The problem with high levels

It seems to me that the central problem of high level games, characters, and campaigns isn't that any given element is 'unbalanced', but that the more power and elements not found in real life in a game, the harder it is to play and GM.

Simply put, the more supernatural elements you have in a game, the harder it is to find the right balance between munchkin-too-easy games and killer GM-too lethal games. This is due to the fact that each additional supernatural element in a game has to be carefully thought out and developed in a game world for it to make sense.

It's one thing to base a game on one supernatural element. Movies, TV, and books do it all the time. The creator only has to think out how that one supernatural element changes reality. For example, let's say you make a campaign based on the premise that anyone with a psychic 'gift' can use ley lines to teleport.

Now you have to think out how this affects your campaign world. How does every political organization, government, religion, and other cultural institution react to it? How common is it? How is it used? And so forth. This is the sort of thing every GM does.

But let's take it one step further. Let's take a generic psuedo-medieval society and give it just the stuff in the three core D&D 3E books. Magic, monsters, and extraordinary skills and feats. How can you figure out how any given society would react to literally hundreds of supernatural powers being given to them? A single wizard in D&D can kill with a word, teleport, fly, turn invisible and perform all kinds of wondrous acts. In order to accurately reflect how this would affect a campaign world, the GM has to look at every spell and monster and analyze it.

This is practically impossible. This is akin to predicting how a given technology will change our society in the next 100 years or more.

But at low levels, this isn't a problem. Players have few powers and those powers are relatively weak. But as so many GMS have found out, players do unimaginable things when they get enough magical juice.

Plan an adventure where the players have to break into a castle and kill the evil king? Better rethink it, since the party wizard just figured out how to teleport the king into the bottom of the ocean.

And so forth.

And as players accumulate more and more power, it becomes harder and harder to predict how the party will attack a given challenge.

Thus the problem.

The question then becomes, how does one address this issue?

My suggestions

1. Don't let players stockpile supernatural powers forever. While they should be able to get better at the things they do frequently, they should also get worse at the things they don't do very well. This is a rules issue and any revisions need extensive playtesting.

2. Throw out monsters far more dangerous than they are and otherwise challenge. Instead of throwing a lot of little encounters, I prefer to throw out really hard (by the CR chart) encounters and see how well they do. I toss out a CR 12 hydra. They polymorph it into a turtle, no sweat. (At 9th level). They get ambushed by a mind flayer and 3 dire ape pets. Then things get more interesting and when they kill that thing, they earned the exp and gold for it. This is my style and YMMV

3. Figure out how standard magic would change society and battle. This is something we could contribute to.

Whee

I agree. I've been going over notes for an old 1e/2e campaign world trying to convert for 3e, and I'm amazed at the low power of everything.

I had 6 players around 9th level (200,000+ xp, that's bloody epic in 3e (I know, you can't compare the xp systems, but it still caught me off guard)). 2 of them had +1 weapons (1 of them was a mage). The other fighter had an ability to hit creaturs needing +1 or better to hit from his cleric granted powers. Other than that, none of them had more than 2 magic items, most of them being utility items, rather than combat buffs.

I remember worrying about them handling themselves, and they would always take out whatever I threw at them. Like you, I would keep them coming. In 2e, you didn't see them level like you do now, so now the same tactic means they hit 20th level while you're not looking. I'm going to have to uber-buff all of my old villains to make them stand a chance.

It's a real stark contrast between the good old days and now. I don't want to go back, but you're right about the risk management. You also the get the "backpack of no return" syndrome where players have so many goodies that they forget what they are and what they do. You give them something to use against the big baddie, and they never even bother to get it identified because they have too much other stuff, and never get around to it.

A lot more bookkeeping all around, you just have to place priorities, and dole out what you feel is acceptable. Keep the item and power burn rate high as well. That way they aren't always buffed and ready when they get hit. I find reading story hours is a good way to prep for the higher levels. See ways to handle things players will do, and get ideas for tactics.

IMHO, YMMV, etc.

The best thing I've found to keep challenging the PCs is to play the NPCs and/or monsters intelligently, and to remember that they're going to have access to everything the PCs have access to. Sure, a black pudding isn't going to come up with brilliant mastermind plots, but the more intelligent (and, IMHO, the *real* challenges in the adventure) will.

For example, early on in my current campaign, a wyrmling green dragon faced the PCs. Now, this dragon knew he couldn't take on the party of 6 (even though they weren't all that powerful), so he planned an ambush. When they entered his lair, he used his breath weapon, but not at the party. Instead, he hit the (already weakened) ceiling and did enough damage to bring down a decently-sized chunk of it onto the PCs heads.

A powerful lich, the main villain of the campaign, has a devil bodyguard bound to her and makes good use of teleport without error when the going gets rough. A few centuries ago, when she first became a lich, she hid her phylactery far, far away and destroyed all record of where it is. And she scrys on the party. She knows what they're going to do almost before they do.

Another NPC, a wizard of some decent power, has hired an assassin to take out the old campaign's party (when next we play in the old campaign). Having a decent amount of gold to toss around, he made sure to hire an assassin that should be a challenge.

A group, working for the aforementioned lich, opened a sealed citadel and quickly got their butts kicked. They retreated and set wheels in motion to alert the PCs, who have come to investigate. The plan? Once the party's deep into the Citadel, and they think that they've gotten to their prize (this is where that scrying comes in handy), battered and bruised, they plan to simply walk in and take what they need. With all the traps and monsters taken care of, all they need do is wipe out 6 little adventurers.

In my old campaign, a yugoloth working for forces unknown, used various magic items to communicate with the PCs from afar. He manipulated them left and right. If they stepped out of line, he sent part of his yugoloth mercenary band to destroy a village (a small one, one with little chance of having a "real" defense in the way of high-level adventurers) a couple days' journey from the PCs, making sure he left "signs" as to who did it. They never actually faced the ultroloth himself.

It goes a long way. :=_

The REAL problem...

clockworkjoe said:

It seems to me that the central problem of high level games, characters, and campaigns isn't that any given element is 'unbalanced', but that the more power and elements not found in real life in a game, the harder it is to play and GM.

Simply put, the more supernatural elements you have in a game, the harder it is to find the right balance between munchkin-too-easy games and killer GM-too lethal games. This is due to the fact that each additional supernatural element in a game has to be carefully thought out and developed in a game world for it to make sense.

Click to expand...

Try replacing the word "problem" with "challenge", and you are there.

It is a general truism in 3e that numbers count. Powerful bad guys die quickly unless they are adequately supported.

A real challenge is giving high level parties the opportunities to get involved in world-shaking events (e.g. politics, kingmaking etc) rather than just bigger fights with bigger bad guys. The core rulebooks would really benefit from an expansion and guidance on how to set up and play (with rules, not just role play!) challenging political and diplomatic encounters.

Cheers