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"Unplayable" is definitely not the right word. "Difficult" suits it better.
Statblocks get huge. It's hard to keep track of what characters can do and use all of their options.
Player characters get powerful. Entire plots can be solved with a single action. DMs have to keep in mind the many powerful abilities their players have access to.
Combat can take even longer to resolve. More attacks, more interrupt options, more defenses, more characters, all add to the time it takes to resolve turns. Inexperienced players make this even worse.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Prepare for a bunch of responses along the lines of "I've never had that problem" and "If your group was like mine you wouldn't think that way".
Yeah, I agree the question is loaded. This could still be a constructive thread though.
For the most part, high level play isn't all that bad. If the PCs were developed organically through lower levels, the players are generally able to manage the complexity. Dropping people in high level PCs they don't know is never going to work well.
The amount of prep-work for GMs skyrockets. Not only do you have to make more complex enemies, you need to account for game-changer spells, and be intimately familiar with the capabilities of a number of high level PCs too... that, or be a first-rate improvisor. But most of us aren't that, as much as we'd like to be.
Then there's the math. Rolling a ton of dice is fun for a while, but at some point bigger numbers is a chore, not a thrill.
It requires a higher caliber of both GM and players, but it is definitely fun and do-able. Ametures need to stick with level ten and under. My 2c
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One reason I find is that spell lists for casters get ridiculously long. It's a major hassle to micro-manage every single first level slot.
The other reason, and I think the most common complaint about high level play is that it's hard to present a meaningful challenge to the group. They just have so many options that they will blow though any enemy, test of skill, or situation. Let's break it down:
1) Stationary obstacles- EX: swamp or flood blocking your path. -Solution: Teleport, Fly, Gaseous Form, etc.
2) Physical combat -EX: swarms, constructs, any monster or opponent. -Solution: Learn the weakness with a high knowledge check, exploit the weakness with your arsenal of weapons, move on. Alternatively, Fire off save-or-lose spells against their weakest save. Alternatively, Just hit the thing vs touch AC. Monster's think that natural armor is the bomb, so just ignore it straight up.
3)Social situations- EX: Convincing the Prison Guards to let your NPC buddy go- Solution: High bluff, intimidate, or diplomacy skill, reroll with any number of class abilities. give a +20 with a low level spell. Have tea.
4)Rescue situations- EX: family of five trapped in a flood's path.- Solution: Summon something that can go get them for you. Have tea.
Concerns:
Arms race - due to NPCs having less treasure than PCs, their effective power is significantly less than the PCs, and it becomes very hard to convince PCs to do anything they don't want to do. This removes the effectiveness of many themes found within fiction.
Space/Room to Act - When your spells affect continents, and your foes are of similar power, one has to wonder why the world didn't burn down a hundred years ago. The planes can mitigate this somewhat, but it's a change to go from Prime adventures to Planar ones.
TOZ covered most of the other points.
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I'm curious about this. I'd like to use this thread to address specific concerns regarding High Level Play (12+). What specifically makes it unplayable?
I don't think it is unplayable, but it is harder to DM.
1. You really need to keep the group to 5 or less. Turns take much, much longer.
2. Dice rollers are your friend. Players can get 8 or 9 attack and do tons and tons of damage. Gathering that many dice into your hands is second only in annoyance to counting them while everyone else waits.
3. People will die. Accept this as a fact, hope you don't TPK them, and understand this is why at high levels bringing someone back to to life happens.
4. As a DM, you have to be able to shift on the fly because your players can do lots and lots of things and you can't anticipate or prepare for all of them. Some people just can't do this.
5. Sometimes one encounter is a session at high levels, sometimes an encounter is a one shot KO. You have to be ready either way.
The main issue is how much more the players can do, and how much more the monsters you are playing as a DM can do. It takes a lot more experience and prep work than some people are willing to invest.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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One reason I find is that spell lists for casters get ridiculously long. It's a major hassle to micro-manage every single first level slot.
The other reason, and I think the most common complaint about high level play is that it's hard to present a meaningful challenge to the group. They just have so many options that they will blow though any enemy, test of skill, or situation. Let's break it down:
1) Stationary obstacles- EX: swamp or flood blocking your path. -Solution: Teleport, Fly, Gaseous Form, etc.
2) Physical combat -EX: swarms, constructs, any monster or opponent. -Solution: Learn the weakness with a high knowledge check, exploit the weakness with your arsenal of weapons, move on. Alternatively, Fire off save-or-lose spells against their weakest save. Alternatively, Just hit the thing vs touch AC. Monster's think that natural armor is the bomb, so just ignore it straight up.
3)Social situations- EX: Convincing the Prison Guards to let your NPC buddy go- Solution: High bluff, intimidate, or diplomacy skill, reroll with any number of class abilities. give a +20 with a low level spell. Have tea.
4)Rescue situations- EX: family of five trapped in a flood's path.- Solution: Summon something that can go get them for you. Have tea.
I would contend that a lot of your examples are plots that are not appropriate for high level play, for exactly the reasons you've described. And I think this is the exact problem many players have with high levels - the plots thay are used to running don't work anymore, and when the GM tries to run them, everyone feels cheapened.
I think the groups which have no problems with high levels have made a small shift in their thinking to involve themselves in plots that only high level characters can do.
High level play to a degree makes the more martial classes redundant. I recently GMed an encounter of a band of minotaurs ambushing the party in a dungeon. Spent a good hour or so statting all the monsters up for this one encounter.
Along comes the gnome sorcerer who with a single empowered fireball killed them all through massive damage and a ton of failed fort and reflex saves. Therefore, an hour of my time beaten through 20 seconds of game time. This wasn't a one off thing, and I cannot equip the monsters much better without destroying the wealth by level charts.
One solution to this is to use bigger monsters I know, but this encounter was already a APL + 2 encounter, so could not really be buffed any higher without risking party member death.
Another option is obviously to give bigger and less monsters, but then the monsters often risk having abilities that the party simply cannot circumvent, therefore meaning member death and so on.
Hence, higher level is hard work.
High level play to a degree makes the more martial classes redundant. I recently GMed an encounter of a band of minotaurs ambushing the party in a dungeon. Spent a good hour or so statting all the monsters up for this one encounter.
Along comes the gnome sorcerer who with a single empowered fireball killed them all through massive damage and a ton of failed fort and reflex saves. Therefore, an hour of my time beaten through 20 seconds of game time. This wasn't a one off thing, and I cannot equip the monsters much better without destroying the wealth by level charts.One solution to this is to use bigger monsters I know, but this encounter was already a APL + 2 encounter, so could not really be buffed any higher without risking party member death.
Definitely more work. And definitely requires a tacit agreement on the part of the players and GM to play the game as opposed to trying to break it.
One question though. You say "massive damage." So I assume you're using the "massive damage requires Fort or die" rule? You might want to consider dropping that rule.
And I'd say that you might want to consider ignoring the whole "well, it's APL+2" thing and just going by how hard you think it'll be.
As far as equipping the monsters, pick up a copy of Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary. Instead of equipping the monsters with gear, equip them with templates that give additional abilities. It'll increas the CR slightly, give them additional power, and will not have them turn into magic cookies the players can collect.
It requires a higher caliber of both GM and players, but it is definitely fun and do-able. Ametures need to stick with level ten and under. My 2c
Ummm... we're all amateurs, unless some lucky sod somewhere has managed to get a paid gig as a GM or player. If so, I want to know how, and if it will pay enough to cover my mortgage and college for my kids.
Seriously, I acknowledge the fact that GMing and playing at higher levels is harder, but it's not that hard. I'm sure a lot of fairly unskilled players do it and enjoy it. Actually, I enjoyed high level play far more years ago when I had far less experience and skill. My lack of experience and relative naivete allowed me to simply enjoy it for the fun of it and ignore the balance issues, wonky math, cheesy illogicality and so forth that are a part of high-level play. I can still suppress all that and just revel in the overpowered ridiculousness of it all now, but it takes more effort to make it immersive for me.
And by the way I wouldn't really call 12th and above high level. I'd start high level at around 15th, and definitely by 17th.
"Unplayable" is definitely not the right word. "Difficult" suits it better.
I'd use the word "irksome". :-)
I agree with most of the comments above, mainly boiling down to two categories:
- Some things that are fun at low levels don't work at all at high levels.
- There can be a lot of tedious accounting involved.
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It takes the GM three times as long to make stuff.
It takes the players 1 round of combat to win.
Not unplayable, but boring and ultimately pointless unless you are using APL+5 or higher CR, as even the slightest optimization and preparation leaves combatants with pretty much auto-hit, and the casters with "Anything not a dragon needs a 20 to make the save. Roll twice and take the worse."
My Kingmaker campaign (lv15 atm) has more or less delved into this. Any given two characters from the party could overcome the encounters as written. Little to nothing can challenge them unless I spend 10 times instead of 3 on making my own opposition which I optimize.
If the PCs were developed organically through lower levels, the players are generally able to manage the complexity.
E.Lincoln is right on; high-level play is only a problem, on either side of the screen, when you create characters from scratch. If you and your players have done the lower-level grind, then you're familiar with the groups play-style and they're intimately familiar with whatever those 12th-level characters can do.
Dropping people in high level PCs they don't know is never going to work well.
Again, this is a basic truth. Also, the GM doesn't know what the players are likely to do. Things just become so much harder.
Sub-question: why do you (meaning anyone) start at any level higher than 1st?
Not unplayable, but perhaps "a lot less fun". The attraction of high level play, in my arrogant opinion, is how much more you can do, and the caliber of opponent you can face. Defeating the evil necromancer who intends to subjugate the world beneath his booted heel is a lot more dramatic than overcoming the bandit leader who is holding the town of Durholme to ransom. BUT, the fact that you can do more doesn't necessarily make things more fun. The plethora of possibilities slows down combat so that a decent sized fight can take hours with increased irritation in the event of a save-or-screwed effect. Balancing a combat becomes more difficult because of the increased variables - do you assume the enemy wizard will go high enough in the initiative tree to get a spell off or not?
I think one of the biggest problems is coming up with a rationale for why the villain of the piece doesn't use their villainesque resources to kill the PCs 'off screen'. The combination of scrying, teleport and 'enough' minions makes it hard to justify level appropriate encounters from a world-beating 'big bad'. "Hmmmm...these heroes have become a thorn in my side, I know, I'll send twice as many lower level characters against them." "Sir, why don't you, you know, send eight times as many? With a couple high level wizards?" "Ummm...actually, you know, that would make a lot more sense, wouldn't it?"
And by the way I wouldn't really call 12th and above high level. I'd start high level at around 15th, and definitely by 17th.
Personally, I would call level 9 the "beginning of the end"; Teleport and Commune are two examples of what I would call high-level abilities, for instance. Where high-level play reaches its peak, I don't know.
And by the way I wouldn't really call 12th and above high level. I'd start high level at around 15th, and definitely by 17th.Personally, I would call level 9 the "beginning of the end"; Teleport and Commune are two examples of what I would call high-level abilities, for instance. Where high-level play reaches its peak, I don't know.
For purposes of generating a character from scratch, yeah, 12th level is really high. A Fighter is trying to pick 12 Feats and Wizard is sifting through how many spells? I dunno, it's just so much easier when you make those choices on at a time.
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In my experience, first off... High level play is NOT unplayable.
It IS, though, a LOT harder if you just jump in with high level characters.
Play characters organically from 1st level on up to high level, with the same GM and the same group, over the course of a campaign, and it's a LOT easier. Since you have a lot more time to learn the characters and learn the other players' characters.
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Sub-question: why do you (meaning anyone) start at any level higher than 1st?
It's the most played level of the game. We've all been there a million times. There are many times I don't want to play or DM for complete novices running the umpteenth iteration of keep on the borderlands or seeing them pull out exactly the same set of tools and tricks that the last dozen first level parties used because there are so few things you really can do at first level and so few things you can really do to first level PCs. There's no more static, uninspiring level of the game than first for me, either as a player or a DM. It's just a grindfest. (I should add that it's not universally awful, but it is the one place that everyone has been there and done that the most. Even with a stunningly great adventure or whatever.)
I don't necessarily want to start at 10th level or 15th level all the time, but the abilities and storytelling potential opened up around fifth level or so are when the group starts feeling like it's really adventuring to me instead of rolling around with training wheels on and hoping its pea shooters put out an ogre's eye. The players have cooler stuff and the DM can play a bit rougher and more varied without either totally shutting down the game with an obstacle they can't pass at all or wiping out the party.
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Things I have noticed that make High Level Play more irritating than Low to Mid Level Play:
(lots of the stuff above)
1: Lack of Player preparation. Seriously, if I am going to GM a game with 4-6 Level 15+ PC's, I have to know the NPCs, Monsters, Terrain, Overall Plot, Maps, Traps, Conditional Encounters, as well as any other myriad things. You have ONE character to keep track of. Know it backwards, forwards, left and right.
2: Boredom at the table. So, Archer McPincushion rolls about 700 attacks, doing some ridiculous damage to the baddy. Because of that, and all the buffs and conditional modifiers running, it takes him 5+ minutes just to resolve a single attack routine. Don't do that, players, just don't. (See #1, as well.
3: I Win Powers. Freedom of Movement means that badass grapple monster auto-fails. So much for that entire line of maneuvers, eh? Similar abilities result in similar immunity. I really like how PF changed Hero's Feast and Neutralize Poison, for this exact reason.
4: Rocket Tag. This is less of an issue if the GM is hard-line about Magic Item acquisition and Stat Arrays at character creation. If not, it is fairly easy to get to the point where winning Initiative means the Cleric/Wizard/Charging Paladin/etc can simply one-shot the critter, then go have tea. This results in #2 very quickly.
5: Gotta Have It Items. Pretty much every player at my table loves to take Item Crafting Feats & the Hedge Wizard Trait. Why? Because then they can tweak their items and gear to be exactly the #'s and abilities to maximize their "I Win" potential. This results in a serious headache as I then have to recalculate all the NPCs and Critters for the adventures following. It becomes an arms race between Monster and PC, where the GM is constantly on the back foot (again, because of the disparity in Preparation Time between Player and GM).
6: NPC creation and Monster Creation takes a LONG time. Much longer than say, General Encounter Design and Story Writing. So, those two features (the most fun for me, at least) get sidelined in favor of accounting and statistics.
It's the most played level of the game. We've all been there a million times.
I totally get that and I felt exactly the same way. In twenty, nearly continuous, years of gaming I had never completed a campaign before. We were always starting and stopping, never got to play regularly. There was a period where we only played on major holidays. Starting a game at high level wasn't just for fun, it was because we just never would have gotten there any other way.
Then I completed a campaign (Second Darkness) for the first time. It was such an incredible feeling to have played a character from 1st through 17th level. Now, I will only play in games were people are dedicated to going all the way to the end. I guess that's good for Paizo, eh? lol
I'll echo other sentiments by saying that it is more difficult. It's particularly difficult to work with published modules where the assumptions of player choices in character development may not match (or come close to) what the players have actually built.
PF (and D&D 3.5) come with a lot of choices in how to build your character and not all of them work together with the same synergies. Some characters can end up a lot more powerful by high levels than others, even when dealing with characters of the same class. Neither character is necessarily poorly built depending on what the players' goals were in developing the character. But big disparities can be difficult to design adventures for.
It's the most played level of the game. We've all been there a million times.Then I completed a campaign (Second Darkness) for the first time. It was such an incredible feeling to have played a character from 1st through 17th level. Now, I will only play in games were people are dedicated to going all the way to the end. I guess that's good for Paizo, eh? lol
More power to you. I don't have, and haven't had, a tabletop group in more than a decade. I had one for about eight months and it was fun at first but quickly turned awful. Once we got to around ninth level, with none of the original party still kicking, it became clear the DM just wasn't interested in actually running anything but a sub-5 game and so was ensuring we got killed often then blaming it on us. It was that kind of game. Frequent deaths plus almost impossible-to-get raising and resurrections.
I'm much happier PBEM-only. Yes, this drags the first level blues out far longer in real time, but I hear similar reasons for starting higher than first from people who play around a table every week.
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- Group-based play breaks down. Will save DCs that are auto-pass for the Wizard and auto-fail for the Fighter. ACs are auto-hit for the Paladin and auto-miss for the Rogue. (Not counting nat 1s & 20s)
- For the GM, creating opponents takes too long. As a GM, it's really not worth my time to stat up an 18th level Fighter, pick all his feats, and learn all his tactics... so that I can use him in one encounter.
- Time at the table suffers. Someone has over 8 attacks, with some things doubling on crit and others not, adding up all the circumstantial modifiers, etc. It just takes for-flipping-ever. You can say "be prepared" but that one guy, he never will.
- The difference between "well-built" and "minmaxed to hell" grows. I'm not even talking about sub-par builds. I'm talking about the difference between a "softcore manmaxer" and a "hardcore minmaxer" - at low level, they have similar power. At high level, their power has significantly diverged. Then the arms race happens.
- Too many spells. Spells deal more damage than swords (esp when you throw in auto-kills). If the Wizard can do that only a handful of times a day, and the Fighter is the "steady damage dealer", then that's a cool differentiation. But once the Wizard has over 30-some spells per day (and enough wealth for wands&scrolls besides) then he can cast his uber-spells every round. Then the Fighter wonders why he tries.
- Too many weird rules. What happens why you're in the bottom of a Shadow Conjured Create Pit, and then you put up an Anti-Magic Field on yourself, but the range doesn't reach the lip? Here the forums, we can figure it out. In the middle of an initiative round? Kills the momentum.
- Impossible to write classic stories. Travelogue? Nope, got a Teleport spell. Save the King? Why bother, we'll just Raise him. Sure, you can come up with special rules and explanations as to why you can't do these things, but at that point, you've bent the world so much toward the Tippyverse, that it no longer resembles the classic fantasy world of Tolkien and King Arthur (or whomever) that you're trying to replicate.
And many, many more. There's just no point. I've run 4th level adventures where the PCs have traveled to Mt Celestia and slain the celestial that gaurds the enterance to the 7th Heaven. Just scale the numbers down, but keep the fluff epic. You don't need your sheet to say "level 35" in order to do Mythic Things (tm).
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Erik's points are pretty much spot on.
I'll also add that High Level play has a problem for a group that only has 4 hours a week to play. (My group usually games on a Tuesday night from 7-11 pm). The higher level the characters get, and more complex their characters and my monsters become the longer combat takes. Considering a combat round represents about 6-12 seconds, that is an inordinate amount of time to spend in combat.
Until High Level play becomes more streamlined it is too painful to play when you only have a short span to run a game in.
In my experience, first off... High level play is NOT unplayable.
It IS, though, a LOT harder if you just jump in with high level characters.
Play characters organically from 1st level on up to high level, with the same GM and the same group, over the course of a campaign, and it's a LOT easier. Since you have a lot more time to learn the characters and learn the other players' characters.
+1
AND use of something to help the DM and to a lesser extent the players manager large amounts of data. Our group uses Hero Lab and on the fly adjustments from conditions, spells, buffs, curses, poison, dispel magic, antimagic zones, etc are as easy as checking a box or two on the PC. (Everyone runs their character on their own laptop/mini and the DM has a desktop running a private screen and a large LCD on the wall to throw up pictures and maps.)
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I wouldn't say that high levels are unplayable, but I would argue that the game doesn't really support high level play. At high levels the sort of plots and adventures that work for levels 1-12 stop working, mostly due to high level magic, which can (IMHO) suck the enjoyment out of the game entirely. Combat encounters often become cake-walks, and when they aren't they can become monotonous slogs that take forever to resolve.
The solution, of course, is to move the campaign away from the tropes of dungeon exploring, looting monsters, and saving the village. But the rules don't really support that, which is why people say the game becomes "unplayable." It's not unplayable, it's just that what WOTC pushed as high-level play doesn't really work so great, and they never supported anything but bigger and bigger CR dungeon encounters.
The Kingdom Building Rules from Kingmaker help a lot, but it feels less and less like "adventuring" the further and further you move away from the good old "wizard in a bar recruits you to retrieve the book/rescue the princess/save the village."
High level is not unplayable. high level CHANGES and GMs expecting low level game with just bigger number will have a nasty surprise.
Once you accept the kids (PCs) are grown up, you start to change your mindset and adjust challenges and campaign priorities accordingly.
Is true that sometimes games mechanics don't help - my last high level game had a very annoying diviner with persistent perfected Flesh to Stone. ARRRGBARRGHLE and he used nothing similar to, say, greater invisibility + overland flight + mindblank.
But overall is a part of the game I enjoy to GM. They don't die so easily ;)
I'm running a post-Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign right now (to tie up all the loose ends) and the PC's just hit lvl 20..
Biggest issues I have found are:
1- Hard to challenge them... most encounters (when they were at 19) were CR22, with the 'boss' type fights even higher, and they still didn't have trouble, and have had only one death (The oracle got targeted with 6 CL 16 Disintigrates in one round)
2- Lack of options... there aren't a heck of a lot of things that make suitable encounters at this level unless you do a whole bunch work modifying/making up your own stuff.
I can see the game would get very boring if it kept progressing (unless I put a lot of work into making up my own stuff) due to fighting the same things over and over, or fighting things that don't present a challenge.
I will say, however, that is definitely both doable AND fun.. It is cool to actually get to use the crazy 9th level spells, and high level class abilities that you always see in the book but don't tend to get up to in most games...
I would say overall the biggest factor is increased work/challenge to the DM.
It's not at all "unplayable." But it's pretty much a game about superheros then, and there are other game systems that do superheros better.
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It's not at all "unplayable." But it's pretty much a game about superheros then, and there are other game systems that do superheros better.
This.
At levels 10+ the PCs are superheroes fighting supervillains. I enjoy the story of the heroes defeating the dragon/evil wizard/demon cult through skill, pluck, and their own physical strength over 'they had better magic'. I imagine many others feel the same way.
An earlier poster mentioned a band of Minotaur ambushing the party while they camped inside a dungeon. That should have been a really cool and harrowing encounter. Instead it got ended by one fireball. That isn't fun for me either as a player or a DM.
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This is where I try to remember the days of 2e. How did I make high-level play more challenging for my players?
Seriously, I know it sounds like too simple a solution to too big a challenge, but sometimes, the guy behind the screen has to have some fun too. Make stuff up, cheat, learn the rules, and then ignore them, fudge die rolls, AND PLAY GOD!
"High level villains are too risky, I don't want a TPK." Okay, when you roll it, soften it.
"High level villains are too soft for my players." Tell your players they didn't roll well enough to beat the DC of the villain's ability.
"The fighter is a broken little toy soldier next to the god-fueled cleric and the pyro wizard." Occasionally, throw the guy a bone, change a stat block to include magic immunity and susceptibility to physical attacks.
"High level encounters are too time consuming." Wing it.
Also, make your players know their characters. Of course, having them play from low (not necessarily 1st, but 5th or below, for sure) to high ensures that they will learn their abilities, especially if they spend enough time at each level, and experience a wide enough variety of tough encounters to have to figure out what to do when party resources run low.
The biggest challenge for me is keeping it fresh. I can do it, but it's tougher with published adventures. Especially if they're keyed maps, and not event-based. But, it's not insurmountable. I just default to 'make s@#$ up'.
Of course, I still want Paizo to publish their take on high-level play, so that I will be able to make LESS s@#$ up. :-)
Everything takes so long that you have either 1 encounter a day or you have your regular 4-5 spread out over weeks, slowing the campaign to a crawl.
Lots of good info here converging on the same consensus: high level play is difficult, but not impossible. For me, the rules aren't written in stone (well not all of them anyway). If something is sure to break high level play for whatever reason, then get rid of it.
Just because the books say wizards can teleport and wish their way out of any situation, doesn't mean your wizards have to. Did you ever see a high level wizard in any of the D&D fiction regularly use these kind of spells to solve problems? That would make for some really boring books...
I am huge fan of epic play. Epic in scope and sense, not necessarily in individual power or level of encounters. A good GM can give their game a quality epic feel from level 1+ without waiting for the higher levels, where just creating a single encounter can be a chore, never mind keeping up with a campaign.
I haven't had the chance to run a high-level PF game yet, but as soon as I get settled in Dallas I'm planning on it. And I'm sure to tweak and improvise changes when I get there since the PF rules are written with assumptions in mind that need to be adapted for each GM and player group.
Another thing I'd like to see...a rules system that just expands the fun levels and creates a balanced system on them. A sort of microscopic view of say levels 4-8 with just a few more gradations to make it cover more ground but remain in those boundaries.
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Another thing that just jumped out at me:
Mapping.
When you're dealing with, say, 9th-13th level PC's, you can use detailed maps with terrain, elevations, etc.
By 14th-15th level, everyone is flying/teleporting/ignoring all terrain features/a dragon so it becomes more of an exercise in futility to draw out the maps.
I tend to go back to "old school" in those cases, usually just describing the scene and features without drawing out the whole deal. It puts a bit more strain on the GM to keep everything in sync and ensure it all stays flowing.
Then you get the players trying to argue about whether that last drow gets caught in the AoE effect, or what have you, and your whole mental picture just crashes down.
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Its that you may as well be playing a game called "initiative"
There are so many ways to kill someone/remove them from a fight
Hit point damage
Ability drain
Failed fort save
Failed reflex save
Failed will save
You can't possibly defend against them all. The only viable strategy at that level is to go first and obliterate your opponent in one action. casters can play this game, martial types cannot.
I call 'loaded question' and answer with 'it's not unplayable, it just requires a little more planning'. ;)
+1. It is harder to account for what a PC can do at higher levels and that makes it easy for them to backdoor your hours of planning. What level it starts it varies from one GM to another. I don't find my level up caution going up until about level 15.
Most times the only reason why it's "difficult" is that the DM don't knwo what the characters are capabel of (and is sometimes stick to the "dungeon smasher low-level-style" of adventures)
We're lvl 8 at the moment and even here I see it, if our Druid pulls a relative rare used spell and the GM simply say "WHAT?"
Most times these are no "hyper-power spells", e.g. a simple hide campsite can deny any nocturnal suprise encounter.
So with the words of Tsun Szu:
"Know your enemy and know yourself and you willnot fear the results of a hundred battles"
Also one thing GMs should always have in mind at High-Level Play:
The PCs are heros, they are the King Arthurs, Hercules, Obi-Wan Kenobis Merlins, Fizban etc. of this world, so its ok if the parties Barbarian knock out the Giant with one blow, if the Wizard avoid the kings guards with a single spell and a "this arent the druids you're looking for."
I think this is also a major problems, some GMs never learned to play this right, they always see the PCs as "the little heros".
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High level gaming needs GM flexibility. Players are too creative and characters have too many powers to cover every possibility beforehand - so don't. If your monsters have good tactics prepared, you've got a fighting chance to kill one of the PC's in a big battle. that's cool. They'll try to stop you - that's cool.
For high level opponents, I make it a rule of thumb to buff the monsters against attacks from at least one party member; yes I cheat, but only when it's fair.
If one PC's attack is particularly effective, the monster had a ring of make-PC-attack-notsogood, or a suitable resist spell prepared, or an evasion feat.
The monster snickers as the excellent attack harmlessly dissipates, it makes a sneering remark, and PC's are motivated even more to kill it to death.
Along comes the gnome sorcerer who with a single empowered fireball killed them all through massive damage and a ton of failed fort and reflex saves. Therefore, an hour of my time beaten through 20 seconds of game time.
ohh cringeworthy. I feel that pain.
The PC's are high level - it's ok if they score a big win occasionally.
But if this was meant to be a hard fight, perhaps you could've added an invisible sorcerer who had just finished casting resist elements(fire/30) on all the mobs, just because you needed that. Maybe the invisible sorcerer has an aura of fire protection that no one has ever heard of before but by Sarenrae, doesn't it work well!
No matter - I think it's a matter of trashing the original plan and coming up with a new one, on the spot.
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Also the additional work required from GMs has a diminishing return. If you spend 2 hours making an encounter and your players wipe it out in a round then you feel you've wasted 2 hours you could have been spending watching a movie/playing/video games etc.
Using APs mitigates this but only somewhat. Consistently the most frequent complaints about APs is the later adventures tend to be cakewalks or miss common high level staples thus bypassing entire chunks of story. As much as I'd love to work on my campaign all day, it doesn't pay the bills or write my essays.
Thus "extra preparation" is not a panacea for high level play. I want to play through an AP and have it be just as fun and well paced as the lower levels, letting me use my prep time to customize the story elements for my PCs rather than waste countless hours optimising monsters to make them more than speed bumps or slogs.
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Also the "just add stuff on the fly" and "ignore the rules" camps ignore a fundamental role of GMin. Fair and reasonable arbitration of the world and rules. Previously unseen sorcerers casting protection from elements are hardly fair or reasonable especially when the caster reasonably asks how he did not see the caster with their see invisibility spell.
It strains reality to constantly fudge the monsters in order to reduce PC abilities to wiffle bats for a few rounds. If that attitude is taken why use the pathfinder rules at all? Just play pretend. It's bad improv to negate. I won't go so far as to say it's bad GMing because your players are having fun. It doesn't mesh with me or my group though and that's why I want to see the rules simplified/streamlined at higher level for faster/ease of play.
