The characters in my Ravnica D&D campaign are level 13 - though they're probably only a couple sessions from hitting 14. In my campaign, there's a traitor in each of the ten guilds who is part of a conspiracy to bring the corruption of Phyrexia to the multiverse's most populous plane. The party spent all of tier 2 working against and ultimately slaying the Simic member of the conspiracy, who had a massive laboratory building Phyrexian monsters. Following that, after they took down the Rakdos and Izzet members of the cult, I decided it would be easiest to simply tell the players that each time they took down one of the traitors (which I'm calling the Praetors) they'd level up. It puts a little more agency into the players' hands, while still giving me a bit of milestone-like control.
One of the things that I've tended to find in D&D is that the higher-level a character is, the less likely they are to run out of resources. If you have a level 1 Wizard, you can cast two leveled spells in a whole day, and then you're stuck with cantrips. More importantly, your level 1 Cleric can only cast Cure Wounds twice, meaning that every fight needs to be approached pretty carefully, and any bad luck or mistake could be lethal.
But at higher levels, the DM gets a bigger problem: players not only have lots of resources, but they can also spend those resources very quickly to utterly devastate your monsters. This is not a bug, of course: the whole point of the game is that the players get more powerful.
But a DM's job is to maintain a sort of razor's edge of difficulty. I feel I've done my job right if the party is panting, bleeding, but ultimately victorious. I don't want them to feel like the victory wasn't earned, but at the same time, I don't want them to feel like they've got no chance (I've never TPK'd - in fact, the only times I've killed PCs have been through somewhat BS abilities like a Banshee's scream, or when a party member did something stupid and charged into the boss room alone with only half their hit points, or in a horror-themed one-shot where the very premise was that the monster was a deadly threat to a bunch of ill-equipped level 1 PCs).
Lots of people disparage the CR system in D&D - and I think that the difficulty of an enemy is certainly more nuanced than a single number. I still think it is useful as an "at a glance" tool. A monster that hits for 9 damage twice a turn is certainly a bigger threat than one that hits for 4 damage once a turn.
But, and this is a bigger deal the higher level they are, if the party arrives well-rested to a single big fight, they're going to do fine. They can blow all their most powerful abilities and the CR encounter-building system is not built to deal with that. If you want to do that, you need to go far beyond the recommended CR to actually give them a challenge.
However, the other way to do this is "the crawl." In this case, you have the party face many monsters in the run up to your climactic battle. Now, it becomes a question of strategic resource management. Yes, your Paladin can crit on that smite and probably do a ton of damage to the lesser demon barring the way to the big boss, but perhaps they want to save that spell slot for the big fight.
On the other hand, if not smiting means the demon lives and then gets off some nasty ability that does thirty damage to half the party, it'll mean expending more resources to heal people up to full than it might have to smite.
Right now, my party is in the middle of what is probably the biggest dungeon I've sent them in. It's a nasty one - there's a persistent miasma of poison throughout it, so the party needs to make periodic saves or take 4d10 poison damage and be indefinitely subjected to the poison condition (I think if they take a long rest outside of the Plagueworks - the name of the dungeon - they'd see it drop).
Now, granted, part of me expected the Cleric to use Heroes' Feast before they entered, which would have not only made this a non-issue, but also made the final boss significantly easier. I don't want to signal too hard for them to do this - in part because I don't want to make it too easy on them and also because I don't want to be seen as playing for them (one of my personal flaws is a desire to help that sometimes veers into control-freak tendencies, and is something I'm working on).
D&D does have healing potions, which can help alleviate the pressure on the healer characters, but there's no such thing as "mana potions." However, there is something that's almost as good: Spell Scrolls (and any magic items with charges that can be spent to cast spells).
I think a lot of DMs will talk about how they really want to feel their players are having a good time - nothing is better to me than seeing my players really excited after a session, looking forward to what is coming next. But the flipside of this is that when players feel frustrated or fatigued, it really raises some self-doubts.
The sessions I ran last night involved a puzzle inspired by the Grand Archives in Dark Souls III. In that game, this massive library is filled with spellcaster enemies whose heads are drenched in candle wax. There are also pools of liquid wax around the building that players can dunk their heads into. At first, there's no real obvious reason to do so. But farther up, you find books out of which ghostly hands will reach, inflicting the "curse" status effect (if it builds up to full, you instantly die). However, dunking your head in wax will give you a couple minutes of immunity to these hands.
Using Walled Horrors (from the Kobold Press books) and modified Wights, I recreated this in a wing of the dungeon - the librarians were non-hostile, and mostly meant to provide illumination and hint that the players should put wax on their heads. But for probably an hour and a half, the party debated what to do and then charged in, fighting the first of these walled horrors, and I realized that we'd be there the whole night if they tried to just fight all of them, so I called for lots of arcana and insight checks to hint a little more that they should dunk their heads in wax.
It... basically it didn't work out so well.
See, I think that, at least for my players, they're all very into roleplay, and so they want the fights to be climactic and challenging, but spaced out somewhat so that they can lean into non-combat solutions. And I think that, in future adventures with this group, I might try to de-emphasize the less climactic fights.
However, as we've seen, that means that the challenge needs to be far bigger. By tier 3, the party has resources out the wazoo, and most of those resources will carry through a single combat encounter, even if it's a long one.
To correct, then, you need to overwhelm them with action economy.
One of the future Praetors they're going to be fighting will be a Storm Giant Quintessant - the Gruul Praetor is one of the members of the conspiracy I think is less clear on what the actual end goals of the conspiracy are - she's just been told that the End-Raze is coming if she participates. The Quintessant is a cool stat block, but even though it's a beefy monster with hard-hitting attacks (some of which are automatic hits, which I'm going to have to account for,) it would not last long against the party on its own.
I don't want to make this adventure nearly as long as the current Golgari one, which has taken months as the players have delved deep into the lower parts of Ravnica's undercity. The Gruul one is going to be kind of shock-and-awe (and have lasting implications that lead to the Boros one).
So, rather than having the party go on a lengthy trek into the Red Wastes (which would be redundant anyway as they've had a long trek through a different Rubble Belt in a homebrewed district where they fought the Izzet Praetor) I think that's going to be more of a quick session-or-two adventure after we handle a lot of character-focused story beats.
I've been thinking that we should more or less roll the combat into one big event. However, to get a sense of a climactic build, I think the boss is going to be up on a hill, tossing Wind Javelins at the party while they face down lesser enemies below.
Anyway, my sense is that the party should be pretty resource-rich for that fight - the challenge will come from the action economy.
We'll see how it goes.
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