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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6975924" data-attributes="member: 6787650">One of my favorite tropes is the Big Bad Evil Guy who is so big and bad that he Cherry Taps the PCs out of boredom, basically. Strahd in Curse of Strahd can function this way at low levels, but 5E out of the box doesn't have any truly epic individuals. I think it's easy enough to add them (e.g. just slap some sorcerer levels on any dragon chassis and you're basically done) but from a design and story perspective it's extremely strange that 5E is designed to feature weak adversaries instead of strong ones.And yes, you can create contrived scenarios like Flamestrike's "suddenly a Balor appears in your midst" that give weak adversaries temporary tactical advantages to make them scarier, but that's the wrong kind of fear for my taste. That is temporary, short-term adrenaline rush and a long-term fear that "the DM might arbitrarily kill us for no reason"; it's not a long-term fear that adds to the campaign the way "last time we crossed Darth Vader he killed Han and crippled Luke!" does. In a roleplaying game I want the latter.5E does have the saving grace that it is designed to scale with quantity, so even if you never change any monster stats you can still scare players with organizations instead of monsters. An individual beholder isn't scary, but maybe a ship full of dozens of them is. An individual Chasme isn't scary to an 11th-level party, but eight of them kind of are. A Tarrasque... well, there's a whole planet full of them (Falx).In my view, high-level 5E play works best when it turns into strategic play. Abandon dungeon crawling and embrace space opera. Think of a 20th level PC as roughly equivalent to a small military unit (squad-size through company-size, depending on the PC), and give the PCs challenges that would otherwise fit into a wargame--but let them use roleplaying means to overcome the challenges. If the Zentraedi spice mines are guarded by a battalion of elite troops, the 20th level PCs don't have to fight their way through all 800 of them in order to sabotage the water supply--they can, for example, choose to impersonate the Inspector General using illusions and do it that way. There will still be plenty of dramatic tension every time they might get detected because a straight-up fight with the whole battalion would be very, very tough; but the players have a lot of freedom to choose their approach, and plenty of room to create fallback plans for themselves.So you can still easily create scenarios using MM monsters where the players need to use their brains and skill in order to win.</blockquote>

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