realize that one party can kill basically anything while the other struggles with easier encounters. Sometimes it's a "skill issue" and sometimes it's because one group has all the OP subclasses or knows about optimizing the crap out of their characters

On the math thing, DnD and other games that use dice for damage made me better at fast math through sheer repetition and practice. I can now break down any addition problem into a 'what combo of numbers equals 10' question near instantly, and from there just add the 10s and tack on the remainder. Very similar to just tracking HP by 10s. It takes practice, and it's not how we were taught math in school for sure.

I get around things like using wish to remove the hags that you mentioned by using contingency spells. Especially in that situation, where the target is a group of high level casters, they would be able to anticipate this sort of thing and have a contingency plan. "Any spell trying to undo our release from our prison triggers an antimagic field around us." Then the spell gets wasted. Several of my big bads already have them as standard equipment. Things like "If I fall below 5% of my hit points I get teleported to X location" and one of my always around somewhere bad guys uses Clone constantly. Whenever you kill her she wakes up in her clone and continues her plans AND if she actually dies because someone killed her clone ahead of time her contingency spell kicks in casting reincarnate on her corpse 5 days after she dies... high level campaigns are still very doable with a little planning. It helps if you have 32+ years as a player and a DM. Then you can anticipate 90% of what your players will try.

Also, do not forget that adding tactics that the monsters can use can change the challenge rating. Such as setting up ambush sites, or darkness when the players do not have the ability to see in the dark. murder holes with archers behind them. Attacking from a distance down a long hallway that has active traps in it.

For wish, I don’t twist the wish, I just follow the guideline that it can make a single 25,000 gold item. It also says the wish can fail. If the wish feels more valuable than 25k, it fails.

One thing I do with monster hit point tracking is add instead of subtract. I just total how much damage they take and once it hits their total--Boom! Done. It's a lot faster and easier than subtracting.

If players wanna wish away a major event like releasing the Hags I'd inform them that would effectively turn back time to that point so everything they have gotten like xp, levels, equipment, money, an etc all gets revert back to that point. Because they had such a huge impact on the world we gotta play out the alternate time line. Basically use the spell against them without needing to twist in monkey paw like, just point out the reality of getting exactly what they wish for no twist.

I guess my group is pretty unique in this aspect. We used to play Epic D&D a lot in 3.5 so we have a really fun time just nuking each other. They love finding ways to try and 1 shot my high level enemies and we laugh when I instakill them in return. They actually thought Tomb of Annihilation was too easy so I had to actually create new traps and make the existing ones more deadly. One guy went through 9 characters by the end of it.

Our high level campaign has a very interesting fighter of all things. The player is good at narration and using their fighting maneuvers to play out the coolest most cinematic moves. Magic users are unwieldy but a good old hack and slash character is actually still very cool

In my opinion, you might have more GMs willing to do higher level campaigns if WotC would do some work and show inexperienced GMs how to run such games.

Alternately, as a GM, you can give the players a magic item that gives them a once a day teleport, lock the barbarian behind a force cage, and let the player feel awesome getting free with an item they think you forgot about.

I have only DMed one 5e gamer, but ive been DMing 3.5 and Pathfinder for quite a few years, and i have a few tips for all you coming after me. First off we agree on that armistice, some spells need to be limited, like wish, find out the problem features of your system and get the group to agree that those things are banned. Second, be varied in the types of challenges, if all they do each settion is killing monsters, not only may the game get a little stale, but they get really good at it, both in and out of game, so when you do things that need a lot of variety, like investigations, hunting, fetch quests, look up the five essential quests (i think it was called). And third and most importantly, do some tests, i use the 5 encounter system, where the first encounter is just a ballpark guess on how strong they are, then depending on how well they do, increase or decrease the difficulty by 50%, so if they get an ass whooping, make the next encounter half as hard, or if its a cake walk make the next one harder. Then the third encounter is in the middle of the difficulty. Now that you have a good sample size, you should be able to gauge how strong the boss is, so the 4th encounter can be half as hard as the 3rd if not a little easier then that, to get some reprieve and a moral boost before the boss, and that would be the 5th encounter. I make the boss the strongest, somewhere a little above the hardest encounter in this chain, when i do things like this, i get a good balanced difficulty curve, well...better then if i just went in blind. An additional bonus is that this curve follow the interest curve, where stakes start out low in act 1 (encounter 1 and 2) then the darkest hour where the heroes face defeat (encounter 3), but then they find their courage and build up the strength (encounter 4) to finally overcome the grand evil that is the final boss of this encounter chain. A nice mini heroes journey if you could call it that. Still, things will go sideways, but that is the nature of the game, so am gona give you a little bonus tip since you got this far down. Dont worry about making a perfect game, because you cant do that by yourself, its a collaborative effort to play DnD, and in the end, you have all gathered to have a good time, and sometimes loosing may be more fun then winning. As long as you are all having a good time, then there is nothing to worry about.

My DM once used Forcecage on the players. He didn't do the smart thing which would be to split the party, the caster used the cage to trap half our party with his champion. The idea of a cage match was really cool. On a side note, when the wizard was low on health, our GM raised his arms like the wizard was lifting his staff and everyone went, "Oh no!" as he broke his staff in half.

As someone who has been homebrewing everything since day one because I play with a 6 player group, CRs which are calculated for a party of 4, barely applies to them. So swarming my players with minions and using legendary actions with monsters has been pretty much my go to. Ever since Tasha's every player has the ability to maximize their action, bonus action and reaction. So the first point has never been a problem for me. There's been times where they've struggled with a moderate encounter because of bad rolls and other times melted through stronger encounters just by sheer luck. I don't particularly care either way. Its funny to me. I'm only there to account for the skills it might take to defeat a monster or finish a quest. The rest is literally a game of dice. I've seen a player of mine roll 3 nat 20s back to back, only to then miss every attack following it for the next two turns (they had extra attack, so that's six attacks given two weapon fighting). Honestly, the thing about forcecage. Just give your monsters proficiency in con saves and a good con score. You'll teleport out of it. You're the DM. You know ALL the things about your PCs. If you really want to challenge them, you can. As for power word kill, eh? Who cares. You want to waste your highest slot to kill one enemy bellow 100 hp? Go for it. At that high levels, I don't even bother with bosses below 450 hp. Sure, your fighter and paladin can nova damage them and get them down to 100 hp in two rounds and THEN you may power word kill them but that's why there are minions with and before the boss. For the wish spell? Run wish the way it is supposed to. There's still a reasonable chance to lose it. Maybe your players aren't really interested in dealing with the hags and would rather wish them away. Sometimes you put a lot of effort and time into something that is only fun for you. But if you want to monkey's paw it, I'd say, sure. Only if the next idea or encounter is fun for them. Simple as. Sometimes skipping entire adventures is the way to go. The game is supposed to be fun and if wishing away a problem or encounter is fun for them. Eh, who cares? I can probably think of something else. Now if you mention that they have magic items that let them cast wish? I don't know why you'd allow that. Wish should ONLY be accessible through the spell in your world. No rings of wishes or any of that nonsense. As for players hating receiving what they dish out, tough luck. I will never use the best spells or abilities in the games against them but I will 100% give them a challenge. I as the DM know that my job is to both challenge the PCs and ultimately lose every fight. As much as I want every monster to show their abilities, if they lose their turns or get taken out early. Meh. I win when the players win. Simple as. And if my players get stunned or incapacitated by doing something they could have avoided, it is not my responsibility. They're adults. Not children. I always hint about the power of monsters and warn them in ways I can without metagaming. If they still follow through, it isn't my fault. D&D is supposed to be fun and the fun of the DM is also a big thing. Players always get to dominate the monsters. So once in a while the player getting shut down isn't a big deal imo.

I agree with all your points and just wanted to add regarding point 6. I think this is where we feel the loss of save or die spells. In 3.5 Save or die was how you kept things dangerous without just always bashing up against enormous HP pools at higher levels. With them gone or neutered so much they might as well be, this is where we end up, so much HP inflation that combats grind to a halt. Restoring these, especially from about level 15 on, would also help with the Math point made as well. Your last two points, while valid issues, aren't anything for WOTC or Paizo or any other TTRPG dev to fix, those are table situations.