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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 1815414" data-attributes="member: 537">... I seem to recall saying something like "find a better DM". That still stands.Your DM may be good according to the metrics of NPC characterisation, building a believable world, playing by the rules, not favouring any one player, etc. That doesn't mean he or she is going to be good when it comes to figuring out how to handle high levels.Back to the original topic. In the latest session of my (now 15th level) campaign, the group went into a dungeon where they met a bunch of vampires. Now these are my custom "vampires" based on the shadow fiend from the FF, as opposed to the vanilla undead thingies from the MM, but that doesn't really matter. The players plowed through them with no real problems. One sunbeam took out 4 of them, and they beat up on the rest.Do I consider this a problem? Not really.1) In the end, it's all about resources consumed, and hit points are only one type of resource. To do that fight, the cleric used her only sunbeam spell, and they used up various other limited-use abilities as well, eg Divine Might. They met more vamps (and their necromancer leader) later, and no sunbeam this time made it rather more difficult.2) A fight that's too easy is not really a problem, as long as it drains some of the party's resources. You can always throw more fights at them later on. And really, there's nothing wrong with letting the party kick ass once in a while, which leads to...3) At high levels, not every fight has to be a challenge. There are basically two types of combat encounters when you're high level: those meant to be tough, and those meant to showcase your prowess. These vampires were the same as those that gave them a hard time at 12th level, and the fact that defeated them easily just showed how far they'd come since then.In the wuxia movie Hero (released just a coupla months ago), there is a scene where two uber-powered swordspersons plow through 3,000 of the king's palace guards on their way to confront him. The point of this scene is not to demonstrate the risk that the swordspersons took in attacking the palace: as far as can be seen, they had no problems at all dealing with the guards. The point is to demonstrate that their abilities and skills are of a completely different order of magnitude to ordinary people.The same thing can be seen in a less over-the-top fashion in some of the fights in the LotR movies, eg when Aragorn takes on a mob of orcs single-handed in FotR. Ditto a lot of fights involving stormtroopers/federation bots in the Star Wars movies. Ditto the bit in Conan the Barbarian, where Conan and his buddies chop up the snake worshippers in Thulsa Doom's temple.The same sort of principle applies when it comes to high-level gaming. You need to highlight the contrast between low and high levels at least occasionally, or there really isn't much point to gaining levels. It just becomes a treadmill.I've run encounters pitting the PCs against large numbers of orcs, assassins, and other low-HD mooks -- 25, 50, up to 100 depending on what level they were at the time. They generally plowed through them like a hot knife through butter, which is pretty much what I'd expected. The real challenges tend to be in the fights with small numbers of enemies.</blockquote>

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