My look at high-level AD&D adventure design considerations, inspired
by Prince of Nothing's recent No Artpunk 3 contest:
https://grodog.blogspot.com/2023/12/high-level-adventure-design-and-play-considerations.html

What other design principles guide your designs and play in high-level adventures?

Allan.

High level characters are very capable and have access to a ton of resources that lower level characters do not.

So do their enemies.

Dungeon stomps need to be carefully designed if they are to be used at all. One thing that can make formdable challenges doubly so is a ticking clock. Time pressure can be a good tool to use to keep challenges difficult. One little trick that usually causes an oh crap moment even from high level characters is an adventure not only loaded with difficult resource draining challenges but one that introduces time pressure about half to 3/4 of the way through. High level characters sometimes get lazy due to all of their cool resources and if they embark on an adventure without any time limit they will quite often be spendthrifts with their resources. Then when they are getting a bit low, turn up the heat, ramp up the challenges and introduce a timed element that wasn't there before.

The prospect of having to go through the toughest parts of the adventure without that rest that they were counting on can make the toughest high levels pucker up and begin to seriously doubt their chances.

If we're talking about 1E specifically, length and pacing is probably my first consideration. Shorter high level adventures, those are pretty much what you'd expect, with scaled up challenges and whatnot.

The longer ones, however, are a very different thing. At 8th+ level, spell-casters are not able to re-up all their spell slots in a daily basis (I assume ~12 hours daily downtime). We're usually talking 24 total spell levels of spells no greater than 4th level. And that in turn sets a limit on daily healing. In actual play, of course, there will be some variability. You might get through one game day relatively unscathed and that will allow spell casters to recover a small number of higher level spells instead of the 1st-4th level ones. On the other hand, random encounters in the night denying casters uninterrupted sleep could force them to go multiple game days without any re-up at all.

To put it into perspective, if you have a cleric of 18+ level with 14+ WIS and want to choose your daily slots to maximize healing, you take 8 cure light wounds and 4 cure serious wounds. And that will heal a total of 76 hit points on average. If there's a paladin in the party (14th level if having similar XP to the cleric), you can add 3 more cure light wounds and a lay on hands, you can add another 41.5 points of possible healing. Then divide it by the number of party members (say 5), the per-character daily hit points restorable is just 23.5. That's all that really counts. Everything else is reserves. This is actually great news for level-capped demi-humans. Unless you take an obviously bad combo (single class half-orc cleric), you should end up with hit points in the 30's. Plenty to cover your daily restorable with a safety buffer.

When planning traps, encounters, etc, just understand, if you average less damage than this daily, it amounts to practically nothing. If more, it will cut into the reserve hit points, spells, potions, scrolls, and charges, and it will be wearing the party down. What separates a 10th level party from something ridiculous like a 30th level party isn't so much how difficult the challenges are, it's more about how much they can be whittled down before giving out.

Also, insofar as player strategies for success, if the constraint is 23.5 daily restorable hit points, stretching that as far as possible is key, meaning having a good AC is far more important than having a ton of hit points. It's better to have a level-capped dwarf with magical platemail and a -4 defensive bonus against large creatures in the front line than it is to have a much, much higher level barbarian in his skivvies.


Apart from that, I pretty much give all the same considerations I'd give to any adventures. Some of them are probably a lot more important for high level adventures. Here's a big thing. You can't just throw challenges at the group. All things being equal, a thinking group of players are going to try to avoid them to avoid the risk of taking losses. In a low level game, the danger is things get boring. Players can get so risk adverse that they're definitely not even playing adventurers anymore.

In higher level games, however, that's when players roll out those spells that DMs dread. The teleports, the passwalls, going ethereal, or even just burning everything down with a nasty fireball. Challenges need to viewed as a membrane with a nucleus that the players really, really want. Players short-sighted enough to use magic to bypass the entire dungeon which was the bulk of the adventure to go straight to the big bad evil guy will be snuffed out if the clues and/or super secret power weapon needed to beat the boss are hidden or scattered about the dungeon they just skipped.


The other big consideration for high level games that is something I consider for adventures in general (mainly because I run an open table) is level as a liability. A 12th level character is less than twice as tough as a 6th level character but loses around 10 times as many XP from a single level drain. More powerful characters have more powerful evil clones. Detect Good/Evil doesn't work on characters unless they're 8th+ level. So in high level games, NPCs can take full advantage of that.

One time I had the party attacked by an animated suit of full plate armor. Normally you attack an armored foe, you're trying to get past the armor, attacking vulnerable points and such. More skilled fighters are more likely to do so. But in this case, you actually need to smash up the armor itself. And so all you needed to hit was to hit AC 10, but if you hit AC 2 or better (unless using a metal bludgeoning weapon), it bypassed armor doing no damage at all. A 1st level fighter is 45% likely to miss, 15% likely to hit AC 2 or better, and so is 40% likely to damage the animated armor on any given attack. Whereas a 12th level fighter with a +4 sword hits AC 2 on a 4 or better, and so only really hurts the armor on a 2 or 3.

While he was working on Quake, John Romero once said "If it can be made in Doom, it's not good enough", basically suggesting that a good Quake map needs to take advantage of stuff that wouldn't be possible with Doom. High level play is kind of similar in the context of D&D - if I gave your character stat improvements in line with the higher level but they never tapped into their higher level resources like spells or equipment and they can still achieve the key goals in your adventure, it's probably not good enough. You have to distinguish your adventure qualitatively rather than just making numbers go up and throw in high-level monsters instead of low-level ones. High-level characters have access to spells that totally change the game and trivialize challenges that might have been a more interesting part of lower-level play. Part of D&D high-level adventures, following Romero's theory, is that you need to enable proper use of these higher level spells in ways that are satisfying.

I think the single most important factor in producing a good high-level adventure more generally (setting aside particular D&D design features) is that it needs to have a sense of scope and scale above and beyond lower-level adventures. I think it's hard to produce high-quality isolated modules for high-level play because part of the mastery of the game is managing that broader scope and stepping into things like name-level considerations and how to work relationships across characters and factions. You need to think about how to pull the social levers a little bit to manipulate the sandbox and achieve an objective. As a 1st level character it's easier to think as a single unit, as a 12th or 14th level character you need to start thinking more like an organization or a coalition of organizations (in a party). Your characters are powerful in their own right but if you can achieve all of your objectives without ever leaning on all these new tools at your disposal, you're just playing amped up D&D but way less interesting because there are so many elements of that low-level adventuring style effectively removed from consideration by good spell use.

One of the most memorable high-level adventures I had played in involved our characters (name-level at this point and semi-retired) having to take on a more active role in investigating a mystery/crisis threatening some of our name-level interests. My Thief character was using his spy guild he had spent so long developing to start pulling at the threads of this mystery. I fed the details to other characters so that they could act on that information with their own resources. Our wizards had spell libraries at this point that enabled a lot of stuff like advanced divination spells like Scrying to start following leads or testing theories. Ultimately, this culminated in us having to navigate a tense relationship with some authority figures we'd previously pissed off and the Fighters needed to mobilize their people to ensure we had the manpower to deal with the revealed threat. As it turned out, our plan needed us to be in multiple places at once and instead of splitting the party we decided we were going to have one of our Wizards prep all these resources to get us in position via Teleport so that we could basically be in multiple places "at once". One of the more memorable moments is that we lost one of our major party members during the first Teleport roll when he was teleported into the terrain because we didn't quite plan well enough and had a bad percentile roll. He was carrying a few of the magic items we considered pretty integral to our plan so we had to kind of improvise. Stuff like that is memorable and it's the kind of experience you can't get at low level.

In terms of game design: I personally would like it if D&D had fewer spells intended to trivialize low-level problems (like creating shelter, generating food/water, negating poison, flight, true-sight, the list is extensive). I think mundane problems are still conceptually interesting and exciting and it's more of a D&D-ism that its design eliminates the excitement of these things. I think spells are more interesting if they're treated like tools in the toolbox with their own idiosyncrasies and drawbacks over achieving the same goal via mundane means. If my Wizard can create food/water and the Ranger can hunt for food, I think it's more interesting to think about when/why a group might pick either option. People often invent their own explanations - like magically created food/water just not tasting very good. But what effect does that have, really? My character is already slogging through mud and living an unpleasant life in the field as an adventurer, and I'm doubtful that my rations (probably hard tack) are much better than magical food. The real impact of having the Ranger hunt for food is that we're burning daylight, and that's almost always going to come at a higher premium than a low-level spell slot and our imagined senses of taste and comfort.

I've only ever had 3 name-level characters as a player in D&D and my Wizard definitely highlighted the shortcomings of high-level D&D spell design. Whereas early adventures are all about ingenuity and moment-to-moment gameplay where you can be a strong contributor just by interacting with the DM and asking the right questions, high-level play as a Wizard definitely felt more like picking the right loadout so we could skip obstacles and avoid interacting with them at all. It's kind of like when you play a Ranger in some RPGs where they have an ability that eliminates the need to worry about food in the wilderness. I'm playing a Ranger specifically to interact with those aspects of the fantasy and make it an active part of the game, not to remove it. I think it undercuts the fun of the archetype. Similarly, I'm playing a Wizard specifically so that I can grapple with magical obstacles. My idea of a great Wizard is one that uses the tools in their toolbox in clever ways and asks the right questions about magic to find solutions. As a simple example of how great low-level spell design is contrasted with high-level: the Grease spell has a strong core concept, the potential flammability makes it multi-use at tables with that interpretation, and so it's a great spell. The coded interactions between things like Wall of Force and Disintegration are way less interesting - codified interactions by their nature only ever work one particular way.

In general, I think the design of lower-level D&D is great and at least part of the reason high-level D&D is not always satisfying is because it's often still treated as a dungeon crawl, but the moment-to-moment gameplay with exciting interactions is replaced with more and more codified solutions, spells to skip gameplay, and particular obstacles that need particular keys to deal with them. I think high-level play should ultimately be about demonstrating mastery of the game and managing the broader scope of impact your character can have on the world. I don't think it should be about just broadening the fantasy with tougher monsters, more powerful spells, and ways of eliminating whole aspects of play that were really fun just a level or so ago.