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ewoods
2015-01-12, 01:33 PM
First, I'd like to apologize in advance. This is part rant and part request for advice, but mostly just ranting. I've been a DM for twelve years now, but I have to admit, I've never been able to master the art of DMing at higher levels. I don't generally use modules. I like to create my own world for my players that's as detailed as I can make it, and I get nothing but positive feedback from my players about that. But I've noticed that when the players reach a certain level, usually around 12-14, they gain access to spells and in sufficient quantity that it reduces my big, detailed, living world to nothing. That 20-story wizard's tower filled with dangers and wonders alike, with each room carefully planned out? Air walk to the top and passwall right into the lich's chamber. That massive continent with towns to be seen and NPC's to be talked to and adventure to be had across the countryside? Skip it all and teleport everywhere you need to go. The fleet of pirate ships standing between them and the mysterious island they need to get to, with rule summaries for sea-based combat printed out for each of them? Polymorph into water elementals and swim under the whole fleet. And heaven forbid you set up force walls in that tower or sea serpents lurking below the waves because then you're railroading them. It seems that inevitably, my long-term campaigns always reach a point where the players indiscriminately stone-shape through the walls next to any door with a good lock and charm everyone who isn't immediately cooperative and use teleport like they would flight paths in Warcraft. I understand that at some point players reach a level of power that makes hopping on a horse for a weeks-long journey seem downright pedestrian, but how boring would Lord of the Rings have been if Gandalf had merely teleported the whole group right up to Mount Doom and everyone was home safe 20 minutes later? I want my players to feel powerful, but I also want the game to be challenging, and when most challenges can be easily bypassed by a couple of 5th and 6th level spells, our weekly games might as well just be skirmish fights with villains that I just place in front of them and say, "roll initiative."

I mean really, what good is that meticulously-designed maze if the players are going to stand at the entrance thinking about flying over it or going under it or really any way to get through it except actually walking the path? There might as well be no maze at all. And yeah, I can set up a series of elaborate spells and barriers, both RAW and homebrewed, that force them to walk the maze, but I don't like feeling like I'm railroading them and quite frankly, it doesn't feel "realistic" to me. Would the person who constructed the maze really have taken the time to create a permanent wall of force on EVERY wall and permanent anti-magic fields that extend above and below it but somehow not through it? I guess what frustrates me about it is that when I read fantasy literature, stuff like this doesn't happen. You have incredibly powerful characters who stumble upon a maze and are like, "Be on your guard! There are no doubt many dangers in here that might befall us." And then they just start walking. But no, characters are like, "Ok, what if we summon planar ally, have him go get two medium-sized bushes from the forest outside, then put one of the bushes in the bag of holding and have the wizard ethereal jaunt to the other side of the maze, and we'll set the bushes on the ground at the entrance and exit and have the druid transport via plants with the rest of us. Would that work?"

Kalmageddon
2015-01-12, 01:41 PM
Don't play D&D.
Problem solved.

Seriously though, this is just another glaring issue with the unbalanced nature of D&D. Not much you can do if you are not willing to paly along and be as unfair and illogical as possibile, making it so that every dungeon has been planned precisely to counter the PCs, with little exceptions where you want them to have it easy.

YossarianLives
2015-01-12, 01:42 PM
I feel exactly the same way! After a certain level the wonder of adventuring goes way. I would suggest running E6 (3.5/Pathfinder, but you can't advance beyond 6th level but you keep gaining feats.) Another idea would be to run low-magic campaigns where full casters don't exist or are very, very, rare.

Honest Tiefling
2015-01-12, 01:49 PM
If you like DnD, houserule it. Explain the issue to your players (They might think themselves very clever to have thought of these tricks and assumed this is what you had intended), so they get where you are coming from.

Using classes with a limited spell list such as the Dread Necromancer and the Beguiler might help. Create a modest list of spells that are fine, and adding as people suggest some more that seem reasonable might also work. And find a system to reduce the magical items that works for you. Heck, I've suggested banning all level 7+ spells and just handing out the spell slots to be used for lower level spells before.

However, I must ask...What play style do your players have? I do have to wonder if they think this is what is expected of them, or if they like the smash-n-grab approach. They might just also see that tower as a puzzle they have solved with Air Walk. But I do not think you will get anywhere without speaking to them of the problem and seeing what their thoughts are.

Palegreenpants
2015-01-12, 02:13 PM
Oh, high-level magic. My greatest foe; we meet again.

I'd recommend cutting out all spells that allow the players to travel/teleport/transform.

Forrestfire
2015-01-12, 02:19 PM
Honestly? I think the main issue here is a conflict between your expectations of the game and what the game actually is. At that point in D&D, the game is no longer the fantasy literature you've read, it's something on a much higher scale, more similar to a superhero story than anything else. By the time the party can teleport across the continent, the game isn't about helping random small towns they come across on their walk. They're legends, and it's probable that the town in trouble has sent someone their way to entreat their help. In the tower example, why did the lich have a tower that could be entered that way? He's smart too, and flying magic is simple, so it seems like it'd be fairly obvious to have defenses against it. In the pirate example, that's likely an issue of, again, conflict in expectations. By the time a party can polymorph themselves into elementals for a long duration, pirate ships without spellcasters of their own aren't a threat, and more of just an obstacle to avoid or turn into a speedbump.

I feel like the solution here is to up your game. Instead of having a lich in a tower, have a lich in a flying fortress with entrances on all sides and defenses in place for many contingencies.

Rather than a continent of plot hooks being bypassed by a teleport, keep the plotlines running (and give updates as needed). When an army of zombies emerges from the North and the party wonders where they came from, they can look at the signs that had shown up of some other story happening at the same time as their own.

Instead of a fleet of pirate ships that can be avoided by going underwater, why not have mage-powered, cephalopod-shaped submarines threatening the party?

Instead of a simple maze that can be flown over, the maze is something with Escherian geometries, that extends in all directions and hurts to look at from the outside. Only at the center is the macguffin they seek, and while there are many possible ways of bypassing parts and going into it, all of them eventually lead to the maze... Unless they manage something exceedingly clever, in which case, awesome!

(The other option is to find a game with different expectations than D&D. You're trying to fit high-level play's wibbly-wobbly-ball peg into low-level play's round hole. It doesn't, unless you force it to. Also, talk to your players and raise these concerns, they might agree with you on it.)

Red Fel
2015-01-12, 02:20 PM
This issue is common to games like D&D. At higher levels, everything turns into rocket tag; characters with options (read: casters) can basically use them to bypass most obstacles. It's why, in games like D&D, I rarely see a campaign reaching high levels, and personally avoid epic level games.

I see five options you can use to compensate for this issue: DM Fiat. Tell the player they can't do that, for whatever reason you have. My advice, don't do this - I personally loathe it. I like rewarding player creativity, even if it jerks around with my carefully-laid plans. OOC Conversation. Sit the players down before the game, and request that they try to follow the plot you've put together, rather than using spells and smarts to bypass it. I rather dislike this one too, because it's a softer version of the first - you're asking the players to play the game your way, rather than theirs. Don't play D&D, or games like it. As suggested by others. This is a problem more for games like D&D, which suffer from a magical arms race at higher levels, than some other games. It becomes a non-issue when you depart from games that allow Wizards to create their own time-slowed private demiplanes and emerge from them seconds (but years in relative time) later with an army of construct minions. Play D&D, but with changes. E6 is a popular suggestion, in part because of this reason - the magical arms race doesn't happen, because characters cap at level 6. Adventures can still be epic and challenging, but the PCs are no longer reconfiguring reality to suit their whims. Alternatively, as others have suggested, remove/ban those spells which break the game. Deal with it. This is the biggest, best piece of advice I have. Look, whether you're playing D&D, D&D E6, or GURPS, the players will inevitably come up with some ludicrous destructive asinine creative ways to come at your plot. You can vent about it, but at the end of the day, it's going to happen. And a great DM learns to deal with the fact that occasionally, rather than finding the seven keys that unlock the magically sealed door to the ancient temple, the PCs are going to blow the wall open with alchemically-crafted C4.
Most importantly, be upfront with your players when this sort of thing happens. Even if you don't ask them to change their playstyle - and I'd advise you not to ask them that - it's important to keep them advised of what's working for you, just as they should keep you advised of what's working for them. Clear communication helps to ensure that everyone at the table has fun, and that you don't suffer DM burnout and the crippling, all-consuming resentment that comes of giving hours of your life and your labor to these miserable ingrates, only to have them use a few well-placed teleport spells and completely bypass what would have been the greatest combat scene of their pathetic little gaming lives.

Try not to be bitter about it, is all I'm saying.

SimonMoon6
2015-01-12, 02:41 PM
It's a matter of changing your expectations for what an adventure can be.

Instead of some slow slog through the sewers with one wearying encounter with a single rat after another, none of which has any relevance to any plot of any sort...

... instead of that boring slow crawl through a dungeon where you meticulously outline how you plan to search each 10' square area of a 500 foot long corridor...

... instead of all the tedious stuff...

... you get to the good stuff immediately! Yay!

We have to fight the bad guy? Let's go to the bad guy! Now we fight him. Yay! That was fun!

You get all the excitement without all the slow stuff. It's like not having to eat your spinach to get your dessert: you get your dessert immediately. Instead of having to wait 364 days, every day can be Christmas. Every session is fun and interesting!

jedipotter
2015-01-12, 03:07 PM
Once you get past 10th level, the power level in D&D gets vague. D&D is made with the glimmer of the idea of balance at all levels, but it's not exactly spelled out well. D&D has a lot of focus on low levels and how weak and mundane the world should be. But once you get to higher levels, it gets vague and silent.

The first big problem is the ''group of adventurers'' idea. The idea works great at any level under 10th. With the classic ''adventurers that live in taverns and fight random monsters and evil plots.'' But starting at 11th level or so, a characters power level is a big high for ''living like a bum''. And this is where D&D gets vague, it kinda says a character should do ''something'', but still ''go on random adventures like they were 1st level''.

Classic D&D had the best system: 1-3 dungeon adventures, 4-10 wilderness adventures, 11-20 domain adventures, and 20-25 Epic adventures. So a 12th level character was more made to be a ruler of a small kingdom, not some ''bum'' adventurer. And there were plenty of rules, but AD&D and 3E never had this.

Next, for high level you can't have ''basic'' adventures, they need to be more hard and complex.

Then you need to up the ''bad guys'' from ''a human with a sword'' to a ''demon prince''.

And finally you need to make the world more fantastic. So you don't have a world were people ''just lock their doors'', but more like ''they take there house out of phase to another plane''. Though this is tricky if you have a gritty world with like ''wood doors'', it's hard to suddenly bump up to triple force annihilation fields.

And lastly, fixing all the things about D&D magic is a big plus.

veti
2015-01-12, 03:31 PM
Conventional dungeons/scenarios don't work with high-level targets parties. This is true. But then why is your lich sitting passively at the top of a tower where any old mid-level wizard can just wind-walk up and nuke him? Liches are supposed to be intelligent! At most he'd have a decoy up there, surrounded by explosives, runes, explosive runes, symbols, sigils and curses, culminating in an Anti-Magic Shell that kicks in at the same moment as the 30 barrels of gunpowder go off.

You can try editing the spell lists, but my experience is that you'd need to edit them quite brutally before you could really put a dent in this issue. There are lots of houserule approaches you could take - cooldown periods after spellcasting, limits on shapechanging and summoning - but they're all quite a lot of work, and your players will probably whine if you try to introduce them mid-game.

At that level, I suggest:

The party should by now have acquired a reasonable list of enemies. Do whatever it takes to beef them up, then they'll come hunting them. Don't be afraid to kill them; don't even be afraid to kill some of them for real, permanently. There needs to be fear.
Remember that high-level enemies have access to the same spell lists as the party. Sauce for the goose, etc.
If the players haven't taken the trouble to build a network of support contacts/friendly powerful NPCs, then they should start to feel distinctly... hunted. Find themselves looking at the map and realising that anywhere they can teleport to, so can their enemies. Put them on the defensive: that's always harder than taking the initiative.
If the players do have such a network of friends, then you can target the network instead of the players. Think of the Operative in Serenity: "leave your quarry no ground to go to". Again, that will force the players onto the defensive, but on someone else's behalf rather than their own, which is even harder.
Taking precautions against certain tactics isn't railroading. Railroading is when you have one specific (set of) resolutions in mind, and you reactively block off all others as the players come up with them. But if you've thought it through and put in obstacles in advance, without knowing what tactics the players would come up with, that's just sensible defensive planning.

OK, I don't know if those would be any help, or if you were really looking for suggestions at all. But anyway... that's how I'd try to address it. Meanwhile, serious suggestion - consider playing some other game system, maybe one where PCs don't get to become demigods.

Xelbiuj
2015-01-12, 04:39 PM
Don't give them time to recover spells.
Abuse any tricks they choose to abuse
Countermeasures against the obvious stuff, next time they go through a wall they shouldn't someone needs to die. Don't let them 'cheat' comfortably.
Nonstandard building materials. Can't stoneshape through coral.
Send their asses to other planes, make sure simple survival and travel require a decent amount of spell slots alone.

Finally, ask them wtf they are doing.
Are they trying to win or have a fun game? If they cry about any of the above, tell them to stop meta gaming.

aspekt
2015-01-12, 05:06 PM
Don't let them level so fast.

ewoods
2015-01-12, 05:14 PM
Thanks for all the suggestions, and for letting me vent a bit. I've played campaigns before where I outright banned teleport. It's just that there's so many that break that "spirit of adventure" that it's not something I like doing. I think a talk with my players might be best.

To add to the discussion, I agree that traditional dungeon crawls and random adventures picked up by random NPC's in random towns aren't really that interesting to PC's who have the power to be fighting high-level enemies. But not everything they encounter can be some powerful villain that's been hunting them, can it? In theory, people of their power level are rare. There aren't hundreds of liches and evil clerics roaming the world hunting high-levels good-guys, or random dragons terrorizing towns all over the places, are there? What do the PC's do between saving the world?

Deophaun
2015-01-12, 05:53 PM
I understand that at some point players reach a level of power that makes hopping on a horse for a weeks-long journey seem downright pedestrian, but how boring would Lord of the Rings have been if Gandalf had merely teleported the whole group right up to Mount Doom and everyone was home safe 20 minutes later?
Or if he had giant eagles that could do it...

The problem seems to me that you're throwing mundane scenarios at epic characters. Why is the lich in a tower? And at the top of it, the most obvious spot, as well? Instead, the top of the tower contains a [insert horrific pet here], and their real target is somewhere else. Make them work to figure out where the lich is. Puzzle it out. Why does your maze rely on walls to keep the party confined? Use non-euclidean geometry and portals to other planes to make passwall irrelevant. Why are the pirates out in the middle of nowhere anyway? Is it just to stop them? Boring! They need an objective that they can actively achieve if the party doesn't stop them. What are the consequences for leaving that fleet intact?

NichG
2015-01-12, 06:01 PM
As was pointed out, high level is best approached as if it were a completely different game. You can't really upgrade low level plotlines into high level ones without it coming off as cheesy, e.g. the Wall of Force dungeon where each room is its own demiplane or the world where every week the PCs are fighting the world-ending-threat of the day and you're forced to ask 'where were these things when they were level 4?'.

IMO, if you want a campaign to eventually be high level, its better to start running the entire thing as if it were high level even when the PCs are not yet. Establish from the very start what things the PCs will want to be able to do but can't yet do because they don't have the ability, rather than finding out too late that they have too much ability for the things you've planned to be relevant anymore. E.g. don't have the game start in the standard fantasy world and move to Sigil, start the game in Sigil and have the PCs risk being overmatched at every turn if they catch the wrong person's attention. Then when they have the power to throw that off, it's going to feel really liberating, and they'll have plenty of good ideas for things to do with their powers on their own terms. You won't have to throw a new super-enemy at them every week, because that stage of the campaign will be all about going after the super-enemies they've been collecting up until then.

At high level you can, and should, also use just fundamentally different kinds of plotlines. Dungeon crawls don't belong in the game anymore past Lv9 or so IMO. So instead of 'hunt down the bad guy in his lair', maybe the PCs have to deal with a simultaneous invasion of three cities each 100 miles apart, by three separate armies all controlled by the same bad guy (something that only becomes reasonable once they have Teleport). Or they have to deal with widespread Domination of public officials by a cult of allied vampires (too many people to Protection vs Evil, and the cult/alliance structure means you can't easily just cut off the head). Or they have to deal with magical pollution being created by a red star in the sky and causing newborns to turn into demons. Or they have to deal with the elemental plane of Fire being influenced by a powerful artifact in the hands of one of the princes of elemental evil, causing all flames in the world to corrupt whatever they burn.

The other important thing to remember about high level play is that you need to have failure modes other than death, because death is a speedbump. If the party fails to stop the elemental plane of fire from being turned into a new Baator, that's the beginning of something and not the end. To really make this work, you have to get the players attached to your world during the low levels so that 'such and such town was destroyed' is something they can relate to rather than just a statistic. If you pull that off, that opens up the ability to run plotlines that put other things at risk than the PCs (and at high level, its generally the case that the PCs are rarely ever in true personal danger).

But if none of this sounds appealing, then there's really no reason you should feel compelled to deal with higher-level stuff at all. You can run E6 or E8 and avoid most of this, and still have ways for characters to advance so the game doesn't feel too stagnant.

Ceiling_Squid
2015-01-12, 06:08 PM
It's a matter of changing your expectations for what an adventure can be.

Instead of some slow slog through the sewers with one wearying encounter with a single rat after another, none of which has any relevance to any plot of any sort...

... instead of that boring slow crawl through a dungeon where you meticulously outline how you plan to search each 10' square area of a 500 foot long corridor...

... instead of all the tedious stuff...

... you get to the good stuff immediately! Yay!

We have to fight the bad guy? Let's go to the bad guy! Now we fight him. Yay! That was fun!

You get all the excitement without all the slow stuff. It's like not having to eat your spinach to get your dessert: you get your dessert immediately. Instead of having to wait 364 days, every day can be Christmas. Every session is fun and interesting!

I guess that's a really admirable attempt to put a positive spin on it, by massively exaggerating the negative aspects of the journey.

Though without the journey, the immediate instant-gratification and repeated jumps to the destination really start to lose their luster, and I say this from the standpoint of both a DM and a player.

I don't think I'd ever have any desire to run high-level DnD, or play in it. Everything feels too trivial.

If I might make suggestions, give the players pro-active opponents who will use the same tactics that they do. It'll be a bit rough, considering that high-level DnD is rocket-slinging, but I suppose the only credible threat would be other high-level casters. A rival Epic-level party (with opposing goals) might spice things up a bit.

...or completely destroy things, depending on your group. Some players don't like the thought of the DM having enemies that use all the cheap tricks and shortcuts that an actual party of players would think up.

Arbane
2015-01-12, 06:25 PM
Are they trying to win or have a fun game? If they cry about any of the above, tell them to stop meta gaming.

It's hard to 'have a fun game' after the TPK. So 'winning' is kinda important. Just sayin'....

dps
2015-01-12, 06:43 PM
To add to the discussion, I agree that traditional dungeon crawls and random adventures picked up by random NPC's in random towns aren't really that interesting to PC's who have the power to be fighting high-level enemies. But not everything they encounter can be some powerful villain that's been hunting them, can it? In theory, people of their power level are rare. There aren't hundreds of liches and evil clerics roaming the world hunting high-levels good-guys, or random dragons terrorizing towns all over the places, are there? What do the PC's do between saving the world?

Yeah, in many ways DnD isn't designed to be played with high-level characters. Early editions actually recommended that after reaching a certain level, PCs more-or-less retire from adventuring, because at that point, they should be running kingdoms such, not going on dungeon crawls.

neonchameleon
2015-01-12, 07:02 PM
First, I'd like to apologize in advance. This is part rant and part request for advice, but mostly just ranting. I've been a DM for twelve years now, but I have to admit, I've never been able to master the art of DMing at higher levels. I don't generally use modules. I like to create my own world for my players that's as detailed as I can make it, and I get nothing but positive feedback from my players about that. But I've noticed that when the players reach a certain level, usually around 12-14, they gain access to spells and in sufficient quantity that it reduces my big, detailed, living world to nothing.

It might help to realise that D&D was designed round about 10 levels and then turning into a domain management game. D&Ds from TSR soft-capped at level 10.

Seriously, running 3.X after level 10 is pushing it past the design parameters. You've nothing to be ashamed of that it's not working up there. And there's a reason E6 (i.e. level capping at level 6) is a popular house rule.

ewoods
2015-01-12, 07:07 PM
This is the first I've heard of E6. Will definitely be looking into that! As a player, I always mapped out my character path to 20 so that I knew what skills and feats to take early on in order to build the type of character I wanted to end up with. It's only just now occurring to me that our campaigns never made it all the way to 20. LOL That DM moved away a while ago so now I'm the one who DM's and I've always kind of thought of it from a player's point of view. I wanted those great abilities that came with the upper levels, so my players want them too. But as a DM, those upper levels are just frustrating. Not that I don't enjoy the game very much. :) I'll have a look at E6. That sounds like something that might work.

Ceiling_Squid
2015-01-12, 07:16 PM
It might help to realise that D&D was designed round about 10 levels and then turning into a domain management game. D&Ds from TSR soft-capped at level 10.

Seriously, running 3.X after level 10 is pushing it past the design parameters. You've nothing to be ashamed of that it's not working up there. And there's a reason E6 (i.e. level capping at level 6) is a popular house rule.

I may have to have a look at E6 myself.

And it does make me sad that WoTC didn't actually integrate the "domain management" aspects from previous editions. Sort of a what-could-have-been, as far as game design is concerned.

gom jabbarwocky
2015-01-12, 10:18 PM
I've learned that running higher-level games can be fun if you do two things;

- Make the players fight for that power. Getting to high-level shouldn't be a given. It can be a war of attrition, a difficult path. There's a reason why high-level characters are rare.
- Once players are capable of wielding that kind of power, allow them to do amazing things. Now they have a massive target on their backs. Every heavy-hitter this side of the planes will want to bump them off to protect their place in the cosmic food chain. This allows an opportunity to exercise your most twisted and illogical fever dreams as enemies for your PCs to fight.

Also, consider that once the PCs are rocking those kinds of abilities to retire the game at that stage. Go out with a bang. The last campaign I ended concluded with the party getting together to collapse all of reality into a single point, allowing them to touch and interact with all places in the multi-verse at once. They then proceeded to blow up the villain's Death Factory of Evil™ with a cosmic punch, smudged the BBEG across the membrane of the universe like a squished insect, and rescue their kidnapped loved ones with a thought. At that point, you just have to say "SOLD. I literally cannot go bigger than that. Last one out, hit the lights."

It worked because when it ended, it tied everything up with a pretty little bow. All the trials that the PCs had to deal with to get here, poof. It's cathartic. There's something about the tone of voice of a player whose PC has struggled with some problem throughout the campaign who gets to that point and asks, "Wait, can I just, like, roll X and that goes away?" and saying, "No. You don't even need to roll."

Just don't let it get old. Unlimited power has diminishing returns, so quit when you're ahead.

Jay R
2015-01-12, 10:45 PM
Your problem is simply that you are still setting up 6th level encounters for 12th level PCs.


That 20-story wizard's tower filled with dangers and wonders alike, with each room carefully planned out? Air walk to the top and passwall right into the lich's chamber.

To be immediately trapped by the lich who used 9th level spells to know when they would arrive and what they would be protected against.


That massive continent with towns to be seen and NPC's to be talked to and adventure to be had across the countryside? Skip it all and teleport everywhere you need to go.

And every NPC of the same level can do the same, and will appear when they're sleeping.


The fleet of pirate ships standing between them and the mysterious island they need to get to, with rule summaries for sea-based combat printed out for each of them? Polymorph into water elementals and swim under the whole fleet.

And face the real water elementals who think they don't belong there.


And heaven forbid you set up force walls in that tower or sea serpents lurking below the waves because then you're railroading them.

It is not railroading to have equal-powered enemies use equal power in equal ways.


It seems that inevitably, my long-term campaigns always reach a point where the players indiscriminately stone-shape through the walls next to any door with a good lock and charm everyone who isn't immediately cooperative and use teleport like they would flight paths in Warcraft.

Which means that walls and locks aren't what stops people on that level. What does? Other people on that level.


I understand that at some point players reach a level of power that makes hopping on a horse for a weeks-long journey seem downright pedestrian, but how boring would Lord of the Rings have been if Gandalf had merely teleported the whole group right up to Mount Doom and everyone was home safe 20 minutes later?

I've seen some people claim the eagles should have taken the Ring in at the start. But there were Nazgul on flying monsters. The eagles could only fly in when the flying Nazgul were busy in a battle.


I want my players to feel powerful, but I also want the game to be challenging, and when most challenges can be easily bypassed by a couple of 5th and 6th level spells, our weekly games might as well just be skirmish fights with villains that I just place in front of them and say, "roll initiative."

Well, yes, most challenges can be easily bypassed at that level. Why would they attack a village of kobolds for their hoard of copper coins and two barkskin potions? Anything big enough that the PCs want it is big enough that somebody just as powerful wants it too.


I mean really, what good is that meticulously-designed maze if the players are going to stand at the entrance thinking about flying over it or going under it or really any way to get through it except actually walking the path?

If the owner is as powerful as they are, there are traps and monsters they cannot bypass. And if they aren't as powerful as the PCs, then they shouldn't have anything the PCs need.


There might as well be no maze at all.

Correct. Challenges for 2nd levels aren't what you offer 13th levels.


And yeah, I can set up a series of elaborate spells and barriers, both RAW and homebrewed, that force them to walk the maze, but I don't like feeling like I'm railroading them and quite frankly, it doesn't feel "realistic" to me. Would the person who constructed the maze really have taken the time to create a permanent wall of force on EVERY wall and permanent anti-magic fields that extend above and below it but somehow not through it?

How do the PCs protect their equipment? Find out by sending some high level party after them. Then have others do the same kinds of things.


I guess what frustrates me about it is that when I read fantasy literature, stuff like this doesn't happen. You have incredibly powerful characters who stumble upon a maze and are like, "Be on your guard! There are no doubt many dangers in here that might befall us." And then they just start walking. But no, characters are like, "Ok, what if we summon planar ally, have him go get two medium-sized bushes from the forest outside, then put one of the bushes in the bag of holding and have the wizard ethereal jaunt to the other side of the maze, and we'll set the bushes on the ground at the entrance and exit and have the druid transport via plants with the rest of us. Would that work?"

I agree that upper level D&D spells are game warping. The solution is to warp your game.

The original D&D assumed that players on that level would clear out some wilderness, build a fief, and start ruling, which would lead to large scale battles. The problem you are dealing with is that your PCs are 12thlevel murderhobos. Why? Do they like sleeping on the ground? And if they are content to do that, why aren't the higher level NPCs with feather beds and full armies stomping on them?

They need to gain responsibilities to match their powers. They need to consider it more important to defend the city from the Lich attacking with an undead army than to go kill some strangers and take their stuff.

How do you make that happen? Give more and more experience points for defending cities and realms than they can get for foraging through wilderness ruins, combined with sending some murderhobos after their stuff.

jedipotter
2015-01-12, 11:56 PM
Thanks for all the suggestions, and for letting me vent a bit. I've played campaigns before where I outright banned teleport. It's just that there's so many that break that "spirit of adventure" that it's not something I like doing. I think a talk with my players might be best.

If you don't want to ban, lots of simple little fixes are easy and really to fix the big problems. Take Teleport. In my game the teleport distance is one mile a level. Scrying is not clear enough to give even a ''viewed once''. Any teleport location must be studied for a whole hour to be valid, as per ''studied carefully''. But if anything is moved, the location becomes ''see causally'' and altering the location is ''seen once''. So clever and paranoid folks can move and change things and make teleports hard. And use the 2E instant death from teleporting wrong...it's a great deterrent.



To add to the discussion, I agree that traditional dungeon crawls and random adventures picked up by random NPC's in random towns aren't really that interesting to PC's who have the power to be fighting high-level enemies. But not everything they encounter can be some powerful villain that's been hunting them, can it?

Well, why not?



In theory, people of their power level are rare. There aren't hundreds of liches and evil clerics roaming the world hunting high-levels good-guys, or random dragons terrorizing towns all over the places, are there? What do the PC's do between saving the world?

This is the trap D&D gets stuck in. Everyone wants the world ''it's a struggle to light a single candle'', but somehow also have dracoliches. It just does not fit that in one house some peasants are eating a single bit of stale bread, but in the next house the wizard is bending time and space like play-do.

So first of, yes....have a 100 liches terrorize the world....heck have 1,000. Have a flight of dragons. If you really need to sell it, have the dragon sneeze and obliterate all the zero level no bodies in the nation. Then build a more powerful world.

And don't forget the planes. Adventures of level 10+ should really be on the planes...not just ''in the woods''.

And between saving the world, the PC's do nothing. You don't even play the characters. Game wise just age them a couple years and then start the next game.

Think of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Avengers saved the world, then broke up. When you have a Captain America or Thor in a movie they are doing big, epic things. On Monday Captain America took out three helicarriers and saved 40 million people. Well, on Tuesday he does not head over to maple street and stop some punks from playing their radio too loud.

Arbane
2015-01-13, 01:00 AM
Think of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Avengers saved the world, then broke up. When you have a Captain America or Thor in a movie they are doing big, epic things. On Monday Captain America took out three helicarriers and saved 40 million people. Well, on Tuesday he does not head over to maple street and stop some punks from playing their radio too loud.

It's worth noting that aside from Villains and Vigilantes, most superhero games don't have them 'levelling up'. They may learn new skills or come up with a new application for their powers, but they don't get "Hey, guys! I just learned to teleport and turn stone to flesh!' like a D&D spellcaster.

As someone mentioned upthread, the bad guys can use the game-breakers just as well as the PCs. That way lies madness and probably a TPK.

Svata
2015-01-13, 03:06 AM
I've seen some people claim the eagles should have taken the Ring in at the start. But there were Nazgul on flying monsters. The eagles could only fly in when the flying Nazgul were busy in a battle.

Yes. That argument annoys me so much. "Giant eagles!" "Yeah, good way to attract Sauron's attention and have the Nazgūl attack. Bad way to sneak into Mordor unnoticed."

Kami2awa
2015-01-13, 07:55 AM
Don't give them time to recover spells.


Seriously, this. Even if it means homebrewing a means to break into Magnificient Mansions (or just ban that spell). Having casters at full power all the time renders limited spell slots pointless - you might as well have unlimited casting.

Arbane
2015-01-13, 12:50 PM
Seriously, this. Even if it means homebrewing a means to break into Magnificient Mansions (or just ban that spell). Having casters at full power all the time renders limited spell slots pointless - you might as well have unlimited casting.

Of course the problem then becomes that one too many fights and the wizard goes from 'omnipotent' to 'peasant in bathrobe'.

veti
2015-01-13, 04:02 PM
Seriously, this. Even if it means homebrewing a means to break into Magnificient Mansions (or just ban that spell). Having casters at full power all the time renders limited spell slots pointless - you might as well have unlimited casting.

No homebrew required, just time pressure. Give the players a task that needs to be finished *today*, not "in your own time, whenever you can spare time in your busy schedule." Rest to regain or change spell slots? No time! You'll have to go with whatever you've got, and pace yourself because that's all there is.

It's simple, realistic, immersive, and it seriously gimps the wizard who's accustomed to a more videogame play style.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-14, 12:31 PM
It's hard to 'have a fun game' after the TPK. So 'winning' is kinda important. Just sayin'.... Only if "losing" means "death." It doesn't have to, and generally shouldn't.

I'm with a lot of people here who talk in terms of changing expectations. If the characters trivialize your challenges, make different challenges. If you're not sure how, ask the players. Find out what sorts of things would both challenge them and be interesting to them. If they're honest and cooperative (and why wouldn't they be, since they're being asked to improve their own game) you can get to where you're designing adventures that don't merely counter high-level capabilities but require them for success. I could see a group who would find it fun to have to spend a lot of their best spell slots (or other powerful resources) just on a multi-dimensional chase-scene, culminating in a fight using their lower-level abilities.

Theoretically, this could also help balance spellcasters against non-spellcasters in combat, in editions where they're not already balanced.

LunLun
2015-01-16, 05:30 AM
I total agree with Beta Centauri. I've DM'd a few epic campaigns and the campaign I am currently running I really stopped my heavy planning when the characters were 10th level and destroyed the tomb of horrors. One of the wizards lost their gear to a trap that took all their gear to the lich's treasure room. She proceeded to use locate object to point the way to her gear for the druid to use transmute rock to mud. They burrowed through the Tomb of Horrors. Almost all traps and encounters bypassed. They got to the one mithral wall and the rogue used her adamantine battle axe to chop down the wall. This was at 10th level. After that I basically just started winging it and mostly going with story and mental challenges, like puzzles and riddles. Once the players hit 16th level I started treating them like super heroes. They started protecting towns from the forces of the tyrannical dragon king. In the end the players like it and we all have fun. Like in the battle at Helm's Deep, Legolas using Manyshot while shield surfing down stairs or later when he takes down an Oliphant. You just have to go with the epicness.

In the Epic campaign before this the wizard took advantage of the conjure seed and made a spell that conjured raw platinum and another that made a giant chunk of diamond. Somebody asked him what it cost to create that spell and he just laughed. he ended up having a diamond/platinum tower that could be seen miles away. It was awesome.