Setting Goalposts: Designing High Level Adventures

[phlapjackage]

Designing high-level D&D adventures is made nearly impossible by the mere existence of the no-limitations full casters. It's not so much that their abilities are too powerful, but that they have too many abilities that allow them to skip (not solve, skip) encounters.

I mean, if you define an adventure as "a series of encounter", then obviously having a selection of powers that allows you to skip all types of encounters makes good adventure design impossible.

I think this only defines railroad-y adventures. "Skipping encounters" only happens when the GM is railroading the players

[nockermensch]

Designing high-level D&D adventures is made nearly impossible by the mere existence of the no-limitations full casters. It's not so much that their abilities are too powerful, but that they have too many abilities that allow them to skip (not solve, skip) encounters.

I mean, if you define an adventure as "a series of encounter", then obviously having a selection of powers that allows you to skip all types of encounters makes good adventure design impossible.

I think this only defines railroad-y adventures. "Skipping encounters" only happens when the GM is railroading the players

Lets talk about the practical use of your GM time, then. Lets say a 17th level adventure is "Entering the 665th layer of abyss and getting a demi-goddess there to fall in love with a Solar." (just killing said demi-goddess is too boring, but works too as the end objective).

So, demons, as they stand, are kind of wimpy. Lets say you decide this demi-goddess's sunken tower is guarded by a number of stated demons. Lets also say that you're going with an underwater/insectoid theme for that layer, so you think adding some templates/customizing some powers would be awesome.

Lets also say that when you imagined this adventure you though on some cool places that you wanted to describe to the PCs: The airs over the black ocean that comprises this layer, full of demonic flies and a few insectoid demonic dragons, the boiling chambers where the damned forever drown, the mess hall for the demi-goddess' armies, and so.

As the GM, How to best use the time you have to prepare for the adventure, knowing that the PCs can with a bit of craftiness to teleport right to the demi-goddess, bypassing the monsters you customized and the special places you wanted to describe?

A very "rail-roady" way to design this adventure is to say that the gates for the inner tower only open with 5 keys, and that each key is one one of the cool locations you imagined. This sucks however, because players by the 17th level should not have to deal with this kind of bullshit collection quest.

A somewhat less rail-roady way is to have the scene with the demi-goddess (the only one you're pretty sure it'll happen) move through all the places/call all the monsters to it. So if the players step right to her, she reacts by gating to the skies above and mounts one of the insectoid dragons. The problem with this approach is that unless you resort to unblockable NPC actions (which are bad taste), her gating can just be counter-spelled.

So I'm actually curious to hear about your suggestions for a situation like this.

[mean_liar]

I'd say better to keep a series of cool places in mind and not try and ram the game through them. Creating reasons to visit those places can be okay if there's not a pressing NEED: a rose so perfect it encapsulates the essence of love, an entity from her past to remind her of what once was, etc... but that's all helpful and not necessary.

As soon as it's necessary, it's a collection quest railroad. Keep it cool, keep it interesting, and any locations you don't use now you use later.

[Caedrus]

One of the thing about high level people often don't get is that the state of being high level is perhaps best defined by your ability to make the world warp around you. That's why I use WoT as an example. High level character command armies when their not destroying them. This is why MCs have a hard time running high levels the PCs having the ability to exert their on the MCs precious world makes them feel small in the pants.

There's more than just insecurity at work here. One problem with greater player agency in a world that the DM has to develop on the fly when players take unpredictable action is that the DM has to develop an increasing amount of stuff on the fly. One of the biggest causes of railroading in a game like D&D is that doing things like writing NPC sheets or drawing maps or juggling loot quotas is a time consuming exercise. If making an encounter takes a minute or thirty, then that's going to affect the amount of pressure for railroading going on.

[phlapjackage]

Lets talk about the practical use of your GM time, then. Lets say a 17th level adventure is "Entering the 665th layer of abyss and getting a demi-goddess there to fall in love with a Solar." (just killing said demi-goddess is too boring, but works too as the end objective).

<snip>

So I'm actually curious to hear about your suggestions for a situation like this.

I used "railroad-y" above with a sort of negative connotation, but I shouldn't have. GM styles vary, and while I would say the ideal GM is the person who can make plans but also adapt like a motherfucker and come up with anything needed on the fly, some of us are not that awesome. As a GM, I know I'm not.

So for the GM (like me) who's not so good at off-the-cuff events, encounters that are pre-scripted and slightly railroady are a harsh reality. But because high level abilities can allow players to skip over these encounters, this doesn't make good adventure design impossible. It just makes it hard, especially hard for those of us who don't yet have the knack for improvisation. And that's ok. High level adventures can be hard to create. But it's not impossible.

As for your example, one thing I don't like is how this adventure is displayed "in a vacuum". Why is this an adventure for the characters? Have they been to the 665th layer of the abyss before? I don't really enjoy the extreme "tactical combat" theorizing for DnD, with it's pokemon-esque "this power against that power".

How do the PCs even know who / where the demi-goddess is?

[Grek]

How do the PCs even know who / where the demi-goddess is?

There's a couple good answers here:

• The PCs (or, at least, one of the PCs) is good buddies with the Solar in question from a previous adventure. And the Solar has met the demigoddess before, learned about her location through the Celestial grapevine and asked the PCs to help.
• Loki tasked them to do it. He says it's for a "hilarious prank" and that they'll be rewarded if they help out. He gave them the details.
• The demigoddess is actually his wife. She fell into the River Lethe during an epic battle on the Abyss and has lost all her memories. The Solar hopes that True Love will restore her to her former self.
• The PCs are working for an Archdemon who wants the demigoddess out of the picture for political reasons. The Solar in question lives on a remote outpost on the Elemental Plane of Fire and will expect her to move in with him. The demon told them where to go and what to do.
• As above, but instead the Archdemon wants the demigoddess's current boyfriend, Edwardo, for himself and is willing to use Soap Opera plots to get the demigoddess to cheat on Edwardo with a Solar so that he can swoop in and pick him up on the rebound.
• The demigoddess is actually the half-sister of one of the PCs, who thinks she really, really needs to get laid and stop snitching on her to Dad. That PC knows where her sister lives because she's her sister.
• They figured it out in a previous adventure, which they took on for one of the above reasons.

[K]

Things that are not worthy of high level:

1. Magguffin hunts. Honestly no reason why this can't be done at any level because Magguffins have no rules.

2. Flavor Treadmills: Getting the Red Sword to kill Red enemies until you need the Blue sword to kill the blue sword until you need the Green Sword to kill the Green enemies.

So basically you can't pretend that your adventure in a cloud castle is not just a reskinning of the Forest Castle. No one buys that AND it severely limits the kinds of stories you can tell.

Things worthy of high level:

1. The power to kill bigger things. Going from a house-sized dragon to a castle-sized dragon. Going from ten orcs to 1,000 orcs. Going from killing mayors to kings.

2. Bigger effect on the setting. Going from saving villages to saving kingdoms from the setting-altering zombie invasion. Ruling a town to ruling a kingdom. Cutting down a forest to corrupting it with dark magic so that it eats enemy armies.

3. More complexity. It's fine to keep your air-combat rules at a certain levels, your plane-altering or empire running at a certain level, your mass combat at a certain level, etc. This means that higher level is defined by a lot more systems.

[phlapjackage]

There's a couple good answers here:

These are all good story ideas. My question (badly put, I don't include enough context in these things), was more along the lines of:

A) if she's a demi-goddess, she should be immune from scrying to some degree, her palace should be teleport-proof, etc. The PCs could try to teleport to an area near the palace or something, but that could raise a lot of alarms if they don't take other precautions. Adventures could be built around whether the PCs try to sneak in, bribe their way in, sabotage the defenses, etc.

B) I'd hope the demi-goddess isn't the same as most NPCs in video games, where they sit in the same spot 24/7/365. So the players can't just "gate in to the throne room" (if that's even possible), because she might not even be there. She might be on the 664th plane visiting a friend. How do the PCs learn her whereabouts? There's whole gobs of story and adventure wrapped up in those details that I wouldn't want to skip over, as a player or GM.

So yes, IF the players have a ton of adventures digging up the demi-goddess's whereabouts and schedule, and maybe have an adventure where they sabotage the teleport-proofness of her palace, then I see no problem letting them gate in to her chambers, "bypassing" guards and whatnot. They just had a huge series of adventures all their own, and hopefully had fun doing it. Then again, they could try kicking in the front door and fighting all takers. Whatever your group enjoys most.

Last time I GM'd (Shadowrun), the players would accept a job from a Johnson and then sit around and talk about it for hours, planning this and discussing if this or that could work. I just took notes on what they were discussing so that I could do some preparation for next session. Seemed to work pretty well.

It's a sad fact of life that areas and encounters you put a lot of time in to as a GM will be immediately skipped by the players, in favor of areas and encounters you did almost no planning for.

[Username17]

Things that are not worthy of high level:

1. Magguffin hunts. Honestly no reason why this can't be done at any level because Magguffins have no rules.

2. Flavor Treadmills: Getting the Red Sword to kill Red enemies until you need the Blue sword to kill the blue sword until you need the Green Sword to kill the Green enemies.

Agreed.

So basically you can't pretend that your adventure in a cloud castle is not just a reskinning of the Forest Castle. No one buys that AND it severely limits the kinds of stories you can tell.

That example is super bullshit. Because the Cloud Castle has obvious differences from the forest castle. Like the lack of an external forest to go make siege engines in and the essentially infinite drops that are around everywhere to the simple fact that you need to fly or teleport long distances to get to any other location. Or the fact that the Cloud Castle involves the aerial combat minigame you talk about being reserved for higher levels below, and the forest castle is effectively two dimensional.

Things worthy of high level:

1. The power to kill bigger things. Going from a house-sized dragon to a castle-sized dragon. Going from ten orcs to 1,000 orcs. Going from killing mayors to kings.

I bolded the mayors and kings because there is absolutely nothing inherent about a mayor or a king that makes killing either be easier or harder. The mayor is a blue enemy, the king is a green enemy. It's exactly the kind of treadmill you were arguing against a moment ago.

Interacting with kingdoms is presumably different from interacting with a village, but the mayor and the king are both just dudes with color coded titles. Either one could be an ogre or a doddering old man.

2. Bigger effect on the setting. Going from saving villages to saving kingdoms from the setting-altering zombie invasion. Ruling a town to ruling a kingdom. Cutting down a forest to corrupting it with dark magic so that it eats enemy armies.

3. More complexity. It's fine to keep your air-combat rules at a certain levels, your plane-altering or empire running at a certain level, your mass combat at a certain level, etc. This means that higher level is defined by a lot more systems.

/agreed.

-Username17