It really depends on what books you allow in, just like 3.5. You have to know the rules well, but a lot of it really depends on what you expect as a DM, and what annoys you. How much power(point buy, and wealth) is also a big factor. I have run at high levels a few times. The experience has never been the same. In my case I was the best optimizer and strategist so I had to hold back, but not make it obvious. Things don't get really hard for me until level 17. Before that it is easier to manipulate combat to my liking, among other things.
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Pathfinder 1E High-level Pathfinder?
- Thread starter MerricB
- Start date
My players are lvl 15 now. It's a five person party with three henchmen. I'm doing the Kingmaker adventure path, so it seemed only fitting to allow Leadership.
We regularly reach lvl 12+. I have run 3.x, Pathfinder, and 4E up to lvls 12 plus regularly (though I quit 4E some time ago).
They are still quite long. Require a great deal of preparation and system mastery by the DM.
Unless you are running 15 point point buy characters, you will need to tweak every encounter in a module. If you do most of your own work, you won't have to worry about that aspect.
I would say average encounter preparation time is 3 to 5 hours at lvl 15+. Not sure how you run modules. I tend to let the PCs mow down common encounters. I plan usually 2 to 3 challenging encounters a module. When I say 3 to 5 hours, I'm speaking about the end module BBEG encounter which I plan carefully. The 3-5 hour timeline is usually an opposing party.
If it is a single powerful monster like say a dragon or demon. I can usually spec the encounter out in an hour or two.
It's about like you remember in 3.x for time. Just different abilities.
I make up my own NPCs. I very rarely use the NPCs as designed in the book. I am very meticulous about designing challenges according to the players I'm going against and their tendencies.
I usually start with the monster in a given module and modify it to suit the challenge. I rarely make up my own monsters. I tweak some already existing monster.
My players are loving Pathfinder. The one player that did really like 4E really likes Pathfinder. He was not a big fan of 3.x. He likes to play melee characters and 3.x didn't make melee characters all that interesting other than doing insane physical damage. Pathfinder now makes designing and running a melee character a great deal more fun and interesting. He was a bit worried that physical damage characters would be left out in the cold again as far interesting play options were concerned with Pathfinder, and he was pleasantly surprised to find that Pathfinder allowed him to design a really cool physical damage character that wasn't just about swinging his weapon.
How are you handling your players?
Rough like usual. Five on one almost always favors the players. They do a lot of damage. They have a lot of tactical options as a group.
It's a lot of work as a Pathfinder DM. A lot more prep work than it was as a 4E DM where the monsters and characters were simpler. Though not as much work once the combat is going as I found tracking all those one round modifiers in 4E a huge pain in the behind in large combats.
I find challenging the players to be the same degree of difficulty as all the game systems. In 4E my players crushed solos and most of what they faced because of their much wider variety of tactical options. Pathfinder it's pretty much the same.
And lucky rolls also have a great deal to do with them winning and the new hero point mechanic greatly favors the PCs. It's different from 4E's hero point system, but no less potent. Maybe more potent than 4E's hero point system. They can really swing a combat in favor of the PCs.
If you could be specific about the problems you had in 3.5, perhaps you could get some answers. What specifically gave you trouble? I can answer if those problems still exist if you want to specify them.
Sadly, 13th-14th isn't really high level.
Back when I was a 3E/3.5E DM, I ran about five campaigns that reached 15th-16th level, and one campaign (Age of Worms) which reached 21st level, so I got a good grounding in the problems that high-level 3E got.
Interestingly, character balance wasn't normally one of them: most of the players were pretty good optimisers (or were helped by those that were) and so either the inadequate classes weren't played... or they'd been fixed by the time we played them. (Player's Handbook II was brilliant for fighters; we used it a lot in the last couple of games we played, including AoW).
Preparation time and combat length were, sadly, much more of a problem. And I run combats quickly! However, reaching Very High Levels in 3E gave us a mass of problems.
Based on your reports - thanks very much for them! - Pathfinder has ameliorated some of the problems, but high-level play is still somewhat problematic.
Cheers!
Glad to see a 4E player that doesn't cry about the balance problem. I find it annoying and false. 3E fighters may not have been interesting, but they werne't weak and could deal tons of damage. Which when it comes down it is what the majority of major encounters come down to.
I'll be honest with you. Much of high level Pathfinder is the same as 3.5 in terms of nightmare prep time and combat time.
The magic arms race still exists where any creature that doesn't have magic better be a beast as tough as the Tarrasque. It all comes down to one group planning against another group and the majority of planning is done by the mages and priests. Lots of scrying, counter-scrying, and such tactics need to be accounted for. Need to know your counters for high level spells and build your parties ready to use them.
If you don't like all that, then I wouldn't go with Pathfinder. It's a slighly improved version of 3.5, but it is still the d20 game system. It is high fantasy bordering on the science fiction-like. And it requires a great deal of prep time for encounters that may end quicker than expected due to bad dice or good dice rolls.
