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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8929889" data-attributes="member: 4937">The biggest problems of 1e at levels 11+ is that the PvE isn't really designed for it and unless the DM is particularly insightful and creative he's unlikely to hit on really good ways to keep the challenge up.  There were few to none good published examples of play for 1e at much above 11th level, and even fewer for above 15th (except possibly a few Companion level adventures like 'Saber River').  And while there are probably better examples published for 2e, they occur late enough in the editions run that they wouldn't have been much help to TSR era DMs.The second biggest problem is that Unearthed Arcana broke the game's balance wide open.  Double specialized fighters and Cavaliers (and Paladin Cavaliers!) and higher-level multi-classed demi-humans and bow specialization and so forth break the game wide open, to say nothing of the longer spell lists allow for more things in the toolbox of spellcasters with good stats.  I feel confident that I could keep the game going now up until quite high levels, but it would have required quite a bit of ideas that would have been novel at the time and like your game the resulting game would be rather divergent from RAW 1e/2e (though probably not in the exact same ways).  But I don't think 1e/2e is nearly as fragile RAW at high levels as 3e.  Even though I prefer 3e as a framework because it has a skill system and more unified mechanics and cleans up a lot of problems, some subtle changes that the designers made really screws up the math.  The biggest of them in my opinion is scaling the DC of saving throws by adding monster HD and spell level into the calculations.  The game gets much more balanced when, as in 1e/2e, most things are going to make their saving throws most of the time at high levels.  Spellcasters are forced more into a support role when they can't nuke everything with save or suck reliably which creates more teamwork and party synergy.  PRCs are probably the second biggest offender in that allow of them allow stacking of things that shouldn't be stackable by taking multiple PRCs and frontloading then same effects over and over.  Deal with those two issues and the game is a lot less fragile.</blockquote>

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