Tiers of Play in Dungeons & Dragons 5e

are your Dungeons & Dragons characters doggit adventures and gritty monster hunters can they barely survive the dangers of a deadly dungeon or are they glorious champions who lead entire armies to battle or are they mighty enough to challenge the gods themselves [Music] greetings Dungeon Master's my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon tears now Dungeons & Dragons characters grow in power as they gain levels and their adventures must change in scope and scale to suit dungeons the Dragons is broken into four tiers of play that we're going to be talking about today they average about five levels PERTs here and they're broken into levels one two four five to ten 11 to 16 and 17 to 20 today we're gonna go through each of these four tiers of play and discuss the powers and abilities that characters possess within each one as well as the types of monsters that are found within each tier and we're gonna reference those with examples from video games books movies and television shows to help you see exactly how Dungeons and Dragons characters evolve over the course of an entire level 1 to 20 campaign this is an extremely useful framework that you can use as a dungeon master to create quests organize your campaign and build appropriate challenges for your characters and understanding this system is one of the keys to unlocking the great narrative strengths of the Dungeons & Dragons game listen let's get rolling let's start with tier 1 which we're gonna call the local heroes or the adventurer tier yeah so what does that look like well this terror starts at first level and it goes as high as 4th level although some people might cut it off at 5th as well yeah now this is the grittier side of D&D this is where your characters are not very powerful they're dealing with very real world issues and they're very very mortal indeed you are probably not surprised at how easy it is after your first adventure for a level 1 character to get dropped by a goblin and this is a theme that continues throughout the this first tier of play low level characters can get taken out in a single hit they don't have a lot of endurance um and they really feel like normal human beings but just very talented ones that tend to have a couple unique abilities yeah I know one thing that I always think of is we've talked a lot about this is even at tier one you don't want to think of your characters as average humans they're they're still heroes they're still they do stand out amongst the general public but they're they're standing out in the way of like they are slightly above average yeah and they're known for being slightly above average yeah they might be the equivalent of like an Olympic athlete or an elite soldier or kind of really any kind of eminent individual that you can think of from real world history was still a low-level character the nobody in the real world has ever been higher than probably level 3 or 4 in D&D terms right and that follows through in a lot of our most popular forms of media right I think if you look at a world like Game of Thrones there is not a single character in that story that could definitively be said to have abilities that are higher than a fourth level character and if you want to look at the setting of Game of Thrones nowhere in that show are the the heroes dealing with with like Tarasque s-- or large-scale monsters the largest scale monster that they have is a dragon which is extremely intimidating in their world because a dragon to a bunch of level 4 characters is yes yeah yeah so in their world that is the be-all end-all of power in terms of strategic plan and if you look at magic at low level play it very much suits a low magic world right people might be able to occasionally turn invisible or throw both of fire or make a small illusion but the really spectacular magical effects don't appear in tier 1 at all right there's no fireballs here there's no teleportation there and Eddie coming back from the dead that would be probably the highest level magic users in the game mm-hmm because it's not something that they're just like oh we could raise them from the dead it's it's a very rare thing mentioned in the show exactly and it tends to be a thing that when these great powerful abilities come into play in stories that are around grittier characters they tend to involve supernatural forces and exceptional circumstances it's not like every day you get them traveling through time or bringing someone back to life it's a special and significant moment and so I find that if you're the type of DM that loves lo magic settings you love low level adventures that are really gritty that there's a lot of risk of death you're gonna love tier one play there's not a lot of magic items to go around you usually find consumables and the the players in general have to feel very mortal there is always that moment for me when we finish a campaign and then we start a new one and I get that that little moment of shock where I'm like what do you mean I have nine hit points that doesn't seem reasonable but at this tier of play that is what you're working with yeah so you're gonna be battling against local bandits thieves guild you might get embroiled in local politics take out a nest of goblins right tier one characters are gonna be really on on edge when they encounter things like Giants and Dragons it can happen but those are gonna be like the boss monsters that they encounter Yeah right a fight against a troll is very scary for low level characters right if two ogres show up three ogres show up you're probably gonna run away all right why don't we move on to tier 2 which is the well we've done local heroes now we're doing heroes of the realm yeah yeah so that's that's a little wider of a scope yeah and the heroes of the realm is often sometimes called the heroic tier and it really represents that super classic swords and sorcery high fantasy archetype because at this point in character advancement a lot of the magical abilities that define the font the fantasy genre begin to appear and much more regularly than they did before I would say it's one of the most noticeable tear changes is when you hit level 5 if you ask anybody that's played D&D for a little while hitting level 5 you always feel like oh there's my abilities yeah there's all my stuff yeah yeah and that's that's where it really comes into play and your characters really do feel like they've just jumped up in power yeah and you can now take a couple hits you can use your abilities regularly and we start to see magical powers like fireballs and lightning bolts are a regular occurrence in most battles you tend to see characters being part of armies or taking on legions of enemies right whereas before they really couldn't and now you know if they get matched up against a pair of giants it's not necessarily a situation where they might run away but that's gonna be difficult battle yeah that's still that's still a top and bad yeah but it's one that they look at now and they say maybe we can take this yeah we also start to see magic items become much a much bigger part a lot of heroic characters have their iconic magical weapon or a magical item of some kind usually still with the with the heroic here nothing of a legendary power yeah it tends to be like subtle magic but still common now an important note about this tier of play the characters are still mortal and they still feel very mortal death is extremely real at this tier of play and you shouldn't start running in thinking that you can handle anything yeah towards the end of this tier I'm coming back from the dead is something that can happen and you see it a lot in stories you also see much more long-distance travel perhaps the characters might take a portal or they might venture into the Fae while - the shadow the shadow fell very briefly right for a specific purpose and I think you really see this quite clearly in something like the Lord of the Rings right where we see the the heroes of The Lord of the Rings are extremely competent aside from the hobbits who are kind of still left behind a tier below yeah but they can fight ochres they can fight monsters and legions of Orcs right and you still get that kind of instances of characters that are coming back from the dead are surviving terrible wounds yeah most most of the heroes and in Lord of the Rings are in this tier I always think it's funny because I always say that a Frodo's a level one character who everybody just gave magic items to yep that's why really isn't like there's like level 5 5 or 6 and Gandalf is really hard to stat because he really is an angel and has added supernatural abilities and that's where I think people run into trouble with fiction is that often a character like Gandalf has abilities that are beyond the tier that the story exists in yeah right that's ok that but D&D actually allows you to do that like if you want to give your characters the ability to become ethereal or summon an undead army yeah you know you can go ahead and do that once but that undead Army's only showing up for one battle and it's probably not gonna be the final battle what's really cool about Lord of the Rings is you see them face a lot of really intense monsters often times they end up running away yeah like with the Balrog or I'm forgetting the name of it but that creature outside the mines of Moria yeah yeah the watcher in the darkness yeah but they still face them they still battle them they still have an encounter with them and survive to tell about it yeah which which is important is you're getting a little bit more of that that magic it's still a gritty tear but with more magic with more more abilities and more survivability yeah and that's why this tier is often called the sweet spot of D&D it's well regarded that the adventures that occur between 5th and 10th level often have this awesome mix of durable action-packed characters and the ability of the dungeon master to involve much higher level threats that the players can kind of tangle with for a moment and then realize they're in over there heads and run away and you haven't yet started to see the truly world shaking magic that comes from the higher level tears because the characters feel so moral right I think other great examples of stories that occur at this tier would be like The Dresden Files for more modern fantasy again magic is very reliable it's a thing that works but people can still travel around a lot if you've played any video games like Skyrim or Dragon Age straight up heroic tier adventures I would even add to that like games like The Witcher series or the richer books um and to even step out again with that heroes of a certain level that are caught beyond their capability guardians of the galaxy it's a great example of a group of characters that they don't really have any amazing high-level powers they're all very competent arguably they have interesting abilities yeah and then they get thrust in over their heads in a situation that are far beyond that they have to really rely on their wits and their allies to survive yeah and I love that as a theme of the heroic tier where the characters face these bigger than bigger threats then they can fight head-on and so they have to grab allies and friends to help them take that threat on we're now going to take a look at tier 3 which moves from heroes of the realm to masters of the realm these truly are powerful characters at this point yeah um these high-level characters once a D&D character reaches level 11 I consider them to be a living legend yeah at this point if they're not well known in the world they should be because legends will be written about these characters they're performing feats that are far beyond the capabilities of a normal mortal human yeah at this point in fact D&D characters have developed superhuman levels of resilience and this is why it's often very hard to roleplay them and also for a Dungeon Master to describe the action because at this point the characters are suffering attacks and abilities that a regular human being simply could not survive at this point they can face like a giant or ogre onslaught yeah and stand up to battle an army of giants yeah right I'm thinking of like that scene from the beginning of Thor where they go in and fight tons of Giants right or even the Avengers themselves and the climax of the first Avengers movie where now you've got characters of such great power and they can battle incredibly dangerous monsters but also in large numbers and the Avengers is a great is a great one to go to because in the Avengers you have something that's threatening the world yeah and the world cannot deal with it so they have to call upon this group of individuals who are far superior to any other human that they know and say you guys need to take care of this because we have hands yeah especially in D&D at this tier things like resurrection magic teleportation over vast distances become regular occurrences characters are taking to the air in battle sometimes of their own volition and they possess extremely powerful magic items so your typical battle is like the scene from a high fantasy action movie or superhero show and embracing that with this tier is what makes it really really exciting yeah one thing that I've noticed uh DMing this tier is you don't really get a lot out of just throwing mundane creatures I know it doesn't work anymore you can't expect to put basic melee fighting enemies up against tier 3 characters and expect that to be a satisfying combat encounter they will just wreck it yeah yeah right you and that's what makes this so difficult for a dungeon master is that now you really need to open up your monster manual go in and find those interesting creatures and sometimes I think you know you you ask yourself this question of like that's a cool monster what if there were two of them right and sometimes that's all it takes right you might look at a really awesome monster that is childlike in the challenge rating 11 to 15 area like a adult dragon and one adult dragon xi level characters can definitely make mincemeat out of them two adult dragons that's a different story that that becomes very even I use the minion rule a lot in this tier where yeah if you throw in that big creature in the previous tiers you throw in a big creature and you have a one-on-one like the party versus that one monster it's a bad bad place to be but in this tier if you're throwing in a big monster you might want to throw in a few little creatures as well to kind of aid in that to make it just seem more dire yeah another thing that I really like that that you do quite often is you'll involve some sort of environmental hazard yes something to like just up the scale of that battle just a little bit more I think actually by this tier you kind of need to stop looking at regular battlefields and probably your campaigns worn out of them it's time to go to other worlds right like let's go to the elemental plane of fire let's go to the heart of all volcano right let's go thousands of miles in the air in the middle of a primal hurricane filled with lightning bolts let's force the characters to battle deep in the depths under water right you really kind of have the invitation now to go over the top with your imagination on and just with every single thing it's like light it on fire or its body's charged with electricity or now you're in space right um it's kind of that in you now need to take the normal ideas that you would have and add one more sentence to the end of them to really take them over the top it gets really difficult because of this to have a serious campaign at this stage but it can be successfully done by increasing terrain like increasing the stakes right when the world is at stake no one's gonna question the fact that that's a giant lightning shooting fish flying through the sky they're gonna be like oh man we got to stop it from destroying the entire city yeah right which I think it's important to note that talking about the previous tears if we look at the first here they're fighting on a local scale yeah when you move on to the next here maybe it's it's the whole realm like we talked about but it's it's something more impacting the realm at a very human level a very natural level by the time they reach this third tier we're talking about world ending disasters yeah yeah and that's where we go to tier 4 the absolute masters of the world and these characters aren't just saving the world they might be fighting for the very foundations of existence itself by the time your characters reach this level we're talking about battles with gods we're talking about just shifting in and out of different different universes at this point yeah like doing the craziest things that you could ever imagine a Dungeons and Dragons character that is over level 17 is effectively a mythological demigod we want to draw inspiration for these adventures in the battles of you know the easier and the venire of a Norse mythology or the conflicts of the Greek gods of Olympus versus the Titans right these primal conflicts that define the fundamental order of the universe are the things that characters of this epic power must deal with and because dungeon dragons 5th edition does not have epic levels really the 17th to 20th level characters now are the ones that take up that mantle right um and straight up it's really difficult to deal with you now got characters who can wish the world to obey them they can clone themselves they can make copies of themselves they can come back from the dead in the blink of an eye they can regenerate from almost any form of damage launched at them and not only that they can summon meteors and destroy entire cities with earthquakes and tsunamis their power is world shattering I think one of the the really cool examples that we talked about is in in the previous year we discussed the Avengers yeah in this tier we had talked about Superman yeah being of this tier of play and the idea here is Captain America as an Avenger but you put them in the same room as Superman and the things that they have to deal with are vastly different yep you know if Captain America has to deal with a meteor coming to destroy the earth he's got to form a team he's got to get all these people to help them and launch a spaceship Superman is just gonna fly and punch that meteor out right and that's the difference in the scope and scale of these high-level characters in terms of the way that they can approach problems and solutions that makes it such a challenge to deal with these high levels of character power but it's something that I think that as a Deanna you need to embrace I've talked to Dungeon Master is a really common thing is like Dungeon Master's go well falling damage in fifth edition' caps out at 20 d6 which if you look at that that's like an average of 70 damage which is not going to kill a 20th level character right so people will then change the rules and say you know if you fall from over 500 feet you die instantly well you know if you took Jaime Lannister and knocked him off a 500-foot drop totally I totally expect him to die yeah but we're talking to your wonderful yeah but if but if you throw Aragorn off that maybe not he did survive a pretty big fall yeah right if you throw Captain America off a 500-foot drop you're probably and Superman doesn't even flinch when he gets thrown through multiple skyscrapers ya know like a thousand feet through all of these horrible things and then he stands back up and he's like oh that hurt you could throw Superman into the Sun and he would survive he might be more powerful yeah yeah actually that might be a bad idea so like you don't need to make the rules bend over backwards to accommodate this in fact like looking at how to deal with this as a DM is understanding how the tiers of play changed the tone and genre of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign and you either need to embrace it or recognize that it's not to your taste and avoid it yeah I see a lot of people talk about this whole idea of how do I keep my campaign setting low and gritty what happens when they reach these higher levels the idea here is don't let them reach those higher levels perhaps you want to cap cop out your campaign at six level if you want like a game of Thrones typesetting yeah and and just straight-up like you go through the Monster Manual saying my campaign setting doesn't have any of these monsters that are over CR 20 there's nobody in my world that can cast a fifth level spell and there you go and if you are open with your players about that and set that exponent as an expectation that can be a really exciting campaign and what you could then do is if you still want to have that a long lasting campaign you can either slow down the rate of XP game or you can let characters that have hit whatever level cap you've added get feats or other abilities maybe they can take a feat to learn like a fourth level spell right at the same time maybe you completely hate the greediness of low level play right and you love a super heroic action start your campaigns at eleventh level if you're like if you can't wait to have that kind of action happening in your campaign and you find low level play boring because it's it's always the same thing do you don't play it just skip over it and have people create characters that are already at a higher level and already have that history behind them the other thing that I want to note about tone write is like maybe you are absolutely in love with the horror genre right yeah I don't think like horror and Superman kind of doesn't really boil in vinegar right yeah they don't really match so like if you love themes of horror then you might find that high level D&D doesn't work for that right so there's certain different genre things like a war based campaign works really really well in the heroic tier because the characters aren't so powerful that they can just destroy that entire army right so it's really important to gauge like what's the story you want to tell and match that to the power level of the characters and the monsters they're going to be facing now if you don't want to limit your campaign if you still want to play a full level 1 to 20 campaign I think it's important to embrace the change and recognize the opportunities that it presents for you as a DM to bring a breath of fresh air into your campaign as it's going along yeah I think one of the things in in our current campaign we went from the the first year to the second year and there was a really dramatic shift in tone but it reinvigorated the characters and the campaign setting I think what was what was amazing about that having just played through yes when we did our level 1 to 5 arc it was extremely light-hearted it was fun nothing was really overly scary which we actually were playing this this very fun version of D&D that involved like taverns games yeah and we had like a rogue Assassin's Guild that we were dealing with who were kind of jerks but that was that was the worst heavy rivalries yeah right then all of a sudden that tear finished and we had a conclusion to that tear that tied itself indirectly to the next year which suddenly up the scale yes you a war themed campaign setting very very naturally yeah and and when that happens the the characters get this opportunity to develop right like your character kay lick the monk was very cocky very arrogant but also took life not very seriously and I remember that moment when when your character met up with your character's father again and the reaction from your character's family was while war has made a man out of you and it had my character had to change a lot of what I had written about who he was as a person changed when suddenly he was thrown into having to go to war yeah and that really changed his outlook yeah I'll be really interested to see how that character changes over the course of the future of the campaign because we want to take this one all the way to level 20 and see where that goes for me as a DM it's also great because I find that a really easy trap to fall into as a DM is thinking that like you have to imagine your entire campaign as one complete movie but the Lord of the Rings is not a level 1 to 20 campaign it's a campaign where the characters went from maybe level 5 to level 7 and wrap the whole thing up right and we only saw that one piece of it so if you make a campaign where you introduce the Dark Lord of death and destruction at level 1 but your intent is to not have the players fight the Dark Lord of death and destruction till level 20 well three years later by the time they actually get to that fight they could be so bored of that character that the the villain looks like a joke because it's like you haven't killed us until now yeah I mean if you have a character that's a villainous that's that powerful why doesn't he just show up and he's like oh you guys are causing a problem yeah so I like to think of like each tier of play as a season of the television series that is my campaign right and so I find it's really valuable to say well I'm gonna have a different villain in each tier you might want to invent like a sprawling conspiracy between those tiers that links things together but sometimes it's just enough to have the same characters in the same settings and that's all the link you need well I'm actually use an example from one of the the pre-made modules here I'm just finishing up running rise of Tiamat after rising or after running hoard of the Dragon yeah and what I really liked about that is at the beginning arc of the story you hear about one of the worm speakers and you're like oh man this is a thread and you spend the first tier and a half trying to track down actually might be the first two tiers trying to track down one villain upon finding and defeating that villain you then find out that she was one of several she was one of the five and now suddenly the tier shifts and you're like oh there are four more of these people that I need to track down which I thought was actually a nice little build up of here you have one villain that really seems like the prominent villain in the campaign and then it opens up to say that was just a pawn in the grand scheme and I think that's a really common storytelling trope and I would never be ashamed of using it right and and also that can be a really cool way like escalating the story - it's like you thought that one villain was deadly but now there are five right and and it's a great way to give a new life to an existing campaign as you move between tears and when you really get up there to the very end of it you really want to start thinking about what the final destiny of these characters are and increasingly let them make an impact on your world I very strong belief that a D&D campaign should alter the campaign setting in which it occurs in and as you get up to those higher tiers your world is gonna get set on fire right things are gonna be world shaking and it will never be the same again and sometimes the most awesome and satisfying thing is for high level demigod like D&D characters to face that world shattering danger and then to see the new first level characters in the next campaign get to live in that new world that was created as a result so this has been our guide to the tiers of play in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and whether your characters are gritty adventurers or bold demigods we'd love to hear about them in the comments below now a lot of this had to do with different types of combat that you might encounter so we have a guide to running combat right up over here character death is inevitable in almost any cure play so you can hear our thoughts on that right over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in a dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 259,481

Rating: 4.9354334 out of 5

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book, tier, level, monster, heroes, hero, master, realm, adventurer, god, gods, demigod, skills, feats, world, local, epic levels, challenge, adventure, design, campaign, overpowered, power, DMG

Id: v9X9GvkJA5k

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2018