Tobold's Blog
Monday, December 28, 2020
 
The weird power curve of 5E Dungeons & Dragons

The two official starting campaigns of Dungeons & Dragons, Lost Mines of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak, both end at level 5. Level 5 is an important power jump for a group: Several spellcasting classes get access to powerful damage spells like fireball, while the weapon-based classes get a second attack. At level 5, full spellcasters now can cast 9 spells per day, up from 2 per day at level 1, and are thus more likely to be able to cast spells every round of combat.

I am currently a player in a level 10 campaign, and a DM in a campaign which will hit level 10 probably in the next session. So, what happened to character power between level 5 and level 10? Not much, actually. Fighters get their third attack only at level 11. Wizards now have 15 spells per day, but rarely manage to cast them all. But even more weirdly, the power of the level 5 spells that level 10 characters have access to seems not a big improvement over the level 3 spells they have access to since level 5.

The aforementioned fireball does 8d6 damage if cast as a level 3 spell, 10d6 if cast as a level 5 spell. The level 5 spell cone of cold deals 8d8, which is only 1 point more on average as a level 5 fireball. Impressive sounding spells like cloudkill turn out to be not very efficient, dealing 5d8 per turn, but between monsters able to move out of the zone and the concentration rule having trouble dealing their damage more than once. The cleric, who was able to revivify a dead character 1 minute after combat at character level 5, can now raise dead that dead character up to 10 days later at character level 10, which doesn't make much of a difference. The circle of the moon druid, who was a powerhouse at levels 2, is basically irrelevant at level 10, as the CR 3 beasts he can turn into are much weaker than the monsters the group is likely to meet.

The power curve getting so much flatter from level 5 to level 10 is probably intentional, an attempt to overcome the previous problem of the "quadratic wizard", whose power increased exponentially because he got both more spells and more powerful spells. The power curve remains relatively flat until it spikes again at level 17, with the level 9 spells being significantly more powerful than level 8 spells.

On the DM side, the Monster Manual gets decidedly thin after CR 11. You still got the top of the food chain, adult and ancient dragons, vampires and liches, demon princes and archdevils. But you are running short of the kind of regular monster that you wouldn't be surprised to find after opening a random door in a dungeon. And in my Out of the Abyss campaign, my level 13 players already dealt with several demon princes, so I wouldn't know what to put as an everyday challenge for a level 17 group.

In summary, 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons feels like great power progression until level 5, then feels as if the regular game has been designed to run more or less stable until level 10, and then the balance of power crumbles beyond level 10. But of course players love powerful characters, and it is very hard to persuade them to abandon their level 11+ characters and start over at level 1.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:20 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
I've said this before, but during the five years I played tabeltop rpgs every Sunday with a fixed group of five to seven people, the exact opposite was true. Not one single person ever wanted to carry on to the higher levels of any game we played (and we played a lot of different ones). We had a cycle of a few weeks for a game that turned out to be not all that popular to a few months for one we all really liked but by the time we got to what would be about the equivalent of level ten in the type of system you're describing, everyone would be pretty much demanding we stop and re-roll from the start to play something else - or just re-roll and re-start the same system if we were really enjoying it.

Becoming powerful in an rpg is a thrill. Staying powerful sucks.
# posted by Blogger Bhagpuss : 28/12/20 16:06
 
After 40 years of RPGs Ive seen every player of every type, but for the last 15 years now I've had a stable group that consistently sticks through to as high a level as I am willing to run to. Usually in D&D 3rd or Pathfinder 1st edition we'd run out of steam around level 12-14 as the game became too strenuous to enjoy, but in D&D 5E we've gotten to level 17 in a campaign and recently I just wrapped a level 20 Pathfinder 2nd edition campaign. It does help that the players I game with are all long time friends who really enjoy being in it for the long haul. We were genuinely disappointed to have to wrap the PF2E game at level 20...there was so much more everyone wanted to do, but the game itself lacks support past that level (for both players and the GM).

@Bhagpuss I've had groups over the years that like shorter or more focused experiences, but there are plenty of players (admittedly usually older) who find the dedication for long campaigns with full leveling experiences....just gotta have the right player/GM mix.
# posted by Blogger Doctor Futurity : 29/12/20 01:59
 
You might want to check out Pathfinder 2e. They put a lot of work into normalizing the power progression across levels. We are currently about 1 1/2 years into a 2e campaign and my players have reached 12th level. While the numbers have gotten much larger, the combats feel about the same -- not noticeably longer or more "swingy" in outcome despite the larger numbers. I do notice that the game in general seems much more deadly that either 5e or PF1. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that rule set.
# posted by Blogger Keith : 30/12/20 00:26
 
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