High Level Campaigns
I can really play at all levels. Each has it's own nature that has to be realized and taken into consideration.
13.5 average encounters of equivalent party level will advance your characters to the next level, and at lower levels that is easy. But at high levels, it become unrealistic for characters to fight monsters of the same level 13 times in a row. Otherwise, why haven't these bad boys just mowed all the commoners down already.
Encounters equal to the party level just don't happen as often, as a rule. Of course, there is the planar adventures or the example in one of my stories of how I sent the players off to an extradimensional Prison Tower (see Tower of Madness at the beginning of this thread) for a multi-level raising slug-fest
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
But these don't work continually and also don't fit everyones style.
Enter roll-playing, puzzles, politics, or anything else non-combat related. Perhaps the characters need to act as ambasadors to prevent a war, escort a holy sect of monks who don't believe in violence (and won't tolerate its use), or solve a mystery. You need to find additional challenges. Give them land to manage or a town to administer. "Defeating" an encounter doesn't mean killing it.
BUT...
This is D&D, and killing stuff is were the fun is. So there needs to be some encounters. And trust me, you can scare high level characters plenty. You just need to prepare and work on the delivery, or flavor. For example, In my "Tower" adventure, the characters entered the complex of some imprisoned Thri-Keen that were locked up. The characters new it would be a great fight, but they had spent 15 levels fighting things with character levels (and your right CE, that is one of the three things that is awsome about 3E Monsters IMO). They went looking for a infamous Thri-Keen warrior known as the sword master (he had an artifact they needed), but like I said, they were just expecting a Thri-Keen with levels stacked up. What I did was stack on Prestige classes and then hit them hard in the first round to get their attention. What their characters saw was a Thri-Keen with a sword in each arm moving incredibly fast,
what the players saw was me rolling to hit the tank something like
16 times. I'd givin the bossman the Multi-Weapon and Multi-Ambidexterity Fighting feats then cranked on the Prestige Class levels in Tempest (3E version, I have not seen the updated one). Whatching me roll, and roll, and roll, and roll somemore to hit rolls deffinetly put some mortality in them. In fact, they named him "The Buzzsaw".
But the point is, take advantage of the pretige classes and templates out there to create a monster that will give the players something they don't expect. At that level, you can get really creative and multi-stack things. Vampire Necromancer Arch Mages, fallen Blackguard Planars, or Fiendish Paragon Oozes (didn't get to run that level
) are epic encounters indeed. Trolls with horns and wings are fun, but they get scarry when they open up a can of "Flurry of Blows" on someone!
Sorry for the long ramble. It's Friday, what can I say
). 
) [/sblock]
