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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 7500778" data-attributes="member: 6796661">In my last campaign, which as a homebrew campaign with now official D&D adventure content, but lots of adapted third-party content, we went from 1-20.   The main issue I had was the amount of time need to prep good set-piece battles.  Outside of combat, Role Play works as well at 20 as it does at 1st. Puzzles do tend to become a bit more fun house, though. Your typical traps and mazes are not going to cut it at this level. But an ever-rotating maze with monster generator and countdown to destruction in its own demiplane created by a mad mage can provide a challenge. Sure, at this level, they could use magic to escape, but escape equals failure and the bad guy wins.  You have to up the stakes and be less forgiving in terms of time crunches, rest, etc. For not-set-piece encounters, I didn't sweat it. Sure, they would normally steamroll anyone dumb or ignorant enough to attack them, but at these levels they earned it. Also, when the bad guys get lucky, it can be funny.Set-piece encounters, however, take a LOT of prep work at high levels, at least for me. Especially because at that time, there was a dearth of official high-level monsters. So first, I would even have to build up a powerful foe or alter an existing monster. I would need to play them as intelligent and really have to plan out their tactics and lairs. My players are ALL more experienced than I am and in addition to decades of D&D they have played many other TTRPGs and we are all heavy board-game players and some of us also have a wargame background, though no many of us have the time for weekend-long sandbox games. If I didn't put in a significant amount of planning, the 4-6 experience heads of my players are going to find weaknesses that my one overtaxed head forgot. Just knowing the powers of my foes was not enough. I can't tell you how many times I've overlooked something or forgot a power that would have to cause the foe to be more of a challenge or would have saved the foe. Something the FOE would have known and done, but I forgot in the heat of the game. So I make sure I have a tactical battle plan. I know what the foes first moves are going to be. I wargame different scenarios. Also, at this level, FORGET about worrying about metagaming. When you are talking about liches, archmages, beholders, and ancient dragons, you are talking about incredibly intelligent creatures with lifetimes of experience. As a DM you'll never have the intelligence and experience they are supposed to have. The only way to model this is through (1) spending a lot of time preparing various moves and tactics in advance and (2) designing the encounter and tactics based on the player characters' strengths and weaknesses. My prep involves using Hero Lab's (by Lone Wolf Development) character and custom-monster creator, and its encounter builder.  Then I put the foes and the PCs into the Hero Lab tactical console and I try to play out the fight to try to catch any obvious short cuts to victory. Based on that I will harden the foes as needed. Some other general advice about high-level encounters:1. Lair actions are your friends. Make the PCs go to the danger rather than the danger come to them. 2. Beyond lair actions, most intelligent foes are going to make the lair itself as deadly as possible for intruders. Don't just stick an ancient dragon on a pile of treasure in a cavern. It's going to have minions, traps, waits to close off entrances, emergency escape routes, etc. 3. Powerful people have powerful partners and powerful friends. I'm tired of one powerful bad guy and a bunch of weak minions. At high levels, there are too many ways for your players to manage this situation. You need to have very powerful people teaming up, working together. To accomplish their goals they will have very powerful underlings and they are not going to be encountered in sequence. Without ingenious planning, the party isn't going to catch a big bad by itself. They will face running a gauntlet of death.  Powerful casters with 75% cover spamming attacks from murder holes, other casters with counterspells at the ready to protect against assassinations and attacks. Forbiddance and other area protections ritually cast making it a resource management issue--to you remove protections or focus on attacks? If you focus on attacks do you have a reliable means of escape if you need it?4. Mobs still present a thread to 4th tier characters, especially if you use the mob rules in the DMG.  The mob rules in the DMG are your friend. It provides automatic hits when a certain number of attackers mob a character. The number of attackers needed increases with the targets AC, but even an AC 20+ character is going to take some damage every round. A massive zombie attack should be concerning, even for someone in magic plate mail.  I have a silhouette paper cutter and some paper minis and cut files for a bunch of monsters. I can whip up a huge army of the undead in a couple hours. Laydown a battle map with some interesting terrain, put some threats/goals the give a sense of urgency and a reason to take on the horde, and have fun. At the highest levels, you'll want multiple goals.  Have pockets of innocent villagers spread out far apart and make the party run around expending resources trying to save as many as they can. At the same time, their mission to take out the wraith leaders or necromancer leaders, and/or get some holy relic before the necromancers do. 5. Hit Points are boring. You'll likely want to up the hit points, maybe taking the max based on the creatures hit dice, rather than the average. But simply chipping away at a bag of hit points is boring. At high levels, you will want foes with magic abilities that help them move out of danger, exert control over the battlefield, which can hit the party hard, but also create obstacles. Spend more time thinking about how to using spells like Prismatic Wall and powerful illusion spells.  Focus more time thinking about how the smart, big bad can AVOID taking damage more than just dishing it out. In a game of hit and then get hit, the party will almost always win. You lich doesn't want to get hit. He didn't get to be where he is by letting himself get hit. He should be difficult to hit and damage. I think 5e handles high levels just fine. It doesn't slow to a crawl as other systems do at high levels. But any high-level play with complicated features and spells in play will require more preparation from the DM. I generally would just wrap up the campaign within a session or two of the characters reach level 20, mostly because the extra preparation time needed gets burdensome.</blockquote>

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