The high level game in 3rd Edition and 3.5 was of particular interest to me. I've shared all my thoughts on it here on ENWorld. Most of these have been covered previously in this thread. Here are some other helpful references:
This one from 2004 highlights the problem:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93424&page=1&pp=40
This one from 2005 highlights some of the best solutions:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?p=2142377
To answer your questions directly:
1. My monsters from the MM are mincemeat to even "commonly" min-maxed high level characters. For example, the weaponmaster can vorpal them, the rogue can blink/dual-wield/sneak/touch attack them, the archmage can insta-kill them with no reasonable chance at success, and the cleric can buff and heal his way out of any encounter.
2. See the second thread posted above for all the good ideas. To summarize, yes, simplify buffs, nerf the big-boy spells that need it, add in a handful of needed spells to save versmilitude, and make liberal use of character generators/npc generators/pre-fabbed modules and excel spreadsheets! Note - it doesn't hurt to have a table full of engineers or accountants!
3. The challenge with tweaking the rules at high level in third edition was three-fold. First, you shouldn't need to change the infrastructure of the core rules to play a game. For example, if you open a game, and see that in the set up, one player has a clear advantage, it's not a good start. It's one thing to say, "I ignore encumberance or alignment because they slow things down". It's another thing entirely to have one player that has an irrefutable/unavoidable advantage, and then say to "make it fun for everyone" you're going to take it away. Second, in third edition, the beauty of the system is that everything is inter-connected. This becomes a significant disadvantage when you start to play with those rules, particularly at high levels. An example of this I've seen often is to "tweak" the iterative attack model. This can pretty drastically change the balance of several classes unfairly. Finally, the extreme nature of the high level game is such that to change something on the fly, becomes much harder to justify. For example, I hit it again, that's over 2,000 hit points we've done to it so far this round, it's still not down? Nope. We start using skills to determine why that would be, because it doesn't seem to fit within the paradigm of the world we've come to understand the last 15 levels.
This one from 2004 highlights the problem:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93424&page=1&pp=40
This one from 2005 highlights some of the best solutions:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?p=2142377
To answer your questions directly:
1. My monsters from the MM are mincemeat to even "commonly" min-maxed high level characters. For example, the weaponmaster can vorpal them, the rogue can blink/dual-wield/sneak/touch attack them, the archmage can insta-kill them with no reasonable chance at success, and the cleric can buff and heal his way out of any encounter.
2. See the second thread posted above for all the good ideas. To summarize, yes, simplify buffs, nerf the big-boy spells that need it, add in a handful of needed spells to save versmilitude, and make liberal use of character generators/npc generators/pre-fabbed modules and excel spreadsheets! Note - it doesn't hurt to have a table full of engineers or accountants!
3. The challenge with tweaking the rules at high level in third edition was three-fold. First, you shouldn't need to change the infrastructure of the core rules to play a game. For example, if you open a game, and see that in the set up, one player has a clear advantage, it's not a good start. It's one thing to say, "I ignore encumberance or alignment because they slow things down". It's another thing entirely to have one player that has an irrefutable/unavoidable advantage, and then say to "make it fun for everyone" you're going to take it away. Second, in third edition, the beauty of the system is that everything is inter-connected. This becomes a significant disadvantage when you start to play with those rules, particularly at high levels. An example of this I've seen often is to "tweak" the iterative attack model. This can pretty drastically change the balance of several classes unfairly. Finally, the extreme nature of the high level game is such that to change something on the fly, becomes much harder to justify. For example, I hit it again, that's over 2,000 hit points we've done to it so far this round, it's still not down? Nope. We start using skills to determine why that would be, because it doesn't seem to fit within the paradigm of the world we've come to understand the last 15 levels.
