NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9208139" data-attributes="member: 6877472">In order to support High Level play, you need to have some kind of consensus of what High Level play is.  If I'm an adventure writer, I have no idea what the capabilities of your party are.  Do you have three Fighters and a Cleric?  Three Wizards and a Bard?  What spells do you have access to?  Magic items?What resources can you draw upon from the campaign?  Do you only do dungeon crawls, or does a King owe you large favors?  Do you own an airship, have access to Teleportation Circles, have sidekicks or your own golems?  Do you actively have a base of operations?  Is Simulacrum banned in your campaign?Does your party have several thousand gold in funds to cast expensive spells, or are they dirt poor?  Do you set DC's assuming that characters have access to Guidance/Bardic Inspiration/Expertise (making them at least somewhat challenging if those are in play, and quite challenging if not)?So right off the bat, you have to write for some "generic party" that only exists in your head.  There are any number of unknown variables.  Most of your adventure, then, is going to be composed of troubleshooting advice for when (not if) the adventure goes off the rails.There are high-level campaigns that move away from mechanics and are more about dealing with high level NPC's, managing kingdoms and armies.  There are high-level campaigns that exist in a super dungeon.  And there's many more in between somewhere.A book of high-level adventure seeds is more useful than an adventure.  A book of high-level adventure advice might be completely useless to a given group, or it might be invaluable.All someone writing such things can say is "this is what we think a high-level game looks like".  But how useful is that, really, if your campaign consists of:Uber-powerful characters beating up Gods on their home planes and rooting in their pockets for loose artifacts?A cabal of influential figures guiding the destiny of an empire?A group of hardened veterans preparing for a last stand in a world overrun by undead?The denizens of a Tippyverse (tm)- a world that assumes that spellcasting is readily available and everyone is crafting magic items?In my mind, the advice for dealing with a high-level game really starts at lower level- knowing how to plot out campaigns, identifying potential issues, knowing how to keep the game on track and knowing when to just let the player's actions define the campaign.  Knowing what to do if the players are too strong or too weak.  How to deal with problem players.  How to make everyone feel like their character is equally important to the game.  How to make fair rulings.  When/How do you buff and when do you nerf things?  Or should you do so at all?If you help people master the fundamentals, that's going to be far more useful for helping them figure out what to do about levels 11 and up.Because the real problem I've always had with high level play comes down to the feeling that I need to always top the previous adventure.  Each new threat has to be bigger, badder, and have higher stakes in order to both challenge and excite the players.  But eventually, this turns into a farce."Well, you beat the avatar of the dead god, what's next?  The avatar of a living god...?"</blockquote>

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