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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fieari" data-source="post: 1597391" data-attributes="member: 16221">At low levels, characters are struggling just to survive each encounter.  They can go in, have a battle, and then retreat to rest because continuing on is likely going to be suicide.  At high levels, encounters tend to be either ultra-easy, or instantly life threatening.  But there is a way around that...Time pressure.  They're used to Rope Trick?  That sounds like they're of the "Fight a battle, rest, then continue" mentality that is key in low level games.  What you need to make sure is that SAID LUXURY IS NOT AVAILABLE TO THEM.  When they're out of spells, out of potions, and they're taking a point of damage at a time and they CAN'T REST, the life is put back into the game.The trick is to come up with a reason they can't rest.  Dungeon crawls, style in the low level manner, aren't good about this usually.  That's why high level campaigns tend to leave the old style behind, but you CAN do a dungeon crawl high level.  You just need to give the monsters some BRAINS.  Don't confine them to individual rooms anymore.  Have them congregate.  Have them COMMUNICATE.  When the heroes arrive, have 'em send a major force after the PCs, right at the front gate.  When things start turning south, have the retreat.  Have them use the terrain advantage...this is their home, right?  They know the lay of the land!  Have 'em act like it!  When building dungeons, put in secret passages, not so that the heroes can find them and find more treasure, but so the NPCs can use them to set up ambushes!Make the goal of the dungeon something the has to be retrieved QUICKLY!  Maybe there's a war, and the artifact in the dungeon can turn the tides of said war, but if it isn't recieved SOON, it'll be too late.  Or make it a hostage situation.  If they take too long, they LOSE because the NPCs kill the hostage, or get the information out of him/her, or whatever.  Or make it so that the heroes have to be at the vault door at EXACTLY this time, like at the time of the eclipse (solar or lunar) or when the planets align or whatever, otherwise the door doesn't open.  Keep track of time.My solution was to have the arch villains of the story doing things behind the heroes' back.  They loot this dungeon, the bad guys have looted the next, and so when the heroes go to the next, they find it cleaned out.  And then next.  And the next.  Soon their racing to catch the bad guy, and now the bad guy has all this cool stuff to use on the PCs.  And now with this newfound power, maybe the bad guy is applying pressure to nearby kingdoms, starting to twist the landscape into an evil likeness of himself...Unless you pit the heroes against INSURMOUNTABLE ODDS, which you KNOW to be insurmountable, and you've already said that feels like cheating, high level characters are not often challenged.  They have now aquired the tools to face ANY DIRECT and OBVIOUS problem.  That's the POINT of high levels.  What you now need to do, is make the problems SUBTLE and OBSCURED and INDIRECT.  Add in some roleplaying, add in some story, and suddenly, just because they CAN level the opposition with a flamestrike doesn't mean that that will actually help them.  Sure, if they NEED to kill something, they can, but the problem now is figuring out WHO they need to kill, WHO they need to protect, WHERE they should be right now, and WHAT the consequences are if they aren't.Some thoughts to consider.</blockquote>

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