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I've always thought an overarching theme of Things Way Beyond Normal Human Abilities was a good way to run a high level campaign. One of my favorite RPGs was Neverwinter Nights: Mask of the Betrayer, where you actually end up being "infected" by the spirit of a man who challenged the gods; there's lots of planer travel and you end up being agents or enemies of the gods themselves.
What will make things memorable aren't the combat encounters, but what the characters choose to do with their power. As Kestral287 said, the wrong choices can mean a deity shows up and squishes them like a bug.
Some good seeds for a high level campaign:
* Evil god is using demons and devils to cause suffering and despair to gain more power
* A disease that can affect the divine is running rampant among lesser deities
* The fabric of the afterlife is being changed an no one knows why
* The hive mind of some uber race has found a permanent portal to your world
* A well-meaning lesser deity has found a way to destroy negative energy. Sounds ok, but things begin to get out of control and chaotic
* A god of war is tired of peace and decides to poke various leaders into action
* A wizard from ages past has arrived from a plane where time doesn't flow to discover his tower demolished and archives looted. He's mad, but does he have the right culprits or is he going after innocent people?
I have seen many threads out there with advice on high level games that mention that at this level it is not about what you can kill but how you can change the world.
I know from experience that a dungeon does not work at high levels.
How are you defining "dungeon"?
If you're referring to a hole in the ground filled with rocks and a few humanoids and oozes, yeah, probably not.If you're referring to any self-contained environment closed off to most of the outside world with its own possibe ecology and social hierachies, well maybe they do work. Gallowspire should be pretty difficult even for "high level" characters and is a "dungeon" by that definition. Likewise the Siege Tower of Nex outside of Absalom could be considered a "dungeon", even though it's likely about eight or nine dozen stacked demi planes.
The PCs have to many ways to simply jump to the BBEG. Is there a way to fix this? Is an example published anywhere?
The rules of the game are primarily about combat. What kind of combats are actually fun at high levels?
Those that the players are invested in, threatened by, or otherwise find interesting. Much like the lower levels of the game, but with more possible threats that don't end up wiping the floor with the PCs.
What expectations does the GM need to bring to the table? What expectations do the PCs?
That the game doesn't play like 1st & 3rd level anymore. Similar evolutions in play style occur at 3rd (look, a single [un?]lucky crit may not kill me!), 5th (look, we can fly!), 9th (look, we can teleport!), 11th (look, I can finally start having some of the things I built my character for!), etc.
What kind of story is worth telling when 9th level spells are the norm?
Um, high level ones? ... PCs are probably not very worried about random bandits mugging them on their picnic, to be sure...
BBEG threatens the entire world: PCs use divination find him and kill him. This is boring.
True. Unfortunate you used the tactics of a 5th level BBEG for a world threatening plotline. I sort of feel bad for the BBEG and wonder how he survived his (probably far more evil than the PCs) rivals that long if he was that easy to find and kill.
What kind of campaign actually requires the PCs to go through it instead of simply around it.
A 1st through 3rd level one? ... seriously, high level adventurers can general bypass the "oh no's a hole in the ground, how do we get over/around it?!" types of challenges. That's part of the fun of BEING high level.
At this level if the the encounter or arc is not mandatory then the PCs will find bypass it. This means the attritional nature of low level games does not really work.
True, that's why it's HIGH level. Much like you are probably not going to rely on swarms of 1/3 CR Orcs with Great Axes to put the fear of crits in them, you do need to step up your game a bit with how you design encounters when you start writing / running higher level content. Fortunately, you should have about 19 levels to run your PCs through before you get to 20th for practice :)
Is there a published adventure that deals well with this. I am mainly asking because I have run several APs now and for some reason I still find big dungeons in books 5 and 6. Whole swaths of them are wasted, the PCs have goal and exploring every room actually makes that harder.
There are a few high level mods that have good premises, but not really. The problem is primarily that of page count, from what I understand. The more complex and higher-CR the encounter, the more text it requires. When a GM isn't familiar with higher-level tactics putting things like a scroll of witness and greater spell immunity in the stat block doesn't help if the GM doesn't know to use those things together. Explaining tactics and contingencies can take even more word count than the actual statblocks themselves. All of that said, Tomb of the Iron Medusa is pretty good :)
This assumes some rationally house rules that prevent infinite wealth and limit beings under your control to the point where the PCs are still the most important things on the board and can not simply point and army Solars at it.
Seems reasonable. Another thing to consider for higher level games is that you can get to the "why" of things a lot more reasonably than you can at lower levels. Pulling back the curtain on the metaphysics and possibly secret politics of the movers and shakers of your world(s). Maybe the PCs can discover why there's not been a shadowpocolypse or why snow-cone-wish-machines aren't used by every other caster in the history of the world.
I ask all of this because my players would like to play with the high level tool box but it is to easy for them to simply stomp the plot and go home. If instead the build then can easily build the best X anywhere in the setting.
It's something you have to work up to most of the time. If you start players at 15+ with no experience at that level, both you and they are less invested in the characters and the campaign than if it's grown organically over time. If it's been grown over time, you should have no end of loose ends, "but why did <x> happen?", etc. to flesh out your higher level games. Frankly, I normally have the problem of narrowing the scope rather than expanding it at higher levels. High level games are not very railroad friendly and the sandbox is more like the Sahara.
-TimD
I find a relatively large # of folks haven't played in good higher level games / campaigns. Combination of factors, but mostly it's about time - it takes awhile to get PCs to high levels and by the time you do, odds are real life will do horrible things to mess up your gaming group. Just jumping in at high levels rarely makes for a good game either, barring some EXTENSIVE work on the part of the GM or an assistant GM type of person.
So 3 quick tips for running high level campaigns ESPECIALLY if you've never done one before:
1. Make sure before you begin, or just after you start, that you know how long the campaign is supposed to go and plan appropriately.
2. Make sure before you begin, or just after you start that your players understand how long you intend the campaign to go so that they can plan appropriately (and so everyone is on the same page).
3. As much as you can, if you are going to be running high level campaigns, start laying the ground work EARLY. This will make the player investment soooooo much easier down the road and cut down on the villain of the week factor a bit.
Here is some advice I once gave about plotting an extended higher level campaign. Even if you don't want your campaign to have anything to do with demons, you may find it helpful for plotting / planning purpose.
-TimD
I have been in and run some fun mid to high level games. I have never gotten above 15th level however.
I think most of the successful ones are the ones that have things figured out from the top down. I generally start with those with the most power, deities. If there are none in the setting I start with the heads of polities and religions. Figuring out what would be happening if the PC's didn't exist is key here. Flexibility is also key, as sometimes the best thing you can do is change something and then make sure the continuity holds. Writers usually write multiple drafts, GM's can benefit from the same process.
Solid advice here.
Start with the end-session villain and work your way down the chain.
Once you have your end-session foe(s), you have one or more themes, critter types and preferred methods of madness that trickle down the 'level ladder' to your starting point.
Then you fill in the cracks, file off the flash and slather on the flavor text.
High level play is a LOT of work. The reason so many high level 'modules'/AP chapters go to great lengths to seemingly shaft high level 'scry-n-fry' is simple: the developers don't want the villains to get cheap-shotted, writing to account for them takes up far more page count than it's worth and I've yet to see the bad guys in print deploy the same tactics against the PCs. A great many of them could and should. Some do not do so from arrogance. Most have other activities on their agendas that make wiping out those annoying heroes that disintegrated half of the outpost used by [insert nefarious plot device here] a task assigned to minions.