Basic challenges / high level players

[Daddison]

Playgrounders,

I'm looking for some suggestions on how to make basic actions more challenging for high level players. By that I mean things like searching for hidden doors, disarming traps, intimidation, etc.

I know that I can jack up the DC on traps - but what if the 13th level rogue takes 20?

Any ideas?

[SilverLeaf167]

Well, just to nitpick, you can't Take 20 on disarming traps, because a failure (which Take 20 gives you multiple of) generally triggers them. Taking 20 works the exact same at all levels though - the PCs just have higher bonuses - so I'm not sure what your issue with it was...?

To start off, I'm going to be "that guy" (since others probably will anyway, and I'll try to be nicer about it): it might be wise to adjust your expectations for what a high-level adventure actually entails. You can still have things like traps, but you should try to make them as impressive as possible to give the actual feel of high-level play and justify the higher DC. If the exact same things have different DCs depending on the party's level (i.e. the same swinging blade is harder to find and does more damage for no logical reason), they might end up wondering why they're high-level to begin with if they don't get to feel like it. Instead of a swinging blade, a trap that for example activates a series of environmental hazards and summons a threatening enemy feels much more interesting (and is better gameplay in general, but maybe I just don't like normal traps that much).

Speaking of environmental hazards, they're a good way to make otherwise simple challenges a bit more interesting and difficult by adding distractions, time constraints and most importantly things for everyone else to do while the Rogue rolls some dice.

Also, keep in mind that high-level parties with any amount of magic can simply bypass a lot of mundane obstacles, whatever the DC. Knock, Fly and Dimension Door are some classic examples that can trivialize a lot of challenges. The party might not have these abilities, or you might just be heavy-handed and ban them, but the best way is to just take them into account and plan around them (while still allowing them to be useful at some point).

Other than that, all you need to do in order to raise a DC is... raise a DC. You're the DM. The harder part is justifying it in-character and making it interesting out-of-character.

[Eldariel]

Playgrounders,

I'm looking for some suggestions on how to make basic actions more challenging for high level players. By that I mean things like searching for hidden doors, disarming traps, intimidation, etc.

I know that I can jack up the DC on traps - but what if the 13th level rogue takes 20?

Any ideas?

Well, first of all, make sure the encounters are relevant for the party. On these levels, party can cast Scrying on the target they're going for, Teleport to it and Teleport out without giving a rat about hallway Traps, skill checks or anything of the sort. And it's okay! It's okay for them to enter places that are no threat to them and they can just walk through! They're really powerful, it feels good to realize that. Just, don't expect for those places to be challenges - when you do present challenges, think of things that are relevant to what they are capable of. Note, Rogues, Fighters and the like only improve in numbers; they become really good at one thing.

The real gamechanger are spells though; with Teleport there's no need for overland travel to get to places. With Plane Shift there's no need for portals either. With divinations, there's no need to go see things for yourself - you can come prepared. And with the various Binding/Summon/etc. spells you don't need to go there yourself period. You can just delegate the simpler tasks and focus on the more threatening circumstances.


Back to traps for a moment: they are completely dependent on the context. A level 13 Rogue taking 20 should easily find all the traps in a vacuum. However, that takes about forever; taking 20 takes about 20 rounds or 2 minutes for each 5'/5' square. So to search a...say 100' long 5' wide pathway and all the adjacent walls, that would take 2 hours just to clear the pathway. However, he can just take 10 and probably be just fine in 20th of the time or 60 rounds/6 minutes.

That's just traps in vacuum though. What if there's a combat encounter and a trap? Say, a perennial favourite, a resetting negative energy burst trap in a chamber guarded by the Undead (or elemental trap in a room with creatures that absorb that element - say, electricity + Shambling Mounds)? All the creatures get constantly healed while the party gets damaged and since it's a combat scenario, the time it takes to disarm the traps has a very real cost to it, though it's possible (but there's no taking 10 without skill mastery).

Another typical way for traps to be relevant is that they interact with something else or are not simply disarmable. The trap can be complex - perhaps it needs some action (e.g. a codeword, answer to a riddle, proper passage or whatever) in lieu of the disarm check to bypass. Perhaps the primary mechanism is elsewhere and there are tons of triggers and disabling one would trigger another - perhaps the only way to properly disable it is to disable multiples simultaneously or to bypass it entirely.

But again, don't worry about the Rogue being good at disarming traps! That's his thing - it's okay for him to be good at it. There can be things like time limits - perhaps a dungeon is warded against spell-based travel (ancient temples and such can easily support Forbiddance for instance) and it might be that as soon as magic detects the presence of living things, it begins a trial. Or perhaps just another power is going for the same item or whatever that the party is and thus they're on a schedule. In general, most campaigns should have things happening on a schedule of which the party has reasonable means to be at least somewhat ever; this forces the party to figure out how to best allocate their time. Taking the time to search every inch of a dungeon is not necessarily a good way to use time, which in turn makes e.g. traps more likely to matter and be dangerous (but again, it tends to come back to spells being able to accomplish these things and thus you should let the Rogue be useful with disarming traps and perhaps bypassing the trigger mechanism for the destruction of said artifact or whatever).


Mostly, they're a level 13 party. Basic challenges are not challenges. That's the whole point. Basic challenges are for a level ~1-5 party. Calibrate your expectations. High level enemy spellcasters and active organizations, planar creatures and such are a better challenge on average for a high level party.

[Segev]

The primary advice you're likely to get here is: don't.

The reason for this is that trying to do that not only feels like an unsatisfying treadmill - no matter how much you level, you're never actually more capable - but becomes futile as new abilities make bypassing these kinds of challenges entirely more and more doable. You'll only frustrate yourself.

Instead, consider their abilities, and look to build challenges which need abilities like those to solve them.

Let the rogue cakewalk past locks and find most of the traps. Or all of them, if he's really careful and takes 20. Or is just that good.

Instead, think about how a dungeon's designer would have built his dungeon to protect it against threats like the party represents. Perhaps he's a red dragon, so he has locked passages which only open when the fire trap goes off. Disabling it prevents the heat-sensitive mechanism from unlatching. The dragon doesn't care if he's bathed in fire, but knows that most intruders will.

Secret doors can still be a thing they find, but use them more for flavor. The real things that you want them to have to work for involve using teleportation or wall-ignoring abilities. Maybe the villain is a vampire who can mist-form into the secret chamber; it takes the rogue a very hard Escape Artist check to wriggle through, or the barbarian needs to break down the wall, or the wizard needs to teleport or shrink people or something.

Don't worry about making Climb DCs "hard enough." If the rogue can make them, more power to him; let him use that as a means of 3D movement while the wizard is flying around and the fighter is shooting with a bow (or riding a flying mount).

In short, rethink the paradigm of your encounters and dungeon design. Your goal should be to validate and make use of the higher-level PCs' abilities, not to keep the old paradigm viable against them.

[Flickerdart]

Your "basic actions" are just skill checks: Search, Disable Device, Intimidate. Raise the DC in various ways and you're golden. Just know that having to get a 50 instead of a 20 doesn't actually make the game any more fun.

[icefractal]

By this point, doors are pretty easy to bypass, so the major players won't be using just doors for serious stuff. Instead they might use a keyed portal that leads to a location which is protected from scrying. If you teleport/phase-door past the portal, you're just in a wall, there is no other side locally. If you smash the portal - ok, you still don't know where it led to. So you need to unlock or subvert it. Or capture someone who's been to the other side so you can interrogate them for the real location.

That should be for people who have the resources, obviously. Don't give some random bandits a bunch of portals. :smalltongue:


Intimidate has a larger problem. Like Diplomacy, it's a skill check (which there are tons of ways to boost and scales fast) against something that doesn't scale as well. So after a certain point, if you stick to RAW, almost anyone can be Intimidated very easily. There are three solutions I can think of:
1) Everyone who expects to be taken seriously acquires immunity to fear and therefore immunity to Intimidate.
2) Make it opposed by a skill check, perhaps defender's choice of Intimidate or Sense Motive. Those skills then become somewhat mandatory, as with #1, but it's less binary at least.
3) Change it to something that doesn't scale arbitrarily high, like you only get to use Intimidate Ranks + Cha + Skill Focus, no other modifiers, final destination.

[Daddison]

Thanks everyone.