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I was looking over some threads that had builds from 1-20th level explaining the huge amount of damage they could dish out at 20th.
Is anyone playing at the level and continuing to play (i.e. on going)?
None of my group ever got past 16/17th under 3.x and we are up to 5th in PF at the moment.
My point of inquiry is would you "optimise" your character the same way knowing it'll only be played until 12th or 15th or whatever. Does this influence the choice of when to get feat A or B?
Interested,
S.
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20th level characters are just as unappealing as 1st level characters.
At level one your party is pathetic. Your sorcerer knows 6 spells, two of which are useful, your fighter can wave its sword around, and sometimes hit something. and your bard is a disappointment to the name of music.
At level 20 your sorcerer has 80+ spells/day, and is basically god, your fighter is killing the Terrasque and your bard left at level fifteen because he got funded by a wealthy patron and is now Bard Ulrich, drummer for the world renowned Bardtallica.
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I'm currently playing a gestalt Sorcerer 20//Paladin 3/Ninja 17 with 5 tiers of mythic Trickster/Archmage (dual path).
It's crazy nuts. I don't bother optimising. I've taken a lot of very weak choices.
We got past epic in a Age of Wryms 3.5 campaign. Got pretty boring really at the end.
And, some crazy levels in old school stuff. One of my Pc's was a demi-god.
So, yeah, Op the guys comparing 20th level builds are optimizing theorycrafters. They often have some axe to grind. Some just like doing the build- on paper.
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Started at 15th and went on to 25+ once. Had a blast. Would do it again.
But the expected level certainly changes how I design my character. I have a 1st level character I just rolled for a single session and knowing I won't play him past 1st means I made some very different choices. (Like 12 Wisdom on a cleric.)
I am currently in a 3.5 game that has run many years. We are nearly at level 19 now. It's fun but I wouldn't recommend it to too many people since it is pretty slow calculating all the bonuses you get and we often only get one encounter done in a session. Of course the GM has also given us souped-up magic items that give us the ability to defeat CR+6 or greater encounters. The big bad at the end of the current adventure we know is at least CR 29 and he probably has extra class levels, abilities, or minions in that encounter that we don't know about yet.
Most of our characters are poorly optimized. But at the power level we're at right now it doesn't seem to matter that much. One was very well optimized for 10th-15th level but his optimization gets nerfed by DR and most of the enemies at this level have that.
Against the right enemies my paladin can do somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 raw damage against the right opponent assuming every attack (of 4) hits and he is properly buffed. That's pretty rare though so in a typical round I consider 120 damage over 2 hits to be decent.
Peet
Yes, we've got a level 20 wizard, level 20 cleric, and a level 20 barbarian. The wizard and cleric don't often do damage, it's a lot of save or dies, or debuffs, or disjunctions (holy crap that spell is mandatory at level 20). When they do use offensive spells, it depends on the spell, obviously! Wizard as Spell Perfection Distintigrates for an average of around 300 or so. The AoE spells do a lot less, but they can kill giant groups of people. The cleric does a lot of summoning and buffing with occasional implosions. The barbarian is nigh immune to magic, and full attacks for around 300/round against most enemies.
Edit: Forgot to mention, they all started at level 1. Not too much thought was put into late game builds, other than qualifying for spell perfection.
I have GM'd to 20 more than once, but I have never played in a game that made it to 20. Real life often stops the GM, but the last time I tried it stopped me. The highest I have played to is 15 as a player.
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I am currently playing a Dwargen Level 51. 20 Artificer, 20 dragon disciple, 1 rogue, 2 druid, 6 or 7 dwarven defender. pretty sure that's him.. dm has the sheets atm.
He started as a dwarf in 2e, a type of dwarf that actually got +2 CHA) that rolled for stats 3d6 as is and how they lay } came up with an 18+2 CHA as a Dwarf Warrior.. That's almost unheard of. Anyway. Klokk started as a warrior clansdwarf kit blacksmith/miner clan of McDermitt. He was specialized in both a war hammer and battle axe, knew how to mine, general blacksmithing and some military tactics.
3.0 come out, he was a fighter 5/sorc5 defender 5 copper halfdragon (dd10). We played in the world of Midkemia based sorta east of Loriel where that river comes out of the mountains. Turns out there is was a fire giant forge and sleeping red wyrm in that mountain range..
We woke up the Valheru, well one but we if we had any clue what she was.. we would have killed her then and there though it would have been a vary evil act/situation.
All the deaths she has caused.. they destroyed kesh, every living being bigger then a bug, razed the entire contitent. The only reason the kingdom even survives is because of the academy. In our world the rift war went a lot differently.
We had bonded with dragons in council of wyrms and eventually twined our souls together so can take the forms of the ancient wyrms, our party number ones of every metallic color, even platinum and some from the each of the gemstone dragons from Mystria as we had walked the hallway of doors, well flown to get there.
So we landed on our dragons at the Rift west of Halisford where we were at. Spoke with the great ones. Offered them as much metal as they could carry. They just had to go to the ruins of Kesh and fight the Valheru with us to get the metal. with a dozen ancient wyrms standing in a circle around them, they agreed. We did not threaten, there was no need.
Imagine being handed helm, made of Mithril and the eye of a red dragon, that when you wear grants True Seeing, Deathwatch, Detect Lie & Comprehend Languages to the wearer.
Each of the 12 age 12 dragons have the soul of a human, dwarf, elf, half-elf, even a gnome bound within them. In the terms of the Great Ones, there are two types of Magic or Tricks as a friend of mine called them. There is high magic or Sorcerer's magic, unprepared spontaneous and there is low magic such as the wizards. Every single one of the our charcters had 25 levels at this point.. at least half of which were high magic classes. No great one in thousands of years was born with that ability. Their society was an Empire in name only, it was the great ones, the wizards that ruled in fact. And they were awed to say the least.
______________
Then 3.5 and we went to Eberron. I became a 20 artificer there when we cleansed the mourning lands and restored cyre of which Prince Oargev has been
We "retired" at 45
We then sponsored new champions of light for eberron and ran a 1-20 mini-campaign for a few years where I made another artificer, in this campaign we reunited the shattered house cannith under my guy Eston. One of the other players played the daughter of King Oragev and my aunt Jorlanna.
If you have ever been to Eberron, Prince Oargev was forbidden to attend the council at thornhold where that treaty was drawn up, so was not bound by it.
Because of that, Oargev allowed us(cannith) to reactivate the creation forges that had been shut up for years. Allowing a huge surplus of forged ones to form the bulk of his army.
In our party we had 2 warforged and 8 dragonmarked heirs that eventually became the leaders of their houses. And the forged earned the ability to develop the mark of marking.
So then we actually decided to randomly explore Xen. We ran into an arcane about to be eaten by some giants, He gave us portable hole with a pair of vary ornate rune carved wooden chairs. Until we indentified it we were vary confused. You see they were Greater Spelljaming Helms.
So naturally we took the hint from the gods and we went spelljamming and stepped in the plane's as well and which got us up to 51 or 52.. im not sure atm. So many classes and levels, its somewhat hard to keep track. Klokk is 22 pages and I print in size 5 font with .5 pencils.
The players are scattered around the states atm. game is on pause.. sorta.
Im running a colonization game with my character Klokk as the gmpc ruler for the first year.. creating a butt load of epic magic items with him. In 2 month of Eberron time (2 years for Klokk on the world hes on) he has to return to Eberron to help seal off a huge rift..
In a Vision our 51/52 level characters have all seen wings of Valheru aback their dragons from Midekmia; legions and legions Quori of Eberron; some nightmarish army of draconians from Anslon that have somehow found their way into The Hallway of Doors and care not for the truce held within.
In our absence, while our characters were off sailing the Phlogiston, traveling the Planes and walking the hall of worlds. Things have gone crazy.
Riedra has taken over all of Sarlona; only Adar remains free. Riedra has blockaided Adar and basically destroyed all of their navy. Nobody in Khorvaire is even aware.
We intrinsically knew that the rest of The Chamber was unaware. Even with the full knowledge of the Wyrm I am bound with.. There is nothing within the Prophecy that even remotely would hint of these happenings.
That supper short version of klokk's tale of the past 11 years.
The vary first magic spell Klokk learned was Fools Gold, turns copper into gold with pyrite dust. I have some guys at my table here that have met Klokk over the years with their characters and never knew he was a copper.. they assumed he was gold.. as do most people, after all if you detect magic, a dragon IS going radiate alteration magic anyway, so who Really would think to look That closely :D
I have another 2e human that is duel-classed Fighter20/Wizard20/Cleric20/rogue4 That's been a journey, ill tell you that. And Still have to go another 16 as the rogue before I can finish my blasted quest and ascend so to speak.
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This was some serious thread necromancy.
It might even have required a 20th level caster to pull off.
My group starts all games at a level that will allow us to reach level 20 by the end of the game. If it's short we start high if it's long we start low but we play 20th level characters often. One time we started at level 10 to make it to 20 by the end and after the game took a few interesting turns we were level 32 trying to fight vampire gods.
Lessee here...
I've played in a few campaigns where the party reached 20th, and then the campaign ended 1 or 2 sessions later. One of the games I'm in is about to do that, actually - we hit 20th last session, and should be finishing it the next session.
I've recently run a campaign to 20th level. The campaign ran for a couple months at 20 before the party managed to destroy the vampire demigod that was the final boss. They had to complete a pretty specific destruction condition to kill him outside of his castle, but they did it. Otherwise, they would have had to have navigated a megadungeon heavily inspired by Castlevania to finally slay the demigod in his own throne room.
Prior to Pathfinder, I took over a 3.5 campaign around 4th level and DM'd it up to 35th.
I also played a campaign that went from 1 to... I want to say 27? It may have been 24th?
Of course, the really crazy thing our group tried in 3.5... Well, our group's been around a long time, and we've done a lot of campaigns.
So we tried a sort of mega-campaign, where the Far Plane, under the direction of the Crawling Chaos, was attempting to consume reality, and launching assaults against everything. And so the heroes of many different campaigns rose up and banded together to do battle for reality's right to survive.
I think there were about 30 PCs split between 8 or so players? People would pick which character they were taking for a mission at the start of the session, and whoever was DMing that week would just roll with it.
That campaign started at 25th level. DMing passed between four different people, based on plot ideas and threads they wanted to run.
It was absurdly over-the-top, but eventually petered out for various reasons. The last few sessions, which I ran, involved two teams traveling to Earth, which had been conquered by the horrible super-villains who had been the PCs in yet another campaign. The party had to put down the super-villians and harness the font of their power in order to wake up Cthulhu, who's dream body had located and was guarding the Forge of Creation. The party needed to harness the Forge of Creation to fight the Crawling Chaos. Anyways, that ended with like 16 or so L30+ characters fighting Cthulhu in R'lyeh, who I'd modified from his CoCd20 write up to have like 40 aberration hit dice, 5 wizard levels, 5 cleric levels, and 80 mystic theurge levels with like 6 quickened spells a round.
He also had another 3 quickened psionic powers per round, but to my embarrassment I forgot those during the combat. Oops!
Anyways, they forced Cthulhu to flee to the Far Plane, and that is where that campaign ended.
Anyways, my suggestion for running games at 20+ -- you are running a game for straight-up superheroes at that point.
Go nuts. They can handle it.
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I think it was intended to be, considering DrDeth's previous posts on optimizers (a word he uses unfavorably).
Oh man, looks like I better craft some Potions of Cure Serious Burn! Zing!
Generally I consider a campaign to be going through all levels 1-20. I actually haven't done it yet in Pathfinder, since I've only run one pathfinder game since this edition was released and that only went to level 7 before it ended prematurely.
However in 3.5 my games were at least 1-20, although we'd usually end up going through a couple of epic levels just in the tail end of the campaign.
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They often have some axe to grind.Not 'always.' Not 'usually.' "Often." That could mean anything from 'nearly all the time' (as you seem to have decided it must) to 'a small but statistically signficant amount'—which is how I took it ...
... and with which I wholeheartedly agree.
T
Yes, and that's exactly what I meant "often" as in a "significant minority". Most are simply optimizing theorycrafters. That's an important role. Mind you, one should not confuse theorycrafting with how most- or even more than a tiny few- games are really played. But it's a Good thing to have them around. they push limits, find loopholes and such. They are a valuable and necessary part of any gaming community.
The issue comes when someone trots out their optimized theorycrafted "stretch the rules as much as possible" 20th level PC and sez "See, this PROVES the devs don't know how to design a game! So now they MUST redesign PF from the ground up to my specifications". Sigh.
I don't care for "optimizing", or powergaming. But I don't find Superman to be a compelling character either. I'm thinking that if my game ever really gets going I'll impose some kind of level cap whenever we all feel that the game is "in the pocket". With understanding and communication with the players as to what kind of story we are trying to tell it should work out much better than a free for all where the characters can't even relate to NPCs anymore.
Would Lord of the Rings have been any good if Gandalf was trading spell barrages with Sauron while Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas sliced apart an army of Balrogs?
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Would Lord of the Rings have been any good if Gandalf was trading spell barrages with Sauron while Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas sliced apart an army of Balrogs?
Possibry. Depends on if the quality of writing dipped, which is what matters, not the power level.
I think it was intended to be, considering DrDeth's previous posts on optimizers (a word he uses unfavorably).
Yeah, but I did say over and over that by "optimizers" for the purpose of the debate we were having I defined as “hyper optimized, use every source even if it’s not really suited for the AP, high point buy, dumping like crazy, every magic item is available, rest after every combat, blowing away the standard AP encounter in just two rounds, rocket tag”. And I even said if they're having fun, then that's great. But it's not how most folks play and many more middle of the road players don't like THAT sort of optimizer in a more standard game. That doesn't mesh well unless everyone wants to play that style.
Yeah but do those people actually exist?
I haven't seen any here. I have seen some people with one of those individually, but you seem to be condensing them into one big thing which no one believes
How about you guys stop with the personal attacks & sniping, and let's discuss the OP, OK?
The first Pathfinder campaign I ran went to 20 (and beyond), which is how most the D&D games I've run since 3.0 have gone, assuming the players schedules stayed synched.
I've never found it as unwieldy as I've heard it described.
I just posted my current ridiculous 20th level 5th tier Gestalt/Mythic character:
It's not in the standard Hero Lab format because 1. I don't have the PF tools for Hero Lab and 2. I don't think it supports Gestalt/Mythic and I wanted to separate out the stats a bit more to make it clearer where everything came from.
I jumped into a game at level 10 and played a cleric until 18. It was one of my most favorite characters. I had a fighter I played from 1st to 15th, which was fun. My current is a barbarian I have from from 1st to 11th. He's fun to role-play, more than anything else. I have played a level 20 only once in a one-on-one tournament. Starting there was kind of cool to try out, but not fun. Typically I begin at 1st level and the game usually ends before getting to high level.
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I GMed Rappan Athuk from start to finish, started at 2, ended at 20. The PC's ascended to demi-god status after defeating Orcus. Was a fun campaign with many lulz to be had at ever level. Near the end I stopped trying to challenge the PCs and just tried to kill them, and in a few cases I managed just that.
I did run a level 1 to level 20 campaign. It was pretty awesome.
The desire to actually get a chance to use those capstone abilities was a major factor in our deciding against using the Mythic rules in Wrath of the Righteous. We're following a scheme where the PC's will level at what would have been mythic tiers 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 meaning that at the end the characters will be 26th level.
We're all looking forward to it.
Having said that, I know the guys who do our builds look completely differently at characters designed for specific levels of play than for 1-20.
Running a 1-20 campaign currently. One guy at the table has never been graced by level 20, so I intend to change that.
We sit at 14 at the moment
Would Lord of the Rings have been any good if Gandalf was trading spell barrages with Sauron while Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas sliced apart an army of Balrogs?
Above link is to the story hour retelling of a high level 3.5 campaign. Sepulchrave's story hour, specifically.
I ran a game that went from 14th to 19th... technically to 20th, but basically the PCs leveled to 20 just as the campaign ended. It had been a long campaign and I had run out steam.
The history of the builds and how people built is complex....
I ran an older campaign in D&D 3.x that started at level 2 and ended somewhere around level 12-14. Don't remember exactly. When I started the next campaign, I invited some of the players from the older game to reprise their characters (not all, the others were not available at the time). The campaign began at 3.5 but Pathfinder was in beta at the time and I had said at the beginning that if the final version looked good we might convert later. But two of the four players basically used the characters they'd built for the older game to start with. Two others were new and built their characters up to 14th.
We converted to Pathfinder final around 15th level. So people had an opportunity to rebuild. Most players tried to be "true" to how they'd leveled before but certainly took some opportunities to make adjustments with the new system. There was some minimal houseruling to enable conversion ease (a converted PrC). Somewhere in there later we lost a paladin, and someone else replaced him with a sorcerer/fighter/eldritch knight. A damned effective character at level 16-17, though I'm sure at level 1-2 he might have been more of a challenge (though maybe not).
Later I ran a mythic playtest with 20th level characters, again inviting prior characters to play where they could. These were rebuilds, only to incorporate new Pathfinder materials now available and to do away with the homebrewed 3.x conversions.
So there really was a lot of rebuilding and conversion in there. I can't say there in fairness there was a lot of stuff that might have been the same if it had truly just been, say, a Pathfinder game from start to finish. OTOH, if I ran a very long campaign, I would certainly use retraining rules if someone was really unhappy with the choices they'd made--but I'd allow that if the game was level 1-5, let alone to level 1-20. I don't like forcing players to be miserable if they've really just felt they made a mistake, and my players tend not to be abusive of such opportunities.
I can also say that some builds were pretty "pure" -- the fighter/rogue/shadowdancer started at level 2 and I don't think his build changed notably from 3.5 to ending at 19th level in Pathfinder (or in his mythic 20th level version). (He just got more effective in Pathfinder, compared to 3.x, because he could sneak attack more things and got rogue talents to further boost his skills.)
I'd love to run from level 1-20 in theory but in practice I don't know if I'd have the patience to run a campaign that would go so long--it's not about dealing with lower or higher levels, it's simply having the time and the creative well to draw from to run a lengthy campaign. Maybe if I ever run an AP and then freeform after it ends. Hard to find the time to do that these days.
One thing I've noticed regardless of where things cap level wise, planned builds can fall apart. Often the campaigns end up demanding you master different abilities than the awesome uber build you've planned out earlier. Sometimes what looks amazing planned out just doesn't work in practice--I had one player in 3.5 who planned out an "amazing trip build" and then realized it was not going to work especially in the particular style of campaign being run.
I have no idea if any of this is useful or not but that's my experience.