Power Problems

[Luna_Mayflower]

Right, here's the thing. I'm sure most of you who DM have this problem, but my players are getting a little on the powerful side. With a party level of 14th, we have a powerful Barbarian, a Sorceror who now has Prismatic Spray, along with disintegrate. A powerful Spirit Shaman healer, along with a Wizard and Psion who are both themselves, you guessed it, powerful.

I'd love for some advice on how I can still present a long, epic encounter to them. Sure, I can send high level monsters at them, but it's often a flurry of Disintegrates and such, along with powerful stuff from the monster, lots of danger and damage, but the thing is over in a couple of rounds.

How do you still present an epic battle against a well-prepared 14th level party?

Thanks for any help.

[Invader]

Multiple monsters will be far better suited to your party than 1 bbeg.

[Stux]

Yes, multiple threats is the way to go.

Get creative with it too. Don't just throw everything in a room and let the carnage commence. Have multiple things competing for the party's attention that they will need to deal with separately. Cultists holding hostages at knife-point, with readied actions to kill them, whilst the high cultist attempts to open a portal to hell and above golems are raining boulders down on the party. That encounter doesn't really make sense, but you get my point I'm sure!

[(Un)Inspired]

What sort of enemies are you sending at your party?

The obvious answer is to throw spellcasters at them but it can be incredibly tedious to run several full casters at once. Have you tried golems for magical immunity? Perhaps factoti that can just keep taking standard actions against your players?

[KnotKnormal]

Multiple monsters will be far better suited to your party than 1 bbeg.

agreed... instead of throwing big things at your party, throw a lot of them. force the spell casters to use up their slightly less powerful AOE spells up so that their "one shot, one kill" spells become desperate attempts to survive. your melee'ers need to be surrounded by enemies with just enough HP so that greater cleave is hard to string together. Also it keeps your healer away from the meat shield, making the meat shield feel helpless and the healer feel powerless. Make your fighters make will saves against mind effects. (confusion is always fun) and your spell casters make fort saves against disease or even mass one shot damage. and make them all roll reflex saves against fire damage because it ain't a party until one of the members burns alive.

One of my players favorite encounters was when they came up against one necromancer, 2 apprentices, and a Boston sized horde of zombies. by the end their spells were empty (except for one detect traps which came in handy) the fighters were fatigued and the bard was dead. ("burned to a crisp, that one did. Victory all around," Said Nevits smirking.). the entire time i kept them feeling helpless and when they were all about to die i used the DM power of "insert random plot McGuffen that saves the party here"