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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="THEMNGMNT" data-source="post: 9883814" data-attributes="member: 6809274">Welcome to the suck.I ran a 122 session 5E 2014 campaign that ended with 20th level characters with 7 epic boons. It was a bit much.At high levels, the game doesn't break. But the characters have so many resources that combat takes longer to arbitrate at the same time it takes more enemies than ever to create a challenge. It turns into a slog.Here's my advice, in no particular order. Note that this works in 5E. I'm not sure how much the game has changed for 5.5E as I won't start my first campaign in that edition until later this year.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Be ruthless. Play to win. You'll be surprised how resilient player characters are.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ignore difficulty level. Instead, take your entire XP budget for the adventuring day and use that to design a single encounter. Actually, you can take all of the XP needed to advance a level and use that to design a single encounter. Not even kidding.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">For that single encounter, have the enemies come in waves. Not because players need the break. It's because you don't want your players to nova all the bad guys in the first round.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">You should be able to confidently drop at least one character each round. For example, let's assume the Battle Master Fighter has 150hp. Are you fully confident that ancient dragon can hit the Battle Master consistently enough to do at least 150 hp in a single turn? If not, it needs to do more damage.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Double or triple the amount of damage that every single monster does. That's it. That's the note.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Come up with specific counters to your characters' powers. I had fights with three archmages who did nothing but counterspell. Actually, what they mostly did was counterspell the players' counterspells. This can feel like you're targeting your players, in truth it's the villains targeting their characters. The villains are feeling the heat at this point and are desperate to stay alive.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Use minions to threaten innocents. That horde of 100 goblins isn't going to harm the players, but it can hurt the NPCs they care about.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Terrain and environment to help the villains and hurt the players. This has been covered at length elsewhere but it can really make a difference when done right. Which isn't always easy.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The danger goes up every round. In round one, the rising lava does 10 points of damage. In round two 20 points of damage. Etc. In round one, the goblin minions kill 1 villager. In round two, it's 2 villagers. In round three, 4 villagers. It round four, 8 villagers.</li> </ul>If you follow this advice, you will have epic and challenging battles that likely take up an entire session, or two, or three. In my experience, there's no way around that. Combat is slow at high level.It also means that characters might gain a level with a single battle. Which means you might only have five or six fights left in your entire campaign. So what are they?</blockquote>

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