How do you handle it when characters go over 20th level? Do they have to choose a new class or is it possible to go to 21st level in a class?
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Beyond 20th level is like being an ex-president. You retire and get obscene amount of money for not really doing much. Occasionally people will want your opinion but you let other people handle the problem and at most give advice.
Often your character becomes a NPC in the campaign for future games.
Beyond 20th level is like being an ex-president. You retire and get obscene amount of money for not really doing much. Occasionally people will want your opinion but you let other people handle the problem and at most give advice.
Often your character becomes a NPC in the campaign for future games.
That is how I usually do it about 3 of my rulers of major kingdoms are PCs that hit 20.
In my games, 20 is the pinnacle of achievement and development in a class, so going further means switching to another class or a prestige class. Also in my games, anyone with more than 20 levels is considered a demigod on the basis of power alone.
If we ever get close to 20th level I'll figure it out then.
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Check out the epic level handbook for D&D 3.0/3.5
It will need tweaking for Pathfinder, yet it has good information on how new challenges arise, or how a game world deals with above 20th level characters. It even shows how skills can be used at ridiculously high DC levels (such as using swim to travel up waterfalls).
The main problem with going above 20th level is the math. A 1/2 BAB means you miss everything at your epic challenge rating, while a full BAB hits every time. A bad save always fails without a 20, and a good save always succeeds without a 1. In other words, if the progression isn't modified or leveled, everything becomes very binary for success or failure to the point that dice are meaningless.
One way to avoid it is to say beyond 20th level, all advancement plateaus to bad saves / half BAB progression, even if taking another class beyond 20. That helps keep the math from diverging too much, while giving PCs a very modest reward for going up levels.
Alternatively you could go for something like E6: Character level is capped to 20, but every x XP you get a new feat. Given how many feats are out there by now (more than 3,000), this could be quite attractive to build a really well-rounded character.
However, this feat progression might be overshadowed by the huge amount of gold the party gets in the same time as the x XP. So the flow of gold should be limited significantly - or you need a campaign reason why PCs regularly lose a lot of gold (which wouldn't be too popular, usually).
Dot.
Give serious thought to simply ending your campaign, and have your heroes pass onto legend.... to someday inspire a new generation.
The game isn't really set up to support post-20th level play.
Or consider the goal of level advancement achieved, and ask your players if they are content to simply adventure without gaining experience. Everyone peaks at some point in their development where they don't gain new powers. But they are still potent figures nonetheless.
Did it 1 time. Here is what I used
Class advancement- continue the tables as written except where lower rules change them. Continue advancing all class abilities that scale by level. May multiclass
BAB- continues as per normal. However bab gained after level 20 never grants additional attacks per round
Saves- 1/2 all for all classes. Just a number fix to stop autosuccesses on good saves and autofails on bad ones
Spellcasting- gain 1 spell slot per level past 20. At every odd level you the slot is 1 higher level than the highest you already have. EX lv21 bard has 1 lv7 slot. EX: lv23 wizard has 2lv10 slots and 1lv11 slot. This is mainly for metamagic but spell research is an option
I do not encourage having a hard level cap. Leveling keeps player interest because psychology. I have tried level caps and they seem to kill a bit of enthusiasm
saves, bab, hd, skills, all that stuff goes on at the normal pace.
Spell slots is where it gets weird. at lvl 21 casters get a lvl 10 slot, at lvl 22 they get 10 lvls to split into spell slots, like another lvl 10 or 2 more lvl 5s.
And then at lvl 23 they get a lvl 11 slot, and at 24 they get 11 lvls worth of spell slots to split as they see fit. and it just keeps going from there.
Spell casting slots above 9th aren't problem. You use them for meta magic or preparing lower level spells. It just means you meta magic a 9th level spell really.
I'm a player in a campaign which is currently at 19th level. We've also currently got 5 mythic tiers, and I think the DM's plan might be to keep going for a while after 20th level gaining just Mythic tiers and I suppose wealth/equipment.
saves, bab, hd, skills, all that stuff goes on at the normal pace.The way 3.5 did it, everyone switched to the same progression for BAB and saves (+1 every 2 levels, which is good for saves, but poor for BAB). Feats, ability increases, skill ranks and hit dice continue to increase normally, as do class features based on a mathematical formula. Caster level continues to increase, but spell slots don't (there is a feat that gives you an additional spell slot of up to 1 level higher than your current maximum - you can take it multiple times).
Fun Fact:
You may remember that 3.5's Divine Power spell set your BAB equal to your character level. In the 3.5 Epic Level rules, characters after 20th level didn't actually gain BAB but got an Epic Attack Bonus every odd level instead, no matter what class you were. So if you were a 30th level Cleric, you could cast Divine Power to have +30 BAB on top of the Epic Attack Bonus (which was the same for every class) and whatever else you had. I have a hard time thinking of words to appropriately describe how much of a middle finger that was to martial classes.
I guess that multiclassing might help to even out your saving throws. At some point it might become difficult to maintain AC as a meaningful defense though. I use it pretty successfully for a couple of my PCs who are 17th and 19th level, but there are only so many AC bonuses you can gather, so it seems like eventually advancing BAB could eclipse them. That's around the same time when stuff like True Seeing is becoming a more common "lower level" effect so that miss chance is getting less effective too. I guess Combat Expertise would continue to go up though the scaling is much slower than BAB.
@making-half-dragons - By the official rules you double the number of XP needed to reach each level.
To gain a level beyond 20th, a character must double the experience points needed to achieve the previous level. Thus, assuming the medium XP progression, a 20th-level character needs 2,100,000 XP to become 21st level, since he needed 1,050,000 XP to reach 20th level from 19th. He’d then need 4,200,000 XP to reach 22nd level, 8,400,000 XP to reach 23rd, and so on.
The problem with going past 20th level is not on the character side, but rather on the GM’s side. If the characters abilities increase after 20th level it becomes very difficult to challenge the party. Every monster is going to have to be heavily modified or they players are going to have a cakewalk. Eventually one of two things happens either the players end up getting bored because nothing is a challenge anymore, or the GM has essentially created a new game.
You can google Pathfinder epic and a epic handbook comes up, it's probably not official but it works fine. It's set up like 3.5 epic handbook but geared for pathfinder. Our group has played many epic adventures and have characters all the way up to 27th lvl. The major problem with epic play in my opinion is that it requires A LOT of work on the GM's part, and things can get weird real fast. We had a epic rogue who had an artifact and was being hunted down by a group that wanted to take it and secure it away, everything was going fine until the group caught up to the rogue...and then through a series of abilities and such everyone went stealth/invs and no one could find anyone. That campaign is still on hold, lol as I'm not sure how we are going to ever actually find each other.