Before I begin my pseudo-rant, let me preface what I am about to say. I've been playing D&D for ~17 years or so and have gone through all of the editions. Our 1st ed campaigns never brought our characters above 8th level or so and our 2nd ed campaigns capped at about 11th. In our current 3E campaign, the entire party ranges from levels 12-14 and we have been running through the Wizards modules (e.g. Sunless Citadel --> Deep Horizon).
The biggest problem we encounter while playing (esp. Heart of Nightfang Spire and Deep Horizon) is very poor adventure design. Characters of our level have access to very potent divination and teleportation magic. When we are given a mission by our church or other affiliations, we tend to scry on our targets, 'port in and whoop some ass. *Or* we role-play with allies to try to find the root of the problem (e.g. usually winds up being the boss of the module), discuss tactics, and throw all of our resources at it.
From the player perspective, we know that we are powerful characters in our campaign world and we like to do things efficiently. We don't generally wander around in the Underdark simply to "gain experience." So what I'm saying is that the high-level adventures that we've played seem to be strictly linear with increasing difficulty. In my view, this is absurd for a high-level module b/c PCs will simply tend to go to the end quickly. Unfortunately, since they will be lower level than required since they didn't plow through all the grunts and underlings like they were supposed to, they will get killed quickly.
So my question is: WHAT GIVES? In Gygax high level modules, spells like T'port and/or other spells were barred for, IMO, pretty decent reasons.
Are Wizards' modules just crappy? Should we switch companies or what? Please let me know your opinions.
P.S. Please don't tell me that we our DM needs to make adventures for us. Everyone in my group is a professional (doctors, lawyers, engineers) and we have neither the time nor inclination to devote so much time to adventure design.
The biggest problem we encounter while playing (esp. Heart of Nightfang Spire and Deep Horizon) is very poor adventure design. Characters of our level have access to very potent divination and teleportation magic. When we are given a mission by our church or other affiliations, we tend to scry on our targets, 'port in and whoop some ass. *Or* we role-play with allies to try to find the root of the problem (e.g. usually winds up being the boss of the module), discuss tactics, and throw all of our resources at it.
From the player perspective, we know that we are powerful characters in our campaign world and we like to do things efficiently. We don't generally wander around in the Underdark simply to "gain experience." So what I'm saying is that the high-level adventures that we've played seem to be strictly linear with increasing difficulty. In my view, this is absurd for a high-level module b/c PCs will simply tend to go to the end quickly. Unfortunately, since they will be lower level than required since they didn't plow through all the grunts and underlings like they were supposed to, they will get killed quickly.
So my question is: WHAT GIVES? In Gygax high level modules, spells like T'port and/or other spells were barred for, IMO, pretty decent reasons.
Are Wizards' modules just crappy? Should we switch companies or what? Please let me know your opinions.
P.S. Please don't tell me that we our DM needs to make adventures for us. Everyone in my group is a professional (doctors, lawyers, engineers) and we have neither the time nor inclination to devote so much time to adventure design.
