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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 3151599" data-attributes="member: 38357">I voted "too fast", but I pretty much only ever DM (not completely by choice). What I have found (in the games I run, YMMV) is that I really wish players would do more with the "cool powers" they have, rather than always looking to the next level. It just ends up that the players always want more skills, more feats, more magic items, and then they're disappointed when they get them and the cycle begins anew. I've seen a bunch of fifth-level PCs take over a major city; not without a lot of work, but IMHO accomplishing that at fifth level was way cooler than walking in with fifteenth-level characters and doing it with one or two barely-challenging die rolls. Gaining levels too often seems (again, IMHO) to make them less significant and less special. I usually try to find other ways to reward players, just about anything that they can actually put on the character sheet and say "See! My character did that!" to try and help "pad things out" when I'm a bit stingier than I might be with XP and treasure.I really find that all the joy gets sucked out of the game (for me as a DM) at high levels. I find that players have all this "great" stuff they want their characters to have and be able to do, but they don't  really know what to do with most of it (in terms of making the game fun for everyone). Also, I feel like I'm forced to "adapt" to the PCs' power level by, basically, taking away all of their cool powers, and I just don't enjoy that. For example: running a high-level dungeon I decided not to simply block all teleportation and scrying into and out of the place. The PCs had some (roleplaying) reasons to actually go through at least most of the dungeon, and a limited timeframe that kept them from doing unlimited divinations, but I expected that this would be a chance for all of their cool stuff to shine. Instead they cashed in favors to get a totally-overkill strike-force of NPCs and teleported directly into the BBEG's sanctum with them. No big deal for me (I don't like long fights anyway), but the players where incredibly disappointed that I didn't make things "more fun" and that the whole adventure was over in one (short) session. (Plus there was grumbling that if they didn't actually need all those extra guys, then they shouldn't have been available. To me that's like saying that you shouldn't be able to expend charges from your magic item if the DM knows that you don't really need to...)I'm not trying to suggest that this is a problem for everyone, and I know that I could have handled that situation better in some ways, but in the group I run I just wish that the players had a much more "with great power comes great responsibility" mentality. The more powerful the PCs, the more impact the players will have on how the game actually runs... I'm not a perfect GM, and so I try to avoid things that make my "job" harder, because they tend to lead to less fun sessions.</blockquote>

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