Hi PFCommunity. I was wondering if those of you that have had success in running higher tier PF games wouldn't mind offering some input on how you tamed the beast so to speak. My 20+ year history with gaming has never seen a high level game, most DND based games collapse by 12 or so due to combat getting so ridiculous (one shotting monsters, more attacks than a ninja movie could conceive, combat clunkiness exposed etc). I'm liking PF and would like to see a game advance into high levels while retaining some of what makes the lower level games so enjoyable. By that I mean credible threats to players and smooth combats.
Thanks.
Preparation!
Players
High level characters dozens of options, possibly hundreds. If they don't have fully-prepped character sheets, you're going to have a bad time. Yes, when things get complicated you sometimes have to crack a book during combat, but it shouldn't happen every time the Wizard's initiative comes up.
Game Master
High level monsters also have a lot of options, but unlike the PCs, you don't have months of experience with each one. I like to print out the enemies for each encounter (PFSRD for monsters, Hero Lab for NPCs), with any treasure already generated. Having the details in front of me, with key parts highlighted, and a place to record initiative, damage, conditions, etc. is invaluable. Without it, monsters become too easy, because I inevitably forget a key ability!
I can keep track of a group of orcs in my head, or on scratch paper, but a rakshasa defended by four kinds of golem? Better get that in writing!
I find with higher level play we have less combats and combats. If we do have combat it's epic in nature. At lower levels it was all about fighting the minions and getting to the BBEG and defeating what ever it was for the treasure. At higher level it just seemed kind of silly to have big huge encounter 5 or 6 times a day. So the games turned more into games of intrigue and politics. Bad guys weren't the types you just walked up to a killed, they tended to be the types that if you did that you accomplish nothing as another rises to take their place.
So, I'm going to provide a specific example without any specifics due to spoiler issues.
I, and my local group, have just finished leveling a team from level 1-12 and playing Eyes of the Ten. we did this in just under 6 months, and these were not even our first pathfinder characters, just our first Society characters. now, society is quite a bit different from other straight homebrew campaigns, but the basics are the same.
now i cant tell you specifics about my high level gameplay (and level 12-13 is about as high as it gets in society) but it is indeed alot to keep track of. i have several apps on my cell and tablet that keep track of spell lists, descriptions, and other combat feats/options that my characters/monsters can do. i can also tell you that even after playing the character constantly, as well as working with my team to develop important tactics and teamwork skills, i still died in all four parst of Eyes... Spoiler: i dont actually give any real spoilers, but i do say kinda how i died, no specifics as far as creatures, causes, or other, but still.
i ALSO know that our GM, who has gmed with us every scenario from 1-12, give or take a few, spent 50 hours prepping Eyes, again, its a very difficult and long scenario and most wont take that long to prep. the best advice i can give you is to be as prepared as you can, and accept that even though you prepare well, sometimes circumstances occur that WILL slow you down or cause other issues, high level play is HARD.
I've been running Rapan Athuk with a group of about 7 people, most are on and off for attendance, and right now the party is hovering around level 14-15 and things started getting pretty out of hand as of two or three levels ago. That was until I stopped caring about trying to be fair. PC's are smart, and will almost always find a way around (or in most cases straight through) whatever you send there way. I use to look at encounters 2-3 above the APL and cringe thinking if they would make it through alive. Now I see encounters that are 4-5 higher than APL and have to think of ways to actually KILL PCs just to make them challenging. They are a force to be reckoned with, and enemies who fight them should be just as powerful, and twice as smart. Don't fight PC's with numbers, fight them with creativity.
The best way to challenge high level PCs is to catch them unprepared, and/or have a better prepared force attack them.
For example:
Fight them with tactics, simple or extravagant. Throwing monsters at their face is going to end with dead monsters. Be fair, be unfair, do what you need to, just give them a challenge.
For home games, high-level play isn't that difficult. You should know the characters well, how they operate, and they should each be familiar with the actions and bonuses from other characters.
I would say that the more options that are allowed, the harder it is to contain any game (home or not). That's one reason PFS gets a little unwieldy, but the primary one is when groups of relative strangers are playing together.
Monsters *will* die in one lucky round of attacks from a PC. Just like they did at 1st level. PCs *might* die in one lucky round of attacks from a Monster, just like at 1st level. Usually, it's smoother than that.
If you have a bard, other 'buffer' class/character, or characters with lots of combat options, you really need to have a cheat sheet for the bonuses to hit and damage (preferably with the totals already calculated).
If the sheer number of dice are an issue (slow-counters or simply many many attacks), find a shortcut to keep the game moving (e.g. average damage, or take 35 for every 10d6, roll the rest).
If you have a bard, other 'buffer' class/character, or characters with lots of combat options, you really need to have a cheat sheet for the bonuses to hit and damage (preferably with the totals already calculated).
...yes. In fact, you might've inspired something. :3
Something else I've found that helps--make use of the gamer propensity to collect lots and lots of dice.
For PCs with many attacks, assign them a number of differently colored d20s. Roll them all at once. This has tended to work well for my groups.
Though, something I just thought of... have a board with different sections marked off. Say, 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 and so on. Roll a d20 into each space. That's the number of that attack, and you can almost roll a bunch at once this way.
...I need to illustrate this.
Glad to hear that prep work helps a bundle. I've recently come off a 4e game and the combats were tactically fun but took so much time story advancement was on the back burner solely due to time constraints (sometimes we couldn't finish 1 encounter a night with the group we had). Good to hear PF doesn't inspire dread at the mention of high level campaigns. I do like the suggestion to use high level combat for dramatic reasons, not just for a fights sake. Pretty much inline with what I planned for a higher level game (if I made it that far).
Like what Majuba said, sheer numbers of dice will get you as well. i played a ranged inquisitor in a party with a paladin another ranged inquisitor two rogues and a cleric. when the rogues sneak-attacked at level 12 they did 7d6 per attack with 4 attacks, and a hastened 5. if one hit they had a feat that let them make an additional attack, consuming their AoO for the round, at full BaB, if they both hit they could both do this, if one missed he could tell the other to take an attack, not as an AoO, as an immediate action, same goes for the other. we had one round where the poor bloke they were fighting had the following happen to him. Rogue 1 takes 5 attacks misses 1, gets SA on all 4 hits and declares the other rogue take a swing for free, which hits, activating rogue 1's AoO for a 5th hit on rogue 1, 21d6 plus 6d6 damage from the holy shortsword in his main hand and 18d6 plus 6d6 from the bane human shortsword in his offhand for a total of 61d6+20 (4 static/hit). Rogue 2 takes her full round attack and gets 5 hits, plus her immediate from rogue 1's hit, for the same amount, giving a grand total of 122d6+40 at level 13. we declared the BBEG dead, but in the rest of our round we could have rolled 4 attacks from each Inquisitor both baning with holy longbows for a potential 5d8 +30d6 +85 static damage each, giving a grand total of 10d8 + 182d6 + 210 static without the cleric or paladin even landing an attack. at level 12 that potential damage output is enough to kill just about anything under cr 18 in a single round (3rd round, needs 2 or 3 to prep.)
Scenarios like the one you mentioned are why games I've been involved in end before high level. When the BBEG isn't a credible threat - let alone the normal encounters, what's the point?
I was reading a thread pertaining to the thought of a PF2.0 and what would be good things to have corrected / clarified. What got me thinking of high level games in PF was someones comment about making high level games as smooth and fun as low level coupled with the content available in Kingmaker / Ultimate Campaign for higher levels (which is something I've wanted for years in other systems I've played). If there is so much fun stuff to allow for Kingdom creation / player governing, conquest etc...but antagonists 6-10 levels higher are minimal threats 1/2 through the players advancement, how do you check that and provide a meaningful campaign short of adding 1,000hp per critter just so they can live past 1 round? Would you start imposing limiters on mechanics? (say limit attacks per round since we have a great example of what I'm thinking about courtesy of Soul in the previous post) Don't get me wrong, when I create a character I do try to be as effective as I can within the confines of the box I'm working in, I enjoy building characters a lot - I wish Paizo had an online / offline builder like WotC does, I'd be using that more than I have the time to. However I can't shake the opinion that unless the players feel threatened during fights, interest will wane and Souls example exemplifies what I'm concerned with.
On a side note - thinking about this has made me believe that perhaps this is why WotC added roles (Defender, Striker etc.) in 4e in order to ensure a damage per round threshold is observed since they recommend a balanced party. To try and allow for higher tier games. I'd been more of the opinion that they just copied MMO's previously. To bad they made the combat much to time consuming and a pain to setup.
Frankly, i enjoy pathfinder the way it is. the situation i spoke about was quite literally a once in a characters lifetime thing. the difficulty in upper level things is that you NEED a team that can potentially do that in order to survive. for another example later on in that same scenario we had a fight that went like this: cleric planeshifts himself and the target of a rescue, both with under 10 hp, as a last ditch effort to succeed the mission, i die, the inquisitor dies (both of us invisible and flying) one rogue dies, soon followed by the second rogue, and the Paladin survives dealing the killing blow with 5 health, 0 channels, 0 smites, and 0 lay on hands. we were 5hp from a tpk, and the only reason we made it that far is that the paladin had a 42 AC with Vindicator Shield up and Hero's Defiance that let him auto-heal once a round upon reaching 0 hitpoints at the cost of a lay on hands. we even played that fight with perfect tactics, the rogues flanking with each other, the paladin tanking as much as he could, and the inquisitors pegging things while invisible from above. the only reason we succeeded at all is that one spell.
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Been running a RotRL game and the characters are about to hit level 18. I can't stress enough how much work you need to do to prepare for a game at this level - you will easily spend hours, not just knowing the scenerio, relevant rules, monsters and NPCs, but the capabilities of your PCs. This last piece can be very important to keeping the game entertaining, as knowing what your group can and can't do can define if an encounter will be boring, challenging, or deadly.
Honestly, the CR system completely falls apart at high level (generally past 12) and can only be used as a general guide. I can't tell you how many times the group has one rounded a CR+4 encounter because the bad guys were defenseless against the PC's capabilities; and how many CR equal or lower encounters they've struggled with because the bad guys have an ability or trick that they are completely unprepared for.
Depending on your goal for the encounter, you may need to adjust difficulty on the fly. The easiest way being adjusting hp up or down, or drop in the advanced or young template on the fly. It's fun for no one when the climatic encounter ends after one character's action because the main bad guy only has 150 hp. It's also a pain when 100 hp minions slow the game down because they won't go down fast enough. Don't be afraid to adjust the challenge as needed!
Keep in mind when you are talking about the CR system you have to consider the ratio of CR to level as well. If you are running APL +2 encounter, and CR is 6 and the characters are level 4. Then your ratio is 33% higher, which is probably going to be reasonably challenging. However if the characters are level 16 and the encounter is 18 then the ratio is only around 11% higher even though both encounters are APL +2. To keep the 33% ratio you would need your level 16 characters to be having a CR 24 encounter, which is APL +8.
Having run Savage Tide, I can attest that the game was not less deadly or challenging at high level, though I put a lot of effort into ensuring that would be the case. We had about twice as many deaths in the higher levels of the games as the lower levels. However, the characters had many more ways of recovering from death. At lower levels death was always much more permanent and making up a new character isn't a big deal. Building a new 19th level character can be a lot of work, so players were much more inclined to use raise dead magic.
I spent a lot of time learning what the PCs could do and developing tactics to exploit their weaknesses. For instance we had a character with the abjurant champion (3.5) prestige class that had a 50+ AC, but a low touch AC, so when I wanted to shake him up I made use of touch attacks against him or attacks that would target other defenses.
Debuffing characters with disjunction magic and the like, scares the crap out of them at high level and will always make things interesting if you are having trouble challenging them.
Insist that characters have a power up suite statted out (i.e., these are my stats when I have my standard buffs cast).
Insist players have stat blocks for any monsters they summon on hand, and consider ruling that a character can only have one summoned creature at a time.
Consider getting rid of the haste spell from the game entirely.