How would you do *actual* high-powered fantasy play with D&D?

[Schwann145]

So D&D is pretty "middle" fantasy at a default. It's bigger than low fantasy like Conan or LotR, but smaller than truly high fantasy like shonen anime or comic books.

If you want to play a Low Fantasy game, the easy way is to just keep it low level and never get past tier 1, or perhaps low tier 2.

But what about the high level? Even level 20 characters decked out in magic gear with access to DMG boons still don't really approach what you can commonly see in shonen or comics.
How would you replicate that sort of gameplay/storytelling with D&D? Or is such a thing a lost cause for D&D and a different system would be necessary?

[DarknessEternal]

Play 3.5. You can play superheroes there.

[InvisibleBison]

I think you need to put forth your definition of high fantasy, because it doesn't seem like you're using one I'm familiar with. High fantasy isn't about extremely powerful people, but about plots that have large stakes and scale. Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy work because it's about an epic confrontation between Good and Evil that determines the fate of the world. To make D&D do high fantasy, you just have to run plots that are of appropriately great scope.

[Mastikator]

I think D&D is easily capable of high fantasy, what you need is epic scales within the setting. Lord of the Rings and Song of Ice and Fire are both described as high fantasy. I'm going to make some changes to Forgotten Realms to make it more high fantasy:

Neverwinter was founded 1000 years ago by a red dragon of the same name, Neverwinter has ruled since. The dragon has raised an army of dragonborn soldiers, all who were previously other races. This primarily to guard the dragons palace which is worth more than all of the real estate of the entire sword coast.

To the south is the Sword Mountain, named so by the Sword clan, a dwarf empire that has over hundreds of years converted the entire mountain into one truly massive fortress, spanning 200 miles. Half of the fortress is overtaken by monsters that the dwarfs wage war against.

Above Candlekeep flies a wizard's tower that pierces the clouds. Nobody has been able to enter it for centuries and the previous/current owner/creator (Elminister) is presumed dead.

[Schwann145]

I think you need to put forth your definition of high fantasy, because it doesn't seem like you're using one I'm familiar with.

Touché. I edited the title to be more accurate to what I'm asking.

[NichG]

Probably the easiest answer is to add a subsystem that all characters get access to, and that consist of 'big actions' that take longer to set up but have massively amplified consequences, compared to the 6 second baseline. Call them 'mythic abilities' or 'legendary actions' or whatever term isn't already overloaded with other stuff, create an in-setting justification for how they work much like pretty much any shonen anime will have some kind of power source that justifies the ridiculous scale of stuff, and then go from there. Have it be multiplicative rather than additive with regards to character abilities without the subsystem, to encourage narrower things that you can do even more extremely versus just 'all the numbers go up but its the same thing'.

So like, lets say we want to do this in a setting. We introduce something like 'vestiges of the energies of creation' alternately called 'Vestiges' or 'Creative Energy', and make some stuff about how some people may develop compatibility with this energy or collect it within their soul - especially those who are well traveled and experience more of the breadth of creation e.g. PCs and major antagonists. Tapping into the Vestiges requires setting the stage - the work of reshaping creation isn't something one does on a whim, but one must create something of the same scale that one wants to influence. A warrior might build a mercenary company or a citadel or something, and tie their Vestige Actions with that place; a druid might rearrange a bunch of ley lines to create a nexus of natural power sustained by the feng shui of the landscape; etc. Once you've done that, you can invest creative energy into that anchor point in rituals or repeated practices that take months, but once you've done it then you've created an 'exception' in the laws of creation that you can take advantage of to do-random-shonen-manga-thing-X.

One of the things about the shonen manga genre is that basically a lot of the scaling has to do with the side-effects of moves on the world. At the core, you can still have someone with a 70% chance to hit someone else and deal half their hp in damage, but now that blow also punches a hole in a mountain behind them or creates a tsunami or whatever. So rather than inflating the numbers to put everyone on a coherent scale (which is going to be awkward no matter what), you can basically say 'if you don't meet this criterion, things which do will basically oneshot you and you can't do anything to them; but if you do meet the criterion, fight as normal but with bigger SFX'. That's specifically for shonen though, which I wouldn't say is the same as high fantasy. For high fantasy, its more that the miraculous really can shape the world in big ways rather than 'everything is pretty much the same, but there are fireballs' - so specifically for high fantasy I'd put more focus on making permanent effects or changes. Here's a city where everyone is blessed with supernatural fortune (and here's how PCs could make that), here's a country where the empress shares her knowledge telepathically with every resident, etc, etc.

[LudicSavant]

Play 3.5. You can play superheroes there.

And you can whip out stuff like the Epic Level Handbook to go even farther.

[Sherlockpwns]

I just finished a level 15 high power campaign and it was downright silly, I can’t imagine playing it to level 20.

I played an artificer and had a 27 base AC, practically permanent flight, and a host of powerful abilities and I was on the lower end of the power spectrum of the group. We had a wizard that had become an enchanted item and could concentrate on (and cast) two spells at once and had a simulacrum body.

We had a fighter with a god-gifted weapon and it was not uncommon to see him dish out over 100dmg in a single round of combat. And so on…

It kind of reached the point where the encounters just felt like complete nonsense in order to make it feel meaningful.

I guess my point isn’t that you can’t do it. It’s that it isn’t really fun imo. The higher power and magic campaigns become the more the game mechanics start to really break down. A DM can always make things more dangerous, or throw weird changes at you, but it all starts to feel kinda weird when you are like “3 adult dragons are in this one area? I guess we just scare them away, they are no threat to us.”

Instead you end up with encounters that are just bizarre. A 9 headed dragon that regenerates like a hydra? And we are fighting it on an electric floor? (Yes this happened).

Anyway, fun at first but it it often starts to feel like combat is either too easy because the game breaks or straight up impossible because it doesn’t. Not that it matters unless you are in some kind of anti magic room since you can just peace out whenever you want.

[DarknessEternal]

I just finished a level 15 high power campaign and it was downright silly, I can’t imagine playing it to level 20.

Follow the actual rules of the game, you won't have those issues in 5e.

[Skrum]

I always though that the defining aspect of fantasy (low to high) is how central magic is to the world. LotR is low fantasy because very few people (the 5 wizards, Sauron, and elves) can use magic - and even then, it's not flashy. The world is otherwise pretty ordinary, with the exception of crazy lifespans.

High fantasy is like...the assumed DND setting? Magic is quite common, it's flashy, and particularly rich societies use things like teleportation circle and healing spells regularly.

But maybe I'm wrong about that!

Re: collateral damage
This is something I've been mulling about for years. Walls getting destroyed from missed attacks, entire towns getting leveled by fireballs, the landscape being altered permanently because two high level characters fought there. I love that stuff, but haven't thought of a great way to add mechanics to it.

Best idea I've had for it so far is multiple battle maps, stacked up. I had one boss figure that conspicuously wore an eyepatch. Well, surprise surprise, we wasn't wearing it for fashion reasons. Final fight, he takes his eyepatch off and reveals a vortex that pulled in everything around him. The characters had to make saves every turn or be yanked towards him (at which point he'd use his reaction for a rather devastating "brace" attack). After that phase started, I punted the top map away, revealing the next map: the same forest, but badly damaged. Trees broken, rocks dragged across the ground, etc. 2 more rounds went by and I switched to my final map; the area had become just dirt and tree stumps.

It was a pretty cool effect

[Kurald Galain]

Even level 20 characters decked out in magic gear with access to DMG boons still don't really approach what you can commonly see in shonen or comics.
How would you replicate that sort of gameplay/storytelling with D&D? Or is such a thing a lost cause for D&D and a different system would be necessary?

By the nature of Bounded Accuracy, 5E doesn't dealy with "high-powered" fantasy all that well. Instead, I'd suggest you go with 3E D&D, or Pathfinder, or Exalted.

[Mastikator]

By the nature of Bounded Accuracy, 5E doesn't dealy with "high-powered" fantasy all that well. Instead, I'd suggest you go with 3E D&D, or Pathfinder, or Exalted.

The DM can easily veer into high fantasy or shonen stuff with bounded accuracy. If you needed to make an ability check at level 1 then DM can just let you autosucceed at level 15, instead letting you make ability checks for actions that were impossible at level 1. The key to know is that the DCs are arbitrary.
Want to jump all the way up a 30 feet castle wall? Can't at level 1, don't even get to roll for it. At level 18 the DM could say that the barbarian is allowed to try with a DC of 16 (and with an athletics modifier of 11 they'd have a good chance of succeeding).

The only thing stopping you from doing Naruto things is you. You can even flavor the spells as ninjutsu, somatic components are the hand signs, verbal components is you shouting out the name of the spell. Fireball-no-jutsu.

[NichG]

Well, its also communicating those things to the players sufficiently well that they actually feel it's legitimate to try...

'Hey guys, if you had wanted to jump the castle wall, you could have just done it' doesn't do much if no one at the table understands that (and when) it's going to be e.g. 'trivial and within genre conventions - don't even roll'.

When you get to really high end stuff, and I don't just mean something that can be done with a 3rd level arcane spell, consistent conceptualization is the hard part. Like 'Should I even think that shattering time is a thing I could do with my insane strength? Is that on the table or not, and what does it even mean if I did it?'. This is more an issue with high end shonen stuff (or superhero stuff) than high fantasy per se, but its definitely a thing when you start to get really crazy power levels and you don't have a consistent rubric to say what those power levels actually mean.

[Sherlockpwns]

Follow the actual rules of the game, you won't have those issues in 5e.

Then it wouldn’t be a high power campaign, it would just be a regular power one.

And even then I’ll happily go on record and say D&D always sucks at high levels. Somewhere around 10-12 is it’s max before it loses its charm. You may not feel the same way, but in my experience peak D&D is somewhere around level 4-8. Enough options to keep it interesting, not so much that everything goes off the rails. It’s as true in 5e as it was in 3.

I’ll still play a higher level campaign, but I’ll probably avoid any that are “high power”. It isn’t my style.

[Amnestic]

I know it's not really the point but I wish people wouldn't use shonen as a shorthand for high power stuff.

Shonen covers a huge range of stuff, even inside its own series. Naruto episode 4 is a drastically different beast to Naruto episode 444. Attack on Titan hardly exists in the same sentence as Dragonball. Dragonball and Dragonball Super are pretty far apart too, for that matter. Yu-Gi-Oh is shonen. Ao no Hako/Blue Box - a series tackling the deep question of 'Can a badminton player and a basketball player fall in love?' - is shonen (and also really good).

[Kurald Galain]

Ao no Hako/Blue Box - a series tackling the deep question of 'Can a badminton player and a basketball player fall in love?' - is shonen (and also really good).

But the D&D rules dealing with badminton are sorely lacking

[Mastikator]

Well, its also communicating those things to the players sufficiently well that they actually feel it's legitimate to try...

'Hey guys, if you had wanted to jump the castle wall, you could have just done it' doesn't do much if no one at the table understands that (and when) it's going to be e.g. 'trivial and within genre conventions - don't even roll'.

When you get to really high end stuff, and I don't just mean something that can be done with a 3rd level arcane spell, consistent conceptualization is the hard part. Like 'Should I even think that shattering time is a thing I could do with my insane strength? Is that on the table or not, and what does it even mean if I did it?'. This is more an issue with high end shonen stuff (or superhero stuff) than high fantasy per se, but its definitely a thing when you start to get really crazy power levels and you don't have a consistent rubric to say what those power levels actually mean.

Does high fantasy begin when someone can shatter time with their muscle strength? Because again, Lord of the Rings is high fantasy. If that is the lower bound then level 1 D&D 5E is already high fantasy if the DM makes the scales of the adventure epic. It's not what the PCs can do, it's what the game is about. The "high" in fantasy is something the DM decides, not the players and not the books.

If the lower bound of high fantasy is Goku exploding a planet with a ki-ball then D&D becomes high fantasy when the DM allows a 17th level wizard to use Wish consequence free.

Considering these goal posts are so far apart that you can't even see both of them the only way to answer this question is for the OP to define what they mean by high fantasy, since they're not using the conventional definition.

[Amnestic]

But the D&D rules dealing with badminton are sorely lacking

Need a DC table so I can accurately assess how hard it is to qualify for Nationals while juggling school work, my burgeoning romance, and an even more taxing training regimen so I don't fall behind.

WotC really dropped the ball by not including it in the core books.

[tokek]

Does high fantasy begin when someone can shatter time with their muscle strength? Because again, Lord of the Rings is high fantasy. If that is the lower bound then level 1 D&D 5E is already high fantasy if the DM makes the scales of the adventure epic. It's not what the PCs can do, it's what the game is about. The "high" in fantasy is something the DM decides, not the players and not the books.

Exactly this.

I think what the OP is after is actually a rather different term. I'm not sure what that term is but I am very sure its not High Fantasy which D&D can already do perfectly well.

[Oramac]

If you're looking for anime style and play, go with Fabula Ultima. It was designed with anime in mind.

As for 5e, I'd agree with others that it's more about the story and the stakes than the actual mechanics. Especially at higher levels you can do some truly incredible things with a little creativity.

[J-H]

I did a fairly high-powered campaign (see campaign log for Against the Idol of the Sun in my signature) 13-20. One of my players called it a superhero campaign. A hasted kensei with a double-range longbow and sharpshooter can snipe enemies from 1200' away. The Warlock used Wish to cast Antipathy on the avatar of a god to shatter the cohesion of his army during the final battle; the party also brought a kraken along, and resurrected a god via an artifact sword the paladin used in what was basically a 1v1 duel versus the CR 28-ish avatar.
It worked. Came close to a TPK because the monk wouldn't use Empty Body, but it worked.

[NichG]

Does high fantasy begin when someone can shatter time with their muscle strength? Because again, Lord of the Rings is high fantasy. If that is the lower bound then level 1 D&D 5E is already high fantasy if the DM makes the scales of the adventure epic. It's not what the PCs can do, it's what the game is about. The "high" in fantasy is something the DM decides, not the players and not the books.

The OP explicitly mentioned shonen and changed the thread title to say 'high-powered fantasy' rather than high fantasy, so the implication to me is e.g. the stuff going on in One Piece, Naruto, DBZ, Bleach, Jujutsu Kaisen, One Punch Man, Fairy Tail, Random Isekai Anime #47, etc. Also, I would agree with the other poster who gave LotR as an example of low fantasy rather than high fantasy. Magic is not prominent in day to day life in LotR. It's closer to Conan than it is to, say, Forgotten Realms even, much less something like Fairy Tail or Slayers.

My point is though that 'just run it and it can be as epic as you want' isn't really good advice when very few people will actually have any idea how to conceptualize those sorts of things in the context of a D&D game. It's all well and good to say 'the DM is part of this process of making it possible', but the OP is asking 'okay, but how do I actually DM that in practice?'. And my answer is, establishing expectations with the players as far as what they can reasonably do and then have them progressively test their limits and find that, consistently, they can go beyond them.

Just being like, well, if a PC tries stuff I'll let it work is only half of a recipe. The other half is making sure the player knows that it's worth trying, and establishing expectations like 'what does it mean to be high level in this setting?'. You mention how far apart the goal posts can be - that's kind of the point. If you want to run Daily Life of the Immortal King and your players think they're in Shokugeki no Soma, it doesn't matter if you jokingly let each player write a single infinity symbol somewhere on their sheet - they need to know what sorts of things are reasonable to do with it.

Even 'consequence free Wish' won't do it if the player using Wish feels they're in a normal campaign with normal limits to what they'll be allowed to actually get away with. You would have to show someone e.g. using Wish to reincarnate into their past self and get a do-over of their entire life, or using it to raise a continent from the ocean floor that they suddenly become the ruler of a nation of amphibians or stuff like that to drill in the point 'yeah, this is just the kind of thing that high level characters do before breakfast in this setting'.

As a less open-ended suggestion, play 3.5e D&D with the BESM Advanced d20 Magic/Slayers d20 rulesets (doesn't have to be in Slayers as a setting) and compare to baseline D&D. If you thought 'wizards are broken' was a meme of baseline 3.5e D&D, you ain't seen nothing yet. Though in that system, fighters with a single wizard level make better wizards than wizards...

[tokek]

The OP explicitly mentioned shonen and changed the thread title to say 'high-powered fantasy' rather than high fantasy, so the implication to me is e.g. the stuff going on in One Piece, Naruto, DBZ, Bleach, Jujutsu Kaisen, One Punch Man, Fairy Tail, Random Isekai Anime #47, etc. Also, I would agree with the other poster who gave LotR as an example of low fantasy rather than high fantasy. Magic is not prominent in day to day life in LotR. It's closer to Conan than it is to, say, Forgotten Realms even, much less something like Fairy Tail or Slayers.

It might really help if we had a lot more context and detail about what the OP really wants. Starting by calling it high fantasy sort of headed the discussion off in that direction - which it turns out is not what they meant at all.

But if all we have is the "I shatter time itself with my punch" then we are so far off into power levels that are super-rare even in superhero materials that I would only recommend narrative game systems. I don't think any system with any level of rule crunch will ever have that sort of extreme free-form capability. I really have no idea what that action even means - probably because I don't consume those media.

[Mastikator]

The OP explicitly mentioned shonen and changed the thread title to say 'high-powered fantasy' rather than high fantasy, so the implication to me is e.g. the stuff going on in One Piece, Naruto, DBZ, Bleach, Jujutsu Kaisen, One Punch Man, Fairy Tail, Random Isekai Anime #47, etc. Also, I would agree with the other poster who gave LotR as an example of low fantasy rather than high fantasy. Magic is not prominent in day to day life in LotR. It's closer to Conan than it is to, say, Forgotten Realms even, much less something like Fairy Tail or Slayers.

My point is though that 'just run it and it can be as epic as you want' isn't really good advice when very few people will actually have any idea how to conceptualize those sorts of things in the context of a D&D game. It's all well and good to say 'the DM is part of this process of making it possible', but the OP is asking 'okay, but how do I actually DM that in practice?'. And my answer is, establishing expectations with the players as far as what they can reasonably do and then have them progressively test their limits and find that, consistently, they can go beyond them.

Just being like, well, if a PC tries stuff I'll let it work is only half of a recipe. The other half is making sure the player knows that it's worth trying, and establishing expectations like 'what does it mean to be high level in this setting?'. You mention how far apart the goal posts can be - that's kind of the point. If you want to run Daily Life of the Immortal King and your players think they're in Shokugeki no Soma, it doesn't matter if you jokingly let each player write a single infinity symbol somewhere on their sheet - they need to know what sorts of things are reasonable to do with it.

Even 'consequence free Wish' won't do it if the player using Wish feels they're in a normal campaign with normal limits to what they'll be allowed to actually get away with. You would have to show someone e.g. using Wish to reincarnate into their past self and get a do-over of their entire life, or using it to raise a continent from the ocean floor that they suddenly become the ruler of a nation of amphibians or stuff like that to drill in the point 'yeah, this is just the kind of thing that high level characters do before breakfast in this setting'.

As a less open-ended suggestion, play 3.5e D&D with the BESM Advanced d20 Magic/Slayers d20 rulesets (doesn't have to be in Slayers as a setting) and compare to baseline D&D. If you thought 'wizards are broken' was a meme of baseline 3.5e D&D, you ain't seen nothing yet. Though in that system, fighters with a single wizard level make better wizards than wizards...

I'm not going into what constitutes high fantasy, just know that if you consider LotR low fantasy then you are not using the conventional definition of high fantasy (and it would behoove you to stipulate your terms when you don't use them conventionally, to avoid confusion).

Now you still need a lower bound of where "high powered fantasy" begins, and where that bound is. Does D&D become high powered fantasy if 50% of the population can cast a single cantrip at will?
Do you need a hero who can explode planets?
Do you need a hero who can shatter time with his biceps?
Do you need a setting where each kingdom has a Godzilla in their army? Or 10?
Does it transition from "not high enough power to just high enough power" when the BBEG shoots a laser from his fist that splits the moon in half?

The examples you give are extraordinarily unhelpful and counterproductive. Let me say that again. You give examples that are not helpful.
One of the first missions Team Naruto receives is to capture a runaway cat. Is it "high powered fantasy" because they leap from tree to tree?
On their first dangerous mission they face off ninjas that can hide in puddles of water. Is that high powered enough?
They then face a guy who can create a water dragon and hold people inside spheres of water. Is it high powered now?
They face a guy who can create ice mirrors and hide inside them, moving faster than the speed of sound whilst doing so. Is that high fantasy?
Is Naruto high powered all along because we see a glimpse of the 4th Hokage defeat Kurama? Because I'm pretty sure somewhere along the line Goku could annihilate Kurama. And One Punch Man? That's a singularly bad example, in the comic we see Saitama bench press black holes. In the anime we see him resist the power of a black hole created by one of the aliens. That literally makes him infinitely strong. His power level is Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel. Unless the players always auto-hit, always insta-kill and are completely invulnerable they will always fall short of Saitama.

[NichG]

It might really help if we had a lot more context and detail about what the OP really wants. Starting by calling it high fantasy sort of headed the discussion off in that direction - which it turns out is not what they meant at all.

But if all we have is the "I shatter time itself with my punch" then we are so far off into power levels that are super-rare even in superhero materials that I would only recommend narrative game systems. I don't think any system with any level of rule crunch will ever have that sort of extreme free-form capability. I really have no idea what that action even means - probably because I don't consume those media.

I mean, I've been in and run D&D campaigns that had that sort of power level and hijinks. The specific example I picked a little bit for the absurdism and to kind of crack the shell of common sense that you have to get past to really get into the genre that is high end power fantasies, but its not so dissimilar to something I've had happen in a game. The specific thing has enough context around it that it would be hard to explain but basically ended up with a fight spilling over into a timeless space where the only way to get actions was to generate them through action economy breaking cheese. So e.g. you needed something like White Raven Tactics infinite action pumps to even participate, though if you hung around near the crack back into normal time you could refresh your actions that way too. Then the campaign continued in that space, and the PCs had a training arc where they learned how to 'already be where they're going' rather than pass through space and time in contiguous trajectories like plebians. All of this stuff had mechanical integration to the D&D 3.5e-ish base, but there was also enough customization I'd say the resulting game was significantly more different than 3.5e than 3.5e is from 5e.

Some level of crunch beyond pure narrative is appropriate I think. You can do it in nearly pure narrative systems - I mean, look at Nobilis - but specifically for power treadmill media its useful to have some kind of scales and ways to move up (and sometimes down) those scales. Its a very common trope because its the easiest way of depicting the size of the gap that the journey will span, which is a big part of that genre. Like, DBZ has power levels; cultivation stuff has all of the stages going from 'you're a tough mortal doing kung fu' to 'you literally create a personal universe in a radius around you with laws of physics that you get to decide' and 'the stuff beyond that which we don't even know how to write, but we show those guys walking around with personal universes being afraid of'; anime stereotypical fantasy loves its D-A, S-SSS rank stuff; etc. That way you have the protagonist who is impressive for being an A ranker, but then they meet the guy whose power is such that the town has built all of the houses on conveyor belts to pull them out of the way when he comes to town because he creates ambient property damage due to his sheer aura and this is shown to just be like a normal occurrence in the setting and even that guy isn't enough to stand up to the BBEG whose existence ends all life whenever he actually manages to wake up, or something like that (vaguely cribbed from Fairy Tail, for reference).

That could be as simple as 'compare your ranks with anyone who might object to what you're doing, higher wins, +/- 1 for a type advantage'. But you can also do it in a more D&D-like way, and the advantage of doing that is it gives players more ways to work out for themselves how to punch across ranks (whereas if its just a single number, its pretty much up to the GM to say how powerful the party is at X or Y moment in time, which has a different feel than 'I went out and got this power for myself' that is more shonen-esque).

And One Punch Man? That's a singularly bad example, in the comic we see Saitama bench press black holes. In the anime we see him resist the power of a black hole created by one of the aliens. That literally makes him infinitely strong. His power level is Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel. Unless the players always auto-hit, always insta-kill and are completely invulnerable they will always fall short of Saitama.

"It's not my bag" doesn't mean "it can't be done". Immortals Handbook for 3.5e, as laughably bad as it is sometimes, has rules for handling infinities and 'infinity + 1 beats your infinity!' and other ways to counter infinities and so on. Yeah its largely silly, but often so is shonen anime.

[Blatant Beast]

• I would recommend using the Cleaving optional rules from the DMG. That way overkill damage moves on to a nearby foe. Sharpshooters might be shooting arrows through creatures, into the person behind the initial target...Mighty Weapon users are reaping foes like grain, etc, etc.
  
• The Epic Resting rules, that allows a Short Rest to be taken in only 5 minutes is a significant boost for Fighters, Warlocks, and Monks.
  
• If you want people to do things like cleaving off the tops of mountains, the easiest way is to not apply a Damage Threshold for objects.
  
• Loot and items can also play a role. 8th level adventurers equipped with Legendary Magic Items are powerful. Give some of the best stuff early, the players love it, and as a DM you can up the power level, which given the player hit points makes things challenging.
  
• You also need to give special foes, super abilities as well. Blows that outright kill, complete immunity to damage, 9 headed hydra dragons that live on electrified floors...that sounds epic to me.

[RazorChain]

So D&D is pretty "middle" fantasy at a default. It's bigger than low fantasy like Conan or LotR, but smaller than truly high fantasy like shonen anime or comic books.

If you want to play a Low Fantasy game, the easy way is to just keep it low level and never get past tier 1, or perhaps low tier 2.

But what about the high level? Even level 20 characters decked out in magic gear with access to DMG boons still don't really approach what you can commonly see in shonen or comics.
How would you replicate that sort of gameplay/storytelling with D&D? Or is such a thing a lost cause for D&D and a different system would be necessary?

If you are trying to play shonen rpg why not just play a shonen rpg like Tenra Bansho Zero? Why do people want to shoehorn DnD into every dang niche there is? In fact thing like Dragon Ball Z which is the epitome of shonen would be a high powered superhero game

DnD is NOT a low fantasy game, but you can probably try to shoehorn it there as well.

[Blatant Beast]

Why do people want to shoehorn DnD into every dang niche there is?

For the same reason why electrical voltage standards are often considered a good thing. The basic rules structure, and resolution system for D&D is relatively simple and straightforward, and can be applied to more than one style of game.

The same is not true for games that are intended to support one style of play.

My experience, is it is much easier for me to sell my friends, (whom have children, demanding careers, other extra-curricular activities, and elderly parents that require assistance), to play a D&D game with modifications then it is to hand them a 200 to 300 page book, and ask them to read it, learn it, and be ready to play it next week.

[Schwann145]

To clarify for the thread, I make a distinction between "high" fantasy and "epic" fantasy.

For example, Lord of the Rings is an example of Epic fantasy, but I would also say it is Low fantasy. If it weren't for the elves, dwarves, and hobbits, it wouldn't even be considered "fantasy;" it would be "sword-and-sorcery."
D&D has historically redefined "epic" to mean "high powered" but in regular context, "epic" means what it definitionally means.

So, in this thread, I'm not asking about how you would "heroically defeat great evil" (an epic). Instead I'm asking, "how would you play Rogue of the X-Men, or the non-Saitama characters from OPM, or Shinigami from Bleach, etc.?"

Why do people want to shoehorn DnD into every dang niche there is?

Personally, I have a powerful desire to play non-D&D games.
Unfortunately I am severely limited by what other people are willing to learn and play. And the vast majority of the ttrpg community just can't be bothered to learn new games; they already know D&D and that's enough.

[KorvinStarmast]

How would you do *actual* high-powered fantasy play with D&D?

Play in @PhoenixPhyre's campaign world. He handles late Tier 3 and Tier 4 pretty well.

If any of you have not read J-H's campaign log for Idol of the Sun, I'd recommend it. Lots of good bits in there on a high level high power campaign.

Lastly:
Don't be stingy with magic items.
Offer an Epic Boon or two as quest rewards in Tier 4.