What if they had to fight NPCs who were kind of their mirror images, that could be cool.
Any GM worth his salt has done this at some point, and any player with a modicum of experience has fallen prey to it once - AND THEN NEVER AGAIN.
They can smell the mirror trope coming a mile away, and frankly it's so played out it could never be a challenge except for the most noobish noob.
The big problem with this trope (and one I've run into myself) is that few GMs can run a PC as well as the player.
It all depends on the group in my opinion. I am running City of the Spider Queen now with Pathfinder rules with a plan to "stop the spell plague" after it.
One of the keys to managing my group is to make sure they have a lot of other stuff to consider. For instance they founded a town on the major trade route that runs from the Sword Coast to somewhere around the Zehntil Keep.
Cohorts stay back and look after player assets, and not every resource the character gets goes back to personal power.....it heads into building their influence in the Realms.
This works, when the dungeon crawl seems to be slowing....a problem brews around their home base and now they have to juggle time and resources to accomplish everything.
In reading posts and guides I have noticed that many pcs do not reach level 20. I was wondering what might be the greatest cause of this?
The genre is the greatest cause. The excitement of Pathfinder comes from something like exploring an ancient ruin and casting fiery spells that sizzle all your enemies. Superhero RPGs focus on things like saving the world from an out-of-control robot with a laser built into the center of the moon.
When Pathfinder characters start skipping between planes and slaughtering devil lords in hell, it can still be fun, but the stress on the GM and players is enormous. With the right group of people, it can work. But most people probably like the more realistic-plus-fantasy (sword-and-sorcery) feel you get up until about 15th level.
The GM of a story-based campaign that goes from 1st to 20th level also needs to foresee the endgame complications from the beginning. That can be tough for inexperienced GMs, and even veterans tend to have limited experience running games for 15th-level+ parties.
For these and many reasons listed by others, there's a dearth of super-high-level adventures. If you're interested in experimenting and need some adventures, check out Bastion of Broken Souls (3rd Edition) and Tomb of Horrors (I only know the 1st Edition version) to get an idea of how the masters handled high-level parties.
It's really a shame, I love high level play more than anything, but people seem to avoid it like the plague. Yeah, it takes prep, but it has great returns for fun factor.
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We started playing a campaign at level 15 once, and we all felt that was great fun for us to build characters and play through; I don't think we ever got bored of the power level. It was great.
The campaign was fun too, but did get a bit stale after a certain point. I imagine that's the real reason most of these "gaming group breakups" happen.
There's a problem with tabletop gaming in that there's a bit of an expectation that the group keeps coming back, and inevitably at least 1 person in the group will have just had enough. It's like anything.
I am lucky to be in a group that has played roughly 40 times a year for the last 10 years, that said we started kingmaker Oct 2010 and have not started book 4 yet, level 10 behold the RP.
Same here.. Been playing for 4 years now, and right now they are at level 10.. It's nice, and there are sooo many options to go, that people actually stop caring about "leveling", and just focus on the problems in their Kingdom. I haven't received a "Can we level?" in quite a while :D
I played once a char from level 1 to 40 with 3.5 XD
The important is you have fun.
I agree with all the naysayers here--I tried epic and didn't like it--it all seemed to be about ridiculous mathematical combats. But, is there a thread praising high-level or epic play? Let's say we have a stable group and a tireless GM. What, then, is the attraction of high-level play? What are the possibilities offered that low-level play does not (other than bigger, badder monsters)?
At high-level you aren´t a adventurer anymore. You become a powerful entity in the world. You can raise empires, create cities, start wars...you will solve deep problems of the world, will travel through other planes e etc.
I've yet to play High-Level in a PnP, but it's very attractive to me.
As a comparison, I played through all the Baldur's gate games to get beyond level 20 (they were based on d&d 2e). You basically started of façing ridiculously powerful entities, you can become as gods, etc. Fun, but not necessarily a sustained fun.
On the other hand, as leonardo (and others) have indicated, you can start doing non adventuring stuff: Build a kingdom, a comercial empire, travel to other planes, etc. To me, the high-level NON combat stuff is what's entertaining. If I ever manage to run a high level campaign, I'm pretty sure that I wont be encouraging combat. Just as lower level players shenanigan higher level ones, now everyone will try to do that to them!
Then again, you can only do this with a group that already enjoys RP heavy games. In my case, that's the primary reason I play (because frankly, if I want combat, I'll go play a videogame).
