Setting Goalposts: Designing High Level Adventures

[virgil]

There has been a lot derision of the 'mundane' and the Charles Atlas, for not being able to compete in a high level environment without the average player disapproving of the effect. There are even retards (Mistborn) who place limits on what is ultimately an arbitrary power source. However, being able to compete in the high level environment only matters if you have a high level environment. While obvious as a requirement, the actual execution is lacking.

There is a plethora of stories set around high-level activities, even fantasy settings (forget the guy saying Sandman wasn't fantasy). Very few of them have actual games with rules built around them, and those that do rely on a very rules-lite approach to the system. There isn't much thought given to these systems, namely because you might as well have a story corner to describe what happens for all the relevance it holds to you. This isn't a bad thing, but shared discussion is difficult, hence why this forum focuses on the systems with a more robust rules set. Just about the only non-supers rules-heavy system that doesn't svck all the horse cock; which enables high level play, is D&D. Feel free to correct me on this assessment.

Given such, it has been noted by numerous people here that D&D adventures svck, with a double heaping of low-pressure zoning for high-level adventures. I ask you this, are there any good high-level adventures for D&D, or gaming in general? Besides examples, how do you make them? There is more to high level escapades than how big the orc is, as larying GTFO tags and it's arbitrary 'threat' to the setting is a boring treadmill akin to World of Warcraft and Dragonball Z. Players need challenges and solutions to be on the same scale they are.

Are there features to D&D that prohibit enjoyable adventures in the mid-to-upper teens, besides the ineptness of the monk (and equivalent)? Are there solutions to address these hurdles that are not on the scale of writing a brand new Monster Manual?

[Mistborn]

Well that was only barely coherent you hideous cock. The key for adventures not to suck is for them to be built around the abilities that the PCs have. The most Important part of that is to recognize when characters outgrow thing. The DM should not be running is LotR fanfic on PCs 9th level or higher. One the other hand those PC would fit just fine into the DMs WoT fanfic.

[Foxwarrior]

Hmm, LotR fanfic for a party of Wizard-balance, level 15 PCs: The Ring is going to be thrown into Mount Doom in five days, and there's nothing you can do about it (for some good reason, maybe Sauron can keep you out of Mordor and you actually want Sauron dead). When the ring is destroyed, you will all lose your powers. You want your precious Haradwaith family members to successfully conquer middle earth: in those five days, slaughter and disrupt the necessary rulers and armies.

It's like a relay race of mass death and destruction. No dangerous opponents to worry about, though.

[fectin]

You might want to identify high-level stories first. To get you started: Tales of the Black Company; half the things Zelazny wrote (Amber, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light, Madwand, etc.); Watchmen; A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court; Wheel of Time.

Within that though, "high-level" adventures tend to actually just be political.

[Ancient History]

There are two main parts of high-level adventures: aligning the personal goals of the players with the goal of the adventure, and designing the adventure so that it is challenging for the player characters. In this, things are not considerably different from low-level adventures, it only requires a bit more planning.

For the first part, you need your players to give a shit. If your PCs do not give a shit, then Gandalf roasts the Hobbits and sees if they're good eating. Because power corrupts. So you have to have a relatively clear motivation for the PCs - this could be an element of the PCs' backstory ("If you don't destroy the ring, the Shire is doomed!"), or a direct threat to them and what they want ("If you don't kill the Anti-Monitor, it'll start draining your powers!"), or even a really big carrot ("It is the most splendiferous BFS in existence. With it, you will be supreme!"). Often a combination works well, sort of push-pulling, but it works best when you and the players can work together to find a reason for them to give a shit.

For the second part, the issue is a little more difficult than just throwing appropriate CR monsters in the way. You have to consider he resources available to the PCs, their fuck-you abilities (flight, teleportation, dimension-hopping, etc.), and any particular weaknesses. Worse, at high levels PC abilities are not equal - so maybe the Flash can run across water, Superman can fly on his own, while Batman and Wonder Woman take their respective aircraft. They can achieve the same basic thing, but in different ways and degrees of difficulty. So for a high-level D&D party, traveling to Mordor is one gate or teleport without error away unless phlebetonium intervenes; that's not a challenge, that's a cakewalk or an artificial barrier designed to make you do shit you stopped needing to do a dozen levels ago.

There is a common misconception that high-level adventures have to be epic sociopolitical dramas. This is a mistake. While it is not to say that the kingdom/country/universe is at stake, in practice most players and gamemasters are not set up to wade into a minefield of NPCs, politics, culture, etc. when they have the personal ability to kill everyone and take their stuff. Many of the most basic adventure ideas work surprisingly well at higher levels, once the appropriate considerations are made.

For example, the player characters are the demigod-like masters of a tribe of hunter-gatherer humans who have banded together to steal the secret of immortality from the gods, which is kept on their home plane of Nogard next to the Eternal Fire. This establishes a clear goal (Nogard), incentive (immortality), appropriate peril (Gods), and context (humans). By coercing the PCs to travel away from their familiar and established powerbase (although some high-level PCs can take it with them), in hostile territory where not all of their powers will work, and which is relatively difficult to get to in the first place, the PCs are placed on a proper adventurer footing and will soon be traipsing around the heavens. Sounds like fun.

[OgreBattle]

Isn't High Level D&D entirely an accident of the designers not actually understanding what effect Wizard/Cleric lvl9 spells will do? It's pretty fair to say that lvl 20 D&D casters are beyond the scope of any "high powered adventure" setting that exists in myth and fiction outside of... D&D.

a boring treadmill akin to World of Warcraft and Dragonball Z

Namek exploding was an iconic moment. Buu turning people into candy was awesome and terrifying.

Dragon Ball's got its power tiers that feel quite distinct.

[Avoraciopoctules]

For example, the player characters are the demigod-like masters of a tribe of hunter-gatherer humans who have banded together to steal the secret of immortality from the gods, which is kept on their home plane of Nogard next to the Eternal Fire. This establishes a clear goal (Nogard), incentive (immortality), appropriate peril (Gods), and context (humans). By coercing the PCs to travel away from their familiar and established powerbase (although some high-level PCs can take it with them), in hostile territory where not all of their powers will work, and which is relatively difficult to get to in the first place, the PCs are placed on a proper adventurer footing and will soon be traipsing around the heavens. Sounds like fun.

Consider this plot stolen.
EDIT: though maybe a little more Chinese-flavored when it actually gets implemented.

[Mistborn]

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.

[nockermensch]

There is a common misconception that high-level adventures have to be epic sociopolitical dramas. This is a mistake. While it is not to say that the kingdom/country/universe is at stake, in practice most players and gamemasters are not set up to wade into a minefield of NPCs, politics, culture, etc. when they have the personal ability to kill everyone and take their stuff. Many of the most basic adventure ideas work surprisingly well at higher levels, once the appropriate considerations are made.

In my experience, high level adventures pretty much have to be epic sociopolitical dramas, because by say, lvl 13, a lot of the things that consist on a "traditional" adventure (travel, exploration, infiltration, research, mook fights) can get entirely bypassed. The way this is classically "fixed" is by taking away the PCs abilities, and I think this is in really bad taste. There are lots of high level TSR modules that cheat horribly, pulling an essentially level 3 adventure on you with the excuse that your magic/items don't work here!

So if you want the PCs with their usual abilities and you want something that could hold a narrative through many games, you need opposing NPCs. And you need the main opposition strong enough that the PCs figure that simply teleporting in, weapons in hand would result in a TPK. Which means that the game plan now is mostly about gaining allies / forging gear / maneuvering the situation so that the party has a good chance to win.

The alternatives are running PVE in epic scale (an age of fire is coming, threatening to consume the world on flames. Find a way to reverse this, or a place to evacuate the world's populations) or the Epic Handbook's silly options, where level 20+ people just adventure in level 20+ dungeons.

[BearsAreBrown]

For example, the player characters are the demigod-like masters of a tribe of hunter-gatherer humans who have banded together to steal the secret of immortality from the gods, which is kept on their home plane of Nogard next to the Eternal Fire. This establishes a clear goal (Nogard), incentive (immortality), appropriate peril (Gods), and context (humans). By coercing the PCs to travel away from their familiar and established powerbase (although some high-level PCs can take it with them), in hostile territory where not all of their powers will work, and which is relatively difficult to get to in the first place, the PCs are placed on a proper adventurer footing and will soon be traipsing around the heavens. Sounds like fun.

How is this not, "Get the MacGuffin from the dungeon!" with a bad costume?

[fectin]

It's pretty fair to say that lvl 20 D&D casters are beyond the scope of any "high powered adventure" setting that exists in myth and fiction outside of... D&D.

Actually, no. There's not a lot of high level fiction, but there is some, and it tends to be quite good. I listed off a bunch of it earlier, and can come up with more if you like.

[virgil]

Well that was a beautifully eloquent piece of literature, you Adonis of a man. The key for your adventurers to smell like Virgil is for them to use Old Spice Bodywash. The most Important part of that is to twice rinse and lather around the PCs. The DM should not listen to my howler monkey screeching about PCs 9th level or higher. On the other hand, those PCs would do just fine if they just pretended to read my MLP/LotR slash-fic so as to shut me up.

Fortunately, I generally DM, so I'll put forth the effort and read your slash-fic. I'm particularly fascinated with how you'll reconcile Pinkie Pie with the BDSM undertones.


Now that that is out of the way. I meant to ask for actual examples. Being all "build around the PCs' abilities" is fvcking self-evident and completely unhelpful. We already know taking away abilities is for the railroading DM, and using situations that require high-level abilities is preferred (corridors just don't exist between rooms now). The questions are how to do it, and what high-level adventures exist that are actually good; specifics were my intention. Just citing fictional sources isn't wholly helpful for a couple reasons; they written by a single author and arrange the results and scenario into a dramatic narrative (not something you can control for a PC), & it's frequently of little use for D&D (the only system that has high-level to a useful degree) because of the difference in rules/expectations. Yes, there's stuff we can use from fiction, but we need to look at specific examples instead of vague "stuff from Amber."

@OgreBattle - The destruction of Namek was a good scenario, and one of the uncommon exceptions to just having the adventure be "fight this guy."

[Avoraciopoctules]

@Virgil

Adventure concept: Tlaloc is a god of rain, agriculture, and disease. He is a total jerk, and has had his church build a set of temple-pyramids to power magical plagues he is sending at a neighboring nation.

The nation hires PCs to warp in with their high-level magic and disable the temples. Each one is a themed dungeon, and when one is disabled, assets will be deployed/moved to better protect the other ones. Speed and stealth mean less chance of overwhelming odds.

[fectin]

Okay, fair.

High level adventure tends to revolve around building a power base, then arranging a coordinated strike on your problem. Usually, you still see at least one asymmetrical advantage that a main character is trying to leverage, often in ways that are hazardous to the asymmetry.

Alternately, it's a gunslinger mystery.

So in WoT, Rand is a Bad Dude. He seizes power pretty early. Then, he spends his time trying not to have his provinces overthrown by plucky adventurersrebels, while dealing with two major threats. Sure, there are some Forsaken mixed in, but they basically don't do anything but posture and break his concentration on the Civ minigame.

Likewise, in Watchmen, Adrian builds power to "attack" a specific problem, while also maneuvering to remove threats. Most of that is not him personally punching dudes in the face.

Lord of Light is literally nothing but a series of that arch-typical high level story at progressively larger scales, formed into an overarching narration.

However, the second Amber series is more of a gunslinger mystery. Merlin is personally a big deal, and only gets stronger. However, he has nowhere to direct that energy, so the whole series is him wandering around, trying to figure out what's going on, and occasionally having shootouts. I'm pretty convinced that's also a usable formula, but it's also less satisfying. Having a plot of "go where your contact tells you, and kill anyone who attacks you" is pretty easy to run, even as a high level adventure, but a bit bland.

So pit your PCs against something that's more of an institution, like the first examples. Let them build an actual power base, periodically send appropriate CR threats to pester them, and eventually let their plan work.

[fectin]

Example adventure: Convert the heathens of Whereverland to the worship of Greg the Less Terrible, God of Not Putting Heads On Spikes. Whereverland is the size and population of New England, and probably has other high level dudes.

[Ancient History]

For example, the player characters are the demigod-like masters of a tribe of hunter-gatherer humans who have banded together to steal the secret of immortality from the gods, which is kept on their home plane of Nogard next to the Eternal Fire. This establishes a clear goal (Nogard), incentive (immortality), appropriate peril (Gods), and context (humans). By coercing the PCs to travel away from their familiar and established powerbase (although some high-level PCs can take it with them), in hostile territory where not all of their powers will work, and which is relatively difficult to get to in the first place, the PCs are placed on a proper adventurer footing and will soon be traipsing around the heavens. Sounds like fun.

How is this not, "Get the MacGuffin from the dungeon!" with a bad costume?

This is part of the point I'm trying to make. A high-level adventure need not be an epic sociopolitical morass, anymore than a low-level adventure need to be about killing rabbits and selling vendor trash. A story is a story, you just need to adapt it to the characters involved.

[Username17]

The idea that high level abilities only exist in D&D is a common piece of apologetics used by the defenders of shitty mundane characters, but it is not true. Every single spell in the AD&D PHB was taken from an actual story. Hell, The Monkey's Paw is about characters having limitless access to wish and a sadistic DM. What makes D&D difficult are the following:

• D&D characters get lots of different powers all at once, rather than just having a signature ability or three like most story characters. While Merlin changes his form and Koshchei cannot be killed by blades and so on and so forth, but these Wizards only do a couple of things in each story, while a D&D Wizard has access to dozens of tricks.
• Many of the wizards in these stories were never intended to be protagonists. Koshchei is a multi-stage boss who can only be killed by finding a series of princesses in different castles and then inventing turducken. Obviously, having a character who can only be defeated by questing to four castles to find a map to the plot point is more acceptable as the BBEG than it is as the protagonist. And yet, D&D routinely hands out such abilities to player character wizards.
• The wizards and the sword heroes that D&D abilities are drawn from source material wise are not remotely on the same power level. Merlin > Arthur, Gandalf > Thorin, and so on. It would be like trying to make Dr. Manhattan and Silk Specter be the same level because they came from the same story. The difference in power levels was a big point of the story being used as inspiration, and if you don't map that difference to the levels in your game, the results are going to be incoherent.

That being said, superhero comics provide as good a blueprint for high level characters having adventures as you are likely to see. The fact that Green Lantern supports several simultaneous monthly comics pretty much puts to rest the idea that stories involving powerful cosmic wizards can't be told.

-Username17

[hogarth]

How is this not, "Get the MacGuffin from the dungeon!" with a bad costume?

Indeed. Every time there's a discussion of epic-level adventures, I see maybe three different categories of suggestions:

• Use epic travelling to go to the epic place and kill the epic guy to get the epic treasure. You can tell it's epic because I used the word epic a lot.
• Use non-epic minions to go places and kill guys while you sit on your fat ass eating bonbons. This isn't actually epic, more like non-epic mass combat.
• Create something amazing. But nobody really knows how to make the process of creating something particularly interesting in an adventure game, other than by tying it in to going places and killing guys. Or maybe just MTP + a few skill rolls.

Did I miss any categories?

[MisterDee]

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.

[BearsAreBrown]

It's also the problem that campaigns tend to be run on MacGuffin plots. You need to collect the Spirit Stones because they're significantly more powerful than you and can be used to Conquer/Immortal/Destroy in ways that you normally wouldn't be able to.

But Super Powerful Dragonballs don't work when your Wizard can already do all that shit.

What does a level 20 Wizard want that he can't get trivially?

[Ancient History]

Hmm. "Mindflayer in a gimp suit" has been done, so I'm stumped.

[RadiantPhoenix]

What does a level 20 Wizard want that he can't get trivially?

Lots of 20th level people to attend his magical tea parties.

[OgreBattle]

The magic tg metqplots for card sets seem like a fun start for high level play.

Phyrexians invade you favorite plane

The Eldrazi are waking up

Babysit this guy witha goatee and airship while another lvl20caster tries to fuck with him

Create a religion and guardian dieties for a planet beset by darkness so they can function without you

Be santa claus, determine all that are naughty or nice and deliver a just gift to all

[Hicks]

Here is an adventure for a 15th level party: the Sultan of Brass reigns over the city of brass with a fiery fist. He personally is a bad ass who commands every Efreeti in the multiverse. How many Efreeti is that? Each layer of each plane in the multiverse is infinite, and there exist planes with an infinite number of layers. You have annoyed him by demanding too many wishes (probably by having Gate or Planer Binding as an SLA at will), and so he has decreed that you may no longer bind Efreeti to get wishes.

Go to the plane of fire, siege the city if brass, and be on the pointy end of 3*infinity^infinity number of wishes every day, until his servants are swayed to crown you the wishmaster of the multiverse instead of just wishing the sultan back on the throne.

My wife and brother made it past the front gate, but got trapped in the (infinity wide) courtyard fighting toward an infinity tall citadel against an infinite number of half-fiend fire giants riding half fiend-pyrohydras with a slightly lesser infinite number of Efreeti commanders bossing them around. They escaped, and I suggested that they try to find some allies in the noble djinn and dao that could use their abilities to tie up and cancel out the infinite wishes of the efreeti.

[tussock]

Go to the Abyss, kill Orcus, take his Wand.

"Encounters" include: a lot of ever-changing anti-wizard notes, 100 Vrock (several times over), a city of liches lead by a council of demi-liches, a Demon Lord (should you kill said God, a city of 100,000 greater demons will all fight you to the death, which is noted as being especially challenging), various top-end unique puzzle-box monsters (some several times over, often with added fuck-you mechanics), a large number of instant-death no-save buttfucks if you are at all incautious (which you can totally steal and use on your enemies), and Orcus with his particularly nasty undead pets who is quite good too.

There's even a super-fast unique dragon who can breathe for 3000 damage, which is quite a big number for 1st edition characters.


Basically, high level modules are about specifically warded sites that prevent local bypass and contain something desirable alongside stuff that can kill you, with no links described unless it's a temporary railroad section (which the outer planes are full of thanks to inherently plot-based geography).