That's exciting! Nearing the home stretch of your high-level campaign!
Thanks, I'm both excited for the finale and am also looking forward to starting a new campaign.
Do you have an anecdote you could share about the kind of tinkering / prep you end up doing to run high-level combat or challenges (doesn't have to be combat necessarily)?
Don't fall into the more HP trap. Maybe it'll keep some enemies in combat for a round or two extra, but at this level, PCs can deal extreme damage and more HP doesn't do much to make combat more interesting.
For example, say you are fighting Orcus and he uses his wand to summon 500 HP of undead. Rather than one or two undead dragons, it will be much more scary and fun combat to bring in a lot of glass canon undead with a variety of special attacks. Think alips, ghosts, haints, poltergeists, maybe throw in both a demilich and some flame skulls. Which floating head is the demilich? In this example, I actually LOWER the HP of the individual minions so I can bring more of them in. The action economy starts to make things scary, I only allow one arcana check per turn so they are going to have to start combat without knowing what everything is (I don't tell them what the things are, only that they see various spirits and floating skulls). It forces meaningful strategic choices, especially with things that have high mobility, can go ethereal, are incorporeal, melt/hide in shadows, etc.
While I will still use things like banishment, paralysis, etc., I much prefer charm magic, possession, etc. Where the player can still play, against the other players. Having multiple enemies in the battle that can do these things are still scary, even at high levels. A score of ghosts can be more scary than a lich.
You pretty much have to go with high-level magic enemies, traps, and puzzles at this level. Lots of ways to prevent planar travel, teleportation, etc. Also, I don't have a problem with lair effects and protections that a PC couldn't do using RAW. It is fair because PCs (at least in my group) have lots of divination and other resources to learn about what they may be getting into. My players are the type that will spend a crazy amount of time on magical and mundane intel gathering and have a great many resources with which to accomplish this, so I don't feel that I have to pull any punches here. Other groups of players not used to my DMing style, or who find prep boring, might have problems with this.
I probably spend more time than necessary thinking about the cosmological order in my campaign. Not only because I enjoy it and because it helps with adjudicating the wish spell. I'm not great at improvising the wish spell on the spot, so it helps to have some heuristics or a sense of how it would work or not work in my world. This allows me to fairly adjudicate wishes without being arbitrary and puts the power into the players hands to research and divinate on how certain wishes could play out. I keep what they learn somewhat vague so there is still room for surprises, but I've been able to avoid players feeling like they've wasted a wish.
In my current campaign, which is focused on a specific area and is not a planes jumping, universe spanning campaign, it helps to have something that grounds the party to the area and makes them care. I use a homebrew system that mixes rules from Strongholds and Followers, rules for reputations from an old EN5ider article, and a mix of PHP, DMG, and Xanathar's downtime activity. The cleric has started a new religious order, the party has built up their various strongholds into a growing town, and there are various factional politics that can help and hinder the party in meeting their goals.
Also, in this campaign, I take a somewhat adversarial role. Not really in that I want to win, but my bad guys do and I will try to kill the PCs. In low levels, that played out mostly through a sandboxy and deadly environment where incaution could easily lead to death. At high levels, however, it means the bad guys see the PCs as an existential threat and will do anything within their power to take them out. Since they are grounded to the area, have a lot of people and goals they want to protect, and are actually NOT gods and can't be everywhere at once, it makes factional politics much more important and strategically building up troops, followers, and other protections to safeguard their interests and the people they care about.
They have always had the option to just move on to some other area and take the campaign in whatever direction they wanted (I have a crazy amount of Lost Lands material) but they've come to care enough about cleansing Rappan Athuk, bringing civilization to the Forest of Hope, and supporting their allies that they never did.
This relates to the earlier discussion about the additive complexity that occurs in 5e at higher levels – the context was player abilities, but it applies equally to the standard 5e monster design where higher challenge monsters tend to have increasingly bloated stat blocks with more complex implicit strategies.
Yeah, and it often isn't that fun. Often it is getting to the BBEG that is more of a challenge and more fun than the actual final encounter. In a long campaign, not every encounter with a big bad has to be epic. It is cathartic to wipe the floor with bad guys after you finally find and get to them. I've learned to focus on a few set piece, epic battles, and am less worried about every combat being a challenge. It is important to make the exploration and social pillars of play still matter at high levels.
I wonder how much a GM or Adventure Writer could "play it where it lies" with 5e, and just tweak things behind the screen (monster design, challenge design, rules unique to the setting/adventure) to mitigate issues related to high-level play, such as the strain on the GM managing vast array of monster abilities/spells/tactics.
Yeah, I think that is what is needed. A high level adventure should include a lot of advice for GMs on how to adjust the adventure for different play styles and powers. It would make it more wordy, but it would help more DMs get over their anxiety of running high level adventures.
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