Within the Old School discussions, there seems to be a fondness for Low Level Gaming?

But what about Dragons, Beholders, Liches, the Tarrasque, etc.?  Doesn't the focus upon playing numerous low level Goblin and Orc encounters, miss out on the thrill of facing down the apex monsters of D&D legend?  If the campaign won't last long enough to ever face what the game is really famous for; I'd rather start a game at mid levels, and go from there.

You do face them, if you want to. And you do defeat them, if you have the luck and wits to do so.

Of course, if you inflate the power level of the monsters then you feel obliged to inflate the power level of the PCs, and you end up posting questions like this.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on December 11, 2021, 01:18:06 AM
You do face them, if you want to. And you do defeat them, if you have the luck and wits to do so.

Of course, if you inflate the power level of the monsters then you feel obliged to inflate the power level of the PCs, and you end up posting questions like this.

Well, I didn't write all those books myself.

In AD&D1e and earlier, dragons, ogres and man-eating apes are in there, such as fought by Gilgamesh, Sigurd, Conan and Beowulf. And they are defeatable by parties of low-level (3rd and under) characters acting intelligently, or single low-level characters who are acting intelligently and lucky. Stupid and/or unlucky PCs have no chance, as it should be.

OR get someone else to face them, and loot the corpses. If you can't be the shark, be the remora

I think there are some very practical reasons behind this phenomenon.

One, most campaigns start at low levels (because that's the default assumption of running a campaign) and much fewer campaigns end at really high levels (because many campaigns fall apart or just reach a natural end before that point). Therefore, there's more low-level adventuring being done by groups all around the world, and consequently, most of the discussion on forums and other platforms are going to be about those.

Two, when it comes to published adventure modules (be they amateur or professional/commercial), good modules tend to be ones that arose during actual campaign play - and since most campaign play occurs at low and medium levels as explained above, most modules will also cover that range.

Three, another thing of note about published modules is that they have to be self-contained. Everything the DM needs has to be in that little booklet or pdf file. That's easy for low-level adventures: "Here is Town, there is Dungeon, go there and loot it." That's what low-level adventurers do. High-level campaign play, however, is quite different. Realistically, a truly high-level party has an extremely wide range of options at its disposal. There's a decent chance they have a ship, so they can always just pack up and go to another island. Or maybe it's a flying ship. Or a flying carpet. Or a spaceship. Or simply the wizard casting Teleport. They can also probably call in favours from a few dozen monarchs, wizards, high priests, assassin's guild masters and interdimensional entities of all imaginable stripes who owe them big time. A very high-level adventure might very well include continent- and plane-hopping, not to mention extensively scouting out a target location with magic and/or divine help from two planes of existence away, simply because PCs of that level range just have these abilities, and they're going to use those abilities to solve problems.
And that's a massive problem for a published adventure module, because there's no way to include all that information plus the adventure in a 32/48/whatever-page-long booklet. The self-contained adventure module format is just not suited to the massive freedom and range of options available to a high-level party. (And even if it could be done, it still wouldn't be of actual use to a DM who wanted to include the adventure in his own campaign, since his party probably has a similarly wide but rather different range of options. In fact, you might argue that proper high-level adventures grow organically from their campaign, and you can't really transplant them into another one.
What you can do, and people have done it, is write a high-level module which artificially curtails the party's options. "The entire dungeon is coated in a scrying/teleporting/magical digging/earth elemental summoning/astral plane travel/divine power-proof adamantium alloy. And the party MUST go in there, and they MUST go in there RIGHT NOW, because the über-super-supreme-over-Alpha-Omega God of All Settings is forcing them to." Essentially, you pad the entire adventure with an impenetrable layer of bullshit about why the high-level party is lacking 90% of the resources and abilities that would be helpful and that they would have in a normal, organic campaign.

After a careful reading of the 1E monster manual, I have concluded the monsters were carefully designed with strengths and weaknesses that allow  any monster in there to challenge a high level group but all can be beat by a very low level group. It depends on circumstance and how smart you play. The exact same dragon provides a dramatically different level of challenge if you catch it sleeping versus if it's airborne, able to stay out of range of your attacks until it's ready to dive on you, breathing on approach, and fly back out of range. Check the 1E aerial combat rules for dragons.

I think it was a mistake to inflate the power level of monsters later on, especially dragons. With the game being called Dungeons & Dragons, I think it's absurd for a dragon to always be something you fight much, much later when you're very high level. In 1E, by the way, 4th level is considered hero level (it's literally the level title for a 4th level fighter). The way I see it, slaying an adult dragon is an appropriate adventure for a 3rd level party to emerge as (4th level) heroes.

So, good question. I think 1E is positioned to answer it well. I feel like later editions, not so much. Probably because not enough people have been asking these questions.

That and you can allways try to, you know, talk to them, bluff them, bribe them, hide from them, or not even be worth their notice.

Encounter was never allways an instant battle. Especially in BX but also in AD&D. This is something that got lost along the way. But 5e tried to bring back. But buried it in the DMG.

Personally, I love the higher level adventures as both a player & DM.  But they are harder to run & plan for due to the generally greater abilities of the players & the monsters. 

I agree with some of the other posts about most groups/campaigns just not lasting long enough to hit 8th level or whatever.  We've run through several of the famous published OSR megadungeons but limited each to a few sessions in order to experience more of them.  But due to the pandemic and scheduling issues (and sometimes playing other games) after 3 plus years that group of characters is still only 8th-10th level.  Now we're waiting for the Necropolis megadungeon from Frog God to finish us out.  That's the rare megadungeon that suggests characters begin at 8th level or higher.

Speaking from my own experiences, higher-level adventures generally require a bit more pre-planning to keep the players from unleashing some bizarre class-skill-spell combo that completely hoses your bad guys.

This can go right into building baddies that deliberately break the rules. I am reminded of the Throne of Bhaal expansion for Baldur's Gate 2, and how Balthazar could (a) spam magic missiles, and (b) ignore Time Stop, despite being a monk.

(I hated that guy.)

It's a lot less painful at lower levels simply because PCs have fewer tricks in their bag to deal with.

They do, and this is less a trend in the OSR, but there's this great prevalence of people running seemingly nothing but one shots. To me a one shot is something you do at a convention.

It's very strange to me.

I never really get attached to my characters so low-level play, while basic and likely repetitive, is a simple pleasure without the trappings of higher-level play.

I could probably play The Keep on the Borderlands variations and be quite happy with having my characters never becoming heroes, as they are far more likely to met their demise: just roll up another one as at low-level it doesn't take long.

Survival and a bit of luck and craftiness, with the goal being find a bit of gold and get out in one piece, rather than heroic play-style I guess.  Plus, it keeps the analysis paralysis of players to a minimum as fewer options (on the character sheet anyway).

Let the dragon remain a fierce, powerful entity for players.  Perhaps they will use their brains and organise a large force to deal with it, rather than 4-5 players taking it head-on.  Killing a dragon could be the culminative climax of a sandbox campaign all on it's own, rather than just another bag of HP to vanquish.  Posing a creature the players can't just bash into submission, requiring preparation and planning seems more interesting to me and hopefully more rewarding if successful.

Quote from: horsesoldier on December 14, 2021, 01:08:04 PM
They do, and this is less a trend in the OSR, but there's this great prevalence of people running seemingly nothing but one shots. To me a one shot is something you do at a convention.

It's very strange to me.

It's because many people have become non-committal.  They don't get married.  They won't sign a long term contract.  They won't agree to plans for the weekend, or even a holiday, far in advance; because something better might come along.  It's hard to get them to commit to anything requiring multiple sessions.

When I say high level D&D, I'm not talking about making things super complicated.

Give the PCs more levels at the start.  Good stats.  More hit points.  Better weapons.  Good spells.  Then, drop them into higher level scenarios.  Perhaps instead of facing a Dragon, Beholder, Lich, or Death Knight at the end of a long campaign; let that happen in the 2nd gaming session.  One session to figure out who they are, where they are, and what they can do; and the very next session, they either run into or stumble into a serious showdown.

One observation from the limb of my game's design is that a lot rests on where you put the line for "typical adventurer."

Part of my goal was for a fantasy kitchen sink where players could begin with any sort of protagonist you'd find in a fantasy novel or cinema. This meant defining the common man as 1x and the common starting PC (including things like young dragons and giants) as 4x (about 4th level in AD&D terms).

This still let goblins and hungry wolves (1x) and orcs (2-3x) be a threat in a slightly better than 1:1 ratio (ex. 6 orcs vs. a party of four), but also provides enough room for a few ogres or grizzly bears (6x) or an adult dragon (10+x) to serve as greater tier threats.

By scaling up linearly from there (a level 2 PC is 5x, level 3 is 6x, etc.) you also deflate the need for excessively powerful upper tier enemies and can keep even the mightiest dragons down in a range where a high-level party can face them solo or a lower-level party with some assistance can face such creatures (though with likely casualties among your squishy hirelings... which is what you see in fantasy stories all the time anyway... guard number 3 is there in the story just to get squashed by the dragon's tail).

Anyway, proper scaling of PCs and monsters relative to the world is a huge part of how to enable all the extremes from goblins to ogres to dragons to demon lords.