Level 20 Exists?
Most campaigns tend to fizzle out or end before level 20 in D&D. There’s an odd balance issue that happens where players are too powerful at level 20 and there are not any creatures that can keep up with them, but this is something I’ve never experienced.
Today, I’m going to give you a plan to run a campaign designed to reach level 20 quickly. This isn’t recommended for new DMs as it is very chaotic and challenging to pull off.
Prepwork
This is where things get a bit tricky. This type of campaign focuses on completely random to semi-random encounters. Depending on how difficult you want to make it affects how you prepare.
You will have players make characters as normal. Everyone starts at level 1. This works well with a single player to a small group of 4 or 5 max.
Story and character growth is not normal as after every session the players will level up. Because of that, the story can become very rapid and things may not always develop in expected ways. You can have a basic idea of what you want in the story but this is a relaxed game that lets players experiment with crazy builds.
With the players set for pure chaos difficulty, you will make a massive 100 monster table. You will pick 100 different monsters you’d like to have players encounter. You will roll a d100 or percentile die with a d10 to find the monster. Because of this, encounters are 100% unbalanced and can result in players dying after any encounter. I will leave it up to you if you wish to have a way for players to revive or if you scale the encounters to match player levels.
If that task sounds too harsh, you can make smaller tables per level range. You will choose 6 or 10 creatures that are at or under the CR of the current players’ level. This requires a lot more work but you can prepare better balanced encounters.
Combat Or Role Play?
This type of game is designed to have one encounter per session. Because of the nature of this type of game, story isn’t a main focus. Sometimes it’s hard to justify why a creature is attacking. The main goal is essentially combat testing of player builds and it allows players to play a full campaign to finish in just 20 sessions.
Concluding The Game Concept
This is an experimental style game and you must be open that things may not align neatly. Story is possible if you’re clever enough, but everyone must agree going in that it won’t be perfect.this is a low stakes game where it’s ok to make mistakes.
Players get to experience level 20 in combat and it gives you a chance to try new monsters you may normally never see in a campaign. Besides, these characters may add inspiration to a long term campaign.
If you have any questions or comments, you can leave them here or join WallyDM’s discord.
I’m a published author that has written various stories over the span of about 25 years. I’ve also been playing TTRPGs for just as long, if not longer. I am currently DMing a campaign thats been going for about 5 years and still going.
2 responses to “A Level A Session Campaign System”
My last campaign I got them all to level 20. There is an amazing sense of achievement. It did take 4 years. And we lost a couple of players along the way. But the core 5 made it. The interesting thing playing through to that level is seeing how the dynamics change of who is the most powerful in the group. In the early stages then the Rune knight was my bane, but once they got to level 15 the rogue, who had multiclassed into Soulknife Rogue, Shadow Master Sorcerer, and Battle Master Fighter was just scary, the other PCs were in awe (and fear)
The Discord server I am in then we have a lot of epic characters, level 20+, we manage a couple of quests for them a year. They are fascinating to see as the skills at that level are amazing. As a DM, it is great to use monsters that you don’t often get to play with, and you have to think of ways to challenge their abilities. It is also fun seeing the RP of lower level PCs meeting those legendary characters and I have often written articles on them in our newspaper.
It feels like something that would work well for a west marches campaign, just keeping things moving like a game of pickup basketball.