D&D 5E Just Finished a Lv.1 thru Lv.20 Campaign -- Ask Me Anything

[MNblockhead]

We should start "1-20 Club" thread! Sounds like your campaign was a blast. I've run two 1-20 campaigns in the past 10 years. The first doesn't really count in that it was a milestone leveling campaign where we'd play for a level for 1-2 sessions. There would be downtime between levels until "once again the heros are called upon..." It was fun, but my second 1-20 was more memorable. It was a Rappan Athuk campaign that lasted 5 years using gp for xp and minor milestones. I've posted at length about it, including what it was like to run tier 4 combats, in another thread. Some of my take aways:

1. D&D starts to feel like a different game after 10th level. By tier four its a fantasy superhero game. Not a complaint, just an observation.

2. My players are long time D&D players and like tactical combat. Running good, challenging combats even at low levels could be difficult. At high levels, I would be exhausted by the end of the session. I liked it, but it is nice to be playing a low levels again.

3. Wish, simulacrum, true polymorph...things got very gonzo. And the combats can be lengthy. The final battle in my campaign lasted 12 hours of IRL game time. I wrote about it here (WARNING MAJOR SPOILERS FOR RAPPAN ATHUK!)

4. High level D&D combat shows the importance of surprise and multiple enemies. Single big bosses are hard to challenge players with. Yet a mob of lower level mooks who get the drop on the PCs can be surprisingly dangerous.

Questions for you:

1. A lot of DMs burn out on 1-20 campaigns. Not only because of the length these campaigns can run for, but also because of the increasing burden on the DM. How did you avoid burnout?

2. If you were to do it again, would you switch to milestone leveling? Especially at higher levels or is spending a good amount of time at each level to really get into that levels abilities important to you and your players?

3. Would your enjoyment of running high-level D&D be less if you were not running it in a VTT with the various aids and conveniences a VTT provides a DM?

4. Was this a one-time campaign or do you prefer to always run 1-20 campaigns?

5. Do you run or play in other campaigns at the same time? If this was your only game, did you ever find yourself wanting to play other systems, try other campaign ideas, and just have more variety? I found that running or playing in the occasional one-shot met my desire for variety sated so I could continue to enjoy running the same game system and campaign for years.

6. Did you let players swap PCs? Did any do so? Without going into detail about the background story for this, most players in my game had multiple characters. Most played the same character, other would swap more frequently. Originally, it was to have backup PCs ready for when a player's character died, but it also allows players to play with different character concepts, classes, etc.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ugh, high level combat is the worst.

To build a "Hard" encounter for five, 17th level characters, I had to pretty much use Legendary monsters. That's monsterS, plural. So every round I had to track multiple Legendary actions, sometimes a Lair action or two, and probably all of their summoned minions and bodyguards. To say nothing of the players, who had so many class features and spell options to consider that one single round of combat could take 20 or 30 minutes to resolve.

It wasn't uncommon for "boss" battles to take more than 3 hours to resolve. Regular, non-boss combats were much faster, usually resolving themselves in about 30-45 minutes or so.

What level, or level range if it isn't a specific point, would you say marked the transition from "I can reasonably do boss encounters without them being a slog" to what you describe here? That is, you've pretty clearly said that 17th level definitely is "high", but is the floor for this effect 17? 15? 13? A loose range-band?

Separately: Would you say that non-combat got similarly difficult for you to properly handle?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm going to make a lot of people mad here, but you asked so...

I think the "martials vs. casters" thing is a myth. The line between magic-users and swordsmen was already blurry at 1st level, and it only blurred more as the levels piled on. By the time our heroes were 13th level, the line between the two might as well have been invisible: the artificer was charging into battle with a magical axe, while the fighter was shooting cantrips.

I know lots of people here say this is a big issue with 5E, but I've never seen it.

That does not sound to me like you had any martials at all. You had a crew of spellcasters, some of them just didn't have spells for the first two levels...

 

[CleverNickName]

Questions for you:

1. A lot of DMs burn out on 1-20 campaigns. Not only because of the length these campaigns can run for, but also because of the increasing burden on the DM. How did you avoid burnout?

2. If you were to do it again, would you switch to milestone leveling? Especially at higher levels or is spending a good amount of time at each level to really get into that levels abilities important to you and your players?

3. Would your enjoyment of running high-level D&D be less if you were not running it in a VTT with the various aids and conveniences a VTT provides a DM?

4. Was this a one-time campaign or do you prefer to always run 1-20 campaigns?

5. Do you run or play in other campaigns at the same time? If this was your only game, did you ever find yourself wanting to play other systems, try other campaign ideas, and just have more variety? I found that running or playing in the occasional one-shot met my desire for variety sated so I could continue to enjoy running the same game system and campaign for years.

6. Did you let players swap PCs? Did any do so? Without going into detail about the background story for this, most players in my game had multiple characters. Most played the same character, other would swap more frequently. Originally, it was to have backup PCs ready for when a player's character died, but it also allows players to play with different character concepts, classes, etc.

1. Burnout is real, for sure--it hits me at least once every campaign. I think this campaign was a little more resilient to DM burnout than my other campaigns because of a few decisions I made early on.

First, the setting: the world was a huge ring of islands that spanned from the planet's equator to the pole, so everything was modular and isolated and each region of the game had a distinctive feel. Every new island they visited was a literal "change of scenery."

Second was my level of involvement: there was no massive, overarching story that I had to manage and push the heroes toward, there were no huge complicated maps and lighting configurations for me to prepare ahead of time. Like I said in my previous posts, I used a rough outline, my players' input, and random tables to "write" the adventure, and used theater of the mind whenever I could (and generic maps with Fog of War whenever I couldn't). Both of those decisions paid huge dividends over the years-long campaign.

2. Nah, we don't like milestone leveling. My players describe it as "DM-May-I," as in "DM, may I have a level now?" And for me, it feels like I'm driving and the kids in the backseat keep asking "are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet?" I understand that a lot of DMs prefer it, and I understand their reasons for liking it so much, but it's not for me.

3. I don't think so. We played 3.5E in-person for years before the pandemic struck, and while those campaigns never quite reached 20th level, they did last for years. We still had just as much fun, throwing pretzel sticks and high-fiving each other and laughing at my feeble attempts at mapping on a wet-erase mat. The format might have changed in the years since, but it has always felt like D&D to me.

4. This was the first time I've ever hit the Level Cap in a campaign. And if I'm being honest? I doubt I'll ever run one like it again. The best parts of the game (for me, as the DM) are between 6th and 12th level, so from now on--for me and my gaming group--I think I'll cap the characters or wrap up the campaign at ~12th level.

5. I'm a player in my wife's in-person 5E D&D group, and I'm the DM for a very infrequent BECM game on Roll20, but this 20th level 5E campaign is with my regular group. We play 5E D&D mostly, but every now and then the DM won't be able to play or too many players will cancel, so we'll run a one-shot of Call of Cthulhu or Star Wars over Roll20, or we'll play a game of Deep Rock Galactic over Steam.

6. The players all have a standing offer: if their own characters are starting to feel dull, or if they saw a cool character class/species that they wanted to try out, they can roll up a character and play it for a few sessions. I'll work them into the story as best I can, their "regular" character will hang out in the background, and they can play something else for a while. And nobody has ever taken me up on that offer. I guess they're committed to their roles?

 

[THEMNGMNT]

I too have run a 1-20 level 5E campaign and this tracks to my experience.

 

[CleverNickName]

What level, or level range if it isn't a specific point, would you say marked the transition from "I can reasonably do boss encounters without them being a slog" to what you describe here? That is, you've pretty clearly said that 17th level definitely is "high", but is the floor for this effect 17? 15? 13? A loose range-band?

Separately: Would you say that non-combat got similarly difficult for you to properly handle?

I think the game really started to grind around 13th or 14th level, and yes: it started with boss battles. Around 16th or 17th level, it had spread to every single battle. The sheer number of dice being rolled and resolved from character to character and round to round became annoying, then unwieldy, then boring.

We started talking about ways to "streamline" things to make combat run faster, but nobody wanted to address the real problem: the reason combat couldn't run faster is because everyone was making multiple actions per turn, with multiple rolls per action. It was faster on a VTT, and I had installed several mods to make it run even faster, Iike AutoButtons and TokenMod, but there is only so much the computer could do.

But non-combat stuff continued to run as smoothly as it always did. Exploration and Social pillars of the game always seemed to run as smoothly at 20th level as they did at 1st level. At high levels, it wasn't unusual for a single battle to take 3 or more hours to resolve...but we never had a boobytrap, skill challenge, or social encounter take longer than 30 minutes.

 

[CleverNickName]

That does not sound to me like you had any martials at all. You had a crew of spellcasters, some of them just didn't have spells for the first two levels...

Well, I can say this much. The party consisted of:

V.Human Fighter (Gunslinger) 14/Warlock (Fathomless) 6
V.Human Rogue (Assassin) 20
Firbolg Druid (Wilfdfire) 16/Wizard (Evoker) 4
Goliath Monk (Kensei) 20
Changeling Artificer (Battle Smith) 20

I'll leave it up to the scholars of ENWorld to debate which of them were "martials" and which were "casters."

 

[sevenbastard]

4. This was the first time I've ever hit the Level Cap in a campaign. And if I'm being honest? I doubt I'll ever run one like it again. The best parts of the game (for me, as the DM) are between 6th and 12th level, so from now on--for me and my gaming group--I think I'll cap the characters at 12th level.

My last campaign ran for 125 sessions. Highest level character at the end was 13th level. No one complained about slow level progression because the sandbox style gave them alot of agency on charachter goals wich were more important than just grinding for XP and levels.

Game stayed in the sweet spot a lot longer.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

For me, the game starts to get ultra gonzo around level 13, when 7th level spells come online. In future campaigns, I'll talk to the spellcaster players and see what we can do to make it all a little less absurd.

At higher levels, combat dragged with 5 players. With 3 players, it never dragged at any level. With more than 4 players, DMs need to work harder to make foes hit harder and drop faster. Maybe the new Monster Manual will help with that?

Finally, be aware that Tier 4 can go by really quickly. Like Tier 1, you don't linger there. It's more of a drive by.

 

[CleverNickName]

My last campaign ran for 125 sessions. Highest level character at the end was 13th level. No one complained about slow level progression because the sandbox style gave them alot of agency on charachter goals wich were more important than just grinding for XP and levels.

Woah, that really is a slow level progression...we made it to 20th level in 71 gaming sessions, using the standard XP progression. Our gaming sessions were about 5 hours long apiece--how long were your sessions?