The year was 1995. AD&D 2e was 6 years old and (arguably) getting beaten up by those new White Wolf games. So in an effort to spruce things up a bit, TSR rolled out with a bunch of updated reprints and rulebooks with expanded options. The new stuff was their options line: Player's Option: Combat and Tactics in May, followed rather quickly with Player's Option: Skills and Powers in July, and Dungeon Master Option: High-Level Campaigns in August. In May of 1996 they would release the final book in the series Player's Option: Spells and Magic, which will be notable later on in the review.
This OSSR isn't about those sissy player options, those books that true grognards regard as a perversion of the "One True Way" and that powergamers regard as delicious nutriments. Instead, we're going to look at the second stab that the authors took at dealing with higher level characters in the game to see what they came up with. The first stab was Dragon Kings, and we know how well that one went down. Maybe they learned something in the intervening years, or maybe a different person writing it will matter.
Speaking of the person writing it, there is one design and author credit for DMO:HLC - Skip Williams. Yes, that Skip, the one who helped write a bunch of core 3.0 and brought us a bunch of stealth nerfs in 3.5 (note - don't drink and try to remember history things).
His foreword starts out well enough though. He acknowledges that opinion on high-level play is pretty strongly divided, and then tries to make a case for it. His case happens to involve a ranger he got from 1 to <unknown> level and then turned into an NPC and doesn't seem particularly epic, but that doesn't seem a bad thing for his goal of selling this to people who hate high level games because they're off the rails. But it doesn't have a lot of promise in it for those of us who want high levels to be different from low ones. There's really not much else to say about it, so we'll drink a bit of rum and move along.
Chapter 1 - The Seven Maxims
This chapter starts out by rather helpfully defining "high-level characters" as any character of level 10 or higher. Given the sorts of weird shit that 11th level characters can get up to, that's pretty reasonable as far as I'm concerned. They say that they'll include rules for up to 30 (which might have been nice in the foreword instead of this chapter), and we'll see how well that goes in a while.
Maxim 1 – Don’t depend on the dice
While this could easily be applied to the game in a way that turned everything into a “mother may I” with the MC, that’s not what they’re going for here. Instead they want you to not depend on the dice for the tension that games are supposed to have. Die rolls are way less scary at higher levels, they claim, because you’re less likely to fail the ones you make and enemies are much less likely to succeed at them against you. Combat can turn into a boring slog where the outcome is known pretty well in advance against lower level foes. And if you throw higher level foes at them, players can burn out on the constant peril and maybe opt to retire or start a new game. Boosting opposition also boosts XP and loot gain, which just gives them new stuff and then you need newer and even more powerful enemies to challenge them.
So what do they suggest instead? Doing smarter combats less frequently, giving non-combat encounters, and trying to challenge the player instead of the character. They suggest things like mysteries, puzzles, and complex political struggles, things where the using your powers in new and interesting ways (if you get to use them at all) is the challenge.
This is… actually not terrible advice I think. The part about challenging players instead of characters isn’t great, but it’s an attempt to keep players involved in the game after the nature of the game has changed and the same old shit won’t fly. It’s not perfect advice, but they get points for recognizing that shit is different at that level in the first place.
Maxim 2 – Intelligent adversaries
There’s a few sub-sections in here, and the first is about considering your opponent’s intelligence. The main point is actually said well enough that I’ll just quote it.
They then follow it with sections on minimizing creature weaknesses and maximizing strengths.”DMO:HLC” wrote:An opponent doesn’t have to be brilliant to challenge high-level characters: It has to avoid obvious mistakes.
[*]They work up some trolls with item based fire and acid resistance or are in a cave with natural explosive gasses, to either mitigate their weaknesses or make the PCs pause before trying to exploit them. Then they suggest that the trolls get hasted (moving from 3 to 6 attacks in this edition) or that attack and pull back in waves to allow their regeneration to patch them up. The justification
[*]They work up vampires that hang out in stagnant water, because it’s running water that damages them, and vampires that disguise themselves as vampire hunters to help a village and employ non-detection to prevent magic from finding them out. And keeping a couple of charmed minions around to break mirrors or snatch holy symbols. Then they talk about ways to get more mileage out of their charm gaze to split the party and setting up their home terrain for gaseous form abuse.
They also say that you should have in-world reasons for these sorts of things, like a vampire being smart and having a shit load of time or the trolls being servants of someone else. They also warn you to expect the PCs to want to steal some of your ideas for their own defenses, and that you should let them do it.
Next subsection is an actual discussion about how to handle enemy defeat and withdraws intelligently. While the ideas in the section are pretty useful, it’s a lot of words spent on a fluff section that only barely acknowledges the morale rules actually present in the game. Yes, looters and opportunistic bandits tend to flee at the first sign of difficulty and people defending their homes tend to fight to the last. Thanks for telling me those somewhat obvious things, now how about mechanics to reflect that in the morale rules? The advice they give on the better part of valor is better, but also very telling – it’s almost all options from spells or magic items. They know there’s not a lot of mundane support at these levels.
There’s a bit more at the end about bad guys minimizing their own personal risk and striking targets of opportunity, but there’s nothing really notable in there. The whole maxim basically works out to “stop pulling your punches and start min-maxing your encounters a bit”. And that’s something that should probably be said for games at this level, just in case your MC wasn’t being a power tripping asshat and had been playing nice for the early levels. Looking back at it now, it’s still pretty good advice for this level of play, if not actually decent advice for any level of play with a well prepared group.
Maxim 3 – Controlling magic
... with Gygaxian dickishness and rust monsters! Maybe. We'll get to it in a few days.
