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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ycore Rixle" data-source="post: 1425884" data-attributes="member: 675">I've played in two high-level long term campaigns, one ten years (1e/2e), one five years and counting. In both, we have had simultaneous "high-magic" and "mystery, suspense, and drama."In the first campaign, toward the end the characters focused on liberating the world of one player's wife from iron-allergic Siv elves (this was a world intially encountered in the Q1 The Demonweb Pits, through one of those marvelous alternate prime material plane portals). Anyway, the multi-planar nature of the campaign, with the PCs crossing from their plane to the Siv plane, and the Sivs bouncing back from the Abyss to their home plane, made scrying difficult and teleportation very risky (in 3.5e, interplanar teleportation is not possible even with greater teleport). So there were pitched battles for gate points, trips across the Siv homeworld to recruit allies, treachery back home in the players' prime material (one of the wizards own apprentices was corrupted - the player wasn't checking her own allies for allegiance). Basically, there were way, way too many things to scry on or divine in order to keep up with the other side's subterfuges. The players had an archmage (21st level) and a high priest (14th/9th fighter) but even with commune, contact other plane, etc. there were still surprises, because the enemy had a thousand-year-old established empire to rely upon, and the PCs were in charge of only one duchy with just a handful of high-level characters. The PCs' rebel allies on the other world were mostly monks - the Sivs had outlawed metal weapons since they were so allergic to iron - and there was one great scene where an army of monks surprised the Sivs by slow-falling over a cliff and attacking from a flank the Sivs thought secure.In my current campaign, our last session, the enemy dragon just revealed that he was the dragon disciple's father. Now, had the party done various divinations, they might have been confused by the fact that the dragon "doesn't want to hurt you" - and he didn't want to hurt them, he wanted to convert them. Of course, one doesn't get to be an ancient white by following caprice over rationality, so he would hurt the party - he just wouldn't want to. That alone could have messed up many divinations - not that the party tried. As for your original points, KM, I would say we handle them like this:a) Emotional attachment. Level progression is not especially fast in our games, and by the time the characters reach high levels, we've been playing them for several years. That alone, really, takes care of a lot of emotional attachment. But of course the world has to be interesting to keep the game going for several years, and I've found that making interesting NPCs befriending the PCs, making the world consistent and believable and active outside the PCs' actions, and always keeping surprises and recurring events and plot twists plentiful makes for players who are emotionally invested in their characters.b) Resurrection, teleportation, and divination. I talked about these above; to me, resurrection is the trickiest. We haven't had much trouble with the 3.5 raise spells - we have implicitly assumed that most people die of old age. This is a good argument for large cities - people tend to clump near temples and healers, even though that might make the city a target - it's a balance.c) Fear is easy. The higher-level a PC gets, the more she has to lose. A 3rd-level PC who loses her +1 sword can do just fine with a masterwork sword she buys to replace it. But an 18th-level paladin who loses his holy avenger - what's he going to use against the marilith now? Not to mention the biggest fear of a PC in one of our high-level campaigns - losing political face. It is amazing what just a little politicking can do to spice up a campaign and make a player interested in something other than BAB.Finally, I want to say that although I understand what mmadsen means by not "resorting to extensive magical countermeasures -- and that this magical arms race leads to an increasingly implausible, difficult-to-imagine world," I don't think this is a valid argument. Are not magical countermeasures the natural development in a magical world? How then is this implausible? It may be implausible to have a magical arms race in a low-magic world (where there is not sufficient magical power to make such a race worthwhile), but it seems perfectly plausible - even inevitable - that such a magical arms race occur in a high-magic world. Let us not attack high-magic world for faults that are only faults within a low-magic scheme; let us evaluate high-magic worlds according to their own premises and by their own rules.</blockquote>

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