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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 4954976" data-attributes="member: 59248">There are a few of ways to signal this stuff.First, you can describe things comparatively -- "the dragon ate that group of bandits over yonder" might very well be a threat the PCs can handle; "Beowulf, the great adventurer from the North, came to slay the beast hoping for a prize, but it cooked him and his men and ate him raw", probably not so much for a few levels.You can, in fact, look at scale (not size); at the very least, heroic tier adventures are local; paragon are political, epic adventures are planar.  So a heroic-level dragon has been messing with farms; a paragon level dragon might have razed the town previously on this site to the ground, or attacked cities; an epic dragon might -rule- a kingdom, or have several paying tribute to it, etc.  Just as the scale of the PCs adventures rise as they do, so does the scale of their foes.Finally, you can use the rules organically to signal to players that certain challenges may be too tough for them -- in some ways, this can act like the MMO "you can't enter this area yet; it's too tough" hard block but without feeling purely mechanical.  Skill rolls around an high-level foe require similiarly high requirements -- this includes everything from knowledge rolls (to, say, find the creature) to climbing rolls to get to it, and so on, and so forth.  You -can- take this as the artifical scaling construct it (in some ways) is, but it's just as easy to say that high level foes tend to pick less hospitable homes, hide their lairs better, guard themselves better, etc.If the party has to, say, get through a level+10 skill challenge before they can face a level+10 monster, they might very well not even win their way into suicide -- not to mention just maybe getting the message that this challenge is bigger than they are.  Obviously, not everything about a high level creature needs to be similarly high levelled (after all, you can have a skill challenge that involves -convincing- the high level creature of something rather than fighting it directly) -- but everything on the direct road to opposition of it should be.</blockquote>

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