D&D 5E How Do You Learn How To Design A High Level Adventure?

As the title says. Over the years I have run a few and read a lot more but without that ye olde AD&D experience how would you do it? The 5E ones don't tend to go that high or work that well when they do

Myself I look at magical dungeons, Nasty traps, or the outer planes. Sailing around on a poison sea where some magic may or may not work. Overlapping trap effects, insta kill traps, terrain, multiple meteor swarms, power word kill I pull out all the stops.

Trial & error.

I’m trying with my OotA remix (PCs are at level 17). It’s really hard to design a foolproof encounter because they have so many tricks up their sleeves. So now I’m focusing mainly on throwing the kitchen sink at them and trying to spin an engaging story. I don’t even worry about trying to balance things anymore, I just try to make it interesting.

Typically I custom-build monsters based around the expected performance level of my players. Usually trying to cover all the saves with different effects and looking for ways for give my "big baddies" multiple actions or "get out of jail free" reactions.

Here's a thing to note: design your monsters and your encounters with your preferred outcome in mind.

It's not hard to create ridiculous things that do nothing but punish players and get them killed, but that isn't typically "fun" or even challenging. I want my players to win. 99% of the time I design encounters that will be challenging, but ultimately have a strong chance of the players succeeding, provided they make good use of their resources. Generally speaking, there's a 20-40% chance of failure and really only if the players miss very obvious things.

I want my players to have an enjoyable, tough encounter that helps move the story forward, so I design all my taps, monsters and so for around the concept that after the battle, the players had fun, felt challenged and the story moved forward.

Other than that, as was already said: trial and error. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't, but there is, IMO, far more "fudge room" (and I don't mean dice fudging) for error at higher levels, so if your first try is too hard, your players are more likely to be able to run away and live to fight another day; if your encounter is too weak, you'll see where you need to toughen things up next round.

For high level battles that are meant to be more than just some attrition / resource usage, I throw away the concept of an encounter being about beating on each other until one side is dead as the victory condition. At high levels that's both trivial and something you've done extensively for 15+ levels already. Just inflating the numbers doesn't make it fresh.

But really, every time I get up to that point, it've because I've been running the party for literally years (my last three campaigns ran 5 years, 7 years, adn 4.5 years) so I know how to calibrate. If you told me "make a set up fun encounters for a random group of 16th level characters I would be out of my comfort zone. Of course, I don't like designing "generic" even at low levels - I have my list of character features so I can make sure I spotlight little used features occasionally and the like.

generally speaking, the best way to tune encounters is by building them throughout the careers of your adventuring party. If you haven't run a campaign from the mid-levels up until the high levels, you'll struggle mightily to understand the PCs power level, but if you've run a campaign building up to the high level climax, you'll know where your party stands in relation to encounters.

Also, when in doubt, just add HP. If the PCs demolish your encounter in a round, pretend it never happened and double (or triple or quaduple) its HP until it makes an interesting encounter.

I don't design as if I were writing for publication. I don't tailor to the PCs - neither to ensure it's winnable, nor to ensure they're appropriately challenged.

High level is a great chance to create material 'status quo' - eg "hmm, the Lich would logically have a few hundred skeletons guarding his palace and a dozen ghost warriors in the throne room" - then let the players deal with it. Or I had a Stuhac (CR 13) and a bunch (12?) of skeletal vine trolls (CR 7)
guarding the three +2 flaming swords on Three Swords Isle. I didn't design around "how do the PCS beat this" - that's up to them.

Edit: One thing this brings up is that cracking open Kobold Press's Tome of Beasts is a good
approach. I only recently got Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, but it looks like the same principle applies - choose a bunch of monsters based on what you think should be there; don't worry about balance.

robus said:

I’m trying with my OotA remix (PCs are at level 17). It’s really hard to design a foolproof encounter because they have so many tricks up their sleeves. So now I’m focusing mainly on throwing the kitchen sink at them and trying to spin an engaging story. I don’t even worry about trying to balance things anymore, I just try to make it interesting.

Click to expand...

Yeah, this sounds like my approach. If the PCs feel overmatched they probably have the resources to retreat anyway. And 5e statting is very forgiving - many level 17-20 PCs can easily solo a monster with CR equal to or higher than their level.

Recently the level 17-20 PCs in my Runelords of the Shattered Star game have been fighting
a ghost, the Curator. I statted him as a level 13 Wizard (per the Pathfinder stats) ghost with AC 20, 270 hp, Legendary actions (mostly claw attacks, +11 for 14d6 necrotic) and proficiency in all saves. He has made for two good battles so far, his ability to cast spells like Reverse Gravity (& incorporeal, so no effect on himself) & Fireball while also meleeing has worked really well. Especially when he attacks the PCs right after they've finished another battle... The Druid PC has been using Sunbeam on him very effectively though.

At higher levels, I raise the stakes in the story. The conflict of the campaign gradually increases in scale (and so do the battles), but most importantly the plot becomes more intricate. Whereas at the start of the campaign the players are merely playing around in a small area moving from quest to quest, at higher levels the campaign starts spanning a far larger part of the world and involving a lot more subplots, characters and organisations. As the players start to care about more things in the world, there are also more elements at my disposal as a storyteller to threaten with the villains.

The complexity of battles also increases. Players have more foes to deal with, and are required to think more about their surroundings. I design the fights to always put the players at some disadvantage, forcing them to think strategically to turn the table on their opponents. I also include multiple subgoals in the fights. So rather than a fight just being about defeating some baddie, the players may also need to stop the baddies from accomplishing their goal, or protect something from the baddies. I try to force the players to divide their attention during these fights and work together. With some fights, retreat may be the better option. At higher levels not all fights will be fair. They may run into opposition that is simply to tough for them to handle, forcing them to flee. Opponents will also use spells and abiliies that are specifically picked to counter their favorite strategies, forcing the players to mix up their strategy.

Dungeons also become more intricate. I work more with height advantages and environmental hazards. Some dungeons may require a bit of stealth to overcome, and traps are a lot harder to spot and disable. I work more with obscuring lines of sight, and incorporate darkness and fog into the battles. Dungeons are designed to support the monsters that inhabit it.

I also take away elements in the world that made the players feel safe before. An important ally may die, or turn against them when they least expect it. Multiple things may be happening at the same time, and the players may have to choose which of these things to act upon. The choices the players are forced to make are no longer binary, but become a lot more complex.

For anything above 11th to 13th level or higher, just throw out the rulebook when it comes to balancing encounters. The only thing you need to keep in mind is the encounters per day thing, and putting them in situations where they can't take a short or, especially, a long rest. Dial it up to 11.

My characters are level 13, a 15, and three level 16s. They're going up against an archmage (not the MM one, but a much more deadly one; I'm away from my notes, but he has legendary actions and is CR 22ish), his apprentice (CR 15 himself, a drow bladesinger because I thought that'd be fun for me to RP), four CR 10 behemoth creatures as siege engines, and a literal army of CR 1-3 creatures. The archmage has finally decided to come out into the open and face the characters, because they have something that he wants. He knows, however, that they won't run, because if they do, the library-city that they absolutely love as characters will get burned to the ground and completely destroyed.

The players knew ahead of time that this was going to happen, because the archmage warned them it would three weeks before, if they didn't give him the magic item that he wanted from them. They evacuated the town, but there's four generations worth of book hunting within the catacombs beneath the keep of the city, literally thousands of books that might be irreplaceable if they just let him run roughshod over the town.

It makes me happy, but for the first time the players and their characters are terrified.