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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bawylie" data-source="post: 7300712" data-attributes="member: 6776133">First thing you ought to do is take stock of what your adventurers can do and roughly how often they can do it. For instance, at 5th level you know they’re attacking twice, got some decent area spells like fireball and lightning bolt, and can probably get some limited flight going. Figure out what they can do once, what they can do frequently, and what they can do without limit. Once you know that, you want to think generally about obstacles. The kinds of obstacles their power can overcome. Major obstacles are overcome by the stuff they can do once a day. Generally you don’t want to use more than 3 major obstacles for each of their once-a-day things. That way, they can absolutely overcome one major obstacle easy least, but they get challenged on the next one of the same type. And even more of a challenge on the third. Let’s look at 5th level flight really quickly. If you’ve got a wizard who can cast fly once a day, you want to put no more than 3 things completely out of reach. They can fly to one no problem, maybe risk a treacherous climb to get another, and maybe they can’t even get the 3rd thing at all. Next you want to look at the stuff they can do frequently and design moderate obstacles for that. You can use as many moderate obstacles as you like. If your party has access to a decent amount of healing, you can be quite free with the damage you deal. If they can pretty much fly or teleport whenever and wherever, you can have as much distance as you want between points. In essence, take serious stock of the party’s strengths and design obstacles that tax those strengths. Maybe they can Gate. But can they Gate exactly how and where they want? What if they need to rescue 3 prisoners instead of one? What if they have the prisoner’s name wrong? At birth they had one name but since adulthood they’ve gone by another altogether. I don’t know. So tax their strengths. That’s key. Second key is to gatekeep against their abilities. Like just above. If they have the prisoner’s name they can nab him. But if they don’t have the true name, their ability to rescue the prisoner is badly truncated. So their strength is essentially checked by a prerequisite obstacle. Then mix it up. A major obstacle gatekeeping a moderate obstacle or vice versa. Design like that and you won’t have a problem at any level. -Brad</blockquote>

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