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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7671856" data-attributes="member: 42582">Speaking purely from my own experience, I think that AD&D has significant issues above the low teen levels - eg the maths mostly breaks down, there are no suitable opponents in the MMs, etc - and I think 4e works well all the way through epic - the maths more-or-less hangs together, there are a good range of published opponents, etc.The "maths" issue and the "opponents" are related, of course, but I have separated them because they are not identical. If the maths breaks down you can't build viable high-level opponents; but the other aspect of opponents is a story one. For instance, if demon princes have 12 to 15 HD, there is no space in the story of D&D for opponents to confront 20th level PCs. This is an issue in AD&D, whereas 4e does a good job of spacing out the D&D story across the mechanical levels from 1 to 30.But getting the maths and story right is only one aspect of high level play. The other relates to GMing techniques, player expectations, etc. The whole rationale of a level-based game is that, as the PCs grow in levels, the scope of their abilities relative to the fiction grows. So 1st level PCs deal with village-sized problems, whereas high level PCs deal with kingdom-level and cosmos-level problems. But having PCs (and, therefore, the players) engage kingdom-level and cosmos-level issues has big consequences for typical approaches to world-building, GM authority over storyline, etc.I think if you look at Chris Perkins 4e GMing blog you can see that he absolutely knows how to run a high level game. But he is using techniques that, as best I can tell, are not mainstream across D&D GMs. Provided that a GM (i) is prepared to let the players meaningfully change the gameworld and the storyline, and (ii) has some basic tools (eg lists, charts) for keeping track of NPC motivations and relationships so that improvised outcomes will be broadly consistent and coherent, then high level play shouldn't raise any particular problems. (Assuming that the maths and related mechanics are in order.)</blockquote>

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