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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 7968971" data-attributes="member: 6777737">Why? I've never met a player who wasn't motivated by (a) a good story, (b) the promise of treasure, or (c) the promise of XP. Those are about as base a motivation as it can get.Where ever the PCs go, they're going to face appropriate level encounters. That doesn't mean that their opponents are going to be interested in destroying the world. Maybe they just want to destroy one city.Besides, what do the stakes have to do with the difficulty of the task? Where is that function defined? Why would there magically be 10th level characters around?Why?What was the Scouring of the Shire compared to Mount Doom? Was the Odyssey less epic of a challenge compared to the Siege of Troy? Was Ripley's battle with the alien queen on board the Sulaco less of a challenge because her epic dive into the depths of processing station to rescue Newt was a better story? Was Luke Skywalker challenged less on Bespin than he was at Yavin IV? If so, why did he lose at Bespin so completely?You know what happens when you have to constantly escalate how epic your challenges are? You get Dragonball Z. Bigger stakes and bigger numbers to comic degrees so that you're forced to travel to alternate universes to find adequate challenges. Eventually you could destroy entire multiverses with a single punch. Worse than just being predictable, it's boring. Oh no, an evil cult is trying to summon a demon/ancient evil deity/previously unknown evil immortal. We have to stop them as quickly as possible with an arbitrarily tight time schedule that makes adventuring just trivially more difficult than it otherwise would be.Forget that.Hooks for high level play can be player driven:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Establish your own city-state</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Become a demigod</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Resolve that nagging backstory hook</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Do something with that portable hole full of platinum and gems</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Find that Holy Avenger for your Paladin, that Staff & Robe of the Magi for your Wizard, or that Ring of Invisibility for your Rogue.</li> </ul>Or DM driven:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Several nations need help stopping a plague or famine</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Good aligned kingdoms face a diplomatic breakdown, threatening the peace</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A new continent has been discovered over the horizon across the sea</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A servant of an good deity has been captured by denizens of the lower planes, and you must rescue them</li> </ul>Kingdom-level threats never really stop being good stories, and the PCs only get vaguely more powerful than they are at level 11. There's Teleport and then there's Wish, and that's essentially it. That's all you have to account for. All you have to do is increase the CR of the creatures.</blockquote>

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