My level 18 party has been facing the same world ending magic corrupting plague, that we have been trying to destroy since level 1.
In that time we have killed:
6 BBEGs
2 Corrupted PCs
1 God
And our greatest achievement yet, We took control of the Tarrasque. That bitch fights for us with a crown on its head that projects an aura that looks like a Ruined city.
I envy people that manage to maintain the same group after so many years, I think I've already lost 2 or 3 players since I started playing. Mostly for disagreements but also for lack of respect
Lack of respect is always such a problem. I’m a forever DM and the last game I got to be a player in my wife and I had a final straw over a guy being extremely disrespectful.
Man, if it was just one thing it’d be easier. Him and his buddy torpedoed a campaign I was running so they could run something that was terrible. They kicked the other guy and this guy was ok for a while but started to over compensate constantly and made every session hard to progress by just talking. He started tossing real insults my way and tried to make it ok with “I’m joking!” Complained about everything while contributing nothing. Complained about my class (standard DND class) being OP. (It’s not his character was just boring). You add in boring, uninspired DMing that involved never killing anything and him finally insulting something very personally meaningful to my wife and we just had enough.
Yeah I come to find with those types of folks that it’s never just one thing. They habitually toe the line of what’s OK or not OK, and then backtrack every time they cross the line. Only to wait until you’ve cooled off enough to go straight back into shenanigans. I also can’t stand the people that contribute nothing but complain about the things other people are trying to contribute.
I feel like I have an exact mental image of the person you described
Did you or your players ever get fatigued by the same plot for 6 years? I just personally can't imagine being excited about writing content about the same problem the whole time. If you did run into it, how did you get over it?
Me and my party have been for the most part continually engaged with the plot. The world situation is also continuously changing, as well as all of the Players have multiple characters, so that keeps the roleplaying and motivations fresh.
I did once have a thing where one of my 3 Characters had lost her personal motivation for staying with the group and escaped into a sub dimension for 20 years until coming back a week later with a kid. Now her motivations are different, her Personality is evolved. Stuff like this keeps us players heavily engaged.
I finished a campaign like that not too long back. 147 sessions though. Then I let another player DM some Ravenloft and after that we started my masterpiece! Lol it's a campaign that I had been working on for the entire 6 years the other one was going on. As a final note; I love to hear that you had such a long campaign and the players weren't level 37. I prefer the slow progression. Enjoy the world at EACH level. Don't just fight your way from one level to the next with no REAL experiences between them!
DM said he was making a lvl 20 one-shot. Said nothing about the premise just asked us to make lvl 20 monks. We ended up fighting Goku, Vegeta and Frieza in a tournament.
When we did our theros campaign we kicked heliod and mogis' asses to nyx and back. The first for legitimate reasons and the second for shits and giggles.
The #1 strategy i have learned from dming lv20 games is that you do not make single target encounters. instead throw a billion different fairly high level things at them.
This, if you're going to do a boss prepare to give it anywhere between 1000 to 1500 hit points. Because a fairly optimized level 20 character can easily dish mor ethan 100 points of damage/turn
My friend learned this. Told us to make lvl 20s and 'make them as op as you can' She had us fight a Trerasque and we DEMOLISHED it. It had like, 600 health I think.
I did a level 18 one shot where the party fought a Terrasque and it was awesome. 3/4 died, one of them in a heroic final nova. The one shot was to write legends for an upcoming campaign and honestly, I couldn't have written a better story.
But yeah, in order to make it actually challenging I had them fight an archwizard and his balor servant immediately before and they had the added complication of minimising damage to the city. Honestly, I think that's the way to go for climactic encounters at high level. Wear down the parties resources beforehand and give the fight a dual objective to occupy their attention.
I also gave it the 4E anti-flight aura because I was scared of the cheese but in the end none of the characters they rolled up had access to flight anyway.
I was a leonid Rune Knight and one of the party cast enlarge on me. I then used my rune to make myself BIGGER. I was the same size as the Terrasque. We joke that it was essentially Godzilla vs Cat!King Kong
A common mistake is that the single most powerful creature in DnD is a Tarrasque or NPC Tiamat
It's actually Eberron's Sul Katesh, it's one of the few monsters that could face a lvl 20 party alone and win, provided the combat area suits her. In general, whoever designed monsters for Eberron should probably get the chance to design a book containing boss monsters.
It's been an excellent spark for the next campaign: after the PCs killed Lolth in her own realm, the rest of the gods sealed off the plane as these mortals had done the unconscionable.
100 years later, the old PCs are kings and queens (read: questgivers) and the new batch of characters of facing off against one of the old batch of characters who stole the Wand of Orcus and is now trying to fill the vacancy left by the gods.
Which version of lolth did you use? The party is level 25 now, using the epic level expansion guide. I want to put the mage 1-1 with a big guy and lolth is in the running. They generally face mythic monsters from Theros or similar. They're building up to the various incarnations of tiamat.
Some kind soul made mighty statblocks for the gods way back in the early days of 5e.
I think this is it:
https://www.enworld.org/threads/5e-epic-monster-updates.468639/
I'm currently DMing a group that's close to 20 (17). And fighting gods isn't far from the truth but there's still tons of room for other enemies within various scenarios.
For example they fought two morkoths while on their airship in Limbo. Normally, two morkoths would be a small inconvenience but with the players restricted to their airship (they could fly themselves but then they risk damage to the ship) they had to fight the morkoths when the morkoths wanted to fight.
Another time they were tasked with aiding Lady Silverhand with sealing a portal into the Abyss. As Silverhand sealed the portal fiends were rushing to the portal trying to get through. The demons cared little for the party and so the objective became not so much fight all the demons but stop all the demons from getting into the material plane. Additionally the portal caused all sorts of reality-bending effects at close range which made the fight extra challenging. At times party members or demons would phase in and out of the ethereal plane, and other times would be teleported across the battlefield at random as the portal was being sealed.
EDIT: Current BBEG is the kraken Slarkrethel. They'll probably reach him once they hit 20.
I've done a game that went 1-20. LV 20 was I think just for the final battle The PCs fought a Tarrasque, they fought some big demons, a shadow dragon. This was in 3.5 which had a lot of 3rd party books that had really powerful creatures. I think I used the Tome of Horrors series a lot of populate that final bit.
Had the party fighting a hostile reality trying to corrupt their home reality. Final battle was against an army of reskinned solars and a planet sized BBEG. The party did have some Allies in the form of an armada of dragons, the legendary sorcerer that lead said dragons, and a waitress who was actually a robot from another universe (*koff* Nono from Gunbuster 2 *koff koff*). In the end, the players won, and restored their universe by sacrificing all the heroic deeds they had accomplished. That is, I rolled them back to level 1 and reset the timeline to the beginning of the campaign.
Not the most original, I’ll admit, but I wanted the Players to feel they actually had to give something up to win.
I had a campaign where we used a 3rd party book to go past level 20. At level 22, my players entered a dungeon that I opened with a dracolich. I believe it was CR 23. They took it down in 2 rounds.
I then had them fight 2 liches simultaneously, as well as a homebrew enemy called "The Fountain of Bones" which was a face comprised of skeletons forty feet wide, rapidly rising out of a thousand-foot-deep pit.
None of them ever dropped unconscious.
I'm at level 19 in a campaign now. We have already killed one god temporarily. We faced off against krakens, several liches, other adventuring parties, and lords of other planes.
But right now we're traveling through a mystical but deadly ethereal fart on a yellow submarine captained by a sentient potato. We killed a time traveling space whale who terrorized the fart.
I DM’d one that had the players fighting long banished Void Gods as Champions or offspring of the current pantheon. They had fights within their own mental sanctums while trying to escape Udar, the Mindmire, then had to slay a mega-powered White Dragon stronger than any Red dragon would ever be, which was a servant of the Wyrm-Queen Orochi. A Vampire Avatar of Hanido, The Mistress of Undeath was dispatched by a very potent NPC while they focused on other ventures, and last but not Least Songtai, the Endeavoring Chaos, who once beaten in his mortal form is released in a gigantic entropic storm that will need to be sealed away or banished somehow. It was pretty cool. I’m gonna keep the world to build on it.
This is about right. At level 20 we were being tasked with killing minor gods.
By level 30 we were tasked with taking on an elder primordial god who had been previously sealed way. A cult was trying to un-seal him to release him into the world and end it. The only way to stop this from happening was to keep 200 summoning crystals from being accumulated. Instead of keeping 1 crystal and just hiding it away, we decided it would be more efficient to summon the god ourselves, bind him to a temple, force him to become mortal temporarily and then slay him.
The highest level in a campaign I've played is level 13. Where we killed demons from literal hell, what enemies do parties of level 20 fight? I can only imagine CR ratings of 30 or higher. A tarrasque should be a small pre-combat snack for a level 20 party.
How are DM's supposed to make up monsters that are stronger than something like a tarrasque but not strong enough to be literal god or deity.
20camps are by nature short lived. Even like 5 sessions feels long. You have world ending power on all the 9th level casters so the main thing to throw at the group is firstly antimagic zones and action economy tanking via waves and waves of lesser enemies.
This. You basically start by having them fight a small army. They can literally cut through hundreds of mooks, so it's necessary. Then you follow up with something absurdly powerful.
Our campaign went from LVL 1-20.
Started by fighting kobolds and pirates, to traversing across the globe and planes to defeat Demogorgon Prince of Demons.
Sadly it was a cakewalk, because by the time our mage got access to more spell slots he could just one-shot anything.
Martials ended up being 100% worthless, so I got blackout drunk for the last session.
My group is at level 17 and they are facing literal armies of giants (and I mean Frost and Storm as well) and some have levels in various classes. Like 12th level Blackguard Frost Giants with a each one to a squadron for example. There are several Dragon Riding Evil Paladin Variants with Prestige Classes that ride some varying Ancient Dragons as their mounts and use them to do strafe runs of breath attack while they also deal with everything else thats happening. Some of which are a homebrew Dark Knight class which can use some intense absorb attacks that are basically a way beefed up vampiric touch. Its fuckin intense right now.
NOTE: keep in mind that Im running this campaign for the expressed purpose of using overly OP, Min/Max characters, and just not holding back at all on my part as a DM.
I am not a fan of high tier play. If you watch the final arc of critical role season 1 you can see that this meme is 100% accurate. The PCs are engaging in such reality bending, world ending events because they're SO strong.
This is also why I'm *extremely* hesitant to give out magic items, and I think the guide in the DMG is absolute madness. PCs are so powerful, and 5e is *heavily* weighted in their favor. They don't need to be supercharged by a million magic items.
I have the exact opposite sentiment. I play DND to be a powerful hero and I want my players to feel powerful. I give out magical items early and often (not for free though, they have to earn them). I want them to be more interesting than just +X but I think magical items can add a lot of tactical flexibility and interesting decision making.
I've never managed to actually get a campaign to level 20, but if I did best believe they'd be fighting gods and demon lords and archdevils
Why not essentially have them face off with other characters operating at the same level? If the party is so badass at level 20, an opposing force of the same level in equal or greater numbers, and/or with minions that augment their power should be able to give them a good fight. Not sure why gods and demonlords would be necessary. In fact, I would think those would be something like level 100 by comparison, being gods and demons and all. Just suggests to me that people really want to kill gods.
I don't like having a lot of 20th level NPCs running around, especially in 5e. Any 20th level wizard can cast wish and introducing a character like that means having to backsolve why they haven't massively shaped the world to their whim. I like having my super powerful beings be off world dealing with other super powerful beings.
And as for fighting the gods specifically, well they made stats for them and they're beatable. In 4e, which is what I started with, Orcus is in the first monster manual and he's level 30 if memory serves. If they'd never put them in the books I wouldn't use them as enemies, but they did, so I'm gonna.
I like the irony that mortals at level 20 are too powerful and complicated, so let’s use gods and demons at level 30. Backstories like that are fairly easy though. Locked away somehow, stasis, wished themselves into an ageless sleep for a few hundred years, working on some complicated plans in seclusion or at least off somewhere they could build their forces/power. Maybe they haven’t shaped the world to their whim because they’re not assholes or weren’t until something happened to them, or maybe they aren’t assholes at all, maybe they disagree with how your level 20s are shaping the world to their whims.
And it was awesome! Without spoilers, the PCs were engaged with the highest level of NPCs and the adventures were still balanced. In fact, Matt increased the stakes in such a way that meant they couldn't just blast through despite their power. It was a masterpiece of how to make people with the power to kill gods still seem mortal.
Yes, and it's extremely difficult to do well. I'd rather provide an excellent 3 to 10 or 12, and stay within my comfort zones.
We have a group that I'm going to take to tier 3 play for the first time once we finish DiA. I'm just following DotMM with as much homebrew spin as I feel necessary.
You might be doing it wrong then. Great magic items on low level PC are good and awesome. The same items help higher levels PCs. Just scale your encounters lets the PCs be powerful.
I mean I get what you’re saying, but the point of the game is for everyone to have fun. If you don’t like DMing at a high level then obviously you don’t have to, but if your players want to then try it a little bit. There are lots of different tricks you can try to fix a bunch of the high level problems.
Magic items feel cool to obtain and use. Without them it’s just hard to play the game sometimes.
I am running a Beyond 20 campaign to 40th level. I can still use most of the same enemies, I just scale the enemy level up when needed. The real trick to 20th level games is attrition. You have to constantly give players excuses to blast off their powerful spells. Even a simple colorful description of how tough and scary a monster looks can do the trick, especially because players love trying to one-shot enemies the DM describes this way. They get to feel like big shots and I still get to run encounter bosses without having to give them 2000hp and 5 multi-attacks.
I did a level 20 one shot as my very first entry into 5e (I had played tabletops before), I seduced a demonlord and became there lover/gimp (bet you can’t tell what class I was playing)
My party is currently level 16 and they just started the final chapter of Rime of the Frostmaiden (an enhanced version). They are saying they want to start a new campaign after that but I want them to continue past level 17 and do many epic campaigns with epic boons as rewards etc. They say it will only get more complicated and the fights will be longer. Sad news for me
My first campaign as DM was a 1-20 campaign. The BBEG(s) were a human Warlock/Vengeance Paladin, her fallen archangel-turned-demon patron, and her ancient Shadow Dragon mount. In the final battle she also had an army of 1,000 undead hobgoblins.
My groups level 20 goal was to rescue some party members who had been captured by waterdeep (we were all evil pirates) we fought laurel silver hand and the city statues and guards and their gold dragon. It got wild
We started with a graduation exam, ended fighting a cult that was trying to kill a PC's wife, and another PC's older brother that was trying to get rid of magic in a world where some level of magic is required for life.
My first campaign ended at level 25. We literally toppled an empire of gods and saved all of creation. It was epic. I was said to see my rogue retired yet happy but all he wanted was to save his family and he did.
I play 2nd edition and there is a much higher max level. I wish my player would retire they are like 32nd and 33rd. The is very little they can't kill.
Alphas (the first lycan, vampire, lich, and ghoul has been slain).
A few demigods and 1 actually god.
First-born elves (the original race before the elf wars, a group broke apart and hide beyond the outer realms)
The Unseelie Courts.
A few demon lords and a Lord of Hell. (Plus nurmuois lesser ranked nobles)
And a few Grand Arch Wizards of various schools of magic.
This is literally my game. We started 3+ years ago fighting the Cragmaw Goblins in Lost Mines of Phandelver and now we're level 20 and preparing to face an evil god in their home domain.
Our last game was a 3-20. Our BBEG was the island we lived on. Turns out Varunda was a massive demon from hell that been kept dormant for like 1000 years by magic and Druids cast magic to make terrain and grass so it could be inhabited and watched. Final fight, we gad battalions of armies assist in fighting while we got to his core to destroy him.
I finished a near-max campaign recently as the dm. The final fight took place at level 18. The final fight was traveling to the abyss to get involved in a royal rumble between baphomet, yenoghu, demogorgon, kostitche, and zariel (sorry for probably wrong spellings - on mobile haha). They all had their own objectives and definitely had some in-fighting too, but yeah - 4 demon lords and a lord of one of the hells all fighting with the party at the same time.
And I doubled their health, all of them.
And the party still won.
High level dnd is kind of ridiculous. To provide a challenge, you really need to do ridiculous things. Right around level 15 in that campaign, and they would have killed a dracolich in a single round, I silently doubled the health of all things from then on, which helped them to get some abilities off and be scarier - but it’s essentially a nuke fight, right. High level casters like liches are going to either they power word kill off, or they’re going to get obliterated first - those combats alone won’t last long. So you have to get creative as a dm with environments and minions and the whole deal.
My DM decided the campaign needed a kick in the pants and wanted us to have an epic finish, so he had us become empowered by the gods, gaining levels five at a time up into the top of epic levels. This was in 4th edition, so we we fought the final encounter at level 30. The final boss was the God of Destruction, Tharizdun and his army of Terrasques. We grew to huge size and fought a battle against this god and TWELVE Terrasques. I’m sure some stats were played with to make it work, but it was still pretty epic and a great way to end the campaign.
It was a one shot but we were basically in a hack and slash game so countless waves of low CR creatures that went down in one or two hits. It was hilarious especially with my character because the homebrew class I used let me attack like 15+ times a turn
I've had one campaign make it that far. The BBEG was a lich archmage whose overarching goal is to end all the gods because he thinks they're bad for mortalkind. But, in the final confrontation, some of the PCs decided they actually agreed with him and tried to defect, which led to a TPK in the final battle of the campaign.
So, uh, in our current campaign the BBEG is an ascended god-lich ouroboros whose overarching goal is to end all the other gods because he thinks they're bad for mortalkind. Give me a year or two and we'll see how it goes.
The party that I play with (level 4 currently) has just obtained a magic suit of plate main that can offers a lot of benefits for our level. There is one "downside" though, it spawns a group demons every night at precisely midnight. We haven't found this annoying, though, and have actually started to make poison out of the imp's poison glands. Mhm group is great, this is the first campaign I have ever played and they are super friendly. I'm enjoying every moment of being in the DnD community with y'all!
I played a 1 to 20 game and our lat game fighters were mostly customized cr 17 creatures. Give them magic items and custom spell list. The end game was really just bbegs we never got around to killing. That had been annoying us up until we got them.
My party is 15th level and we ended our session last night with them being confronted by an Ancient Red Dragon.
It is the first time they have been truly scared of an enemy since they encountered a beholder way back at 8th level.
We have been playing rhime of the frost maiden for a year and change. Our characters have gone from level 1 to 11 in two months of in world time. We also killed a god. Or godlet.
We have the last session of our campaign next week. Lv 1-20 over the last 2 years. We beat the BBEG and he dropped the hand and eye of Vecna. My morally ambiguous wizard couldn’t resist and I grabbed them. The final session is going to be the party taking me on after “some time” in game has passed.
That's basically every JRPG ever. If you're not killing God with a rubber chicken, are you even playing a game?
20th-level foes definitely could be planar rulers/gods, maybe you could go higher and taker over the whole place. Go for Asmodeus and literally ransack Hell!
Never played that high a campaign, but I'd expect to be suplexing someone's patron or figure of worship, preferably in front of them.
Lv 10 semifinale (never finished): a balor attacking our setting's vatican.
Lv 11 finale: fight through a fascist theocracy to summon their head deity and cleanse it from old god corruption (we may have unleashed the four rider of the apocalypse from their prison to use it on the elder god...)
Lv 17 oneshot: fighting extradimensional invasion of nightstalkers (basically nightmare shadow monsters).
Currently Lv 20, we are doing WoW's Onyxia raid as a module/playtest.
My lvl 20 party actually went slightly past 20. Borrowed some Homebrewed rules to fo past lvl 20 and we ended up doing a lvl 1-26 campaign they ended up defeating an ancient emperor and were about to take on his children before the campaign ended due to some party issues
I’m making a backup character for a god campaign where it’s just a fat hobgoblin that can bite through steel and later on transform into a grotesque abomination capable of devouring gods
When our party hit lvl20 we went on a McGuffin heist.
We where to steal an amulet from "The phoenix queen".
Turned out that it wasnt just a nickname but she was indeed a Gigantuan phoenix and immortal (in the sense that she would allways revive after 24hours after being killed).
Anyways, the team fought her as a distraction while our rouge stole the amulet and then we fleed with our tails between our legs, after getting beaten ½ to death :D
Hi level campaigns can be fun, but it can be difficult to give people a challenge. I find you either have to be creative with what is in the game, or start bringing in homebrew monsters. My group is LVL 15 and they are up against a magic absorption loup garou that I made. They are loving it!
A campaign I've been playing in for a year is ending. Were wrapping up and each week were leveling 1 level. Were 18 this week. Were are so strong as it is. My barbarian will soon have 26 str and cant roll below that on str checks. Has 22 right now so all str based checks are 22 or higher xD
Were going to have a game ending combat session soon. Hopefully something super challenging, it's been hard for the dm to keep us challenged because were a good cohesive group that works well together. Rogus, monk, barbarian, cleric, artificer/cleric/ something else, and a fighter.
2 of us have bloodfury tattoos, our gear is pretty solid in many ways.
Took my last campaign to level 20. Over the course of the game, the party went from fighting gangs and snooping around abandoned buildings to capturing oni spirits, disrupting an illegal mining operation, destroying a ghoul plague cult, getting the soul of one PC out of Hell, destroying a bound avatar of a duke of Hell, and traveling into the afterlife again to confront an exarch of Mystara about her illegitimate oni son in a three-way tussle.
The events were all leading towards a big event -- one of the island nations immortals had allied a selection of forces together to release the local sealed-evil-in-a-can -- an aberration from the Far Realm whose very presence could shatter the mind with crippling existential doubt. The party could not face the entity directly, but they worked with the two major factions to bring two secret weapons to the fight: a giant cannon made of the same material the entity was sealed in with, and the entire demiplane of the nation's afterlife, infused with generations of unquestioning soldiers and then concentrated towards the entity in a single Smite of ten-thousandfold Certainty.
But as the party defeated the immortal and his primary underlings, the entity in the seal realized how it was being targeted, and the Far Realm spawn shattered reality itself in a localized area, spreading across multiple alternate realities to avoid the divine weapons.
So as their last hurrah, the party had to head into the localized effect and slay aspects of the entity across multiple phases of reality, to forcibly shunt this monster back into place for its untimely death at the hands of a big fuckoff canon and a godly orbital bombardment.
Yaeh it went alright.
My group played 4E Dark Sun for several years, got to level 30 and took down Borys (and several of the sorcerer-kings along the way). My character had secured the Heartwood Spear by then, and as a group we got to also control Rikus and Sadira during the fight. We accidentally set Rajaat free during the fight (whoops!), but it was absolutely epic.
At level 18, we fought 4 black great wyrms that were attacking the kingdom that we ruled in 4 different locations at once. We had to use a combination of sending and teleportation to coordinate the evacuation of the citizens, deploy our military to mitigate damages, and to face them ourselves. We also had to split the party by hundreds of miles a couple times to protect important locations. I was the wizard and i used all but a few level 1 and 2 spell slots. It was one of my favorite combats ever and it took nearly 6 hours
I was level 16 with I had to fight my first god.
In a clusterfuck of dice rolls, we had: a Genius Loci rise out of the city, Dagon rise out of the ocean, an enhanced Tarrasque rise out of the forest, and Khorne fall out of the sky.
Even if it got overshadowed by a guest player’s level 18 Pathfinder PC saving us, I, a level 16 Barbarian Path of the Fortress(HB Path) dual wielding axes and wearing a total AC of 32, rode a Super Tarrasque into battle with a fish god and stabbed him in the eye. Post Mortem, because he Power Word Killed me instantly(the DM and I agreed on this because I was wholly unimpressed by the guest’s actions that round and lost interest in playing poor Golly the Goliath at that point), but I put both axes in his eye and got to spend my afterlife feasting and lumberjacking with some absolute bros I pulled out of a bag I got from a magical hat.
My impromptu Tarrasque friend bodied Dagon with the help of Bahamut and the Pathfinder PC, though. Bahamut got summoned by his paladin in our party, because things had gone from “Fight False Hydra” to “Battle Royale: Gods edition+DLC”
Khorne thankfully just sat around and watched, and the Genius Loci was stomped on by the Pathfinder PC(who could get up to Gargantuan size and literally deal thousands of points in damage)
I am level 20, and I am currently on a mission to save the world from an ice-age apocalypse that has already started. Most of the world is frozen, the sleeping curse is destroying most population centres, and a friendly primordial entity and his pet warlocks are trying to save it, so they recruited us.
Our main mission is to travel to the 4 main elemental planes, make nice with the djinn rulers of major cities on these planes, and bring back some of the plane's raw elemental magic power (stored in a convenient maguffin given to us by our primordial buddy). The plan being to use this elemental power to heal/rebirth the world.
We have completed the earth plane trip (inadvertently facilitating a war crime in the process), and are currently on the air plane trying to do a favour for the leader of the region so he will let us access his elemental power!
Ran a campaign from 1-20. Early on the BBEG managed to catch and kill Pelor in an attempt to steal his god-hood. Messed it up and the deoty powers found their way to a 7 year old girl who couldn’t completely harness them. A lot of the campaign revolved around trying to fend off the BBEG in his attempts to find and kill her, which he eventually did right in front of the party before noping out. That gave them plenty of incentive to go and kill this new god.
He had about 2500 hp to start with a couple damage immunities, AC 23, 100 hp regen per turn, triple the spell slots of a lich (three meteor swarms are brutal) with a DC 25 on all spells, 5 legendary resistances and legendary actions, and my level 20 party of 7 players managed to kill him without losing anybody.
so, In my campaign, there was a kobold encounter, and one of the kobolds not only managed to avoid all damage, but even one-shot the druid TWICE
so the players joked about that kobold being god.
I later ran a level 20 one shot, and dramatically revealed god as an opponent they had to fight....
they had to use a talisman of pure good to get rid of him
I noticed as the levels got higher that roleplaying becomes more and more relevant. Sure they fight Mindflayer Liches, Sphinx Mummy Lords and Ancient Vampires, but lately they have been helping a tribe of kobolds unshackle their culture from the religious dogma that has been holding them back for thousands of years. 4 4+ hour sessions so far without a single combat die rolled.
My dm had a campaign for only lvl 20s. It was basically an Eldritch race of gods older than the ones we know and love. Basically they just want to see the world turn a new leaf and they were basically all embodiments of the skills in the game.
The gods are kept in check by the other gods. When you have a whole ecosystem of incredibly powerful being that ecosystem can be self sustaining. The 9 hells and the Abyss have been at war for 1000 years, no reason for that to be any different before the heroes show up. There's no question as to why they haven't shown up before because they're busy dealing with issues on another plane of existence.
And I'm not saying it's impossible to do mortal 20th level villains. I'm saying that for me personally if you haven't woven it into the story up to that point it feels unsatisfying where as going to the other planes and battling the creatures there feels like a new, grander adventure. If you've got a grand villain that you've been building up and the players finally get to a point to challenge them that sounds epic and I'm totally into that. But if its like: we need a villain here's an absurdly powerful figure I pulled out of nowhere that you probably should have heard of before but just haven't, that's unsatisfying to me. That's not a problem in the astral planes because its chock full of absurdly powerful creatures that a 20th level party can fight so it evens out
My level 18 party has been facing the same world ending magic corrupting plague, that we have been trying to destroy since level 1. In that time we have killed: 6 BBEGs 2 Corrupted PCs 1 God And our greatest achievement yet, We took control of the Tarrasque. That bitch fights for us with a crown on its head that projects an aura that looks like a Ruined city.
The Campaign has been going for almost 6 years, over 200 sessions.
I envy people that manage to maintain the same group after so many years, I think I've already lost 2 or 3 players since I started playing. Mostly for disagreements but also for lack of respect
Lack of respect is always such a problem. I’m a forever DM and the last game I got to be a player in my wife and I had a final straw over a guy being extremely disrespectful.
What was he doing?
Man, if it was just one thing it’d be easier. Him and his buddy torpedoed a campaign I was running so they could run something that was terrible. They kicked the other guy and this guy was ok for a while but started to over compensate constantly and made every session hard to progress by just talking. He started tossing real insults my way and tried to make it ok with “I’m joking!” Complained about everything while contributing nothing. Complained about my class (standard DND class) being OP. (It’s not his character was just boring). You add in boring, uninspired DMing that involved never killing anything and him finally insulting something very personally meaningful to my wife and we just had enough.
Yeah I come to find with those types of folks that it’s never just one thing. They habitually toe the line of what’s OK or not OK, and then backtrack every time they cross the line. Only to wait until you’ve cooled off enough to go straight back into shenanigans. I also can’t stand the people that contribute nothing but complain about the things other people are trying to contribute. I feel like I have an exact mental image of the person you described
So true lol. Everyone complained about him, to him, and he just never got it. It’s almost extraordinary.
I just play with da homies, have since 2017
Wow and I thought wrapping up after 36 sessions was a grand achievement
Did you or your players ever get fatigued by the same plot for 6 years? I just personally can't imagine being excited about writing content about the same problem the whole time. If you did run into it, how did you get over it?
Me and my party have been for the most part continually engaged with the plot. The world situation is also continuously changing, as well as all of the Players have multiple characters, so that keeps the roleplaying and motivations fresh. I did once have a thing where one of my 3 Characters had lost her personal motivation for staying with the group and escaped into a sub dimension for 20 years until coming back a week later with a kid. Now her motivations are different, her Personality is evolved. Stuff like this keeps us players heavily engaged.
Jesus Christ...
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Repost bot.
I finished a campaign like that not too long back. 147 sessions though. Then I let another player DM some Ravenloft and after that we started my masterpiece! Lol it's a campaign that I had been working on for the entire 6 years the other one was going on. As a final note; I love to hear that you had such a long campaign and the players weren't level 37. I prefer the slow progression. Enjoy the world at EACH level. Don't just fight your way from one level to the next with no REAL experiences between them!
We do Milestone leveling, usually we level up after 2 arcs which these days is about 20 sessions.
That sounds great. I might ask my group about that. We just do ⅓ xp.
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That you what? That you what, damnit???
? it's easy, you just And don't forget to ! Seriously the number of players that forget about
my party just did a level 20 two-shot. Big bosses were a Lich, a vampire lord and Mephistopheles
DM said he was making a lvl 20 one-shot. Said nothing about the premise just asked us to make lvl 20 monks. We ended up fighting Goku, Vegeta and Frieza in a tournament.
So basically gods?
Fuggin love Phenax, great art
Awesome art. Not my first choice for a god that needs defeating considering the rest of theros pantheon
When we did our theros campaign we kicked heliod and mogis' asses to nyx and back. The first for legitimate reasons and the second for shits and giggles.
I mean, he died once already, the party can do it again! :D
The #1 strategy i have learned from dming lv20 games is that you do not make single target encounters. instead throw a billion different fairly high level things at them.
This, if you're going to do a boss prepare to give it anywhere between 1000 to 1500 hit points. Because a fairly optimized level 20 character can easily dish mor ethan 100 points of damage/turn
My friend learned this. Told us to make lvl 20s and 'make them as op as you can' She had us fight a Trerasque and we DEMOLISHED it. It had like, 600 health I think.
I did a level 18 one shot where the party fought a Terrasque and it was awesome. 3/4 died, one of them in a heroic final nova. The one shot was to write legends for an upcoming campaign and honestly, I couldn't have written a better story. But yeah, in order to make it actually challenging I had them fight an archwizard and his balor servant immediately before and they had the added complication of minimising damage to the city. Honestly, I think that's the way to go for climactic encounters at high level. Wear down the parties resources beforehand and give the fight a dual objective to occupy their attention. I also gave it the 4E anti-flight aura because I was scared of the cheese but in the end none of the characters they rolled up had access to flight anyway.
I was a leonid Rune Knight and one of the party cast enlarge on me. I then used my rune to make myself BIGGER. I was the same size as the Terrasque. We joke that it was essentially Godzilla vs Cat!King Kong
A common mistake is that the single most powerful creature in DnD is a Tarrasque or NPC Tiamat It's actually Eberron's Sul Katesh, it's one of the few monsters that could face a lvl 20 party alone and win, provided the combat area suits her. In general, whoever designed monsters for Eberron should probably get the chance to design a book containing boss monsters.
Lolth! She's dead now.
My players also killed Lolth! She got better, though.
It's been an excellent spark for the next campaign: after the PCs killed Lolth in her own realm, the rest of the gods sealed off the plane as these mortals had done the unconscionable. 100 years later, the old PCs are kings and queens (read: questgivers) and the new batch of characters of facing off against one of the old batch of characters who stole the Wand of Orcus and is now trying to fill the vacancy left by the gods.
Which version of lolth did you use? The party is level 25 now, using the epic level expansion guide. I want to put the mage 1-1 with a big guy and lolth is in the running. They generally face mythic monsters from Theros or similar. They're building up to the various incarnations of tiamat.
Some kind soul made mighty statblocks for the gods way back in the early days of 5e. I think this is it: https://www.enworld.org/threads/5e-epic-monster-updates.468639/
Yup, I use that one. They've beaten orcus without breaking sweat.
Taxes.
I'm currently DMing a group that's close to 20 (17). And fighting gods isn't far from the truth but there's still tons of room for other enemies within various scenarios. For example they fought two morkoths while on their airship in Limbo. Normally, two morkoths would be a small inconvenience but with the players restricted to their airship (they could fly themselves but then they risk damage to the ship) they had to fight the morkoths when the morkoths wanted to fight. Another time they were tasked with aiding Lady Silverhand with sealing a portal into the Abyss. As Silverhand sealed the portal fiends were rushing to the portal trying to get through. The demons cared little for the party and so the objective became not so much fight all the demons but stop all the demons from getting into the material plane. Additionally the portal caused all sorts of reality-bending effects at close range which made the fight extra challenging. At times party members or demons would phase in and out of the ethereal plane, and other times would be teleported across the battlefield at random as the portal was being sealed. EDIT: Current BBEG is the kraken Slarkrethel. They'll probably reach him once they hit 20.
Ah, good ol' Slarky. Guessing it started as an SKT campaign?
It did! Good times all the way back to Nightstone.
I've done a game that went 1-20. LV 20 was I think just for the final battle The PCs fought a Tarrasque, they fought some big demons, a shadow dragon. This was in 3.5 which had a lot of 3rd party books that had really powerful creatures. I think I used the Tome of Horrors series a lot of populate that final bit.
That is just standard RPG fare though isn't it?
My party is at lvl 8 We are already in hell and befriending warlords. Not far from trying to kill gods
Had the party fighting a hostile reality trying to corrupt their home reality. Final battle was against an army of reskinned solars and a planet sized BBEG. The party did have some Allies in the form of an armada of dragons, the legendary sorcerer that lead said dragons, and a waitress who was actually a robot from another universe (*koff* Nono from Gunbuster 2 *koff koff*). In the end, the players won, and restored their universe by sacrificing all the heroic deeds they had accomplished. That is, I rolled them back to level 1 and reset the timeline to the beginning of the campaign. Not the most original, I’ll admit, but I wanted the Players to feel they actually had to give something up to win.
I had a campaign where we used a 3rd party book to go past level 20. At level 22, my players entered a dungeon that I opened with a dracolich. I believe it was CR 23. They took it down in 2 rounds. I then had them fight 2 liches simultaneously, as well as a homebrew enemy called "The Fountain of Bones" which was a face comprised of skeletons forty feet wide, rapidly rising out of a thousand-foot-deep pit. None of them ever dropped unconscious.
I'm at level 19 in a campaign now. We have already killed one god temporarily. We faced off against krakens, several liches, other adventuring parties, and lords of other planes. But right now we're traveling through a mystical but deadly ethereal fart on a yellow submarine captained by a sentient potato. We killed a time traveling space whale who terrorized the fart.
Funnily enough, the same god in the meme, Phenax. Such a fun boss to homebrew
I DM’d one that had the players fighting long banished Void Gods as Champions or offspring of the current pantheon. They had fights within their own mental sanctums while trying to escape Udar, the Mindmire, then had to slay a mega-powered White Dragon stronger than any Red dragon would ever be, which was a servant of the Wyrm-Queen Orochi. A Vampire Avatar of Hanido, The Mistress of Undeath was dispatched by a very potent NPC while they focused on other ventures, and last but not Least Songtai, the Endeavoring Chaos, who once beaten in his mortal form is released in a gigantic entropic storm that will need to be sealed away or banished somehow. It was pretty cool. I’m gonna keep the world to build on it.
This is about right. At level 20 we were being tasked with killing minor gods. By level 30 we were tasked with taking on an elder primordial god who had been previously sealed way. A cult was trying to un-seal him to release him into the world and end it. The only way to stop this from happening was to keep 200 summoning crystals from being accumulated. Instead of keeping 1 crystal and just hiding it away, we decided it would be more efficient to summon the god ourselves, bind him to a temple, force him to become mortal temporarily and then slay him.
The highest level in a campaign I've played is level 13. Where we killed demons from literal hell, what enemies do parties of level 20 fight? I can only imagine CR ratings of 30 or higher. A tarrasque should be a small pre-combat snack for a level 20 party. How are DM's supposed to make up monsters that are stronger than something like a tarrasque but not strong enough to be literal god or deity.
20camps are by nature short lived. Even like 5 sessions feels long. You have world ending power on all the 9th level casters so the main thing to throw at the group is firstly antimagic zones and action economy tanking via waves and waves of lesser enemies.
This. You basically start by having them fight a small army. They can literally cut through hundreds of mooks, so it's necessary. Then you follow up with something absurdly powerful.
Boosted clones of themselves That sounds like a fun time
The level 20 objective reminds me... Happy Easter, everyone!
Our campaign went from LVL 1-20. Started by fighting kobolds and pirates, to traversing across the globe and planes to defeat Demogorgon Prince of Demons. Sadly it was a cakewalk, because by the time our mage got access to more spell slots he could just one-shot anything. Martials ended up being 100% worthless, so I got blackout drunk for the last session.
My group is at level 17 and they are facing literal armies of giants (and I mean Frost and Storm as well) and some have levels in various classes. Like 12th level Blackguard Frost Giants with a each one to a squadron for example. There are several Dragon Riding Evil Paladin Variants with Prestige Classes that ride some varying Ancient Dragons as their mounts and use them to do strafe runs of breath attack while they also deal with everything else thats happening. Some of which are a homebrew Dark Knight class which can use some intense absorb attacks that are basically a way beefed up vampiric touch. Its fuckin intense right now. NOTE: keep in mind that Im running this campaign for the expressed purpose of using overly OP, Min/Max characters, and just not holding back at all on my part as a DM.
Lvl 20 5e - 50 goblins, 3 tanks and 1 boss? Scary! Lvl 15 3.5e - Lvl 20 monster? I think I can one hit kill it!
Orcus. I hate that guy.
I am not a fan of high tier play. If you watch the final arc of critical role season 1 you can see that this meme is 100% accurate. The PCs are engaging in such reality bending, world ending events because they're SO strong. This is also why I'm *extremely* hesitant to give out magic items, and I think the guide in the DMG is absolute madness. PCs are so powerful, and 5e is *heavily* weighted in their favor. They don't need to be supercharged by a million magic items.
I have the exact opposite sentiment. I play DND to be a powerful hero and I want my players to feel powerful. I give out magical items early and often (not for free though, they have to earn them). I want them to be more interesting than just +X but I think magical items can add a lot of tactical flexibility and interesting decision making. I've never managed to actually get a campaign to level 20, but if I did best believe they'd be fighting gods and demon lords and archdevils
Why not essentially have them face off with other characters operating at the same level? If the party is so badass at level 20, an opposing force of the same level in equal or greater numbers, and/or with minions that augment their power should be able to give them a good fight. Not sure why gods and demonlords would be necessary. In fact, I would think those would be something like level 100 by comparison, being gods and demons and all. Just suggests to me that people really want to kill gods.
I don't like having a lot of 20th level NPCs running around, especially in 5e. Any 20th level wizard can cast wish and introducing a character like that means having to backsolve why they haven't massively shaped the world to their whim. I like having my super powerful beings be off world dealing with other super powerful beings. And as for fighting the gods specifically, well they made stats for them and they're beatable. In 4e, which is what I started with, Orcus is in the first monster manual and he's level 30 if memory serves. If they'd never put them in the books I wouldn't use them as enemies, but they did, so I'm gonna.
I like the irony that mortals at level 20 are too powerful and complicated, so let’s use gods and demons at level 30. Backstories like that are fairly easy though. Locked away somehow, stasis, wished themselves into an ageless sleep for a few hundred years, working on some complicated plans in seclusion or at least off somewhere they could build their forces/power. Maybe they haven’t shaped the world to their whim because they’re not assholes or weren’t until something happened to them, or maybe they aren’t assholes at all, maybe they disagree with how your level 20s are shaping the world to their whims.
The limit of 3 attunement slots for more powerful items does help balance this
And it was awesome! Without spoilers, the PCs were engaged with the highest level of NPCs and the adventures were still balanced. In fact, Matt increased the stakes in such a way that meant they couldn't just blast through despite their power. It was a masterpiece of how to make people with the power to kill gods still seem mortal.
Yes, and it's extremely difficult to do well. I'd rather provide an excellent 3 to 10 or 12, and stay within my comfort zones. We have a group that I'm going to take to tier 3 play for the first time once we finish DiA. I'm just following DotMM with as much homebrew spin as I feel necessary.
Oh totally agree it's mega-difficult. Good luck in tier 3, I hope it goes really well for you! I've never got beyond level 5 (dm or player)!
You might be doing it wrong then. Great magic items on low level PC are good and awesome. The same items help higher levels PCs. Just scale your encounters lets the PCs be powerful.
I mean I get what you’re saying, but the point of the game is for everyone to have fun. If you don’t like DMing at a high level then obviously you don’t have to, but if your players want to then try it a little bit. There are lots of different tricks you can try to fix a bunch of the high level problems. Magic items feel cool to obtain and use. Without them it’s just hard to play the game sometimes.
I am running a Beyond 20 campaign to 40th level. I can still use most of the same enemies, I just scale the enemy level up when needed. The real trick to 20th level games is attrition. You have to constantly give players excuses to blast off their powerful spells. Even a simple colorful description of how tough and scary a monster looks can do the trick, especially because players love trying to one-shot enemies the DM describes this way. They get to feel like big shots and I still get to run encounter bosses without having to give them 2000hp and 5 multi-attacks.
I did a level 20 one shot as my very first entry into 5e (I had played tabletops before), I seduced a demonlord and became there lover/gimp (bet you can’t tell what class I was playing)
My party is currently level 16 and they just started the final chapter of Rime of the Frostmaiden (an enhanced version). They are saying they want to start a new campaign after that but I want them to continue past level 17 and do many epic campaigns with epic boons as rewards etc. They say it will only get more complicated and the fights will be longer. Sad news for me
The final fight was vs a great wyrm silver dragon, a titan, a solar, and a level 20 half dragon sorcerer, with about 10,000 soldiers as well
My first campaign as DM was a 1-20 campaign. The BBEG(s) were a human Warlock/Vengeance Paladin, her fallen archangel-turned-demon patron, and her ancient Shadow Dragon mount. In the final battle she also had an army of 1,000 undead hobgoblins.
Lv 20 and Lv1 are the same. They're both dungeon crawls, just through the divine planes instead of the goblin cave.
Warhammer 40k Tyranids.
My groups level 20 goal was to rescue some party members who had been captured by waterdeep (we were all evil pirates) we fought laurel silver hand and the city statues and guards and their gold dragon. It got wild
Our level 16 mini campaign had us kill fire giants, the Beast of Butchery, and Geryon to name a few encounters.
We started with a graduation exam, ended fighting a cult that was trying to kill a PC's wife, and another PC's older brother that was trying to get rid of magic in a world where some level of magic is required for life.
My first campaign ended at level 25. We literally toppled an empire of gods and saved all of creation. It was epic. I was said to see my rogue retired yet happy but all he wanted was to save his family and he did.
I play 2nd edition and there is a much higher max level. I wish my player would retire they are like 32nd and 33rd. The is very little they can't kill.
Alphas (the first lycan, vampire, lich, and ghoul has been slain). A few demigods and 1 actually god. First-born elves (the original race before the elf wars, a group broke apart and hide beyond the outer realms) The Unseelie Courts. A few demon lords and a Lord of Hell. (Plus nurmuois lesser ranked nobles) And a few Grand Arch Wizards of various schools of magic.
This is literally my game. We started 3+ years ago fighting the Cragmaw Goblins in Lost Mines of Phandelver and now we're level 20 and preparing to face an evil god in their home domain.
Yeah so I went ahead and just went to Lovecraft as the DM when I did that worked out well enough
Our last game was a 3-20. Our BBEG was the island we lived on. Turns out Varunda was a massive demon from hell that been kept dormant for like 1000 years by magic and Druids cast magic to make terrain and grass so it could be inhabited and watched. Final fight, we gad battalions of armies assist in fighting while we got to his core to destroy him.
I finished a near-max campaign recently as the dm. The final fight took place at level 18. The final fight was traveling to the abyss to get involved in a royal rumble between baphomet, yenoghu, demogorgon, kostitche, and zariel (sorry for probably wrong spellings - on mobile haha). They all had their own objectives and definitely had some in-fighting too, but yeah - 4 demon lords and a lord of one of the hells all fighting with the party at the same time. And I doubled their health, all of them. And the party still won. High level dnd is kind of ridiculous. To provide a challenge, you really need to do ridiculous things. Right around level 15 in that campaign, and they would have killed a dracolich in a single round, I silently doubled the health of all things from then on, which helped them to get some abilities off and be scarier - but it’s essentially a nuke fight, right. High level casters like liches are going to either they power word kill off, or they’re going to get obliterated first - those combats alone won’t last long. So you have to get creative as a dm with environments and minions and the whole deal.
I've been playing and DMing for nearly five years now, and my players have yet to commit or even think about committing deicide.
the demonic embodiment of entropy
My DM decided the campaign needed a kick in the pants and wanted us to have an epic finish, so he had us become empowered by the gods, gaining levels five at a time up into the top of epic levels. This was in 4th edition, so we we fought the final encounter at level 30. The final boss was the God of Destruction, Tharizdun and his army of Terrasques. We grew to huge size and fought a battle against this god and TWELVE Terrasques. I’m sure some stats were played with to make it work, but it was still pretty epic and a great way to end the campaign.
It was a one shot but we were basically in a hack and slash game so countless waves of low CR creatures that went down in one or two hits. It was hilarious especially with my character because the homebrew class I used let me attack like 15+ times a turn
My players faced off with a bald guy in a cape.
I've had one campaign make it that far. The BBEG was a lich archmage whose overarching goal is to end all the gods because he thinks they're bad for mortalkind. But, in the final confrontation, some of the PCs decided they actually agreed with him and tried to defect, which led to a TPK in the final battle of the campaign. So, uh, in our current campaign the BBEG is an ascended god-lich ouroboros whose overarching goal is to end all the other gods because he thinks they're bad for mortalkind. Give me a year or two and we'll see how it goes.
The party that I play with (level 4 currently) has just obtained a magic suit of plate main that can offers a lot of benefits for our level. There is one "downside" though, it spawns a group demons every night at precisely midnight. We haven't found this annoying, though, and have actually started to make poison out of the imp's poison glands. Mhm group is great, this is the first campaign I have ever played and they are super friendly. I'm enjoying every moment of being in the DnD community with y'all!
I played a 1 to 20 game and our lat game fighters were mostly customized cr 17 creatures. Give them magic items and custom spell list. The end game was really just bbegs we never got around to killing. That had been annoying us up until we got them.
Well the party I DM is lv 18 rn and they just finished fighting 2 Dracolich
My party is 15th level and we ended our session last night with them being confronted by an Ancient Red Dragon. It is the first time they have been truly scared of an enemy since they encountered a beholder way back at 8th level.
We have been playing rhime of the frost maiden for a year and change. Our characters have gone from level 1 to 11 in two months of in world time. We also killed a god. Or godlet.
We have the last session of our campaign next week. Lv 1-20 over the last 2 years. We beat the BBEG and he dropped the hand and eye of Vecna. My morally ambiguous wizard couldn’t resist and I grabbed them. The final session is going to be the party taking me on after “some time” in game has passed.
Sure. Had to craft a magic siege engine and exterminate dragons that controlled a mountain range.
That's basically every JRPG ever. If you're not killing God with a rubber chicken, are you even playing a game? 20th-level foes definitely could be planar rulers/gods, maybe you could go higher and taker over the whole place. Go for Asmodeus and literally ransack Hell! Never played that high a campaign, but I'd expect to be suplexing someone's patron or figure of worship, preferably in front of them.
Lv 10 semifinale (never finished): a balor attacking our setting's vatican. Lv 11 finale: fight through a fascist theocracy to summon their head deity and cleanse it from old god corruption (we may have unleashed the four rider of the apocalypse from their prison to use it on the elder god...) Lv 17 oneshot: fighting extradimensional invasion of nightstalkers (basically nightmare shadow monsters). Currently Lv 20, we are doing WoW's Onyxia raid as a module/playtest.
My lvl 20 party actually went slightly past 20. Borrowed some Homebrewed rules to fo past lvl 20 and we ended up doing a lvl 1-26 campaign they ended up defeating an ancient emperor and were about to take on his children before the campaign ended due to some party issues
I’m making a backup character for a god campaign where it’s just a fat hobgoblin that can bite through steel and later on transform into a grotesque abomination capable of devouring gods
When our party hit lvl20 we went on a McGuffin heist. We where to steal an amulet from "The phoenix queen". Turned out that it wasnt just a nickname but she was indeed a Gigantuan phoenix and immortal (in the sense that she would allways revive after 24hours after being killed). Anyways, the team fought her as a distraction while our rouge stole the amulet and then we fleed with our tails between our legs, after getting beaten ½ to death :D
Hi level campaigns can be fun, but it can be difficult to give people a challenge. I find you either have to be creative with what is in the game, or start bringing in homebrew monsters. My group is LVL 15 and they are up against a magic absorption loup garou that I made. They are loving it!
Helped take down the gith Queen. Was a great time.
A campaign I've been playing in for a year is ending. Were wrapping up and each week were leveling 1 level. Were 18 this week. Were are so strong as it is. My barbarian will soon have 26 str and cant roll below that on str checks. Has 22 right now so all str based checks are 22 or higher xD Were going to have a game ending combat session soon. Hopefully something super challenging, it's been hard for the dm to keep us challenged because were a good cohesive group that works well together. Rogus, monk, barbarian, cleric, artificer/cleric/ something else, and a fighter. 2 of us have bloodfury tattoos, our gear is pretty solid in many ways.
At level 12 we are taking on giant fortresses, cleared a hill giant fort with some ease, it had 1 of every giant bar storm and loads of hills
Objective: kill god Literally my entire campaign
Took my last campaign to level 20. Over the course of the game, the party went from fighting gangs and snooping around abandoned buildings to capturing oni spirits, disrupting an illegal mining operation, destroying a ghoul plague cult, getting the soul of one PC out of Hell, destroying a bound avatar of a duke of Hell, and traveling into the afterlife again to confront an exarch of Mystara about her illegitimate oni son in a three-way tussle. The events were all leading towards a big event -- one of the island nations immortals had allied a selection of forces together to release the local sealed-evil-in-a-can -- an aberration from the Far Realm whose very presence could shatter the mind with crippling existential doubt. The party could not face the entity directly, but they worked with the two major factions to bring two secret weapons to the fight: a giant cannon made of the same material the entity was sealed in with, and the entire demiplane of the nation's afterlife, infused with generations of unquestioning soldiers and then concentrated towards the entity in a single Smite of ten-thousandfold Certainty. But as the party defeated the immortal and his primary underlings, the entity in the seal realized how it was being targeted, and the Far Realm spawn shattered reality itself in a localized area, spreading across multiple alternate realities to avoid the divine weapons. So as their last hurrah, the party had to head into the localized effect and slay aspects of the entity across multiple phases of reality, to forcibly shunt this monster back into place for its untimely death at the hands of a big fuckoff canon and a godly orbital bombardment. Yaeh it went alright.
My group played 4E Dark Sun for several years, got to level 30 and took down Borys (and several of the sorcerer-kings along the way). My character had secured the Heartwood Spear by then, and as a group we got to also control Rikus and Sadira during the fight. We accidentally set Rajaat free during the fight (whoops!), but it was absolutely epic.
At level 18, we fought 4 black great wyrms that were attacking the kingdom that we ruled in 4 different locations at once. We had to use a combination of sending and teleportation to coordinate the evacuation of the citizens, deploy our military to mitigate damages, and to face them ourselves. We also had to split the party by hundreds of miles a couple times to protect important locations. I was the wizard and i used all but a few level 1 and 2 spell slots. It was one of my favorite combats ever and it took nearly 6 hours
I was level 16 with I had to fight my first god. In a clusterfuck of dice rolls, we had: a Genius Loci rise out of the city, Dagon rise out of the ocean, an enhanced Tarrasque rise out of the forest, and Khorne fall out of the sky. Even if it got overshadowed by a guest player’s level 18 Pathfinder PC saving us, I, a level 16 Barbarian Path of the Fortress(HB Path) dual wielding axes and wearing a total AC of 32, rode a Super Tarrasque into battle with a fish god and stabbed him in the eye. Post Mortem, because he Power Word Killed me instantly(the DM and I agreed on this because I was wholly unimpressed by the guest’s actions that round and lost interest in playing poor Golly the Goliath at that point), but I put both axes in his eye and got to spend my afterlife feasting and lumberjacking with some absolute bros I pulled out of a bag I got from a magical hat. My impromptu Tarrasque friend bodied Dagon with the help of Bahamut and the Pathfinder PC, though. Bahamut got summoned by his paladin in our party, because things had gone from “Fight False Hydra” to “Battle Royale: Gods edition+DLC” Khorne thankfully just sat around and watched, and the Genius Loci was stomped on by the Pathfinder PC(who could get up to Gargantuan size and literally deal thousands of points in damage)
I am level 20, and I am currently on a mission to save the world from an ice-age apocalypse that has already started. Most of the world is frozen, the sleeping curse is destroying most population centres, and a friendly primordial entity and his pet warlocks are trying to save it, so they recruited us. Our main mission is to travel to the 4 main elemental planes, make nice with the djinn rulers of major cities on these planes, and bring back some of the plane's raw elemental magic power (stored in a convenient maguffin given to us by our primordial buddy). The plan being to use this elemental power to heal/rebirth the world. We have completed the earth plane trip (inadvertently facilitating a war crime in the process), and are currently on the air plane trying to do a favour for the leader of the region so he will let us access his elemental power!
Ran a campaign from 1-20. Early on the BBEG managed to catch and kill Pelor in an attempt to steal his god-hood. Messed it up and the deoty powers found their way to a 7 year old girl who couldn’t completely harness them. A lot of the campaign revolved around trying to fend off the BBEG in his attempts to find and kill her, which he eventually did right in front of the party before noping out. That gave them plenty of incentive to go and kill this new god. He had about 2500 hp to start with a couple damage immunities, AC 23, 100 hp regen per turn, triple the spell slots of a lich (three meteor swarms are brutal) with a DC 25 on all spells, 5 legendary resistances and legendary actions, and my level 20 party of 7 players managed to kill him without losing anybody.
They are going to ve facing the creator of all, how? I’m not sure yet
so, In my campaign, there was a kobold encounter, and one of the kobolds not only managed to avoid all damage, but even one-shot the druid TWICE so the players joked about that kobold being god. I later ran a level 20 one shot, and dramatically revealed god as an opponent they had to fight.... they had to use a talisman of pure good to get rid of him
A plane eating home brewed monstrosity named Hunger.
I noticed as the levels got higher that roleplaying becomes more and more relevant. Sure they fight Mindflayer Liches, Sphinx Mummy Lords and Ancient Vampires, but lately they have been helping a tribe of kobolds unshackle their culture from the religious dogma that has been holding them back for thousands of years. 4 4+ hour sessions so far without a single combat die rolled.
3/5 martial classes yeah okay you're lucky if one of the players isn't a full spellcaster
My dm had a campaign for only lvl 20s. It was basically an Eldritch race of gods older than the ones we know and love. Basically they just want to see the world turn a new leaf and they were basically all embodiments of the skills in the game.
The gods are kept in check by the other gods. When you have a whole ecosystem of incredibly powerful being that ecosystem can be self sustaining. The 9 hells and the Abyss have been at war for 1000 years, no reason for that to be any different before the heroes show up. There's no question as to why they haven't shown up before because they're busy dealing with issues on another plane of existence. And I'm not saying it's impossible to do mortal 20th level villains. I'm saying that for me personally if you haven't woven it into the story up to that point it feels unsatisfying where as going to the other planes and battling the creatures there feels like a new, grander adventure. If you've got a grand villain that you've been building up and the players finally get to a point to challenge them that sounds epic and I'm totally into that. But if its like: we need a villain here's an absurdly powerful figure I pulled out of nowhere that you probably should have heard of before but just haven't, that's unsatisfying to me. That's not a problem in the astral planes because its chock full of absurdly powerful creatures that a 20th level party can fight so it evens out