dave2008
Legend
So what are those?
What are the easy ideas that don't become stale over multiple scenarios to get from level 15 to 20?
D&D 5E The challenges of high level adventure design.
What are the easy ideas that don't become stale over multiple scenarios to get from level 15 to 20?
Paul Farquhar
Legend
This is a good approach, if you start thinking about level 20 when you are doing your worldbuilding before the start of the campaign.
Personally, I find planning for what might happen two years out (real time) is beyond me.
More commonly in my experience, it's a case of "okay, so we've saved the world, what are we going to do now?"
Teleportation is a common complaint about high level campaigns. The solution is to either utilize it, having the characters teleport directly/nearly to the site of the actual adventure (bypassing unnecessary travel encounters), or deny it by having the site be unknown, where the characters have to follow a trail. Once on site teleportation becomes less of an issue, but it can still be used to bypass locked doors and other obstacles, at significant risk.
Divination can be problematic as well. The ideal solution is to have suggestions for the most probable queries, and accepting that divination needs more flexibility than is often given. The adventure could have 3-4 different divination results for broad categories, one of which should fit the answer for most questions. Those that don't precisely fit get one of them instead, with the indication that they're asking the wrong questions.
Divination can be problematic as well. The ideal solution is to have suggestions for the most probable queries, and accepting that divination needs more flexibility than is often given. The adventure could have 3-4 different divination results for broad categories, one of which should fit the answer for most questions. Those that don't precisely fit get one of them instead, with the indication that they're asking the wrong questions.
I think this is where D&D's advantage of a cosmology works wonders.
By level 15, you should have developed a web of powerful beings that you can attach followers to as NPCs that affect the PCs.
Then it becomes less "what are we going to do?" and more "X &Y are teaming up to mess with our stuff"
NOTHING gets players more engaged than a NPC than taking their stuff.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
Passwall makes doors and walls redundant.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
That's like saying "you should have worked harder at school so you have a better job."
It's more, if you got to level 15 without a level 15 ecology and community, you need to stop running the game until you create one.
Its essentially the "High levels isn't difficult but different." You can't use charts and tables for level 1 PCs for level 16 PCs.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
No. We don't run that sort of game. I hate worldbuilding, and my players aren't interested in it anyway.
It's both. Also boring.
Laurefindel
Legend
As discussed above in the thread, one of the problems of high-level adventure is inherent to high-level play; at that point, PC have so many hp and resources that in order to present a challenge, the opposition needs to be so strong that it start to make less and less sense in the game-world, or reach a level of gonzo that turns off many players and DM.
Either that or keep up rocket-high stakes and a break-neck pace for most of the adventure to enforce attrition. It can easily devolve into saving the planet before midnight, again.
Part of the solution is to get out of the game-world, or go macro, using planes and otherworldly domains as a new battleground.
There is only so many Advengers movies you can do about saving the earth/human race from alien entities before it becomes redundant.
Well then if you get to a certain level you have to stop playing.
Essentially when PCs become powerful enough to mold the world, you need to have built a world for them to mold.
