I was looking through my collection of D&D books. I have everything published officially for 5th Edition with the exception of Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Now, it's ironic that that's the book I've just mentioned because it holds a unique place in 5E: it's the only published adventure book that goes into tier 4, and furthermore, goes to level 20.
First, let's break down tiers of play: In the simplest terms, they're just level ranges. Tier 1 goes from levels 1-4, Tier 2 goes from 5-10, Tier 3 goes 11-16, and Tier 4 goes from 17-20.
Lorewise, the broad assumptions the game makes about these tiers also applies to the notoriety of your player characters, with 1 representing local heroes, 2 representing heroes of the kingdom or nation, 3 being heroes of the entire world, and 4 being heroes of the multiverse. These categories are less hard and fast - they make an assumption that you're doing the standard style of D&D campaign in which you start off fighting bandits and end up fighting gods.
Mechanically, though, these levels tend to represent clear breakpoints: because even pure casters will only have access to 2nd level spells in tier 1, and Revivify, the lowest-level resurrection magic, is a 3rd level spell, by necessity a tier 1 adventure is going to be a bit scrappier. Upon hitting 5, the wizard can get fireball, the cleric can get revivify, and all the martial classes (except Rogues) can start attacking twice a turn.
Indeed, pure casters will get a new level of spell at the start of each tier that generally represents a big step up in power from what was previously allowed. Compare Fireball (a 3rd level spell that does damage to every creature in a sphere when it goes off) to Shatter (a 2nd level spell that does likewise,) and the jump from 3d8 (average damage 13.5) to 8d6 (average damage 28) is pretty ridiculously huge. At tier 3, pure casters get 6th level spells, which, while perhaps not quite as iconic, are distinct in that a half-caster like a Paladin will never be able to cast stuff at that level. Then, at tier 4, pure casters start to get 9th level spells, which become godlike in power, like True Resurrection, Invulnerability, and most of all, Wish.
In theory, D&D is supposed to scale up to keep the difficulty relatively smooth - you throw tougher monsters at your party as they get more powerful. The truth, though, is that this isn't really the case. In the earliest levels, largely due to the fact that player character health is very low, but also because there just aren't that many options for the players to take, success and failure can happen very swiftly. My roommate, for example, while running the campaign he does with his work friends, unexpectedly killed a player character with a swarm of bats (hardly the sort of thing you'd expect) and in the same combat, another character gave a healing potion to the group's bard - whose player chose, as what he thought the character would do in a panic on his next turn, to cast thunderwave, which wound up instantly killing the character who had just healed him.
Not only is this far less likely to happen at higher levels, but the consequences are potentially negligible. My the time your cleric is level 17, even disintegrating a player character need not mean the end for them (I remember being shocked to discover that True Resurrection can even revert someone from undeath.)
D&D is very popular these days, more than it has ever been. But how many people do you know who have run high-level campaigns? To an extent, simply making it that far can be a challenge, even when using milestone leveling. I have only briefly run one-shots at higher levels (level 18,) and so I can't speak from a great breadth of experience, but my sense is that you can't just throw big, hard-hitting enemies at them and expect it to be a challenge. I used Orcus as my big bad with maxed-out health on the more recent of these one-shots (summoning a dracolich and two death knights to aid him) and didn't kill a single player character, despite the fact that, by the game's encounter-building rules, this was supposed to be a very deadly fight.
Again, I'm not sure I have the experience necessary to evaluate exactly how to change things, though I have two theories: the first is that monsters' health does not keep pace with the party's ability to inflict damage. By this point in my regular campaign where the players are level 11, a 200-health dragon can barely withstand a single round of combat against my player characters, and yet the very beefiest monster in any of the books has only a bit more than three times that amount. I also think that their ability to inflict damage is not as massive as it seems they should be. Orcus, for example, has a terrifying reputation, but in terms of the actions he can perform, they're a bit underwhelming. His melee attacks will do 68 damage in a round if they both land, and the spells he can cast through the Wand of Orcus do either a fireball's worth of damage (as we established earlier, averages to 28) or 61.5 against a single target - which is honestly not a lot against a high-level PC.
Strategy is, of course, necessary to make these a bigger challenge. One thing I've been playing around with is the need to drain player resources over the course of an adventure (which makes one-shots tough.) The dungeon model is designed around the idea of denying players the chance to take long rests, and making short rests rare reprieves. The players in my current campaign are in the midst of a huge battle that has a few overtuned fights in the hopes that their final confrontation against the adult blue dragon who will serve as the boss actually manages to give them something of a challenge (he'll also be taking great advantage of his ability to fly to make it harder for them to get to him.)
But here's why I want more published adventures for high-level play: give me something to model.
Reading through Candlekeep Mysteries, I do think the quality varies from adventure to adventure (Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion has overtaken Shemshine's Bedtime Rhyme as my favorite, perhaps purely because of its absurd story,) I can definitely see how most of the adventures will work, some being more combat-oriented while others are a bit more of an investigation. So, it frustrates me that the highest-level adventure in the book is for level 16 - just shy of peeking into tier 4.
I'd love to see an example of a Wizards-approved tier 4 one-shot. How do you build something that's a challenge to people who are, by this point, planes-hopping god-slayers?
I suppose I will need to complete my collection and actually get Dungeon of the Mad Mage at some point, but I'd also like to see some more work done in that high-level space, to encourage groups to try to push onward and reach that epic tier of play.
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