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Hello there!
I have read around here that high levels are broken. Badly designed.
I can't believe this to be true. Pathfinder has had around 50.000 beta testers! How can be broken an important part of the game like the high levels game? 50.000 beta testers hasn't noticed that? Pretty difficult to believe.
What do you say? Are the high levels broken?
Well, we don't really play high levels much but I've noticed when GMing, that around after lvl 12 the game really starts to go crazier. PCs flying and teleporting around seeing the future and all that stuff. It's gets a bit hard to write the adventures after that. And we like more "realism-like" games so we usually call it a campaign around there.
Pathfinder has had around 50.000 beta testers! How can be broken an important part of the game like the high levels game? 50.000 beta testers hasn't noticed that? Pretty difficult to believe.
One of the primary design goals of Pathfinder was compatability with D&D 3.X.
You can't make a game that is both fully compatible with D&D 3.X (i.e., doesn't bar or seriously nerf any of its base classes) that doesn't come off the rails at high levels. You just can't.
It's not considered that important because 99% of campaigns end at lower levels.
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It is, IMO, a basic flaw of the magic system that causes this. Everything sans-magic scales perfectly fine, but magic scales at a ludicrous rate.
If you want it all to scale at a more normal/expected pace, you have to redesign magic to scale linearly. The only way to do that would be to eliminate the idea that magic can and will do everything, which is something you will never get most people to agree to.
Lazzo's comment, in my mind, points out exactly why the "magic can and will do everything" attitude is the game breaker here.
I haven't DM'd high levels (over 12th) since AD&D. From my experience with 3.X, I'd say that playing high levels requires a very good and very experienced PathMaster. I don't think it's so much of a case of those levels being broken as it is a case of a misconception of what the game actually depicts at those levels.
Personally, I'm more a fan of the first 6 levels of the game (E6). I feel that most epic stories can really be told without the characters advancing much higher than that. See The Alexandrian: Calibrating Your Expectations for why I say this.
All high level games eventualy leave the rules behind. That is a given. Once you cross the threashold where the PC's can teleport without error the game has always been broken. The "warrior classes" eats your face with 350 damage a round, and don't get me started on the sneak attack damage dice.
It is something you get to know, love/hate about dnd. But, as a player, you'll never have to worry about how the level 17 party is going to handle the 45HD dragon. As the GM you know one thing; they'll handle it. Of course, the players will sweat bullets at first, but when the dragon goes down, and loot goes out, any table will cheer, while any good GM will be glad to have run such a classy encounter.
Spellcasting characters and non-spellcasting characters are not playing the same game.
This just gets more noticeable at night levels, but you can see it at 1st level if you try (fighting guys stab people while arcane guys cast illusions and charms for hugely asymmetric power capable of affecting battles and plot).
Owner - D20 Hobbies
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I have read around here that high levels are broken. Badly designed.
What do you say? Are the high levels broken?
I play almost exclusively high levels. Used to be three days a week (12th level, 15th level, and an 18th level game just finished.)
I play high level PFS (10th level character right now and can't wait to play the 12th level arc.)
As for high level broken, I think few people play it. I don't call it broken. But it does take a good GM to challenge the party and you can't always just throw Level+2 CR monsters at the party and hope for a challenge, especially if the party is full of highly optimized PC's. So it comes down to how well the module is written (like not putting Forbiddence zones to block teleporting and/or making it not matter whether or not the PC's can teleport, etc.) and how well the DM is at designing challenging encounters for high level parties. I'd say it is more of an art than a science.
While i do agree with people that the balance tends to tip in favor of the casters at high levels, i wouldnt necesarrily say the game is broken. Iwe recently finished a campaign in which my group reached lvl 14, and besides the fact that CR equal monsters at that level is down to about a hand full, i dont think the system as such is broken.
I think most of the reason people dislike these games, and why they probably dont work for many gaming groups, is that making encounters and writing plots is very very hard for the GM. Is the fact that a pc can read minds, TP anywhere and has a bunch of abilities plot destroying? i would say no, only if you have a GM that dosnt take into account that this is what the players can do, and try to throw challenges at them that expects them to do said stuff. If you keep pretending the same plots work at lvl 5, will work at lvl 15 and up, then ofcourse the game is broken, but with a creative and inventive GM i dont think the game in itself is.
With that in mind, i will say that it is no easy task to write encounters or plots at these levels, the monsters in the bestiary really dont work all that well at these levels, so you have to come up with a whole bunch of new tactics and cool stuff that can happen, grant new abilities to monsters, and stuff. I think i spend atleast 2 hours per encounter going over the numbers and new abilities beforehand. So it is a very time consuming thing to do.
So i think my real answer is no, the game is not broken at lategame, that is the Corebook is not broken, the bestiary, as it is designed mostly to low-mid levels (under 14), leaves a lot of things to the GM to fix, if you want exciting encounters.
edit: yah i agree with the 2 previous posts, its an art to write these plots.
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Any specific examples of things to keep in mind?
Reaching 13th level with a group; I seem to get intermittently befuddled by one spell or another that I hadn't thoroughly studied for game impact.
Just did the geometry for a wall of stone being used as an igloo to shelter from a blizzard.....heh heh.
nice one and very cool idea by your players. I would say look over their items and spells, get a feel for what they can do. You have probably also had a lot of combats with them, so you should be pretty clear for their strenghts and weaknesses. Use these to make cool combats. And also try to suprise your players, so they keep being on edge. Invent new abilities for monsters, use spells in a coolway against them, ex. scry the players so the monsters know the PCs plan, and use this against them. Did this with a CR 16 dragon, that had time to buff up, make invisible walls, and just generally prepare, before they entered its lair to kill it.
Then design different challinging things outside of combot too, giving them opportunity to be clever, like the iglo. Try to take most of what they can do into account, but if they outsmart you with a cool ability, take it like a man. My players where thrilled each time they could ull a fast one on me, as i really didnt let it happen that often. Makes for a fun and competitative game i think. Hope you can use atleast something from this rambling.
I don't think it's broken either, but it is substantially different from earlier levels. It's also more difficult to design any standard adventures for because the number of choices that PCs have creates a lot of diversity among PCs.
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Thanks everyone for your responses.
It's good to see that most of people doesn't believe the game to be broken. I'm glad to see that, because I really love this game.
Though it is not broken in theory, I'd argue that it is broken in practice.
The reason I say this is that although the system is balanced, the complexity of planning and preparation required on the DM's part makes the checks and balances impractical to apply.
Though there are counters to every high-risk/high-payoff spell, utilizing those counters in the right proportions is an intense balance game. Sure, you could have every single BBEG past level 15 have continuous dimensional anchor, death ward, non-detection, freedom of movement, etc, but it would be unfair to the person who specializes in the abilities those spells render moot. Then you have to consider how often it is considered "fair" for those opponents to have that, at which point you've immediately increased the workload by an amount proportional to the number of spells of that sort that exist (which is a lot) unless you're lucky enough for your character to be a spontaneous caster at which point you may be able to limit the issue.
"I teleport the opponent into that lava pit we visited a few months back."
"I dominate the opponent and have them kill themselves."
"I cast energy drain on the opponent."
"Disintegrate."
The list of situations goes on.
If you really want to balance these in a way that isn't horrid for the DM, the high-risk/high-payoff spells need to be re-tooled to be normal-risk/variable-payoff. In other words, they need to get lucky to have that full effect take hold (a la the x4 critical a fighter may deliver)
but they don't need too much luck to have a normal effect take hold (a la the normal hit that same fighter might deliver). A dominate person spell could be changed such that there is an initial (hard) save to avoid getting penalties when you take actions other than what the enchanter wants, then a secondary (easier) save to avoid being completely at their mercy.
However it would be done, the DM needs a gradient or they'll be forced to alternate between feeling too nice (The dominate worked) or feeling like a dick (Nope. Your turn was useless.)
It is unique to the caster that their options slowly converge to a high-risk/high-payoff schema. They start with spells like magic missile (no-risk/little-payoff) and end with spells like Wish (which tends to be high-risk/high-payoff if used for anything other than its relatively tame "safe" uses). Other characters generally move from high-risk/high-payoff towards moderate-risk/moderate-payoff (with occasional lucky high payoffs). Critical based characters spike higher, but still have that small dent that they fairly reliably place.
Maybe I'll work on a magic system that has a similar full-attack-action shtick as the mundane types do.
TL-DR: I'm ranting, it's mostly safe to ignore me.
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nice one and very cool idea by your players. I would say look over their items and spells, get a feel for what they can do. You have probably also had a lot of combats with them, so you should be pretty clear for their strenghts and weaknesses. Use these to make cool combats. And also try to suprise your players, so they keep being on edge. Invent new abilities for monsters, use spells in a coolway against them, ex. scry the players so the monsters know the PCs plan, and use this against them. Did this with a CR 16 dragon, that had time to buff up, make invisible walls, and just generally prepare, before they entered its lair to kill it.
Then design different challinging things outside of combot too, giving them opportunity to be clever, like the iglo. Try to take most of what they can do into account, but if they outsmart you with a cool ability, take it like a man. My players where thrilled each time they could ull a fast one on me, as i really didnt let it happen that often. Makes for a fun and competitative game i think. Hope you can use atleast something from this rambling.
Thanx; actually I definitely did.
The last campaign I played in 3.5 was an Epic one. We had actually started the characters at level 10 and stopped at about 26 or so. The DM had been playing D&D since the first box set came out and had amassed a lot of resources and knowledge though so he was very familiar with the planes and gods and god-like beings. It was fun because the DM knew the world and had the resources to pull from to keep things interesting.
Plus running an Epic Rogue is AMAZING. I've always liked rogues but you take one to Epic levels and get him a magic item that grants Hide in Plain Sight (when he has +80 to stealth) he can go anywhere and sneak up on anything.
When you have powerful characters like that, it's fun to see how the DM will challenge it. It's also fun to imagine what those characters will start to do to their world. Will they create new domains? Are they ambitious enough to try to conquer places? Or do they simply just keep exploring the limitless universe because they just want something to do?
What I've found running the game for several years now is that the focus and control of the game changes. At low levels, the GM can reasonably control where the players go and what they do. At higher levels, players have to decide what they want to do and the GM has to react. I don't think that is broken, it is just a paradigm shift. If you want the players to go have a chat with Orcus about something and they decide they'd rather fight his lieutenants, or just go talk to Demogorgon, you have to roll with that. You need to have access to lots of places and people that you can go to quickly, and you always need one random thing that can happen to stall the players while you adjust. Player expectations have to change as well, if they still expect the plot to railroad them, it can lead to trouble.
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wow... really???
In my experience, and yes I HAVE played past level 20 into Epic Rules, the game works fine.
There are a lot of powers, but in the end, you can usually only use one at a time. Fighters and Rogues can do a LOT of damage, but then again, the bad guys have a LOT of HPs as well (and usually hit back just as freaking hard, if not harder).
Teleport without error, also known at low levels as just walking, is no real issue. The PCs move from one place to another. Big deal. If you want to keep the PCs from getting somewhere, then use some creativity to make getting somewhere difficult (a wall? is that the BEST you can do?). And besides, casting the spell uses up resources (it uses a valuable slot that could have been used in combat).
What does happen at high levels is that classes MUST focus on their respective roles more. If a player has tried being jack-of-all-trades through the lower levels, he'll be ineffective at high levels. A player that likes to hog the spotlight by doing megadamage will quickly die if someone does not play a tank. The tank is not "glamorous" and few want to play a support caster either. But then, a party full of limelight prima donnas is doomed at high levels.
I think groups that are not into power gaming will find high levels quite fun. Power gamers will find it disappointing because everyone must work as a group to achieve results.
But simply put, high levels is NOT broken, but it does demand a different attitude than low levels
Personally, I'm more a fan of the first 6 levels of the game (E6). I feel that most epic stories can really be told without the characters advancing much higher than that. See The Alexandrian: Calibrating Your Expectations for why I say this.
Excellent read, thank you for posting :) I don't agree about lowbies (I hate 'em!) but it does give a solid perspective on relative power levels. Personally, I like about 6-12: parties are really coming into their own and the game is shifting. Lower and it's "What now? Cultist? Orcs? A baby dragon? *Pllfffttt*" and higher it's "Yup you killed the Bad Guy!" or "The good news about a TPK is that we all get to roll up new characters!"
*shrug* I just enjoy playing, mostly ;)
GNOME
RPG Superstar 2013
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I think the game works great, and I dig the high level play. Having said that, a game this complicated can't really be perfect. Some monsters have no shot against thing their CR - they will not present a challenge at all against a balanced party. Even though I haven't been there yet, I feel pretty strongly that a balanced party of four optimized 23rd level characters will have little trouble with the tarrasque. Dunno. Like to find out. : }
Deeper plots will keep the game entertaining, and you have to use every part of the game to make combat entertaining. Buffs, alternate features so encounters aren't predictable, terrain - it all has to be blended well, and tailored to what makes your high level palyers view the campaign as successful.
One thing I see a lot of GMs falter at in high level paly is what to do about that broken guy who kills balors one per turn. The answer to me is surround him with medium AC dudes with HUGE hit points. Maybe they can cause a lot of damage, maybe they struggle to hit at all. Maybe they cause enough that it becomes a race: can your fighter tard kill all four iron golems before they gas him multiple times in the same round? But give them some way to roll significant dice, and slap some kind of risk on the encounter. He'll be useful to the party, get to use all his bells and whistles, and reserve the meat of the encounter for the rest of your party.
It's not broken from what I've seen. I haven't played to 20th but I've been the DM for up to 17th. I haven't see a problem at all. I've read about some of the problems only they haven't materialized in my games. My melee guys are happy and doing fine and the casters get to pull the "I win" card when I let them and if they are clever enough to know what to do.
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Hello there!
I have read around here that high levels are broken. Badly designed.
I can't believe this to be true. Pathfinder has had around 50.000 beta testers! How can be broken an important part of the game like the high levels game? 50.000 beta testers hasn't noticed that? Pretty difficult to believe.What do you say? Are the high levels broken?
Oh, plenty of us noticed, plenty of us made suggestions/comments/observations based on playing high level 3x campaigns. Many of us were completely ignored.
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Owner - D20 Hobbies
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"I teleport the opponent into that lava pit we visited a few months back."
"I dominate the opponent and have them kill themselves."
"I cast energy drain on the opponent."
"Disintegrate."
Teleport is a tool, if you even try to mitigate it at high level you are doing something wrong.
Same for dominate, energy drain, and disintegrate.
you could have every single BBEG past level 15 have continuous dimensional anchor, death ward, non-detection, freedom of movement
It isn't like you have to have every BBEG have counters to these, but you must consider that every BBEG would be concerned with these that he is particularly vulnerable.
Most BBEG are not a single BBEG. You are more likely to (as a BBEG) to send minions (many of them at once) against the PCs. And by minions, I mean encounters of 4 to 6 monsters that are a challenge to the PCs regardless of their CR to PC average level ratio.
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Let me see if I can simplify my point to its rudiments here.
Low level:
Caster - "Spell Worked" / "Spell Partial" / "Spell Didn't"
Martial - "Attack Critical" / "Attack Hit" / "Attack Miss"
So far so good. A TWFing martial type is more complex, but oh well.
Mid Level:
Caster - "Spell Worked" / "Spell Partial" / "Spell Didn't"
Martial - "2 Criticals" / "1 Critical, 1 Hit" / "1 Critical or 2 Hit" / "1 Hit" / "2 Miss"
A discrepancy appears, but its manageable.
High Level:
Caster - "Spell Worked" / "Spell Partial" / "Spell Didn't"
Martial - All attacks critical -> 3 critical, 1 hit -> 3 critical / 2 critical 2 hit => 1 critical 3 hit / 2 critical 1 hit -> .... -> none hit. (Much more complex when including even a single critical feat)
*sigh*
I'm trying to point out how the caster always has the same number of reward levels (barring AoE): 3. As the game moves forward, the martial types start getting more and more gradient to the reward level of a given round, but casters do not. Because of this all of their rounds that *do* give a pay-off have to give a high payoff, but sometimes that high payoff can be the entire fight, leading to anti-climactic moments caused by a spell doing what is considered normal.
For example, if the opponent forgot their freedom of movement this morning and the caster uses Imprisonment there are two results: Either the fight is over, or the round was wasted. Same thing happens with Dominate monster or Power Word: Kill (with death ward dodging the second one).
I do not see any real problem with *most* spells, just the ones that must, by necessity of concept, be save-or-die or save-or-you-might-as-well-be-dead. I argue that these kinds of spells should have left the "die" effect to the equivalent of a critical (opponent nat 1s their save then fails it again, much like confirming a critical) and given a smaller, related effect that occurs under most circumstances, even if that effect is hard to think of. If necessary the spell level would be modified.
Dominate monster could have, for example, imposed significant penalties to any action but the recommended one(s), and only forced the action(s) on a critical failure (requiring confirmation, as described above). This would allow the flavor that a player was going for to be there, without causing the spell to be in the "save or lose" category.
Anyway, this may be more in the "Major Pet Peeve" category of things, but w/e.
TLDR: More ranting. Just as much caused by a preference for some semblance of simplicity as any real problem with the system.
I played up to level 40 in 3.X.
Thing is, that game CHANGES. Things that you consider a limitation or an unpassable barrier become trivial.
This just means you must sometimes scale challenges, sometimes understand that challenges must change, become different things.
That thefocus of the campaign must be switched.
THIS is the point of a level based game, after all. Play the same game with different numbers makes no sense.
"I teleport the opponent into that lava pit we visited a few months back."
"I dominate the opponent and have them kill themselves."
"I cast energy drain on the opponent."
"Disintegrate."
Teleport is a tool, if you even try to mitigate it at high level you are doing something wrong.
Same for dominate, energy drain, and disintegrate.
you could have every single BBEG past level 15 have continuous dimensional anchor, death ward, non-detection, freedom of movementIt isn't like you have to have every BBEG have counters to these, but you must consider that every BBEG would be concerned with these that he is particularly vulnerable.
Most BBEG are not a single BBEG. You are more likely to (as a BBEG) to send minions (many of them at once) against the PCs. And by minions, I mean encounters of 4 to 6 monsters that are a challenge to the PCs regardless of their CR to PC average level ratio.
Lots of little monsters...use a swarm template. FAster and more effective than say 6 10th level kobolds or 10 6th level kobolds...
Then a Massive Swarm of kobolds attacking is dangerous rather than tedious...
The game tends to BOG DOWN at upper levels, so many feats, spells magic items, class abilities, that everything drags, from GM design time to encounter duration. Where an encounter at 2nd level might take 15-30 minutes, it might take 2-3 hours to complete at 15th level.
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I played up to level 40 in 3.X.
Thing is, that game CHANGES. Things that you consider a limitation or an unpassable barrier become trivial.
This just means you must sometimes scale challenges, sometimes understand that challenges must change, become different things.
That thefocus of the campaign must be switched.
THIS is the point of a level based game, after all. Play the same game with different numbers makes no sense.
Here's the problem. You can do whatever you want, but the fact is, the RNG in d20 doesn't scale well.
This is why everything flattened out in 1e. Gygax knew the d20 doesn't handle big well at all. WotC didn't, apparently.
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Hello there!
I have read around here that high levels are broken. Badly designed.
I can't believe this to be true. Pathfinder has had around 50.000 beta testers! How can be broken an important part of the game like the high levels game? 50.000 beta testers hasn't noticed that? Pretty difficult to believe.What do you say? Are the high levels broken?
I'm pretty sure that many (if not most) of these beta testers never played high levels before the beta testing ended, or they never reported any feedback about high levels. Usually they have time to play low level games only or just make some builds of high level characters.
There are issues with high level gameplay but IMO Pathfinder has improved that part of the game.
You assume quite incorrectly, actually.
And Pathfinder put a band-aid on a heavy shrapnel wound, frankly.
actually i found that the encounters dont take that much longer at high levels, preparing for them do.
As stated previously i had of 13th level chars assault a CR 16 Dragon with a lot of special abilities i had given it. One of the cool things of this system is that damage scales pretty well i think. A single mob a party assaults at lvl 5 will probably be down in 2-3 rounds, and as it turned out in my accounter (yes the PCs did have a permament fly spell on them, so it couldnt fly away), the dragon went down in 3 turns, about the same you would expect at lower levels. At that time it had also ripped most of the party to a pulp, but that is party because of a haste spell and other various buffs. But i find that with the damage output at higher levels, is so huge that after 3 rounds either the party or the opposition will probably be ripped to threads. If you fight multiple monsters the encounters will take longer ofc., but that is also the case with multiple mobs at lower levels.
The real difference at higer levels is that, if a GM plays it right, an encounter will be lethal if the party dosnt prepare well for it, if they dont know what to expect, so that part of the game will take longer. So as stated by a lot of others, the game's focus simply changes as the level increase, the system is not broken. Although i do agree that the same couldnt be said for 3.0 and 3.5, as the power of melee types was simply too small at higher levels compared to casters, something pathfinder has dont some things to fix.
I played up to level 40 in 3.X.
Thing is, that game CHANGES. Things that you consider a limitation or an unpassable barrier become trivial.
This just means you must sometimes scale challenges, sometimes understand that challenges must change, become different things.
That thefocus of the campaign must be switched.
THIS is the point of a level based game, after all. Play the same game with different numbers makes no sense.
Here's the problem. You can do whatever you want, but the fact is, the RNG in d20 doesn't scale well.
This is why everything flattened out in 1e. Gygax knew the d20 doesn't handle big well at all. WotC didn't, apparently.
I see your point, but I meant that you need to re-imagine "what a challenge is" not the numbers.
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I see your point, but I meant that you need to re-imagine "what a challenge is" not the numbers.I played up to level 40 in 3.X.
Thing is, that game CHANGES. Things that you consider a limitation or an unpassable barrier become trivial.
This just means you must sometimes scale challenges, sometimes understand that challenges must change, become different things.
That thefocus of the campaign must be switched.
THIS is the point of a level based game, after all. Play the same game with different numbers makes no sense.
Here's the problem. You can do whatever you want, but the fact is, the RNG in d20 doesn't scale well.
This is why everything flattened out in 1e. Gygax knew the d20 doesn't handle big well at all. WotC didn't, apparently.
Again, problem is, we're discussing a gaming system. I can run high level games because I've been doing this for over 30 years now, and I have a pretty good grasp on things. Not everyone does, and a robust, workable system can fill the gaps in DMing experience and whatnot. Except 3x doesn't do that well at all.
My biggest problem with the higher levels is that most encounters tidy themselves up into 2 categories: anticlimax or boredom.
The monster lays into the PCs, opening moves are made, back and forth for a round, and then a natural 1 has the monster die from full hp. Everyone who was into it and getting prepared to continue on... comes to a halt. Excitement stops. People feel annoyed they didn't get a chance to shine or to engage the monster.
The monster lays into the PCs, opening moves are made, back and forth... and then the PCs realize the monster has high hp, high dr, annoying spellcasting, double fightering annoying powers, etc. etc. but whoever made the monster thinks it's fine for it to also do like 1d4+1 damage or have abilities with save DCs of 13 or 14. Long, long boring crawl later, the monsters are dead, the players are bored and their characters are untouched.
"Make an x save" no longer has bite past 14 because most DCs for normal monsters are around 20 and by that level you have like a +15 on your good save and a +10 on your bad save.
Don't even talk about the terrain. Unless it's an indoor dungeon I don't even draw it; the PCs will just fly over the whole thing anyways.
Almost no encounters past level 13 fit into the "fast-paced, exciting, edge-of-your-seat and ultimately satisfying" paradigm.
that might be true, that it doesnt do it well.
To come up with a challenge at these levels requires the GM to think of completely different things. He has to imagine a plot that will challange demigods, and that really is quite hard. I wouldnt write this down to a failure of the system, but the supposed power of the PCs at this level, compared to people in our world. The GM has to think like, what sort of challange would be hard to solve, even for the old Greek gods? cause this is almost the power level of the PCs at this time.
In short he has to think outside of the box, so yes level 15 and up are hard to GM, because of a lot of things, and not every GM can come up with stuff that will be a test to someone at this level. If you dont want your PCs to be demigods, and do stuff real mortals can hardly imagine, then stay away from these levels.
I think that most people in this forum post actually agree on a lot of things, the game mechanics is not broken, its only that the system doesnt compensate the fact, that the GM needs to be increasingly inventive with the plot. Whether this makes the system broken, or just hard to GM at high levels, seem to be the issue here.
My biggest problem with the higher levels is that most encounters tidy themselves up into 2 categories: anticlimax or boredom.
The monster lays into the PCs, opening moves are made, back and forth for a round, and then a natural 1 has the monster die from full hp. Everyone who was into it and getting prepared to continue on... comes to a halt. Excitement stops. People feel annoyed they didn't get a chance to shine or to engage the monster.
The monster lays into the PCs, opening moves are made, back and forth... and then the PCs realize the monster has high hp, high dr, annoying spellcasting, double fightering annoying powers, etc. etc. but whoever made the monster thinks it's fine for it to also do like 1d4+1 damage or have abilities with save DCs of 13 or 14. Long, long boring crawl later, the monsters are dead, the players are bored and their characters are untouched.
"Make an x save" no longer has bite past 14 because most DCs for normal monsters are around 20 and by that level you have like a +15 on your good save and a +10 on your bad save.
Don't even talk about the terrain. Unless it's an indoor dungeon I don't even draw it; the PCs will just fly over the whole thing anyways.
Almost no encounters past level 13 fit into the "fast-paced, exciting, edge-of-your-seat and ultimately satisfying" paradigm.
I think i wrote earlier that i agree that the bestiary lacks challenges at higer levels (14 and up), since few of the actual encounters are up to par for the CR. I found that if you want fun encounters at these levels, you have to be creative, and make stuff up on your own. But as the bestiary isnt the rules, just sample monsters you can use, i think the argument that the system is broken because the monsters dont fit well, is a false assumption, as the monsters really aint part of RAW material. I do hope that the bestiary 2 will make more challenges against high level party's, to minimize the altering a GM has to do in any given encounter.
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Owner - D20 Hobbies
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I do not see any real problem with *most* spells, just the ones that must, by necessity of concept, be save-or-die or save-or-you-might-as-well-be-dead.
The basically have a problem with the only part of high level play that makes high level play more desirable than low level play.
Save or die effects (and unfortunately to a large extent PF diminished these) are what makes the game fun for me.
Being high level means you sort of become a flower that can be crushed (mentally I'm thinking back to my AC 38 HP 300+ Cleric type with my weakest save a +18 Reflex who was fully undamaged and due to an unfortunately act by a rabid Wild Shaped Druid fully attacking a Gargantuan Black Pudding, I died in one round from 6 split puddings recently split by said Druid.) This wasn't a save or die spell, but it certainly was a danger zone. It's not often that character died, but there wasn't anything I could do about 6 grapple damage attacks from the ooze. Had I used FoM, I'd have lived.
In short, when you win a combat at high level you win because you:
1) Made no mistakes
2) Applied your effects better than your opponents
It's what makes the game awesome.
In contrast to low level, where you have less risk and less fun.
FAster and more effective than say 6 10th level kobolds or 10 6th level kobolds...
The game tends to BOG DOWN at upper levels, so many feats, spells magic items, class abilities, that everything drags, from GM design time to encounter duration. Where an encounter at 2nd level might take 15-30 minutes, it might take 2-3 hours to complete at 15th level.
First, you wouldn't do 10x 6th level Kobolds. You would blend monsters, each having complementary effects. If you just do "easy" frontline fighter types, they will be cut down. Use monsters with at will Suggestions and good camo against fighter PC's combined with flying artillery and one or two frontline to pinpoint weak PC's (for example.)
As for bog down, the quick fix for that is in the DM's hands. In our groups, we tend to reinforce the "it's only 6 seconds" concept. If you are taking more than 20 seconds on your turn, your turn needs to end. Roll all your attacks before your turn, etc. Most of my PFS games of lower level tend to have a harder time getting done in 4 hours.
Maybe it is related to this concept of strategic play that 4E is pushing? Where players have a desire to make the perfect strategic actions on their turn? You don't need to be perfect folks. If you can be perfect in 10-20 seconds, great. Otherwise "good enough" is fine.
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Owner - D20 Hobbies
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Gygax knew the d20 doesn't handle big well at all. WotC didn't, apparently.
Funny, I have fond memories of 1E. But I probably shouldn't. I was a 17th level Druid in 4th with more Hit Dice than the 20th Fighter who Multiclassed into Wizard and reach 20th Wizard (so 40 levels.) I had more experience (yet only 17th level) and more HP's (14 Hit Dice verses the 40th level with only 9 Hit Dice.) This didn't seem fair (for me having more HP or for them having more levels) but it was still fun. I believe it demonstrates Gygax didn't do any better.
I'm pretty sure that many (if not most) of these beta testers never played high levels before the beta testing ended
There are issues with high level gameplay but IMO Pathfinder has improved that part of the game.
We cut over a 16th level game to Pathfinder Beta, when it came out. Bought the book and all. Turning was broken in beta, as in undead had 0 chance of killing the PC's broken. Whether or not Pathfinder improved high level, I'm not sure.
The real difference at higer levels is that, if a GM plays it right, an encounter will be lethal if the party dosnt prepare well for it
Lethal combats is what makes high level fun (in my view.) One thing is PF makes this less of a detriment. I remember in a 3.5 game, I went from being the highest level PC at 14th level to the lowest level PC at 14th from something like 9 deaths in 13 games or so (not exactly sure on the details but I died in about every combat for many months of a weekly game.) I had a Cleric cohort who would hang back and res me out of combat.
One example awesome combat is this event. I was the only High HP/High AC/Turn Undead guy in the party in a High level Vampire den with front line Blackguard vampires backed up by Ultimate Magnus Vampires (4th level spontaneous and prepared.) One combat I was the *only* remaining/living PC (near TPK, my cohort died) and the only living vamp was the UM with only 1st level spells remaining. I could have died, it was close to being a TPK. I had previously dispel magic'd him to remove his shield protecting him from sunlight and I had a sunlight effect I'd been using on him (master of radiance) that on a failed save would poof him. He had made the save around 20 times so far and I couldn't take another round of magic missiles from him. He failed the same. The whole game (to TPK or not) centered around the NPC rolling a 1 (because a 2 would save. My DC was 29 and he had a +28 or higher.) He rolled a 1. We lived. It was one of the most fun I've ever had. I saved the whole party.
These events rarely happen in low level, but I can retell last night's playing of #17. A group of 4 1st level players had lost a party member in a previous fight (he was stable at -2) so for the final encounter with a 2nd level NPC and four 1st level the Wizard casts color spray and the 2nd level NPC who failed and I (the DM) rolled 8 for rounds. In the next round the Wizard PC was knocked unconscious, the Fighter was knocked unconscious and the Witch was knocked unconscious by a staggered opponent. At this point the only conscious thing is the raven Familiar and the undamaged but unconscious for 2 rounds 2nd NPC. Which means the game is a TPK depending on the raven's actions. I gave the Witch an arbitrary DC 12 Perception from the Raven (had +8) to "know" the grave situation and another DC 12 Wis check to "do" what the Witch would have wanted had he been awake. He made both, so he tried to CdG the unconscious opponent. At a critical of 2 damage and fort save or die of DC 12, the NPC woke up in 2 rounds but was still alive but stunned for 3 more rounds. On the last round of "pecking" before she lost her "stun" condition, she rolled an 11 on her fort save or die. She died. The raven hung out until the PC's healed from natural healing. They lived.
I am running a game where the characters are currently 18th level. The campaign started as a mostly-core-only 3.5 game at level 14, and we switched to Pathfinder when it came out--I think they were level 16/17 at the time.
I am going to tell you something: every time I see someone say, "Pathfinder at high levels is broken" and I ask them for their actual gameplay experiences regarding this, I get stunning silence. This is of course circumstantial, and bear that in mind.
I don't have time (maybe I will follow up later) to go in depth with all of my experiences, but my general experience is --
-- It's not broken, it's just different. You have to adapt to the fact that you can't take a level 18 party through a level 1 dungeon crawl. You need story heavy arcs, and you need to hit them with a variety of different types of challenges to help each character shine. If "the spellcaster gets to win" all the time then you're not using enough creatures with SRs and other immunities. If the meleers are shining and the spellcaster twiddles his thumbs you're going in the opposite direction.
I will caveat that the party is below suggested WBL guidelines. This is due to a number of reasons like the party said they were going to go to a city to gather resources and allies, so I put all the resources and the allies in the city, and then they decided not to go there after all. And I'm trying to find story-sensible places to put treasure, which is difficult in the scenario I've created, so that's a hole I dug myself. I do design the challenges bearing in mind they are below WBL, but I'm sure it also makes it easier to design challenges when they're not overladen with gear (and I have to wonder if WBL guidelines are too high, as the party is dealing fine with CR 16-18 challenges pretty dang well--while still taking some appropriate damage--as it is).
Nothing's wrong in high-level Pathfinder that isn't wrong in high-level 3.x. The solution is the same too, the GM needs to know the rules, and the Players need to know the characters. The game doesn't play the same at high levels as low levels, so the GM needs to change the way adventuring works. This is not a bug, it's a feature, in my opinion.
I won't speak to what other games do, but I wouldn't want a group of legendary heroes with superpowers doing the exact same thing as the level 1 schmucks only larger. I think that the new powers are really tools that change the game, and if the GM doesn't change the campaign accordingly, yeah it's all gonna fall apart.
Of course, I manage my expectations. My understanding is that levels 17-20 are mainly for villainous NPCs so that they can provide a challenge to 4 PCs of 16h level. I have GMed only a single Pathfinder campaign from 1-10th so far, so I can't tall you if those last 6 levels are going to work for me, but I don't anticipate any big issues.
Just like DM fiat, or optimization threads on these boards, it comes down to your definition of DM fiat, optimized or broken. Damage is pretty straight forward to deal with, but it is the intangibles of magic like teleporting, mind reading, planar travel, etc. that make it very difficult for a novice DM to run a game, and as stated above there is alot more for a character to remember for high level play.
Even in GURPS, which is simplistic in regards to D&D, the common problem areas were teleporation spells, mind reading, and magic making the defenses of the character very hard to penetrate.
Therefore, as long as the melee classes have magic to compensate for the lack of magic spells of casters, there will be less of a discrepancy to deal with.
Nothing's wrong in high-level Pathfinder that isn't wrong in high-level 3.x. The solution is the same too, the GM needs to know the rules, and the Players need to know the characters. The game doesn't play the same at high levels as low levels, so the GM needs to change the way adventuring works. This is not a bug, it's a feature, in my opinion.
I won't speak to what other games do, but I wouldn't want a group of legendary heroes with superpowers doing the exact same thing as the level 1 schmucks only larger. I think that the new powers are really tools that change the game, and if the GM doesn't change the campaign accordingly, yeah it's all gonna fall apart.
Of course, I manage my expectations. My understanding is that levels 17-20 are mainly for villainous NPCs so that they can provide a challenge to 4 PCs of 16h level. I have GMed only a single Pathfinder campaign from 1-10th so far, so I can't tall you if those last 6 levels are going to work for me, but I don't anticipate any big issues.
I agree with alot of what you say. Basically once a certain set of tools (particularly spells but not only spells) get in the player's toolbox, things change. Walls for instance stop being an obstacle. Certain kinds of fights become trivial (monsters that can attack at range or deal with flying pc's for instance). Certain story types become a joke (investigating a murder you say? I raise him from the dead and ask who killed him....)
The scale and scope of stories have to change, and alot of dms arent ready for that. Either they dont want their world to 'be that way' or they arent used to it. If most campaigns in your group stop before going to that level naturally because the main plot finishes up, then the dms of that group wont have the same experience. So for alot of veteran players things go really smooth and are really interesting from 1-12ish but after that, things go wonky (kind of like how we all felt when we started but without the jovial enthusiasm of something new).
The game isnt really broken at high levels, its just a different, more complicated and more challenging game.
That's fine though. If the game didn't change as levels increase then there would be little point in levelling up. It's a bit silly if a group of low level PC's against an ogre plays out exactly the same as a group of high level PC's against a balor, just with the numbers all scaled up.
Exactly. I can see that it's reasonable demand more support for the "DM homeworks" but different levels SHOULD play differently IMHO.