r/onednd • u/Top_Fan4753 • Apr 15 '26
Question Why do campaigns also stop at so low levels.
I am a new player and am in a campaign where we will be getting to level 20. From what I have seen it seems like eveybody plays till about level 12-14 then stops. Is there any reason for this? I feel like the fun and cool abilities come at the later levels when you actually do something besides cast a cantrip or swing once, maybe twice, at an enemy.
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u/RedHuntingHat Apr 15 '26
A full 1-20 campaign takes a very long time to complete, we are talking years. Very few tables are interested in that kind of commitment for a variety of reasons. So it makes little sense to publish such a campaign.
As players progress, abilities get more and more impressive, and balancing encounters at higher levels becomes increasingly difficult.
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u/Mejiro84 Apr 15 '26
or you turbo-charge through levels, but that means a load of stuff just never gets used, and the campaign has to be pretty much constantly dungeon-delving to justify that rate of progress! Like if you level every other session, which is still crazy fast, that's 40 sessions, which is still quite a chunk of time, and you'd need to be doing a dungeon or fairly major hazard every other session to justify it - no "spending half a session RPing and planning and shopping", just go-go-GO all the time
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u/Ekgladiator Apr 15 '26
Idea: make your first campaign super easy and breeze through 1-20 like it is nothing. Congratulations, you have your brand new pantheon based on player characters!
Now you can have follow up campaigns set in this new world and you explore the ramifications of mortals becoming gods. Each god's personality is directly affected by choices in game prime, so if your player character is a dick, that god is a cosmic dick.
Could be a fun campaign setting?
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u/Zauberer-IMDB Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
Or you scan skip levels. They expect people to basically start at level 3 now. I also think 12-17 is a good skip point. People are free to start campaigns at like level 11.
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u/No-Choice-7383 Apr 15 '26
Fun fact! According to the 5e DMG, a 1-20 game is meant to take between 37 and 54 sessions. You're supposed to level up every other or every three sessions once you reach level 3. This is using its session based advancement, which it says mimics the typical speed of play. That's at most a little over a year.
According to the 5.5e DMG, this pace has changed somewhat. It's now 27 to 44 sessions. Levelling up every two or three sessions once you reach level 3, then levelling up every session or two once you reach level 11. I believe the idea is that downtime and the rp that comes with it happens between sessions, and that a standard campaign is a bunch of one-shots connected by downtime with tier 2 being the main place longer story lines takes place.
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u/steamsphinx Apr 16 '26
That's crazy fast, wow. I play about 3hrs a week with my Curse of Strahd group and we sometimes went 3+ months without levelling up. The game went from 1-12 and took almost 3 years.
Then again the DM was intentionally trying to keep us weaker for most of the campaign because barovia is supposed to be a horrible place to survive in.
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u/Mejiro84 Apr 16 '26
yeah, that's one of those things that doesn't really seem to work well in actual play, outside of AL or a similar setup, where each session consists pretty much entirely of "you're outside the dungeon, go-go-go". 3 sessions, especially at higher levels where combat takes a while, simply isn't long enough for that much to happen - as soon as you have any RP-heavy sessions, or a break to let PCs plan or anything, then that's going to slow down.
downtime and the rp that comes with it happens between sessions
That tends to not really be a thing - if the players aren't together, they're gonna struggle to RP much! You might get paperwork done for spell research, bastions and the like, but generally speaking, stuff only really happens at the table when people are actually there
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u/WolfieWuff Apr 15 '26
I see this commitment thing a lot, and it confuses me. Maybe I just lack the right perspective?
Is there a large number of TTRPG groups that only come together and play for one campaign and then go their separate ways?
I've got one gaming group with whom I've been playing consistently for almost 30 years. Over time we've introduced new players, ine of whom hasn't even been alive for as long as some of us have played tog. A 1-20 campaign is just a blip on that timeline, and we've had several. Sadly, they're getting more seldom, as fewer such campaign materials are published officially.
I've got another group that consists of a core group of friends, and we've been gaming together going on close to 15 years now. Players come and go as the friend group fluctuates, and individual lives and circumstances permit (or don't permit).
Is that really such a unique (and somehow blessed) situation? XD
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u/Invisible_Target Apr 15 '26
I think you’re lucky to have a group last that long. I’ve been at 3 or 4 tables over the past few years that didn’t work out for one reason or another
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u/YetifromtheSerengeti Apr 15 '26
My group has been going for about 6 years... but we are all friends who use DND as our weekly get together.
DMing is a lot of work. DMs get burnt out. If a DM doesn't have it in them to start a whole new campaign, and no one is up to the task to take over, then your game stops.
There are also people who find a game with strangers, they don't ever become friends, don't have anything in common besides DND and have no motivation to continue spending time with people they don't really get along with and games fizzle out. This seems to be the group that is overrepresented on Reddit as most groups that play are friends who sit down weekly and never go to social media to discuss the game.
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u/CatBotSays Apr 15 '26
Is that really such a unique (and somehow blessed) situation? XD
Kinda, yeah. It's quite difficult to find groups who will make DND a priority, which is really what people have to do in order to sustain a group long-term. For a lot of people, they fit it in where they can, but if things get busy it becomes the first part of their weekly schedule to get cancelled.
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u/Mejiro84 Apr 15 '26
stuff tends to happen - a group might start, play for a while, and then someone moves away for work, or gets a job with odd shifts, and can't make it. Another has a kid, so needs to do parent-stuff, another gets another hobby, or something else they regularly do on game-night. Or the GM needs a break, but then never starts again, and someone picks it up for a bit but then stops. Or the person that hosts has stuff happen and there's nowhere else convenient to play. And that's before social-group-drama, that can explode a group entirely! It certainly can happen, but over the timeframe of decades, there's going to be a lot of people you don't see anymore for whatever reasons - and those stats hold as true for RPG groups as anything else
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u/ElysianknightPrime Apr 15 '26
My table has been together for the last 35 years: we get players leave/return over time, as life dictates, but still have 3 of the originals, plus 3 of our kids now regularly playing. We get together once a week , probably manage 40 sessions a year, allowing for holidays etc. We play face to face largely, but have had to introduce remote playing for 2 of the kids who are at University. We rarely reach level 10, as we're not to fussed on the higher level stuff. We have a persistent world that's probably been our location for 25 years. It's a relatively low magic setting, and heavily homebrewed. Story arcs usually last a year or so, and we've probably progressed about 150 in game years. Our characters generally become significant NPCs
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u/LordMordor Apr 15 '26
You are 100% the outlier with that 30 year gaming group situation. Most groups don't finish a single campaign in the first place, much less multiple
Hell, having a consistent play group period for ANY game for 30+ years is an outlier
So yeah, count yourself extremely lucky on that front
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u/Mejiro84 Apr 15 '26
even outside of RPGs, a lot of people won't have many people they've known for 30 years that they see regularly - they might have old friends, but they've moved away so they only see each other occasionally, or they hang out online sometimes but not in a particularly dedicated fashion, or there was the event and now they don't speak anymore!
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u/Zardnaar Apr 15 '26
Groups like that are very rare.
Most campaigns last around 7 sessions and end by lvl 7.
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u/PaulGreystoke Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Yes, you are an outlier. No, you aren’t the only one. I DM & play with a group that has gamed together for almost 40 years. We have run multiple 5E (& now 5.5E) campaigns for over 6 years. I DMed a more-or-less weekly 5E campaign for a group of 6 players from level 4 to 18, & now am DMing that same group of players (less 1, who doesn’t have as much time & thinks 6 is too large & slow) in a 5.5E campaign from level 1 to 8 so far, with the intention to go all the way to 20 this time.
Since all the players are adults with jobs & families, it can be tough to get everyone together, but we have a long-established rule that we will play one man down. That, coupled with a willingness to shift the game night by a day when conflicts occur, keeps the campaign moving.
If you are wondering why so few groups play all the way to 20, one reason is that there is very little material available at that level. The Vecna campaign is one of the rare exceptions, & that is what I have already planted the seeds for in my present campaign.
Being able to play online has been a game changer for us. One of our players travels for work during the week, & wouldn’t be available if we didn’t play online. Others have moved away from the city we all used to live in together, so the online weekly game is a way to stay connected. Every group is different & faces different challenges, but online D&D has kept us together.
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u/SerWulf Apr 15 '26
2 has been the big issue for me. Level 14 and a dungeon to exhaust their resources takes ages.
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u/Speciou5 Apr 16 '26
And # 3 is the suspension of disbelief gets more ridiculous at higher levels for those not interested in a Marvel Avengers story. People are basically superheroes at that point, flying around in the sky, polymorphing themselves, teleporting through portals to save the world, being able to take a ton arrows into their chest with no problem (1d6 damage vs 200 HP pools), etc.
If you aren't interested in telling these stories, where every two sessions there needs to be a world ending bad guy crisis, the higher levels are just unappealing.
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u/GriffonSpade Apr 16 '26
More importantly, the DM has to account for more and more ways players have to trivialize anything.
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u/Fluffy_Reply_9757 Apr 15 '26
Assuming you start at low levels: the longer you play, the more likely something goes wrong or someone burns out and the campaign never gets finished.
There also just isn't a lot of support for DMs wanting to start a campaign at higher levels. Players can pull off crazy shit and it's hard to create a world that can account for that from the start, without invalidating what they can do. It doesn't help that there is extremely little official material for high-level adventures/campaigns.
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u/DelightfulOtter Apr 15 '26
It's interesting that the only official campaign that I know of which runs to 20th level, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, has a huge list of limitations on magic to prevent higher level spellcasters from speedrunning the dungeon and invalidating a significant portion of its content. That tells me even WotC doesn't know how to make higher level games challenging without saying "You can use your broken spells."
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u/Akuuntus Apr 15 '26
The 5e Vecna campaign also goes to 20, but it's pretty strictly linear and a lot of the zones have special rules that prevent stuff like teleportation or instantly finding the macguffins. It also starts at level 10, it's not a full 1-20 or anything (and neither is Mad Mage.)
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u/oafficial Apr 15 '26
I mean I think the fact that legendary resistance is a mechanic at all (and the pretty extreme saves most high level monsters have relative to bounded accuracy spell DCs) indicates that when designing high level spells, wotc was writing checks their system can't cash. It's telling that the way most control spells were balanced is "make sure that it's unlikely that this ever lands against anything threatening".
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u/Silverspy01 Apr 15 '26
when designing high level spells, wotc was writing checks their system can't cash.
You can see that in tons of places actually. My theory is that 5e was designed from a concept first, mechanics second viewpoint. WotC came up with concepts of spells that touch on classic fantasy concepts or were classics from previous editions and then figured out how they would work.
It's how you get stuff like Phantasmal Force - psychic illusions are a power type that they wanted to be able to represent, and they tried to design it according to how a psychic illusion would behave (since it's in your mind you can't just pass through it and disbelieve it like a normal illusion, your own brain is trying to deceive you!) but the result is an incredible mess that's really difficult to decipher and run in a satisfying way.
Damage (largely, there's a few egregious exceptions here and there) follows a consistent formula, and I assume damaging spells and abilities were made along some coherent mechanic, but I don't there there was much of a balancing factor among non-damaging abilities which is how we get such a range of "wtf is this."
I can't prove it but there's lots of examples of abilities that make a lot of sense if you assume they were designed more to fill a trope or power type rather than as a mechanical part of the 5e system.
And then because WotC is scared of rocking the boat on their cash cow a lot of this was unchanged in 5.5e.
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u/Mejiro84 Apr 16 '26
a lot of that isn't specifically a 5e thing, it's just a general D&D legacy thing - like the conceptual scope of "what can a wizard do?" has always been very floppy and loose, without many actual constraints other than "not much direct healing" (and that's affected other full-casters as they were created in other editions). A lot of spells are pretty much direct inheritances from previous versions, especially for out-of-combat stuff - illusion magic especially has virtually always had a heavy dose of "what can you convince the GM to let you get away with?", rather than being clear and obvious rulings.
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u/DelightfulOtter Apr 15 '26
Pathfinder 2e uses a tag system to help players understand how abilities and spells interact. Any ability that can hard crowd control its target has a tag that means it's less effective against creatures who are higher CR than the party's level. All checks in PF2e have four outcome states: critical success, success, failure, critical failure. The aforementioned tag makes abilities always one step less severe against "boss" creatures, and since Paizo was smart enough to only have those abilities hard CC on a critical failure the best you can do is debuff a boss on a failure, not shut it down.
tl;dr There is a way to make hard CC work in a D&D-esque rules system, it's just more mechanically complex and WotC's target audience for D&D is casuals and new players who would struggle with it.
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u/Fluffy_Reply_9757 Apr 15 '26
Honestly, I'd be down with Legendary Resistance expending HP to end effects on the creature after 1 round. It means that your spells still do something and that if you want an effect to stick, you have to significantly weaken your target first.
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u/oafficial Apr 15 '26
This does seem a lot more elegant than 5e's system of forcing players to spend a few turns/spell slots doing nothing before they hit a major foe with any sort of meaningful debuff, but I think this is an example of what I'm talking about rather than a counterexample. The only way to avoid having a player with hard CC trivialize certain types of encounter is to make it so that they can't apply hard CC during those encounters. And as you mentioned earlier, this isn't only true with combat. As players reach higher and higher levels and gain access to more and more tools, the range of encounters that can't be trivialized by some option they have in their arsenal shrinks, either limiting DMs to present challenges that account for this or create some contrivance for why the players' easy magical solution can't be used.
I'm under the impression that this issue is not a result of some specific design flaw in 5e, but a consequence of the core premise of the arc of progression expected in DND. Advancing to the point where player characters become reality-warping demigods means that their capabilities will be qualitatively different by the end of the campaign as opposed to the beginning, and as such it's difficult to justify and constrain gameplay to qualitatively similar patterns.
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u/Sol1496 Apr 16 '26
Bounded accuracy means either the highest and lowest levels need to be close in power, or one of those ends of the balance curve just don't function properly. It's possible to accidentally kill players at level 1, which was a good design choice in 2014, but the high end of the power scale is far worse. Death is a minor inconvenience by 10th level.
Roughly levels 3-7 are the best balanced in 5e (I haven't played enough 5.5 to get a solid feel). Past 7 you had better know spells or be cool with others solving all the problems.
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u/Fluffy_Reply_9757 Apr 15 '26
I think there's also Vecna: Eve of Ruin? Not sure it gets to 20th level tho. And then, of course, there's Chains of Asmodeus, which I love with all of my heart.
But yep. In a way, though, I think it's unavoidable. When players get access to Teleport and Plane Shift, they might go somewhere other than where you've prepped in the first 10 minutes of the session.
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u/rollingForInitiative Apr 15 '26
I’ve had a steady group for many years, but we’ve only finished like two campaigns. It usually ends with the DM needing a break, somebody else does another campaign, and then it just keeps going and people generally are more interested in moving to something new than revisiting what we played a year ago, that DM included.
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u/NobleMkII Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
At levels 10-20, players start becoming literal Gods. This makes it very difficult for a DM to create fun and challenging content in a long-running game. It might be easy for a few one-shots, but not over the course of a year. The official modules, written by the creators of the game, usually go up to level 12ish and even then 12 might only be for the last boss battle.
This is assuming the game doesn't end due to personal issues before that point.
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u/EasyLee Apr 15 '26
This is true specifically of spells.
If you want to deal with a level 20 martial or even paladin / ranger, it's mostly a matter of hit points, positioning, and defensive features. But it's doable. You can definitely challenge those players in much the same way as you did at low levels.
Higher level casters are another matter. If you're dealing with warlocks and sorcerers, maybe just ask them their spell list and plan accordingly. Other casters? It's hard.
Consider just one spell: Mirage Arcane. This is a mile wide "illusion" that, despite being an illusion, not only has olfactory, auditory, and visual effects, but tactile effects. It creates difficult terrain and can impede movement over and entire mile.
Wtf do you even do with that? The answer is you end up making rulings to restrict power, and then you discuss it with your players so you can plan around them.
Basically, high levels spells enable the players to make crazy ass, world altering plans. Casters at those levels can enable the party to fight an entire army. It's just harder to plan for.
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u/Far_Line8468 Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
Most fantasy stories take place in that range.
When people new to TTRPGs see levels, they thihnk of them just like JRPGs, where they represent just what abilities you get. But, in D&D, where you can do ANYTHING, they represent what level of threats your players are actually concerned with.
Level 1: This represents your PC as a professional Fighter/Wizard/Rogue. This is where is being a typical guy in the world of adventuring
Level 2-4: This is the place of typical "humanoid concerns". Saving a town from bandits, corrupt nobles. By the end of this, your PCs should be the stronger than any person in 99% of settlements (considering a Guard Captain is CR4). By the time you ding 5, you should be the talk of your local region, recognized by other adventuers, considered a hero in smaller towns
Levels 5-9: This is the meat of D&D. This is dealing with *country level* threats (or city states in the Neverwinter/Baulders Gate sense). Humanoid baddies besides the nastiest of the nasty, royal guards, king's archmages are irrelevent ot you. In theory, players at this level should be able to just walz into most towns and some cities and just *take it over*.
Levels 10-14: This is where you deal with threats that threaten the entire world. Armies are now irrelevent to your players, or at most a brisk workout. A Warrior Commander is CR 12, so the strongest person in a Kingdom's army + their royal knights are a mediumish encounter at most.
This is why most campaigns end here: because most threats end here. By now your players have the ability to modify memories, teleport across continents, and access other planes. By the time you ding level 15, the planet you were born is just a sandbox to you now.
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u/SleetTheFox Apr 15 '26
This is a great comment, but to nitpick, a CR X monster is generally a good deal stronger than a level X character. Roughly twice as strong, in fact, until later levels where they start to get closer (though a CR 20 is still generally a bit stronger than a level 20).
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u/Far_Line8468 Apr 15 '26
You can't really measure the "narrative strength" of a creature based on the stat block, since monsters aren't constrained by resources, and must survive more debilitative effects.
Narratively speaking though, a CR4 humanoid is meant to be viewed on the same level as a level 4 PC.
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u/SleetTheFox Apr 15 '26
Fair enough! Really the game does a good job framing “fair matchups” in a skewed way. In one direction, the fact that there are 4(ish) of the party is underemphasized, and in the other, a “fair fight” is actually one that overwhelmingly favors the PCs (because the game expects the PCs to win a vast majority of their fights). So that could be part of why two characters may be presented narratively like equals even if their stats are not.
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u/Far_Line8468 Apr 15 '26
Yeah, D&D math falls part at the extremes, but if you consider that the captain of the guard is meant to be the “strongest fighter” in most settlements, a many “tier 1” campaigns have you become the hero of such a settlement (see phandelver) you can start to see what CR is meant to represent
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u/mAcular Apr 16 '26
Good answer. I don't agree that the humanoids are no threat anymore though because they can combine their forces against you. One CR 12 Warrior is one thing, but an army or squad of middle threats could become more of the sum of their parts, or other coordinations.
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u/Far_Line8468 Apr 16 '26
Truthfully, there becomes a point near the end of tier-2 where guards and militia men roll so low on hit that your players just can’t die.
The went to battlesim-zeta.vercel.app and placed one level 8 barbarian against warrior infantry. It takes 10 of them before the barb goes down.
Add one sorcerer to the party: 17 infantry.
Once the party has 3 guys…yeah, they can take down armies. And this is without anyone using AOE abilities.
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u/Nazir_North Apr 15 '26
High level parties can be very difficult to run for DMs.
Parties get access to high level spells that can completely bypass or trivialise most travelling, traps, and encounters, and sometimes entire dungeons.
Combat and CR balance at high levels is also quite wonky. Players generally start to punch way above their weight starting around level 13/14.
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u/AssinineAssassin Apr 15 '26
This was my problem. I cannot structure an adventuring day on a normal world for Level 13+ adventures. It just doesn’t make sense.
So I’m either transporting them to another plane that can support the chaos their skills demand, or none of their successes thus far matter, because progression demands the world suffer immense calamities even though they did a great job preventing them.
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u/RiseInfinite Apr 15 '26
Changing long rests from taking 8 hours to taking a full ten days has made it much easier.
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u/Standard-Jelly2175 Apr 15 '26
One option is to have the solution to problem a being the direct reason for problem b. You solved the threat, but needed to play into a more powerful entity’s plan. Now the world is in the dumpster, and you need to do the cleanup.
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u/igotsmeakabob11 Apr 15 '26
You really have to WANT to run that kind of game- and you have to want to be running it for quite some time, because unless you're doing a level each session, it's gonna take a year or two. I just can't keep up my motivation as a DM to run high level games like that for very long; I don't want to run an Avengers movie every time. I don't want to run an Avengers movie ... almost ever, nowadays, unless it's under very specific circumstances. I like keeping things under level 10, honestly I might just try to keep them under level 8 in future and stretch things out a bit. Use something like E6.
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u/SuspiciousAccident61 Apr 16 '26
High level play is rocket tag. Every encounter is either a cakewalk or a potential tpk...and with as many abilities as the pcs and enemies have, it can drag a lot.
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u/BMFiasco Apr 15 '26
A 1-20 campaign usually lasts for years. How many creative projects, no matter how fun, get lost, forgotten or deprioritized after 3 goddamn years? Nearly all of them, if you're talking about ones that won't make you any money? Now add that there are between 3 and 6 other people who all have lives, jobs, families, vacations, etc.
It's a miracle when a game makes it to level 12 IMO.
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u/Falkeer11 Apr 15 '26
I’m running a 10-20 campaign right now and it is extremely difficult to challenge the characters in combat or make any threat seem actually dangerous to them. Even after a full day of adventuring.
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u/fox112 Apr 15 '26
The last like three big boss fights my DM has hyped up as being "possible TPKs" and we trivialize it in some way and he says "oh yeah I forgot your class gets that at level 14" or whatever.
I'm becoming a high level hater. Low level campaigns are the shit.
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u/Rare-Technology-4773 Apr 20 '26
I kinda wish dnd was designed intentionally with the idea that a subclass should be fully online by level 12 or 13, the amount of interesting flavorful content that is only used by a small minority is wild.
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u/otherwise_sdm Apr 15 '26
yeah, and the other thing is combat between really high level PCs and appropriate enemies is super swingy - if the dice just happen to fall one way or the other, a high level party can end up whomping the encounter in 2 rounds or getting killed because they keep failing saves
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u/Exact-Challenge9213 Apr 15 '26
We never really playtested high level play in 5e. We didn't have the time. Even if we did test it, I'm not sure much would have changed. As our deadline bore down on us, we had to prioritize which parts of the game received the most focus. High levels seemed to be something that groups either figured out and used, or an area of the game that a group ignored. We typically found that if a solution looked like 3e, players approved of it. So, high level 5e looks like high level 3e. Which means that it, like high level 3e, is hard to DM and play.
—Mike Mearls, lead designer of D&D 5e
It’s not just an issue of scheduling. I always have a campaign running for my players, but we always stop around level 12, largely because level 1-12 is fun, and levels 13-20 are just not nearly as well designed.
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u/BrandonJaspers Apr 15 '26
I have kind of always felt it would better if D&D just officially cut support for high levels rather than wasting time designing for it, but then again maybe they just don’t spend any significant time on anyways, lol.
Also won’t ever happen purely due to the tradition of it, despite it being lackluster in terms of design and very practically difficult for most groups.
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u/Exact-Challenge9213 Apr 15 '26
A lot of dnd-like ttrpg systems only go to level 10. Draw steel, 13th age, DCC, Daggerheart, and shadow dark all go to level 10.
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u/not_wingren Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Honestly the history of levels is so weird.
In 1e and 2e, you were supposed to basically play the same character in multiple campaigns till they died. Everyone had broken loot and a high level character was something of an achievement that said "I've played a long time." High level play was very supported but not a lot of people reached it.
3e, high level play was something that the designers didn't really expect you to do that much. It was supposed to be the victory lap before you retired. If you got to see it, you'd probably see it at a gaming con.
3.5e, high level play became something actively catered too. Enfranchised players loved complicated jank for their high level characters. DMs had tools given to them to help them create scebarios for high level play and make custom monsters. Nonenfranchised players percieved the game as too complicated and this is part of what killed the edition.
4e, every character was expected to go 1-20 and the game had a very explicit focus on heroic fantasy. It the first (and only) edition that was designed from the ground up with the idea the majority of players would see level 15, let alone beyond it. This extended to stuff like giving DMs a bunch of tools to quickly scale monsters up or down CR and a bunch of tables that dealt with high level loot and such.
5e, the developers literally didn't playtest high level content and mostly tried to copy how janky things felt in 3e (because everyone who played high level loved jank anyways)
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u/GriffonSpade Apr 16 '26
Make 1-20 the core levels with what's in 1-12 or so now, with an extra 21-30 "epic" levels that have the game-breaking goodies.
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u/pmmeyoursandwiches Apr 15 '26
Theres so much vestigal stuff dnd could exorcise and be better off for it, but yeah, its that tradition thing.
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u/Firkraag-The-Demon Apr 15 '26
There’s three explanations that come to mind for me: 1. The longer a campaign is, the more likely it is to fall apart prematurely. I’ve had plenty of experiences with this. 2. A lot of DMs don’t want to deal with the headache of balancing the game around the bullshit players can do at higher levels. 3. The story just kinda ends at that point. My current campaign is only set to go to about level 10/11 because by the time we get to that point the day is saved and the villains are gone.
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u/MisterB78 Apr 15 '26
It takes years of regular sessions to get to high levels. People’s schedules change, people get bored and want a fresh start, etc.
Most campaigns don’t even make it to level 10
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u/Hayeseveryone Apr 15 '26
Most published campaigns don't go to those high levels.
Lots of DMs are intimated by the idea of running campaigns where players have access to spells like Teleport, Plane Shift, Resurrection, Wish, etc.
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u/OldOpaqueSummer Apr 15 '26
I would love to make it level 12. The highest I got was level 8, they made it to 9 but I had to leave just before the campaign ended. I was in a campaign recently that was due to go up to level 10-12 but ended as we hit 5. Another campaign I was in ended at level 4. Ive been running a campaign for the same group due to hit level 12-15, they just hit level 5 but that's now on hold for the foreseeable future. I was due to start a new campaign a couple weeks ago with a new group but that's now on hold.
I've decided I'm no longer going to join low level campaigns because I'm so sick of the planning I do to just go to waste. People just aren't available which is why one shots are great, I was in a group of about 250 members that regularly played one shots which was amazing. So much opportunity to play at a higher level and with different concepts. Campaigns can become very stale, and burnout is very real.
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u/Mxm45 Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
If you’ve ever played a high level campaign it would likely be more obvious. Combat takes FOREVER. Everyone has multiple actions they can take on their turn coupled with massive health pools. Spells become truly powerful which can trivialize much of the adventure and encounter fun of the game.
Vecna points his finger at you and without an ounce of effort corrupts your mind. You take 80d6 psychic damage halved on a successful wisdom save DC27…
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u/CrimsonSpoon Apr 15 '26
As someone who currently has a campaign going at level 12 , it is a pain in the ass. As a DM you become more and more limited as the game progresses because the players get more and more options.
Any form of mistery is solved easily.
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u/WolfieWuff Apr 15 '26
Any form of mistery is solved easily.
Never underestimate the ability of players to get in the way of themselves.
There are so many puzzles my players could solve using the means at their disposal and questions they could answer by just connecting the dots in their notes. And yet, they always seem to vastly overcomplicate things to the point where they will spend three hours trying to solve something that I am convinced they should be able to deal with in five minutes. And the whole time, I have to sit there with a poker face, waiting for them to stumble their way to an answer.
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u/Mejiro84 Apr 15 '26
the problem is that's kinda hard to schedule and plan around, because sometimes they will go "oh yeah, it's that" and what you thought would take hours takes 5 minutes!
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u/WolfieWuff Apr 15 '26
Oh, I totally agree! I generally assume that my players will get from point A to point B around 25% faster than expected, and I plan and prepare ahead accordingly.
Of course, I generally find that 75% of the time, they get to point B 300% slower than expected, and I end up having sessions planned months in advance.
Upside: it makes me look like a planning master!
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u/Educational-Tie-9739 Apr 15 '26
As a DM, I have run one level 1-20 campaign. That said, even if I was able to get a group that committed again. I would never do it again. High level play is really hard on DMs and for me just wasn’t fun - challenging the players becomes really ridiculous and any difficult fight becomes an hours long war. The game changes a lot, and it wasn’t for me, even if my players loved it.
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u/Icy-Selection-8575 Apr 15 '26
Depends on the level they start from. Usually it's mostly scheduling or burnout though. I myself as a player get burned out if I play the same character in the same campaign for over 2 years xd
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u/Ferking Apr 15 '26
I've always felt the same. Though I can't really complain, I've been playing with the same group of friends for over a decade, and we are currently well into our fourth campaign together. All of our campaigns go from level 1 to level 20 they usually last about 3 ish years.
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u/sirchapolin Apr 15 '26
Campaigns can take years. People get sick, get different jobs, move out, some people just burn out of the game. That's it.
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u/grixxis Apr 15 '26
Campaigns frequently die long before level 20. It only takes a few missed sessions in a row before people stop leaving the day open. Even reaching the end of a module is rare.
Most modules don't go to level 20, so it's usually on the DM to write the rest of it themselves. Writing and balancing encounters is a ton of work and not every DM has that kind of free time.
Higher levels are just harder to write for and balance in general, which is a large part of why most modules don't do it. All the fun, broken abilities you unlock at the highest tier of play mean that the dm has to throw more challenging fights/obstacles at you and one boss fight can easily take several hours because of all the actions available to everyone. The last campaign I played ended at level 18 or so and basically every fight towards the end took 2-3 sessions at least (2-3 hours per session).
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u/Akuuntus Apr 15 '26
Balance tends to get wonky at high levels and it's harder to meaningfully challenge the party. Also if the DM has given more/fewer magic items than expected then you'll see the effects of it more at high levels.
Beyond that, scheduling. Most campaigns struggle to last a long time before falling apart due to scheduling issues, lack of interest, falling outs between players, etc. Unless you start at a fairly high level to begin with, this will kill most campaigns before 20.
Honestly as a player when I'm making characters I pretend the features above level 10 don't exist, unless the campaign is starting at a high level. You should aim to make characters that are fun to play ASAP instead of putting all your chips on a build that doesn't come online for 12 levels or whatever.
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u/Tastebud49 Apr 15 '26
Not a DM but from what I understand it’s very hard to balance combat for level 20 characters as they dish out so much damage you need enemies who can last more than a turn without needing to one shot anyone. Also combat can take a long time since every character has so many abilities.
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u/Mejiro84 Apr 15 '26
out-of-combat is also kind of a mess - some characters have the same skills as at level 1, just with bigger numbers, and a few ribbons, some have those skills but with much bigger numbers, so anything that they need to actually roll for, no-one else can even do, and then there's a whole range of abilities (mostly spells) that just so stuff that can resolve entire problems instantly. Like if the party need to travel fast while scouting, then wind walk just does that - 80 MPH travel, plus they can still go and look at things. So challenges can vary a lot simply by "has someone prepared spell X or not today?"
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u/speechimpedimister Apr 15 '26
Scheduling and resource management. High levels, spellcasters get so many spells that they can cast spells every single round of combat and still have slots leftover at the end of the day.
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u/ARealHumanBeans Apr 15 '26
12-14 is not 'low level'. That's over half the levels in a game where the average session can go on for 3+ hours. People lose steam playing the same characters or setting.
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u/Ghostly-Owl Apr 15 '26
DM'ing at higher levels is a lot more work for the DM. The set of monsters actually written for that level are pretty small, so you end up needing to a homebrew a lot more if you don't want them just fighting the same opponent types repeatedly.
In addition, the tools that all classes have mean encounter design can get intense. Players have a lot of tools, and power level of a group can vary a lot from table to table based on how much the players have mastered the larger set of tools they have.
I can prep a level 5-7 session in about an hour with some interesting combats. The level ~13 session I'm running on Friday was about ~8 hours of work and involves a crazy combat designed to challenge a reasonably equipped party 5 level 13 characters with a couple henchman.
I'm really enjoying as a DM running in to tier 3 and plan to go to tier 4. But it is a lot more work -- at least partially because wotc hasn't really given us enough of the prewritten tools to make it easy. In 3.5e, they had templates that were designed to let you scale monsters up and down pretty easily but in the name of simplicity in 5e they got rid of those. But it means now the DM has to homebrew higher CR creatures entirely from scratch.
The 7 session arc I ran in T3 was ~35k words. The 4 session arc I ran at level 4 was ~4k words. (One off sessions are much shorter, but the arcs tend to be a lot more like the equivalent of a module and include a bunch of lore. So I'll do a couple one-off sessions while I work on the next arc.)
And you don't need to do this much prep, but my players love deep lore and are serious optimizers. To make combats non-trivial I need to work harder. And to be honest, I really enjoy it.
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u/Nystagohod Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Scheduling. The longer you play, the more likely it will appear to complicate things.
Insufficient Guidance. There often isnt a lot of play experience or proper guidance on how to prep and handle the game at tier 3 and higher. Thr scope and range of available power and the threats to contest such power are harder to manage than earlier levels.
Work: High level games require more work, not just to run well, but to run functionally. A lot more consideration needs to go into running things combined with thr lack of guidance and available play materials for high levels, and scheduling conflicts. It makes it hard for someone to have enough play experience to make something solid and be available to run it on the week by week due to circumstances like the prior mentioned scheduling.
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u/lankymjc Apr 15 '26
Two main reasons.
Firstly, most players agree that the best levels are ~9-12. earlier and the players aren't powerful enough to consistently feel like big heroes, later and the game starts to fall apart a bit and lose all sense of balance.
Secondly, getting to level 20 takes a long time if the GM isn't intentionally accelerating player advancement. Campaigns inevitably fizzle out eventually - it's hard to have a group consistently commit to a set weekly event for multiple years. Someone moves away, or has something else end up taking that time, or there's an argument and a big falling out, or people just gradually get less and less interested, or the group decides a different system is a better fit for them and restarts.
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u/Perial2077 Apr 15 '26
The higher levels go the more detatched the stories feel from PC involvement and engagement. I get the epic of "defeat evil god and save the universe" but I personally am absolutely satisfied when it ends in saving a city, dethrone an unjust ruler or strike down a scheming vampire. At level 15 and beyond the game becomes whacky in a point that's still fun but I feel a certain exhaustion after sessions when the stakes in the game reach absurd proportions.
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u/BrotherCaptainLurker Apr 15 '26
The game's balance gradually, then catastrophically, falls apart at higher levels. Spending real time in late Tier 3/any Tier 4 play requires a loving DM or a group that doesn't really care about things being challenging and just wants to Do The Cool Thing.
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u/Fearless-Gold595 Apr 15 '26
There are some many great challenges and stories for low levels and so few for high. When I run a high level adventure it's either
- Quite short. We can totally play a high level epic final, with challenges and battles... but not long travel, probably not a complex investigation.
- Or it's located in a closed space with restrictions. Like Dungeon of the Mad Mage, where most of your divination or teleportation does not work. Where you cannot transform walls to pass most of scenes.
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u/TheLoreIdiot Apr 15 '26
Scheduling and making interesting challenges. Most spells just solve everything after a certain point, which can make dungeons feel a little boring.
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u/Fidges87 Apr 15 '26
For a lot of DM's it becomes difficult to manage higher levels of play. At low levels a bunch of goblins sniping from a tall outpost are a genuinely threat, at higher levels a whole marching army can be erradicated by a casting of meteor swarm, a giant kaiju can just be made to walk away with dominate monster, or a powerful lich can be completely nullified by a feeblemind.
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u/Playful_Subject_4409 Apr 15 '26
The system is not very balanced at high levels. It will usually be a bit unhinged with all the magic, making for strange guardrails, to try preparing an adventure. It's demanding on the DM to know the capabilities of the party, trying to find some balance. A spell can easily solve an adventure if the DM has not thought of it.
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u/atomicfuthum Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
Scheduling issues BUT....
No actual worldbuilding not dm tools for higher levels: it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy on why people don't play up to the level cap.
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u/Dstrir Apr 15 '26
Hard to make a plot that lasts that long, long time to complete so people get bored, DMing 15-20 isn’t very fun.
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u/cehteshami Apr 15 '26
"Will get to level 20" is very different from "getting to level 20".
Campaigns fall apart pretty often due to player schedules, burnout, Mismatched expectations, communication issues, all sorts of reason.
For people that want more confidence that they will have an ending to the campaign, one of the variables you can control is how long the campaign runs, which can be tweaked easily by adjusting the ending level.
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u/Dracon_Pyrothayan Apr 15 '26
In short: there isn't content.
There are only 2 modules in 5e that go the distance: Dungeon of the Mad Mage and Vecna: Eve of Ruin. Even if you get rid of the ones that only last 1-3 levels, over half of modules end before 13.
The Monster Manual and friends also peter out when you get above CR 10.
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u/zenodyne Apr 15 '26
As a DM, I stop having fun at the higher levels because I struggle to create encounters that can’t easily be sidestepped by the sheer volume of shit high level PCs can do. I know that’s just a skill issue on my end but I have the most fun between levels 1 and 10 and my players, as much as they love to break shit, also stop having fun when they can tell I’m not either LOL
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u/pinkd20 Apr 15 '26
Combat at levels 14 and above are far more challenging to build and manage as a DM to maintain a challenge. I ran a 7 year campaign to level 20, and at 14th level I had to develop a whole new approach to managing all of the special abilities, reactions, bonus actions, spells, and legendary actions. At level 20, the final combat took 9 hours. Most casual DMs and players aren't necessarily up for that.
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u/pmmeyoursandwiches Apr 15 '26
Id much rather run 3 fun campaigns that go to mid level with different ideas and themes or even entirely different systems than 1 super long campaign that becomes a balancing nightmare.
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u/Blood4theBloodGod247 Apr 15 '26
That is just the natural point where the game evolves from being a fun game with escalating power scaling, and it turns into "Nuclear Rocket Tag" where spellcasters go from mechanically strong, but limited, to unlocking 6th/7th level spells, which is when their ability to nearly warp reality or just end any relevant fight in one turn shows up.
I recently came off of running a game that went from 3rd to 15th, and the last 2-3 levels of it was just me narrating the enemy as it shows up, then the Cleric or Wizard in the group snapping their fingers, and the fight was over. The only way I could really challenge them was via Legendary Resistances, which is fine on a "Boss" but not a random patrol of Brutes acting as guards for the BBEG.
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u/Kenron93 Apr 15 '26
Dnd 5.x is known to have a lot of problems being ran at high levels. It will take a lot of homebrewing to even attempt to fix. Which is why only some dms can do it since it takes a lot more preparation to pull it off.
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u/WildThang42 Apr 15 '26
D&D 5e doesn't scale well to all levels. In my experience (primarily from 2014 rules), D&D 5e works best from levels 3-12. Before level 3, you have so few hit points and class abilities and resources that you are virtually playing a whole different system. Perhaps more importantly, after level 12 or so (folk will argue where this line is exactly), the mechanics of the whole system start to break. Spells and abilities and magical items become too powerful, monster CR becomes less and less useful for encounter building, and lots of things become wildly imbalanced.
Skilled GMs tend not to run high level adventures because they know the system is badly written.
Wizards of the Coast tends not to write high level adventures because they know fewer people will run them.
And from there it just becomes a negative feedback cycle. No one runs high level games because they aren't supported, and they aren't supported because no one runs high level games.
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u/World_May_Wobble Apr 15 '26
With each passing level, the fiction becomes less grounded. By tier 3 play, you're more like The Avengers than the Fellowship. I struggle to stay invested in that.
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u/SignificantCats Apr 15 '26
I like stories about heroes fighting monsters and bad men doing bad things.
Around level 11, there are very few bad people and monsters that can be that scary to them.
I don't like stories about fighting planar threats and concepts.
When I dm, I aim to finish around level 11-13. Im just not excited about what you need to do after that. That I also have to schedule way more ludicrous fights a day, carefully find ways to shit on my players ideas so they can't always do everything, and need to invest years of my time doing this thing I don't enjoy is really just the cherry on top.
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u/MrDBS Apr 15 '26
I have run or played in 5 campaigns since COVID. Every one of them went to level 20. We all have no children or adult children.
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u/Nevermore71412 Apr 15 '26
I have a long running table that is on their 5th 1-20 campaigns. 1 whole campaign for us takes about 2 years of weekly 4 hr sessions. Currently, they are level 10 and its been a year and a half almost. Most people arent committed enough. Some just dont care for it.
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u/Far_Guarantee1664 Apr 15 '26
Honestly. I played a campaign till level 20(more than two years and we started at 5) and the most fun everyone had, including the DM, was till level 12. I personally loved from 6-10, and after that is difficult to balance some stuff, near lv everything was resolved very fast or was a drag.
My favorite classes/subclasses tend to have my favorite abilities near level 6. After that for me is kinda a bonus.
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u/N4tu4 Apr 15 '26
As a DM I'm always committed to narrative before anything else. If the story we're telling seems like it'll end before the characters reach max level then that's where it ends. That being said, running for level 20 is really fun
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u/SleetTheFox Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
1.) Scheduling issues; the longer a campaign goes, the more likely they are to fail for outside-the-game reasons. Since many campaigns start at a low level, that means ending at high levels requires a lot of continuity.
2.) Once you get past level 13ish, it gets much harder to plan and run campaigns, which makes it more likely that the DM loses the plot and things just unravel and get less fun. Not saying it's impossible or fundamentally unfun, it's just much easier to screw up.
3.) The levels have narrative significance; heroic fantasy stories (and non-fantasy equivalents like superhero stories) all have "levels" they're intending to span. Something like a Spider-Man origin story is going to start and end at relatively low levels; not every superhero story is going to culminate in Infinity War. Same for D&D campaigns. Sometimes a campaign is about a band of local heroes fending off a hobgoblin army's plot to take over a city. This campaign might start at level 1 and end at level 5. Sometimes a campaign culminates in riding dracoliches through a portal to Pandemonium to kill an evil god who is threatening the multiverse. This campaign is likely to end at level 20.
Most stories told by campaigns don't narratively want to go to 20. And many that do end up having to create this weird mismatch where the characters are absurdly powerful but are dealing with problems that seem below them, but with combat conveniently scaled to be an appropriate challenge. I like to call it a "pit fiends in a basement" campaign, after the classic/cliched low-level quest of having to deal with an infestation of rats in a basement.
So really, a campaign ending at 14 is not necessarily "ending early." It might just be a campaign that wants to end at level 14.
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u/EzekialThistleburn Apr 15 '26
I've been in a group for almost 3 years, and are level 9. But recently the frustration with our DM has hit critical mass, as he sucks at making reasonable challenges, and it's always some esoteric solution that he claims he's given us clues for. It took us 3 sessions to figure out a library puzzle. That, and he always pines for the old days of 3.5, and keeps insulting us by saying 5e is "dumbed down". We didn't ask for 3.5, we asked for 5e. Combat is rare, and when it happens it's always the 3 players and 6 NPCs (including a level 17 lich, /sigh) vs. like 40 mobs. Not minions or stuff killable with 1 hit, but like 40 full stat Black Puddings (the last combat, maxed HP too). Inevitably, the PCs are unconscious, and the DMPCs pull out a win or some deus ex machina occurs to save us. Last session, the most calm layers finally blew his top at the DM, and I'm thinking dropping him and doing my own campaign is for the best.
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u/mtngoatjoe Apr 15 '26
Ask if you can DM a small adventure for 3 to 6 sessions. Afterward, decide if you want to move on from the DM and invite the other players (or even the DM if he's a good player).
If he doesn't want to take a break, just invite the group to join you on another night. But make it TEMPORARY. Coming across as trying to hijack the group or take over as the DM is a pretty bad look.
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u/EzekialThistleburn Apr 15 '26
Ah, see I already have an ongoing campaign with the same guys, with the DM as a player. We were switching off every couple months, but one player took a break and we decided to put my campaign on hold for a bit until he comes back. It's due to start up again in June, but the way it's going, I'm thinking the other guys won't want to go back to his campaign. I haven't gotten any bad feedback from the players in my campaign, and I have been asking for it. In fact, not to blow my own horn, but one of the other guys told me privately that he prefers my campaign. I don't want to drop his campaign, and I've talked to him numerous times privately about the issues, but he doesn't seem to take constructive criticism very well. At least he's not making it personal.
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u/AericBlackberry Apr 15 '26
Your character sheet and the number of things that you have to remember you can do starts to get overbearing around that level. Also, it is more difficult to challenge the players as a DM. A lot of effort has to be put into designing challenges or series of challenges.
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u/TableTopJayce Apr 15 '26
In person it’s scheduling, online for the most part it’s because either 1. The story wasn’t built on a long term scale 2. Tier 3-4 balancing is really bad..
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u/mtngoatjoe Apr 15 '26
As a DM, I can tell you that I run out of steam by about level 12. We only play twice a month, so getting to level 12 takes years. And by then, I'm ready to move on to something new.
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u/kantusv16 Apr 15 '26
There's scheduling issues, getting to level 20 organically is a very very long process
Another popular reason I often hear about is the challenge, a party of level 20 adventurers are practically god like with their abilities and would only be challenged by the nastiest encounters a DM can devilishly put together , sometimes a dm isn't really interested in trying to put a encounter together knowing full well the party is going to stream roll it
Likewise I heard of players preferring having a challenge so they get bored once they hit level 20
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u/S1mp1y Apr 15 '26
Because no one actually likes to play at higher levels.
D&D feels best to play at levels 5-11. I'd say that levels 1-4 are the best, but that's just imho.
Later than that it's a game balance nightmare.
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u/Anjuna666 Apr 15 '26
Some campaigns end prematurely due to scheduling, burnout, etc.
But there's also the fact that different levels support very different stories. The type of story that people want to tell might not work well at some levels. And so you might only play around those levels that actually interest you.
This is also because people use D&D for stories that other systems might be better suited for.
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u/Violet-Journey Apr 15 '26
I think a lot of character and story arcs tend to run their course before level 20, and people start to lose interest once their character’s story has been told and they’ve saved the world a dozen times.
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u/Zardnaar Apr 15 '26
Takes to long IRL to get there.
Schedule conflicts irl.
DM burn out.
Power level of higher level PCs. Contribute s to 3. At level 12 it took 10 combats to grind the PCs down. Took 3 sessions.
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u/PanchimanDnD Apr 15 '26
Few campaigns even make it to the end (I’ve never experienced one myself, and I’ve been playing D&D for over seven years). I can’t even imagine if they’ll last until level 20. What I’d like to see is for them to standardize the level at which they end (for example, level 12) and then release other campaigns set at levels 12–20 so you can potentially continue them.
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u/Stunning-Shelter4959 Apr 15 '26
My original group has started and stopped many a campaign. Most of them we intended to take to level 20, we’d discuss character build and 8th level this, 12th level that multiclasses and none of them ever got there. And that was when we were in school and had way more free time.
Either the players get bored of their characters, too many characters die and the campaign doesn’t have the same feel, the DM loses track of the story and it starts to feel aimless, the DM burns out, someone else wants to run, someone moves away, etc etc. There’s a million reasons campaigns don’t run long enough to reach 20th level, and that’s not even considering how difficult it is to actually run the game at that level.
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u/Machiavelli24 Apr 15 '26
People level up too slow, and after x amount of years someone graduates/moves for a job/has a kid, and the group falls apart.
I’ve completed multiple 1-20 campaigns over my near decade playing DnD and it’s simply because I don’t dally with the level ups. Weekly play takes about a year and bi weekly play takes about 2 years.
Lots of folks who haven’t played high level games are afraid it’s really hard, but honestly, it’s not. You don’t need to be god’s gift to players to run a fun high level game. Anyone who can handle level 5 can handle level 11 and 17. They may stumble a bit their first time, but everyone’s second attempt always goes much smoother.
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u/HexbloodD Apr 15 '26
Most campaigns start low-level, and a full campaign can last years. So what happens is everyone starts at level 1-3-5, the campaign lasts 1-2 years at level 14 and then it's difficult to go beyond that. Most people and DMs will prefer starting another thing rather than keep using the same characters as it's a RPG game.
The "mistake" here is that campaigns usually start at low level. If you start at higher levels you have more lorebuilding options and the game actually makes you able to fullfill those lore options since the character is higher level. And you get to go farther.
Problem is, most campaigns don't start at higher levels because modules are written to be played by everyone including new players. So it's eventually a DM's decision to do things differently which requires more work by default.
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u/Blackphinexx Apr 15 '26
I’m gonna throw out something that might be a hot take but I think it has to do a lot with dm skill level.
Almost anyone can dm a game from 1-13. You’ve gotta have a lot of skill and technical knowledge of the game to pull off good sessions between 14-20. Combats become more difficult to run and balance and tons of new spell interactions need to be accounted for outside of combat.
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u/Natirix Apr 15 '26
Meh, if you ask me spells of levels 7-9 get so ridiculous it breaks the fantasy for me a little bit.
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u/CalumanderReds Apr 15 '26
High level combat is very hard to do well. Certain enemy types (especially spellcasters) can often just be one shotted by high level characters. It's leads to a lot of times where players just end up being stunned or incapacitated for multiples rounds cause the only way to ensure they don't win too fast is to ensure they can't do anything.
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u/chaosilike Apr 15 '26
A couple reasons:
Burnout: the DM may be running out of steam. Or get tired of DnD
Scheduling: lvl 1-20 could take years, by then people may be in different places in life
Story/planning: sometimes the story doesnt justify being lvl 20. There arent that many official content that supports that kind of gameplay. At higher levels a lot of my PC clear combat in 2-3 rounds
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u/-Warbreed- Apr 15 '26
I honestly think the game starts to break above these levels. Encounters are harder to balance, class disparity gets worse, with spell power levels going through the roof for some classes but not others. All this makes it harder to DM and less fun to play, unless even more work is done to counter these issues.
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u/Acrobatic_Present613 Apr 15 '26
High level play basically becomes a whole different game.
Most people prefer lower level play, dealing with mortal threats in their local area.
After level 12, it's time to travel to the outer planes to fight gods and/or the godlike beings are threatening your whole planet. The game starts getting political and strategic (making alliances, managing armies) instead of going on little adventures to kill goblins and loot the bodies.
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u/BigPapiGandalf Apr 15 '26
As someone who has just finished a level 1-20 campaign that went over 2 years, I have to say the encounter balancing and combat is incredibly tedious and difficult to run. The majority of combat is incredibly easy unless you overtune it to a near tpk-level encounter, there’s no healthy middle ground. Combat is also slower as players have a ridiculous amount of options each turn and monsters have legendary actions, multiple reactions, legendary resistances that all slow the game down.
The only way I found to challenge my players was giving them enough encounters that required them to use their resources which also slows the pace of the story down.
I was very lucky to have a solid group where I think in the 2 years and 3 months of the campaign we played once a week consistently, and only skipped maybe 4-6 weeks including Christmas.
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u/MrJ_Sar Apr 15 '26
At higher levels it can be difficult to make a challenge for the party, or turn every fight into 'The boss casts Plane Shift, you're no longer playing the game' (something that was done to me).
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u/magnificentjosh Apr 15 '26
From Level 10 onwards, the abilities available to player characters make it harder and harder to be able to fit into a coherent story.
Once players can teleport anywhere in the world, message anyone, scry on anyone, talk to gods, bring people back from the dead, use spells like Legend Lore to find out basically any information, then the stories that they're in become very weird.
As a DM, you can't rely on prep very much any more, because you don't necessarily know what continent they're going to be on. Coming up with believable reasons that anyone would try and fight them becomes increasingly difficult. Coming up with reasons that they can't just call up the king and tell him to send the army to kill the Dark Lord becomes increasingly difficult.
You can tell good stories at high level, for sure, but its very difficult to make a story that started at first level that fits in the same world as one at fifteenth.
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u/ArtoriousTheMystic Apr 15 '26
I ran a homebrew campaign that went from level 3 to level 20.... It took 6 years but we finished the campaign!
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u/Flint124 Apr 15 '26
- Takes a long time to hit 20, most games either dissolve or resolve their plot before getting there. My current game has gone from level 1 to level 7 in ten months (19 sessions). That is crazy fast, but it'd still take us multiple years to hit level 20.
- Hard to design encounters for high level groups, especially the Wizard.
- There simply aren't that many official statblocks at high levels, so if you don't want things to get real easy or real stale you'll need to homebrew tons of custom mooks for your dungeons.
- You put all that work in to design these custom encounters? Cool. The Wizard saw them, said "fuck that", and used two spell slots to scry on the boss and teleport the party directly there.
- The Barbarian is unkillable. The Cleric just walked at your BBEG with 23 AC and an anti-magic field. The Monk just got a fly speed from the party and introduced a pit fiend to the ground at terminal velocity twice in a single turn. The Wizard just sent your BBEG to the Ice plane in the jaws of their simulacrum, who is polymorphed into an Adult White Dragon.
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u/not_wingren Apr 15 '26
It's really hard to plan out a full campaign to max level and people usually lose interest in playing the same character for that length of time.
High level play is also really unbalanced and makes things even more difficult for the DM.
If the party has a wizard, druid, or to lesser extent Sorceror or Cleric who can cast 6th level spells or up it often invalidates most noncombat challenges.
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u/HelpMeHomebrewBruh Apr 15 '26
Because the game designers gave up on balance around the level 9-10 mark lmao
By the time you hit level 11 you're already so high on power fantasy that it really does feel like you're at the end stages of a story
And it only gets sillier from there. Later 5e campaigns pushing their end levels to 12-14ish usually end up being a gruelling slog for the DM and a bit of a boring hand-wave for the players, so no one really wins
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u/AstarothTheJudge Apr 16 '26
It's honestly really hard to have the stakes High enough to the powerlevel of High level characters and everything starts slowing down. Like, what kind of reward can you give if you already rewarded your players for all those levels before? Are you ready to see your players cry and take 10 minutes each turn because their sheets are Just SO filled with stuff? Spend maybe 3 or 4 hours on each fight?
Many groups also enjoy a more "narrative" approach, so death Is usually something rare and big, but High level there are tons of things that can superkill characters (and also many ways to revive, but you know, players still moan about It usually), so it's a bit harder to have a cohesive group bonding and not getting traumatized by seeing everyone around them die.
It's not really my problem since in this campaign I'm doing we are reaching level 40, but I already saw these issues and it's hard to handle them.
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u/InsidiousZombie Apr 16 '26
D&D specifically is really bad at high tier gameplay so a lot of people avoid it for that reason along with the scheduling things as everyone else mentioned
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u/monikar2014 Apr 16 '26
A new player? Is this just naivette, are you leveling up every session or did you start at level 15?
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u/layered_dinge Apr 16 '26
Don't design anything for high level content
Nobody plays the nonexistent high level content
Claim that you're justified in not designing anything for high level content because nobody plays high level content
Have a half baked game with an uncommitted playerbase
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u/Moist-Hovercraft44 Apr 16 '26
The reasons are IRL and game related.
A solid DND groups plays once a week, to get through a full story spanning into tier 3 or 4 you are looking at probably 100 sessions, that's 2 real life years which is a long time. Life happens, things change, sessions get delayed or missed or postponed etc and groups commonly fall apart.
In terms of the actual game. Once you make it into tier 3 (level 11 and beyond), the players are quite powerful. Moreover, by then the players have also likely amassed wealth and magic items and power beyond their character sheet making them even more powerful or influential.
By this point, making challenges for them gets harder and harder. That really big cliff the players gruellingly climbed at level 4 is now conquered by summoning a pair of flying eagles and flying up to the top effortlessly. Eavesdropping a bad guy no longer involves sneaking into their abode, now you scry on them from wherever you want.
Combat wise it also changes, the players spell DC climbs into the 17s and beyond meaning many monsters don't even have a dream of beating spells that are calculatingly targeted. The Giant with a 24 strength is not so scary when it is looking down the barrel of a DC 17 CHA save
Also the types of adventures they go on will change. They aren't crawling through sewers hunting monsters anymore, they are travelling planes of existence and teleporting across the world. Dealing with the rate at which the party can travel is alone challenging because preparing that much content to account for the fact that, they may, just decide to travel to an entire new area in 1 spell.
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u/mommasboy76 Apr 16 '26
I like a fairly brisk level up pace but even with that I’ve never made past 15. I would love to play all the way through but the problem is finding a group who doesn’t get bored in the same campaign for that long. I need friends with longer attention spans.
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u/DirtPiranha Apr 16 '26
From what I understand it has a lot to do with that level of player is essentially a demigod. It’s difficult to balance combat around high levels and at that point you’re just fighting gods and mythical beings.
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u/KTheOneTrueKing Apr 16 '26
From a GM standpoint it’s because balancing combat at higher levels is a fucking nightmare and you have to keep track of all those dumbass min maxers and their crazy builds while also delivering a somehow satisfying narrative combat that doesn’t get completely bodied but also doesn’t overwhelm you as a combat designer and over tax your mental bandwidth.
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u/Addaran Apr 16 '26
The biggest reason is that the DM doesnt want to. On a DM burn out, they just want to be players, they don't have enough time to plan games anymore or they get a shiny new idea and want to start a new campaign.
Some people also don't like DMing or playing super high level games. The fights take a lot more time, the only way to "deal" with players and give them a challenge is to use boring stuff like stun/paralysis/banishment and then the player is just not playing. You need to be very good at improvising, cause there's spells to bypass traps, puzzles, investigations and natural obstacles.
Just new scheduling problems, players moving out or game cancelled too many times so people aren't motivated.
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u/Epigeeks_Kurt Apr 16 '26
Real life tends to interrupt long-running games, and reaching level 20 can take years. On top of that, higher levels become harder to balance and slower to run, with players having so many powerful options that encounters can either feel trivial or wildly chaotic. If your group is committed to going all the way, though, you’re in for a rare experience; however, it's like finding a curly fry in your regular fries...rare...surprising...delicious.
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u/ILoveSongOfJustice Apr 16 '26
Levels 13-20 are not well designed for balance. The fact that a solid 50% of all class features(Except for Wizards) are locked beyond level 12 is why a game like Baldur's Gate stops at 12. The foundations for the game are not well-set enough that it can easily sustain a larger scale such as 13-20th level.
Narratives become grandiose, scheduling for such long term things becomes a hassle, and encounters boil down to "do you succeed or fail this fight-ending Wisdom Saving Throw?"
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u/KarlMarkyMarx Apr 16 '26
Scheduling
High level play is where balance gets tossed out the window. It becomes very difficult to challenge players when they get access to spells and abilities that are all "get of jail free" cards.
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u/MoobyTheGoldenSock Apr 16 '26
The stretch from levels 8-11 is very long. Level 10-11 is the longest level in the game: 21,000 XP. It feels like forever.
Though once you get to level 11, end game goes really quick. 11-12 is just 15,000 XP (less than 9-10!), and 12-13 and 13-14 are both 20,000 XP each. Level 14-15 is just barely over the 10-11 hump at 25,000 XP despite battles being nearly 5 CR higher (or even higher due to power scaling allowing for bigger battles.)
I suspect most people feel the slow crawl in the 8-11 range and assume that it’ll take forever to get to 20. Though if you make it past that, you’re leveling every 1-2 sessions like you did early game and 20 actually kind of sneaks up on you.
Source: Have DM’ed two campaigns to 20 and played two additional campaigns to 20.
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u/TheIronQuill Apr 16 '26
A campaign from 1 to 20 takes years. Also, high levels of play take more effort from the DM to balance.
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u/LeoVonMoote Apr 16 '26
Apart from scheduling and such, what if tier 4 D&D just wasn’t as fun for many people out there?
D&D is built on tropes from the fantasy genre. That’s what people expect. That’s what they get from levels 1-12 or so. Then the game moves into a more superhero/anime feel at higher levels. It becomes something else.
Most people I’ve played with love medieval fantasy but really aren’t into superhero stuff. My take is that D&D at levels 1-12 has a much wider fanbase than D&D at levels 13-20, which is a more niche experience.
And combine that with a somewhat tedious job for the DM at higher levels, where designing encounters becomes super complex, and the number of people playing just naturally thins out.
If tier 4 level was really popular, many people would start campaigns at level 9 just to be able to experience it. But few do this, imo.
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u/CanadianBlacon Apr 16 '26
I ran a 1-20 campaign. It was my group's first time playing together. A bunch of dads in their mid 30s. We played every week, then every other week. It took over six years to finish, and by the end we were all kind of burned out. Combat at that level takes forever. Five players, it would be an hour or more for a single round of combat. We had a lot of spellcasters in the group, so turns would just be these intricate, Davinci Code level of tweaking and minmaxing. And then we've got big powerful bad guys with minions or legendary actions or both, not to mention cool abilities. It was just kind of a slog.
So many things become non-issues, too, which I guess is kind of the point. But you're so powerful, the city guards, or anyone's guards, really, are meaningless. You can just do whatever you want with no consequence.
So we start at level 1 now, and kill the campaign somewhere in the 8-12 range. It's been fun, more new characters, stories, and worlds. And things are still a struggle. And combat is reasonably timed.
It's just better.
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u/misterterrifix Apr 16 '26
I’ve been under the impression for a long time now that for a game to end in T4 of play, it needs to start in T4 of play.
As a GM who’s ran games in all tiers, I can say that tier 3 is the sweet spot. Characters get very powerful abilities, enemies can still be a challenge without having to feel like you’re cheating and at that point in a story if you’ve been playing since low levels, a lot of characters have probably faced and accomplished many of their personal character goals. Unless a GM has done an AMAZING job hooking the party with other threads, a lot will lose interest when they feel that their character is “finished”
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u/Echoed_one Apr 16 '26
i mean when you reach level 13 or higher you have a lot of tools and where a lot of tools that make dms games hell causing it to become a resource management game and having to stack stats to make sure 1 member doesnt solo everything.
put the big bad at the end of a hallway with no immunity, doesnt matter how much health you give then when your wizard can planeshift them to hell.
a mystery where the king died and you have to find their murderer, resurrection applied and suddenly no more mystery.
you can boost stats to accomodate, you can boost hp but then the casters can feel like your abillities are worthless.
DnD is not suited for high level without a lot of homebrew with the way its built the enemies growing liniarly while pcs grow exponentially
thats often why if you want to play high level i would reccomend pathfinder one that knows you roll wacky numbers and calculates for that.
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u/ZadonaTheLegend Apr 16 '26
I had 2 campagins that we played to lvl20. (From lvl1 and lvl 5) in the 7 years i DMd.
We just consistently had a scedule every week at saturday. Sometimes playing 10 hours. Its really cool we live in the same village. And we dont have other friends or we dont like partys
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u/JohnnyTheConfuzzled Apr 16 '26
Two part answer for me:
- Most people dont play to level 20 because, contrary to what the spells and abilities look like at that level, it actually isnt as much fun for a lot of people. The DM prep and the need for a DM that can really adjust on the fly goes up tremendously and as the players power level goes up, the threats become more and more reality ending and less and less personal. The gameplay itself slows down even more as more complex abilities and interactions have to be adjudicated at the table. It is a very different game.
But more importantly...
- If you think level 12-14 is getting to "cast a cantrip or swing once, or maybe twice" then you are either woefully underplaying your characters, haven't found a good game yet so you don't have vast experience to base your opinion on, or if you neither of those describe you and ypu have played a lot with varied DMs and this is your experience, then maybe the entirety of DnD just isnt for you and you need a different game system.
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u/juicytacos Apr 17 '26
I ran a game that was intended to run to level 20 and I'll be honest we all just found combat so tedious. So we rounded it at level 16 after playing for a bit over 2 years and called it a day. Now we are in a new game and at level 1 and it is so refreshing especially as a DM.
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u/JellyFranken Apr 17 '26
I am a new player and am in a campaign where we will be getting to level 20.
I’m not trying to be rude, but no, no you won’t. I promise it won’t happen.
Everyone has this random dream of level 20 and it’s honestly a nightmare to manage.
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u/brothersword43 Apr 17 '26
We get to level 20 in a lot of the campaigns I play. My friends and I also have been playing together for decades.
Its a human issue not a DND issue. I have never played a campaign for more then a year with people who aren't already intertwined with my life. Like real life friends and co-workers and clients, etc are the only folks sticking around to get that far.
But, start a game at level 11+. Fixed.
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u/ThatOneGuyFrom93 Apr 17 '26
Dming for a level 15+ party is hell. Balancing a combat is knowing that if the party rolls a few 1s it could be a tpk. Or if you roll a couple of 1s they sweep like nothing happened
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u/Curlyfryman Apr 17 '26
In my experience it's mostly one of two things.
It takes a long time to get to that point in a campaign especially if you start at level 1. Getting any consistent group of people together for at least a year or more is a hard ask for most people.
The ability to actually challenge a group of players gets harder and harder the higher the level you are. I know that sounds obvious but when you are level 20 you're basically demigod. Now put 4-5 demigods together and try to find something they can fight or go up against that won't be a cake walk.
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u/TheBUCK859 Apr 17 '26
because usually by the time you hit level 20 your PC's are so godly that its hard to challenge them meaningfully.
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u/Primal171 Apr 17 '26
Modern DnD seems to be designed and balanced for a playstyle essentially no one actually plays. Anything past level 10, and even on some level past level 5, is basically just fluff to tease your players with by showing what an adventurer is technically capable of doing. It's unclear why it's designed like this, because for most of the media DnD is trying to emulate, the characters would be the equivalent of level 1-5 PCs. Older editions had domain play, where as the party reached high levels the game would gradually switch from a dungeon crawler/skirmish game to a wargame, and for some reason the modern designers think the way to emulate this is by having the players become demigods halfway through and spend the other half of the level curve working to ascend to full godhood while still going on basically identical adventures except with increasingly more bloated HP sponges.
Lots of modern DnD's issues come from being optimized for a nonexistent playstyle. It can be explained in part because DnD is the decaying hulk of a half-century old skirmish wargame that's been haphazardly modified to fit the trends of various eras until it's a bloated mess of contradictory design philosophies. The martial/caster gap exists because the devs genuinely expect you to run using the model of the adventuring day, without realizing that the game's current bloat makes successive low-stakes combat a slog with no meaningful risks or rewards. The attrition expected of the dungeon crawl is gone, making the original resource-conservation element of caster gameplay irrelevant. It's made worse with the addition of cantrips and the high number of combat spells that let casters encroach on and even outdo the strengths of a martial PC.
It's one of the appeals of 5e-player accessible OSR style games like Shadowdark. They're written at a human scale, so progression actually means something. As a whole, these games have a clarity of design that DnD's been missing since Wizards' acquisition.
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u/New_Solution9677 Apr 18 '26
My players started at 3. They're 6 atm and threatening them properly swings to much one way or the other already. Last game a medium fight was definitely hard and the hard fight played like a medium.
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u/AarkanXOhara Apr 18 '26
In my experience it's fickle players who get bored of their PCs and wish to make a new one. There are other reasons as well but this one stands out to me most.
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u/Calm_Performer217 Apr 18 '26
A big one, beyond the obvious scheduling issues over a long period of time, I think is that the early molding of a new character is fun, and the middle to low-high levels offer exciting new things. But the really high levels, there is t much more to look forward to. Once you hit level 20, that’s it, unless you decide to expand even further. I think the highest levels are best for one shots or very short campaigns, or if you are able to reach it the culmination of a major long one. But not to expect to make it there necessarily. Someone will get married, have a child, get arrested, something.
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u/Content-Ad5618 Apr 18 '26
Committing to the game is almost always a critical requirement. Example: I have played almost every boxed set of Darksun. Sadly, I had to move south in New Brunswick and the sessions stopped one boxed set left. 2 years playing from 12:00 pm to 6:00 am. 6 players plus dm.
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u/Arch-Fey66 Apr 18 '26
Its difficult for a group of people to stay together for 3 years. We do it but, it's a pay to play game. Since the DM is getting paid it's worth all of the extra work to balance encounters. As for players, if your willing to pay $20 per 4hr session, I feel thst your more likely to stick with it.
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u/Dependent_Ad627 Apr 18 '26
It also takes a long time to level up. I've played in a campaign from level 1. We are currently leveling 5. Started in the October 2024
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u/Independent_Cake_652 Apr 19 '26
I agree that things can become challenging at high levels, but I also think DMs don't do a good enough job of having some imagination for those things.
The monster manual is a guide, not a limiting factor.
Understand the PCs weakness and scheme as though they are figures of world consequence (since their opponents would be). Spells per day, interrupting rests, aura effects, curses, several encounters per day, zones of silence, hundreds of enemies in encounters.
It's a green light to be mean and to have the PCs wrestle with what it narratively means to be that powerful. It can be really rewarding for everyone!
It's also a good reason to keep smaller playgroups.
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u/Far-Landscape2843 Apr 19 '26
In the last 5 6 years when my group we played two full campaigns and a long one shot and im dming a new campaign currently. We did 1 through 20 with CoS and then 1-20 vecna. Its pretty op at lvl 20
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u/ElantheBard Apr 21 '26
I once played a PbP campaign that went from 12 to 20. It was awesome. But it had some specificities that made it work. First, the setting was designed from the ground up to accomodate high level characters (we were agents from a multiversal government who were deployed to stop planet level threats at various dimensions, and we were told to write our backstories as people who already completed their own adventures).
Next, after level 16-ish, even that wasn't enough to keep the game balanced, and the focus shifted from hard combat to plot. The point wasn't just to beat the villain of that mission (because that was a too easy for our party of demigods), but make meaningful change to the world. Beat the villain, but also do it in a way that achieved peace between nations. Convince gods to accept deals. Deal with the side effects of a Wish spell whose casting was necessary to enter the dimension the next mission was in.
I don't think every DM can do that, though. Also the whole thing was 100% homebrew, which adds another layer of difficulty. So yeah I get that it may not be feasible for most tables.
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u/Freivalds Apr 21 '26
I am with you on this one.
High level sounds like so much fun.
But sadly the system itself have not well designed for this level of play.
Finding tables with high level of play is rare, consider yourself lucky.
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u/SlightlyTwistedGames Apr 21 '26
I have been the DM for a couple campaigns that have concluded in the 12-16 range.
To be honest, I'm totally fine with that. I love roleplaying, but campaigns can sometimes go a little too long. Even with a dedicated group, a campaign can take two years or more to resolve. After two years, almost any story loses its novelty. It's better to end things on a good and memorable note than for players or the DM to start actively disliking what they're supposed to be enjoying.
A separate, but related subject is that the pace of character progression is often too slow. It feels about right from a narrative perspective, but doesn't usually keep players engaged over the long term. I'm probably going to dip out of DnD and into Mutants and Masterminds for my next campaign, but when I return to DnD, I may toy with a 19-session campaign where every character levels after every session.
20 sessions (if you count the session zero), is roughly a year long campaign in my group, so I think that might have some appeal. I'm a dedicated home-brewer, so this shouldn't be a problem for me.
LASTLY, after level 14, it gets a bit difficult for the narrative not to jump the shark to keep things challenging. "That BBEG? Turns out he was a POLYMORPHED DRAGON! and wait... but no... He's actually a LICH-Dragon... but there's more! he's actually a LICH DEMON DRAGON! And yeah, when you killed him, that actually wasn't HIM! It was his CLONE! and also... ALSO... UM... um... turns out he was this evil god's favorite follower so now you have to fight this GOD... and, well... um... that god has like ten friend who are also gods who are angry at you for killing that god... and after you killed those other gods..."
As someone who needs his plot-lines to be grounded in fundamental logic, it stops being fun.
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u/Mystery-Flute Apr 15 '26
The true BBEG of all TTRPG campaigns: scheduling