The D&D Power Curve and The Avengers

One of the commonly held beliefs in the D&D sphere is that the game is the most fun in the 6th to 9th level range, and the enjoyment of the game drops off rapidly on the high end. Above 12th level, why play? The complexity and overpowered nature of high-level play puts off a lot of gamers, ourselves included, and it just feels like no edition of D&D could ever solve the problem of high-level play.

Hit points are in the hundreds, damage output is cranked up to the max, the party waits for the mage to cast that one spell that solves the adventure, encounters are near-impossible to balance, and the main source of fear in the game is insta-death traps and attacks. In a low-level game, there is still some play with the numbers, and there is still a sense of fight and fair play. At high levels, you worry about 'not losing all your work' like your high-level character is some spreadsheet you have been working on all day that never hit 'save' on.

Then why do these levels exist? To say "this game has high-level play?" What use are high levels in a game if they aren't any fun? To be fair, D&D 5 simplified the matrix of rules and options at high level (by reducing feat bloat and simplifying stat blocks), but we don't feel solved the problem of play above 12th level, and this problem goes back all the way to the days of the original D&D game for us in 1980.

You still are this character with hundreds of hit points, a massive MMO-like damage output, and "large numbers" but no real power. For us, for a high-level game we would rather be playing a game with superhero rules since that feels better, and a superhero system is designed to challenge and balance "mighty heroes" better than a D&D polyhedral system that is better scaled to handle characters under 10th level.

There is a point when a D&D character transforms into someone who belongs on The Avengers. At this point for us, D&D breaks in terms of being able to rate, resolve, and provide challenges to the character - and even more so, handle a group of superheroic characters.

A game that would handle The Avengers easily in terms of providing challenges, fights, and balanced superheroic play for a group of players works better for us. Playing a superheroic-fantasy style game with D&D with characters above 12th level is a slog for us and our group, where if we spin these characters up with most any superheroic rules set, it kinda works. It feels right. We can rate and handle fights and challenges better. There is balance again. We know how strong that fighter's shield is to various attacks. We know when the barbarian's fist can knock down a wall. We can rate the mage's powers and understand their power better.

Better yet, with a superheroic rules set, the dice range is designed to play with those characters better and we are not rolling ten or twenty dice for damage for every attack, every turn. We're not adding thirty to a d20 just to beat a forty. The target numbers and dice ranges are in check. The damage output is not some annoyingly-high number of polyhedral dice thrown on the table every turn. The game was designed around a high power level, and it works well handling both normal people and Thor and the crew.

D&D and also Pathfinder's high level games feel like texting using a flip-phone to us in this age of smartphones. They rely on scaling damage and well-worn game-breaking magic. They break the dicing system and number ranges we enjoy in the low-level game. They become tedious to use and apply to high-level groups. For us, these games start out good, get great, and then fall apart quickly past 9th level.

And the next table over the group playing an Avengers game with a superheroic RPG is whooping it up, knocking down evil foes, breaking through walls, and handling high-level play fast and easy. Their magic systems work and don't break the game. High-level foes are easy to create, and are fun to fight in a balanced and challenging way. And we are over here trying to piece together characters with dozens of very-specific feats, huge pools of damage dice, spells that solve the adventure anyway, and a system that is straining to provide a decent and definable challenge to the group.

It feels like we are trying to send a text message with a flip phone, and pressing the "2" on the keypad multiple times to cycle through the first four letters of the alphabet, the number two, and some punctuation marks.

For one freaking letter.

And they are over there with smartphones, texting away with next-generation on-screen keyboards, and having fun.

D&D's low level game is good, and its mid-level game is fun, but we have never found a version that plays as well as a superhero game does for us when characters get to a power level of "great power and great responsibility."