20-30 levels is way too damn many.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I understand why people carve up the gamespace into 20 or 30 levels of play. People like the idea of their peasant-level heroes becoming world-spanning badasses but they don't want the story to advance so quickly that they don't enjoy the journey.

Unfortunately, after that Penny Arcade burnout story I think that 20-30 levels is way too long for most people.

I can't tell you how many campaigns, both online and offline, who make all of these grandiose plans to have an epic adventure that lasts for so many ranges and even make plans ahead of time for what the game will be like when people get to paragon or epic -- but then that never happens. Groups dissolve or people get burned out before then and call it a campaign. And people get angry and frustrated if the campaign ends way before people were theoretically ready to call it quits; after all, it's more frustrating to only make it 7 km in a 10 km run than it is to run 5 out of 5 km.

I mean I have had several campaigns we end up playing like 20-25 sessions, which should honestly be more than enough to get us through the interesting parts of Journey to the West or Mahabharata from start to finish. But that's frequently only enough to get us to the 1/4th mark of the entire play experience.


My proposal is that you slightly reduce the number of levels in the game (something like 15 or 16; I prefer 16) but also make advancement through them faster. More importantly, advancement delays should have a hard upper limit. If you don't gain a level after 3 or 4 sessions the game should force you to unless the group agrees to Rule Zero it. The DM can and is encouraged to advance the game faster than that. My vision is that one level/session games not only become no longer uncommon but actually the norm.

[Swordslinger]

I don't see the current level cap as a huge issue. You actually should have levels that most people don't reach, because then DMs have more leeway as far as planning a campaign. It would really suck to have a campaign with more story, but the PCs are at max level and can't advance anymore.

Also, not everyone starts at level 1.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I believe that the number of campaigns that hit the level cap but stumbled along like a zombie even though they wanted to feel the sweet, sweet drug of power accumulation is much smaller than the number of campaigns where the DM and group had plans and fantasies of going from peasant to demigod but coming up way short.

If that's the case then we should focus on making the advancement faster, because the number of disappointed/frustrated groups is a lot higher. And you don't want that.

[virgil]

Wasn't the original goal of 3E to speed up experience gains for levelling, such that one would reach level 20 over a school year of dedicated gaming?

[Gx1080]

Two caveats:

*The number of levels is not that important, because they are mostly arbitrary marks on a huge XP bar. For example, you can have 50, 70 levels, but if the amount of time between those levels is short, then it takes about the same time as having 20, 30 levels.

(Yes, yes, there's the extra book keeping, butis a simple example).

*How long is a "session"? 2, 3, 4 hours? How much is actually done on said sessions? (Ok, this one is me nitpicking)

[Lago PARANOIA]

A school year of dedicated gaming is still too long and too optimistic. Very few groups last for 30-40 sessions. I consider it a good group if we got up to 15. I believe that if your game can't get from the bottom floor to the nominal max level (excluding crap like the Epic Level Handbook) in 25 4-hour sessions then there's something wrong with a game.

If you are one of the lucky sons of guns that get to regularly experience campaigns that last for 10 months, then more power to you, but you should be Rule Zeroing your games to go slower, not telling everyone else to Rule Zero their games to go more quickly.

[Swordslinger]

I believe that the number of campaigns that hit the level cap but stumbled along like a zombie even though they wanted to feel the sweet, sweet drug of power accumulation is much smaller than the number of campaigns where the DM and group had plans and fantasies of going from peasant to demigod but coming up way short.

That's true, but it's not a big deal if you run out of story at level 15 and stop. You could continue as much as you want, but you can also stop as much as you want.

If we went by "most campaigns", we'd probably be stopping at level 5 or something, because most games are short lived.

The goal shouldn't be to get to level 20 every game. This isn't a MMORPG.

If that's the case then we should focus on making the advancement faster, because the number of disappointed/frustrated groups is a lot higher. And you don't want that.

I think this is more a problem with players rather than the rules. Really I find the leveling in 3E and 4E to be more than adequate. 2E was granted super slow if the DM didn't hand out lots of gold, but that problem has been fixed.

Any faster, and you honestly wouldn't even get a chance to try out all the powers you got from your previous level. You'd cast web once or twice and then you'd be casting stinking cloud.

I've actually had a couple games in 3E/4E that have gotten above 15th level.

Now, I can understand the argument for capping the level if the higher levels can't be balanced due to play testing constraints. However, limiting it for the sake of having more people cap out is not a good reason.

If anything, people always want more levels. There's a reason there was demand for an ELH in 3E. People hate the idea of hitting a cap in levels and being stuck there. Ask anyone who had to play under 1E/2E racial level maximums. Enforced level caps are generally a terrible idea. It's okay to simply stop the rulebook at a certain point, but people generally are going to want another book to continue that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If we went by "most campaigns", we'd probably be stopping at level 5 or something, because most games are short lived.

The goal shouldn't be to get to level 20 every game. This isn't a MMORPG.

Do you think most campaigns stop at level 5 because people are satisfied with the level 5 experience and figure that going on would be pointless--or do you think that the average group dissolves before getting much further?

And sure, not every group can or even should set getting to level 20 as a goal. But the fact remains that for whatever reason a lot of people do in fact want to get to level 20. And the further fact that so few groups actually achieve this goal should make you wonder if you made the goal too difficult.

I think this is more a problem with players rather than the rules.

I think that this is the wrong way to look at things. If you have two groups of players and going more in the direction of pleasing one would end up simultaneously increasing the displease the other then you should move the slider so that the maximum number of people are satisfied.

Who gives a care whether these new goalposts don't conform to some abstract concept of a Goldilocks' zone? The only important measure is player satisfaction.

Any faster, and you honestly wouldn't even get a chance to try out all the powers you got from your previous level. You'd cast web once or twice and then you'd be casting stinking cloud.

Sure, you don't want things to advance too quickly. But by the same token, many people also want to try out Stinking Cloud and Wall of Fire.

If people are perfectly satisfied with Acid Arrow and Glitterdust, then the players and DM should freeze advancement until people get sick of it. And considering that most D&D games have had people enjoying Acid Arrow and Glitterdust much more often than getting to enjoy Fabricate and Dominate Person due to campaign time limits it seems clear to me that it's in the interests of the game to have a quicker advancement.

I've actually had a couple games in 3E/4E that have gotten above 15th level.

I have, too. I have also had many more games in which people didn't get to tell the range of stories they wanted to because the game ended before they could reach a reasonable progress level.

[CatharzGodfoot]

If you assume 20 sessions before a game goes kaput (which is optimistic), 20 levels with a standard gain of one level per session is fine. You only run into problems with the 'free multiclassing' paradigm of 3e, which results in characters changing too quickly for most players to keep up.

And that's only barely an issue. I ran about ten sessions of a Tome game with complete D&D noobs, having the characters level up after each session. That was a lot of abilities for a group of novices to keep track of, but even then they were only rarely forgetting important abilities. It probably would have been worse with full spell casters in the mix, though.

[Swordslinger]

Do you think most campaigns stop at level 5 because people are satisfied with the level 5 experience and figure that going on would be pointless--or do you think that the average group dissolves before getting much further?

Little bit of both. In 3E, a lot of DMs were afraid of running high level stuff, and usually ended the game before then. And of course, a lot of groups simply dissolved from scheduling issues or people losing interest.

And sure, not every group can or even should set getting to level 20 as a goal. But the fact remains that for whatever reason a lot of people do in fact want to get to level 20. And the further fact that so few groups actually achieve this goal should make you wonder if you made the goal too difficult.

The problem is that achieving this goal can be harmful to some groups. You aren't forced to continue if you're not level capped, but you are pretty much forced to stop if you're at the level cap. Or at least, a great deal of players lose interest when they can no longer advance.

That could just be a generational thing, I don't know. Maybe MMORPG players are fine being level capped, but I know the people from the pre-MMO generation find it pretty boring to not be able to advance anymore.

All I know is that in 2E, I dreaded picking anything that wasn't a human due to those racial level caps. Those things were fucking terrifying. Even though you knew the game probably wouldn't get that high, you always envisioned that nightmare scenario where you'd get there and have your advancement totally halted for the rest of the game.

Who gives a care whether these new goalposts don't conform to some abstract concept of a Goldilocks' zone? The only important measure is player satisfaction.

Which is precisely why you don't want to cap advancement. The damage done to enjoyment by saying "You can't get any better." is much greater than the damage done by a player who just never made it to level cap.

In one case, you're playing without an advancement potential, in the other case, you're not even playing anymore. I think the first definitely takes priority.

I have, too. I have also had many more games in which people didn't get to tell the range of stories they wanted to because the game ended before they could reach a reasonable progress level.

If that's the story you want to tell, why not just start at a higher level. If anything, I think the concept that you can start a game at high levels needs to be stressed more so than capping the levels people can get.

People tend to like features more so than limits.

[Josh_Kablack]

My personal experience is that most games flame out after 1-2 sessions; most that make it past the initial hurdle last the 10-14 sessions that once-a-week during a semester adds up to, maybe one-in-three or one-in-four of the full semester games avoid being killed by the holidays and make it through another semester, and only a handful of games make it to the two year mark - but those never have precisely the same playgroup for the entire run of the game. I think in over twenty years of gaming, I've been a part of exactly two games that went for longer than two years, and known of one other. ( My Inner Seas 3e game, the Forefront Champions game (which at this point is more a series of shared-world miniseries than a single game), and Grabowski's Aspects )

However I've also been involved in games that met twice a week, or every weekday for two hours after school, or even continuously in the cafeteria with people leaving for class and coming back their next free period. and whoever has the most motivation and biggest free block running at the moment.

So, I think a core or initial book should really focus on the first 10-15 sessions worth of advancement, and then have enough guidelines for people to figure out how to handle advancement for games which go to twice that length, and any further advancement should be left to rule zero or an Epic-Level / Immortal's rules supplement that people can buy when their game makes it into a third semester.

However, there is a lot of variation in time per session and playspeed. My Inner Seas game ran from roughly 1pm to 10pm on sundays. (although it often didn't really get started until the Stillerz were done playing). My current Monday game group is lucky to get started by 7 pm what with the jobs and kids and babysitters, and people get tired by 11 pm with one player having to leave by 9:30 in order to get enough sleep for his early shift. This group uses a bunch of terrain an minis and likes running characters with minions and sidekicks and digresses a lot, so even the pure arena combat session, we barely got through 3 combats in one night where we went late - even with the combats on a 5-round limit. For comparison, Dragon_Child's Sharn Watch game ran in a 4 hour window and generally involved investigation and skill checks and crazy plan making and usually managed to fit in 3-5 combats and a wrap up scene with time to spare most of the time. Some of that was due to his clamping down harshly on digression and maintaining better focus, some of that was due to the college kids having more energy and fewer preoccupations than my usual older group, some of that was due to the PCs in that game not having cohorts and charmed critters and animated dead and so on, some of that was due to using a sketch and block battlemat instead of involved terrain setups, some of that was due to the enemies being lower CR-to-level ratio than the preference of my other group, and some was just mysterious.

Then you also have the issue of advancement changing characters. As much as people want their own character to gain power and neat new abilities, rapid advancement can result in characters only using a trick a couple times before it becomes obsolete and can make it very hard for the players in a gaming group to understand how to set up openings for their teammates and how to benefit from the abilities of their teammates. That sort of thing has to be a consideration - and in a system like 3.x D&D a level-a-week advancement means that wizards are getting at least 2 new spells each session, divine casters are getting to pick from like a dozen additional new spells every other session, and even core fightgars are going from swinging a +1 bastard sword to stacking keen and improved crit on top of mounted charge multiplier shenanigans in like 4 sessions. If you have a slow-combat heavy disgression group like mine, where each session is only maybe one biggish combat that means that a number of abilities may be gained never to be used before they are obsolete - which is a waste of space and player cognitive processing power.

[Winnah]

From another side of the table, being able to provide consistent challenges in a level range from 1-30 is a real issue. Especially when the increase of power equates to an increase in the complexity and number of rules to keep track of.

Personally, I hate fucking up a game because I lget tired or distracted and lose track of some fiddly monster detail. I've also had players crack the shits if I neglect some detail that turns a challenging encounter into a cakewalk, or vice versa.

While this can be countered somewhat by turning green Orcs into red Orcs as the players go up levels, that is not a very satisfying solution for anyone. Higher level characters gain paradigm shifting abilities which requires them to face suitable opponents. A reskinned, attribute bloated Orc is not an appropriate challenge if characters can fly, warp minds and alter the tactical landscape in a number of other ways.

Give your advanced Orc too many special abilities in order to make them a suitable challenge for a higher level party, you run the risk of making encounters extremely complex. Not that complexity is a bad thing. Many players tolerate and even enjoy complexity and micromanagement.

[Fuchs]

We're the exception of the norm then, my current weekly D&D campaign is entering it's 10th year or so, we started playing but not weekly pre-3E. We slowed advancement down to about 1 level per year. The campaign chronicle hit over 1000 pages this year.

Same for the weekly Shadowrun campaign, also close to 10 years running.

All my weekly games since I started 20 years ago lasted for years.

[Ice9]

If you have a slow-combat heavy disgression group like mine, where each session is only maybe one biggish combat that means that a number of abilities may be gained never to be used before they are obsolete - which is a waste of space and player cognitive processing power.

This. I've played campaigns where we leveled so quickly a lot of abilities got "left behind" - by the time you got around to needing them, you already had something better that made them obsolete, and/or they were no longer strong enough to deal with the foes in question. That wasn't so great.

Also, I feel like, while people do enjoy frequent rewards, the amount of paperwork involved in level-up is such that I don't want to do it unnecessarily. So if your game really only supports 10 levels worth of change, don't try to stretch it into 30+.

What might be interesting is having a relatively small number of full levels - let's say 5-10. Each one represents a non-trivial growth in experience and capabilities, and should change the scope of gameplay at least enough to notice. Then between those, you get horizontal growth and minor specialization boosts, delivered in small frequent packages.

[Doom]

I've had quite a few campaigns run for multiple years.

20-30 levels can work fine if what you gain from levels is relatively small (see Skyrim) it's no big deal. On the other hand, in a game where you're rolling 20 sided dice, and you get +1 a level, either the die rolls become pointless, or the treadmill becomes annoying.

[ModelCitizen]

Who gives a care whether these new goalposts don't conform to some abstract concept of a Goldilocks' zone? The only important measure is player satisfaction.

Which is precisely why you don't want to cap advancement. The damage done to enjoyment by saying "You can't get any better." is much greater than the damage done by a player who just never made it to level cap.

In one case, you're playing without an advancement potential, in the other case, you're not even playing anymore. I think the first definitely takes priority.

I gotta strongly disagree. Always having something to work toward is kinda cool, but huge level caps are damaging to the game and it's not worth it.

Early AD&D had an (implied) at around level 10. Around the time you got an army or Teleport or Create Undead, you were also ready to fight Lolth or Orcus (the Fiend Folio versions anyway). The DM could even sort of put giant spiders and driders in the same adventure as Lolth, and ghasts and frost giants in the same adventure as Orcus. The game ran out of manageable new abilities to give you at the same time it ran out of bigger fish for you to fight, and that makes a lot of sense.

I'm not grognarding out about how we should go back to AD&D or anything. But early AD&D did put capstone challenges and capstone-appropriate abilities at the same level, and it put the capstone challenges at a level where the DM could still use the final boss's mid-level lackeys.

That fell apart because the soft-cap was never actually enforced. Someone noticed, "hey, if we can fight Orcus at level 10-12, what do we do at level 15 or 20?" No one wanted the answer to be fight 1d4+1 Orcuses, so Orcus got mudflated to the point you couldn't field him in the same adventure as ghasts or frost giants. Then someone else asked "hey, if I get Teleport at level 9, what new ability do I get at level 15 or 20?" For some reason that time the answer was different: "oh you get this spell from my notes on this lich dungeon boss, don't worry it's totally balanced by RP limits I never bothered to write down." The result is a huge disconnect between the utility progression and the monster progression. By the time you're ready for the greatest feat of your personal asskicking career (fight the biggest monsters) your spellcasters graduated from personal asskicking 5-10 levels ago.

A level cap gives us a point where we can safely provide both big utility abilities and big adversaries. I'd rather have that than 3e's unmanageable high-level clusterfuck or 4e-esque "same shit, bigger numbers" stretching off in front of me forever. In a game that expects players to grow in power and take on progressively greater challenges, the level cap should be set to something a party can realistically reach. A party who starts "the Orcus campaign" at level 1-3 (fighting a couple ghouls in a crypt) should be able to finish that story arc before the campaign falls apart for RL reasons.

Just to put some numbers on it, I would aim the cap toward a year to a year and a half of once-a-week play. Not 52 sessions/year, but once a week for actual people with occasional scheduling conflicts. If you assume 3e's rate of advancement I'd cap the game at level 12 or 15. And if I was willing to start a 3e game at level 1, I could even go down to 10.

[Swordslinger]

I gotta strongly disagree. Always having something to work toward is kinda cool, but huge level caps are damaging to the game and it's not worth it.

Early AD&D had an (implied) at around level 10. Around the time you got an army or Teleport or Create Undead, you were also ready to fight Lolth or Orcus (the Fiend Folio versions anyway). The DM could even sort of put giant spiders and driders in the same adventure as Lolth, and ghasts and frost giants in the same adventure as Orcus. The game ran out of manageable new abilities to give you at the same time it ran out of bigger fish for you to fight, and that makes a lot of sense.

I see where you're going with that, but the statement about running out of new abilities to give you is wrong.

At level 10, you have 5th level spells, and you in fact still have another 4 full spell levels of spells that are getting handed out. If you're a mage, the game is about halfway done giving you stuff.

Now, you make a good point about being able to include lesser monsters in combats. But this isn't an issue with level cap so much as the power gap between levels. In AD&D, gaining a level meant a lot less numerically. Mostly because it was really tough to get a good AC. So lesser monsters were able to contribute something to the fight, even at high levels. In 3E/4E, ACs are generally so high that low level monsters become trivial and completely phased out.

There's certainly an argument that levels are giving too much benefit and it should be toned down so that 4 HD monsters can challenge 10th level heros again the way they could in AD&D. One way to do that is to cut AC scaling significantly, so you gain a point of AC once ever couple levels. Less numerical advancement and more ability based advancement.

[ModelCitizen]

I may not be explaining myself well because I'm trying to talk about several different but intersecting ideas at once. I'll try to clarify.

I see where you're going with that, but the statement about running out of new abilities to give you is wrong.

At level 10, you have 5th level spells, and you in fact still have another 4 full spell levels of spells that are getting handed out. If you're a mage, the game is about halfway done giving you stuff.

I realize the spells go up to 9th level, but as you've said before yourself the high level spells often don't work well. There's a definite shift around level 11 from spells that were written for PCs to bullshit plot abilities the writer never expected PCs to have. It's not that you necessarily couldn't define Gate or Polymorph Any Object more rigorously, just that D&D never figured out how and had to hand them out anyway.

In particular, 9-12 is where pre-3e D&D started to hand PCs armies. But the game never actually had a robust enough army-scale wargame or nation-scale strategy component to play with armies for very long. That's fine if the army is a capstone and we just have to MTP it for a couple sessions, but it's not fine if we have to make that army matter for another year of play.

So while pre-3e did have more abilities you could theoretically get, it didn't really know what to do with you once you had them.

There's certainly an argument that levels are giving too much benefit and it should be toned down so that 4 HD monsters can challenge 10th level heros again the way they could in AD&D. One way to do that is to cut AC scaling significantly, so you gain a point of AC once ever couple levels. Less numerical advancement and more ability based advancement.

We're not talking about fielding 4th level monsters against 10th level PCs. 3e Orcus weighs in at CR 28. 4e Orcus is level 33 solo. Trying to figure out how to put 4 HD ghast mooks into the 10th level Orcus adventure is a problem I would love to have.

[talozin]

I realize the spells go up to 9th level, but as you've said before yourself the high level spells often don't work well. There's a definite shift around level 11 from spells that were written for PCs to bullshit plot abilities the writer never expected PCs to have. It's not that you necessarily couldn't define Gate or Polymorph Any Object more rigorously, just that D&D never figured out how and had to hand them out anyway.

One of the early Gygax "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" columns in Dragon -- it was collected in the second "Best Of", to give you some idea of just how early -- contained a frank discussion about how the game was at its best in, I think, the 5-10 range, and that the existence of level draining monsters was essentially a patch to keep the game there for as long as possible.

That is a horrible and slapdash way to handle a major problem in your game system, but the thing is, he was pretty much right, even if his solution sucked. Around 4th-5th level was the point where mere survival started to become less of a problem, and you had accumulated enough options, whether spells or magic gimmicks or whatever, to make the resource management and problem solving aspects of the game interesting. Past the 10-12 range and you started to have too much stuff and too many options to keep track of and the threats started to become ridiculous.

You can see it in the level ranges of the adventures released for AD&D. There's a lot of 1-3, of course, because everyone starts there, but there's also a lot of 4-6, 5-8, 7-9. We can pretty much all remember the 8-12 modules because there weren't that many of them, and you can count the number of 10-14 modules on one hand.

What's frustrating about this is that the problem Gary Gygax identified 30 years ago is still present in pretty much the same form in 3rd edition, although they've succeeded in at least making the sweet spot arrive earlier. The game is still sort of dull at 1st and 2nd level -- though less so, because everyone gets more selectable abilities sooner -- is at its best from 3-8 or so, and falls off a cliff once you get much above level 11 or so, even if you have a gentleman's agreement to ignore the wackier power loops in your game.

[Krusk]

My solution for homebrew games was to top classes at 10 levels long. 10th level is the agreed upon highest level. If we decide we want to go past that, you have to multiclass which works essentially like 3e.

You can be a fighter 10, wizard 5/fighter 5. At level 11 you can be a fighter 10/wizard 1, or wizard 6/fighter 5, but never a fighter 11. (assume level 6 fighter abilities are similar in power to level 1 wizard and vice versa, we went with lateral expansion as opposed to vertical)

For advancement we level every or every other session and call it good. This gives us about 15 sessions on average, which is right around when the story we are telling is usually ending anyway. (or we have gotten bored and want a new one)

20 levels in a system is just wishful thinking, and 30 is silly.

Reasoning - You want to get ever power your class offers. When the 3.5 game looks like it will end at 19th level, the DM finds themselves padding encounters so everyone hits 20. We went with all important all the time, and skip the padding.

[tzor]

You can see it in the level ranges of the adventures released for AD&D. There's a lot of 1-3, of course, because everyone starts there, but there's also a lot of 4-6, 5-8, 7-9. We can pretty much all remember the 8-12 modules because there weren't that many of them, and you can count the number of 10-14 modules on one hand.

I was mostly into the Lankhmar adventures, but it semed the exact opposite for me. You could count the number of modules in the 1-3 range on one hand and half were crap. That was always a problem when I was starting a new campaign. Fortunately I didn't have to start many of them so it was always a variation of the same starting module. (Watch my wealth.)

[Swordslinger]

I realize the spells go up to 9th level, but as you've said before yourself the high level spells often don't work well. There's a definite shift around level 11 from spells that were written for PCs to bullshit plot abilities the writer never expected PCs to have. It's not that you necessarily couldn't define Gate or Polymorph Any Object more rigorously, just that D&D never figured out how and had to hand them out anyway.

Yeah, there's no doubt that high level spells just haven't been playtested and can really break the game. If your advocating to just toss them out, that makes sense.

In particular, 9-12 is where pre-3e D&D started to hand PCs armies. But the game never actually had a robust enough army-scale wargame or nation-scale strategy component to play with armies for very long. That's fine if the army is a capstone and we just have to MTP it for a couple sessions, but it's not fine if we have to make that army matter for another year of play.

Armies are a difficult topic. If you make armies too good, then PCs go from heroes to military commanders, and you wonder why the world needs heroes at all when you can just toss a unit of crossbowmen at a dragon and win.

On the other hand, if high level characters are too powerful, armies become more or less pointless.

We're not talking about fielding 4th level monsters against 10th level PCs. 3e Orcus weighs in at CR 28. 4e Orcus is level 33 solo. Trying to figure out how to put 4 HD ghast mooks into the 10th level Orcus adventure is a problem I would love to have.

I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen in any system, unless your level gain is almost completely trivial. I do agree that 30 levels is way too much, and the major bosses should fit more concisely on the 1-20 scale. Orcus should probably be CR 22-23 instead of 28.

Most of the problem with making the big NPCs that big is because the designers don't want them killed and just want to create these huge numbers for the sake of creating huge numbers. At least that's what 3E Orcus is. 4E Orcus was actually a benchmark to actually be fought and killed, but the 3E versions for the most part are designed to be unkillable (of course, because the designers suck at that, people find ways to kill them anyway.)

But seriously, a CR 28 in a game that ends around level 20 should be an impossible encounter. By the CR system, a CR 28 should be an even match for sixteen 20th level PCs, and that doesn't even count the allies Orcus should have. That's just insane, and ranking something with a CR that high says it's made not to lose.

The CR of the super monsters needs to come seriously down, either that or the game should just not bother stating them at all.

[talozin]

I was mostly into the Lankhmar adventures, but it semed the exact opposite for me. You could count the number of modules in the 1-3 range on one hand and half were crap. That was always a problem when I was starting a new campaign. Fortunately I didn't have to start many of them so it was always a variation of the same starting module. (Watch my wealth.)

Some of the licensed stuff got a little wacky, e.g., I think the Conan modules were level 10-14 for no adequately explored reason beyond "Conan is a badass." Now I wish I'd actually read them -- even at that age I smelled a money grab -- so I could see how they expected the characters from Schwarzeneggar's Conan to deal with high level AD&D. They're probably on the internet somewhere ...

[ModelCitizen]

Yeah, there's no doubt that high level spells just haven't been playtested and can really break the game. If your advocating to just toss them out, that makes sense.

Partially. If we throw out those abilities we also need to throw out the levels where they happen. Otherwise we just have to stretch the utility spell progression over twice as many levels. That makes the progression stagnant and sets cool abilities that do work to unreachable levels.

If you didn't want to do that, you could make the high-level abilities work well. Even if you succeeded, those abilities move the focus from adventuring to world-building. The game's assumptions and structure need to fundamentally change. If you don't want to play in Ars Magica Tier you shouldn't have to play through 5-10+ levels of it before you're high enough level to beat up the final boss. And if you do enjoy Ars Magica Tier the game should offer you world-building challenges, not just bigger monsters to punch in the face.

Even if the high level abilities worked they belong in advancement scheme that comes after the end of the "adventuring" progression. When your game becomes about running kingdoms and making demiplanes it's time to stop giving out more hitpoints and better save DCs.

I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen in any system, unless your level gain is almost completely trivial. I do agree that 30 levels is way too much, and the major bosses should fit more concisely on the 1-20 scale. Orcus should probably be CR 22-23 instead of 28.

10th level is a bit low. IIRC Queen of the Demonweb Pits was level 12.

If I had to pick an ideal CR for a (3e) endboss I'd pick CR 16. That's an endboss for a 12th level party. Reachable in about a year of play, and the casters have 6th level spells but not 7th. Vol is kind of Orcus's Eberron counterpart and she's a 16th-level wizard. That's about right. (Vol's CR would be a bit above 16 because of her templates, but they mostly just add anti-climax protection in the form of SoD immunity and a phylactery.)


Sidenote: 3e doesn't cap at level 20. No one gives a shit about epic anymore, but Orcus is from BoVD and the writers assumed epic back then. CR 28 is a bossfight for a level 24-26 party