High Level D&D Characters Can Simply Break the Rules

I finished several long-running D&D 5E games in 2022 and 2023. I don’t know if I’ll ever return to 5E (or 5.5E, or the many derivatives that have emerged since the SRD was released to the Creative Commons). I could play games in various old school, new school, and no-school lineages indefinitely, and be fine never again explaining the game's baffling design to a new player.

But… if I ever return to the game, it would surely be in part because I have run so much of it. I feel entitled to judge its design in a way I wouldn’t do for any other game because I’ve played 5E the most. And I would be very comfortable hacking it for the same reasons, in a way that I am not (yet) comfortable hacking other games.

D&D 5E is a carefully balanced game. I believe the entire “problem” of balance could have been avoided in D&D’s design by adopting rules-light principles from other games. But setting that aside, and accepting that Wizards of the Coast wanted to create "balanced" options for players to choose from, 5E succeeded admirably.

Look at the core classes in the 5E 2014 handbook. They are remarkably well-balanced against each other. There are a few dud archetypes (subclasses), but even those can be fixed with minimal accommodations by the DM. Players don’t need system mastery to create a character that stands on equal footing with the rest of the party. Mission accomplished.

…Up until around 11th level, anyway. The game plays smoothly during the first two “tiers” of levels, but begins to break down in the third tier, and crumbles entirely in the fourth tier. I experienced this in a game that I ran from level 1 to beyond 20 (using Epic Boons to continue progression past the de facto endpoint). The sheer power and range of options available to a high-level party meant that it was increasingly difficult to present level-appropriate challenges within the framework that had held up through tier one and tier two. And even without any players intentionally min-maxing, certain characters begin to shine brighter than others at high levels, just because of the nature of their class or the player’s style of applying their strengths to the game.

I’ve talked about creating tougher challenges before. Insofar as the DM has essentially no restrictions on how strong they can make antagonists and obstacles, the only limit on ratcheting up challenge to match the group’s power is player trust in their fairness as a referee. 

Breaking the Game

But what about balance within the group? I believe D&D 5E, through its design, implicitly promises internal party balance among PCs. And that internal balance breaks down in the third tier of play. In online discussions, I see people lament this as a weakness that should be fixed. But that feeling of balance from the first two tiers isn’t coming back, so I’ve found it’s more useful to embrace the breakdown.

A good way to do this is to let characters break more rules. This is less radical than it may sound. Many PC powers are merely specific exceptions to general rules. For example, the power to levitate is, in a broad sense, just an exception to the general rule that gravity applies to the characters.

The 5E cleric’s Divine Intervention is a good example of this. “The DM chooses the nature of the intervention; the effect of any cleric spell or cleric domain spell would be appropriate.” Note the text indicates that copying a spell would be appropriate, but clerics are not limited just to spell effects. This is good space to break the game in interesting ways, as long as it’s consistent with the logic of magic and the deity's power within the context of the game. (Of course, WotC's rejiggering of 5E into 5.5E has at least considered replacing this language with something boring and rules-compliant; once again (in my view) trying to find a solution to something that isn’t a problem).

As an example from one of those long-running games, a PC chose the Tavern Brawler feat. They chose it for the flavor, as it wasn’t particularly optimal for their barbarian. But this was easy to address. I offered them magic items and diegetic feat-like abilities that complemented Tavern Brawler by removing restrictions on how it was used. Soon they were using enemies as improvised weapons and throwing impossibly large objects at their opponents.

Is that “broken”? In the abstract, perhaps. But in practice, it was no more extreme than what several other characters in the party were doing with strong conventional class features. D&D 5E at high levels should play like this. It should leave balance behind. It should probably feel like another game entirely.