Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 265 - High Level Campaigns

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

Running high-level TTRPGs (level 11+) are different animals! In this episode I break down essential GM tips for these epic campaigns. Plus, I’ll give you some advice on how you need to change your prep to run a legendary game.   #rpg #ttrpg #dnd #pathfinder #gmtips #playertips #tabletop #roleplaying #highlevel Resources: Episode 45 - Minions - https://www.taking20podcast.com/e/ep-45-usining-minions-from-dd-4e-to-make-combat-better/  Buy Me a Coffee! - ko-fi.com/taking20podcast www.taking20podcast.com  Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/taking20podcast  Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/taking20podcast  Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/taking20podcast.bsky.social

This week on the Taking 20 podcast. Am I saying that you shouldn't run high-level campaigns or you shouldn't throw traps at them? Absolutely not. You know me. I'm rarely going to say don't do it. I will say there are some changes you will need to make if you're running these high-level games. Thank you for listening to the Taking 20 podcast, episode 265. Some tips for GMs running high-level games. campaigns. I want to thank this week's sponsor.

Well, you know, Thanksgiving was this week here in the U.S., so our sponsor this week is Turkey, the bird, not the country. The family wants me to stop with the Thanksgiving puns during dinner, but I don't know how to stop. I just can't quit cold turkey. Once again, I want to thank the generous donor and sponsor of this episode, Owen Winkler. If you have an idea, by the way, for an episode, please feel free to send it to me on social media or via email, feedback at taking20 podcast.com. Also, please accept my apologies for this

episode being a week late. I had family come in and stay the week before and through Thanksgiving and it completely wrecked my ability to write and record an episode. So I'm actually recording this just as family has left and I'm actually taking a little bit of time off work to get this done. But anyway, my apologies that this one is late and I'll try to make it up to you on the next one. In a lot of ways, high-level games really are the big leagues with every good and bad interpretation of that statement. Player characters have ludicrous powers, extremely high-level spells, and a myriad of options for their characters on every round of combat. Similarly, the adventures for high-level campaigns usually have extremely high stakes. The PCs aren't rescuing

kittens from trees or killing rats in Tamile Tandervale's basement. They are facing worlds shaping, or maybe even world-ending threats. These campaigns can span worlds, multiverses, even entire planes of existence. I mean, sounds fun, though, right? Well, I want to keep the big leagues comparison going. At low level, you're playing, like, club ball in front of 100 people on a Sunday afternoon with relatively little pressure, but with high-level campaigns and high-level PCs, it's like you're in a stadium with 25,000 screaming fans ready to sit.

celebrate or boo every outcome. Running high-level games are higher pressure, more difficult, but potentially more rewarding. So let's talk about what I define as high-level. Let's call high-level campaigns anything over about level 11. This could quickly, by the way, turn into a semantic argument because the line where high-level, quote-unquote, starts could be fiercely debated. Is it 11, 15, 17? Maybe high-level's only 20 and mythic levels. But for the purposes of this episode, I'm drawing that line at level 11. 11th level characters in D&D, for example, the spellcasters get their first six-level spell, which are extremely powerful. Fighters get a third attack with their attack action.

Rogues get reliable action, which can reduce a number of random negative dice rolls. In Pathfinder 2E, similarly, a number of builds really expand in power about level 11. Six-level spells, since both games use a Vancey and magic system, guardians get like unbreakable mastery. Most classes now have at least one saving throw at the master level and probably a couple of expert level. Just in general, characters now have a tremendous number of feats, a lot of high-level skills,

and are very capable in a number of situations you could throw at them. Because of these character powers, it makes designing and running a game at that level or higher much more difficult than low-level campaigns. And that's where I want to start. suppose you want to DM a game for high-level PCs. To get the most obvious advice out of the way, if you're a newest GM,

please don't jump right into running high-level campaigns. As you're getting your feet wet, as you're learning your skills, as you're honing your ability to run games, stick to low-level games where you can keep the scales low. You can keep the challenges at a low level, because jumping right into high-level stuff

and trying to plan for all the abilities the PCs will have, will really break your spirit, honestly. High-level PCs have a tremendous number of resources available to make some of the traditional obstacles you would throw with them trivial to bypass. High-level spellcasters have spells like teleport or misty step or airwalk that make physical limitations or barriers and traps completely inconsequential. The party's moving down the hallway where you read in the description text,

you round the corner of the five-foot-wide hallway, see a pit trap in front of you with a small ledge on the other side adjacent to a door with a grinning skull. A low-level party might say, oh, this is going to be a challenge, and they might struggle with the pit. It's hard to get across without complicated rope setups. They may not have the equipment or spells or capability to get over or around it. It's a great obstacle to throw at a low-level party. But high-level parties, a five-by-five pit trap is a little more than a speed bump. They can fly across it, levitate across it, set up a pulley system.

and haul the party and equipment across maybe in a few minutes, and it becomes little more than an annoyance. Am I saying that you shouldn't run high-level campaigns or you shouldn't throw traps at them? Absolutely not. You know me. I'm rarely going to say don't do it. I will say there are some changes you will need to make

if you're running these high-level games. The first major thing you need to change would be the stakes of the campaign. If you're experienced and you've run a lot of low-level campaigns, you've thrown threats at the PCs, no problem. But at high levels, the threat needs to be worthy of their attention. If there's an issue facing the village like a group of marauding cobalds or an evil ogre harassing travelers,

level 14 characters probably won't be the ones handling it. Not the least of which, by the way, because it would be a boring adventure where the PCs aren't really challenged. 14th level characters show up, kill the ogre in one round, come home and yay. Eh, that's boring. Hardly even worth getting a session together. One of the good features of any adventure is that the outcome is not known, so the threats must meet the capability of the characters that you have.

High-level characters deal with threats that are region, world, maybe even plainer-level threats. The big bad, whoever and whatever the threat is, is likely cosmic level. Think Thanos, which threatened half the life in the universe, or Mr. Shadow from Fifth Element, or Sauron from the Lord of the Rings. These big bads could destroy life as we know it or reshape the world in whatever way they want. Those are the types of threats that high-level characters respond to. All of this to say, my first tip,

is that you must raise the stakes to a high level. The penalty for failure should feel weighty, permanent, maybe even world-shattering. It's not a goblin incursion, it's an alien bent on restoring entropy to the universe, or the potential resurrection of a long, dormant goddess of death, or a dragon who's gone beyond hoarding gold and is now beginning to hoard souls, or hope, or dreams,

or maybe the undead lich thought to be sealed away for all of eternity, is escaping. And they need to either be slain permanently or recaptured, kind of like Tar Bafon on Galerian. These are the stakes of high-level campaigns. You've gone beyond saving kittens from trees, Now you're saving entire populations from death or worse. Secondly, if your high-level party will be entering dungeons, the dungeons should be built to grind resources downed.

For the most part, parties at a certain level can survive nearly anything you throw at them once. The beholder disintegrates a member of the party in a tough fight. Annoying, but someone has to expel true resurrection to bring them back without a body. Or that ancient dragon just did 14D6 damage with its... acid breath weapon. That's fine. Greater resistant energy, communal will blunt that attack and the party will be just fine. The point is, higher level PCs have access to resources that will make challenging them difficult. Now, what resources am I talking about, by the way? Healing abilities, spell slots, per day abilities, consumables, anything and everything that, to use a nerdy term,

gated behind a per time period use. As an example, Pathfinder 2E has a number of class abilities that are usable once every 10 minutes, which in practicality means that once per combat, unless your combat stack up really quickly back to back. Does my barbarian use the Predators Pounce ability now or save it just in case I really need it later in the combat? Do I use my one healing ability now or when people's health are lower? Should I give the barbarian one third of their hit points back for my one heel or do I fully heal the sorcerer? Is this the time to use that last charge on the lightning bolt wand, or will there be a better use of it later? The PCs have no shortage of powerful abilities and consumables and items that can shrug off a lot

of effects or cause a lot of damage at least once. In order to challenge a party like this, you need to adopt a bit of a grinder mentality where you're hitting them with more fights than they're used to, with rest being a little harder to come by, forcing the party to dig deeper in their bag of tricks than they're used to or maybe even want to. Now, how do you do this? How do you grind a party like this? Two ways. Isolation and tenacity. Isolation is pretty obvious on its face. I mean, make sure they're adventuring in some remote location far from a safe haven. The environment should reinforce that they are no longer in Kansas anymore, Toto. They are strangers in a strange land and they are the invaders here, very much out of place. Obviously, being,

Being geographically distant from civilization is one way to do it, but by high-level campaigns, a lot of the parties have access to teleportation magic and can traverse continents in six seconds. In this case, distance may be created by being on different planes of existence, pocket dimensions that don't allow teleportation, magic dampening fields that prevent long-distance travel, or other, to be blunt, artificial ways of creating distance, even though the party has powerful magics. It's the same challenge you have in a sci-fi campaign, by the way, when there's a starship in orbit. How do you keep them from just beaming back to the ship when shit gets dangerous and beaming down again 100 feet away and continuing on with their

adventure? It's the same logic. There's a magnetic flux field or item failure or some other reason that the party can't just do that and make it trivial. Now, as for tenacity, what I mean is that the PCs should have a more difficult time in the dungeon than you traditionally throw at them. If they usually have four encounters in a day, make them go through five or six. If the encounters are usually four PCs against three baddies, make it five or six baddies. Make the baddies smarter, use cover, ambush, have magic items and abilities, or anything that you can do to make the encounter more difficult and give them more challenge than they're used to. What I'd recommend is some variety in the encounters you throw at them.

Not just ogre, ogre, ogre, ogre, ogre, ogre, ogre, or ogre, maybe ogres have vermin as pets or trolls as partners. mix it up, hopefully, to keep the players interested. Another trick is to make long or full night's rest harder to come by. When PCs take a long rest or night's rest, depending on your game system's term, a lot of the abilities, spells, etc., reset to full. It's a critical tool that PCs use

to keep their characters strong, their abilities ready in case they need them. So let's make that harder to come by. And there's multiple ways to make that happen. The most effective way would be to introduce a ticker clock. Make the parties rest a significant decision with potential consequences. When the parties declare a long rest, let them know that the villain may be busy while they sleep for eight hours. Maybe they complete the ritual, kidnap an NPC, move to a more fortified location, or secure

critical reinforcements for their baddies. It might make the next day's encounters even harder because they're choosing to rest. Use the time they spend resting to advance the enemy's goals or reinforce their defenses, making it clear that resting is not a pause button for the world. The phrase I always use from my various parties is that Tempus fugit, time flies. The world does not and should not sit idle while the PCs decide to kick back for the night. Another tip would be occasionally interrupt the rest with encounters. During the day, the parties fully armed and armored, marching in a certain order, protecting the squishier party members from the creatures that want to eat them.

However, when the rest is interrupted, a lot of the times the party members aren't in armor, aren't fully healed, maybe don't even have weapons out of their storage. Encounters while resting are inherently more difficult and dangerous, and the PCs could be at a distinct disadvantage, especially against smart opponents. Moving the conversation to outside of the dungeon, one thing to remember is that high-level PCs are basically celebrities. The party has already done amazing things on their way to these high levels and probably are very well known. If so, they should be approached by envoys from kings and leaders and archmages, local, and maybe even from far away, with offers of work, pleas for help, demands for their services. High-level allies and powerful villains could be common in their circles. They're rubbing elbows with the rich, the powerful, and the dangerous.

Walking down the street, you could even make normal townsfolk just awestruck, terrified of them. At a minimum, people will be whispering and talking about these, oh my gosh, is, is that Lorethe the magnificent? He's really powerful. Did you hear what he did to the ogres? The PCs won't blend in anywhere, especially if their faces are known and actions spread among the populace. This reinforces their legendary status in the world. I've hinted at this, but to directly state it, one feature of high, level campaigns that I love is the hard choice. The hard choice dilemma, quote-unquote, contains problems without easy, clear-cut solutions. A classic example, the villain is

simultaneously attacking three buildings or three cities or three continents. The party can try to save two. Which one do they choose to let burn? This forces moral weight onto their power, and it makes them understand that their choices have serious consequences. The example I love to use here would be like the Avengers and most MCU movies. These heroes are extremely powerful and a common theme is the cost of power and wielding it responsibly. Characters like the Scarlet Witch and Thor and others can save thousands or even millions of people, but they can't be everywhere at the same time.

How do they decide who to save and win? How did they pick the threat that they focus on, knowing full well that that means that they are choosing not to focus on other threats elsewhere? Similarly, the PCs may be able to destroy the Big Bad's lieutenants and rid the town of a persistent threat, but doing so may cause collateral damage with innocence perishing in the battle. If they wait, the lieutenant may be away from the population center, but the lieutenant will be more powerful, maybe. These moral choices give weight to powerful campaigns and helps the players understand that with great power comes great responsibility. Ha!

Snuck in one more MCU reference. Enjoy that one. As an example of giving choice some weight, there was a high-level campaign I ran a long time ago that revolved around seven artifacts that had been scattered to the four winds, collectively known as the Riven Regalia. A mind-flare-like creature was attempting to collect them and use their power to bring back a Cthuloo-esque,

creature from the great beyond that wants to consume all of creation, yada, yada, yada. The big bad wasn't always a mind flayer and viewed their current form as suffering and would rather be utterly destroyed than continuous things are. For those that recognize them, by the way, this is a smattering of Thanos and Asriel from dogma and the reapers from Mass Effect, all collected together in that Big Bad, which is why I repeatedly say there's nothing new under the sun. borrow, borrow, borrow ideas from other media and steal, steal, steel, steal plot ideas where you find them. Anyway, the party had choices about which pieces of the ribbon regalia they went after with the full knowledge

that the Big Bad's going after pieces as well. If they wanted to take 10 days to start crafting magic items, that's 10 days of progress the Big Bad will make towards one or more of those artifacts. Tempus Fuget, the world is not idle. It gave the campaign a sense of weight when they discovered the Crown was the first thing the big bad went for. The party had already gotten a bow and was making progress towards another one when the big bad got his first piece. That drove home the weight of their choices and the race for the pieces was on. I still game with some of those players now and then and they still mention

how fun that campaign was. One of these days, I need to collect my notes and publish that adventure. It was as fun to write as it was to run. Anyway, another tip you can use is when the party becomes very high level, they are nigh on unkillable. Even if the Big Bad Slays one or disintegrates another, they usually have access to powerful healing and resurrection magics that makes death a speed bump, minor inconvenience. Even if they can't cast the raised dead spell themselves, they've probably made contact with someone who can.

One quick trip to the High Priestess of Michical from the Dragonlance series, and voila, their good is new. So what do you do? Could you make resurrection or healing magic not work properly? Sure, I mean, I would definitely warn you. the party before you spring that on them. But it comes back to the party has made a choice to delay their work on the main plot while they bring Lothario the Bard back from the great beyond. Good. Keep the clock ticking. It might take them a few days to get their friend resurrected. Meanwhile,

the Big Bad is quested to Istar to find an artifact that they're looking for, thereby putting the party at a disadvantage if they quest for the same item, or maybe even lose out on getting the item altogether. Quickly, I'll say that if the party is too tough for the Big Bad to take on directly right now, then the Big Bad can go after the people or things that they love instead, whatever those things happen to be. The Big Bad sends some of its forces to harass a town a couple of days away. The PCs teleport to take care of the threat, and while the PCs are gone, the Big Bad hits the PCs where it hurts. Now's the time to look at those character backstories and see if there's a relative or family member or friend that the PC is close to, and have the Big Bad attack them,

kidnap them, maybe even kill them. But Jeremy, the only thing my PC's seem to care about is money. Good. Then have the Big Bad take that. The PCs have a home base where they're storing some of their loot and the Big Bad's forces break in and take it, maybe killing or kidnapping some of the higherlings in the process. Even the most roleplay-averse player cares about their money and if nothing else, hit them in the pocketbook. Okay, let's shift to designing combat encounters for high-level characters. This can be a challenge even for experienced, old, DMs like myself. Reasons are the same as what I mentioned at the start of the episode.

High-level characters have powerful spells, tremendous resources, and lots of options when dealing with foes. But Jeremy, you may be saying, D&D has the challenge rating system, and Pathfinder has an XP budget system for encounters, and as long as I say close to the level of the party, I'll be just fine. In my experience, if you're under level 10, I wholeheartedly agree with you. The CR and XP budget are pretty good guides

with Pathfinder's XP budget system maybe being a little bit better due to the design of the system. No shade towards D&D, but the CR system really gets wonky at high levels. It's just harder to balance baddies at those high levels. A lot of times they are hit point sponges

or they have tons of attacks per round or they have an ability like a breath weapon that can absolutely wreck the party's day but they can only use it once every one to four or six rounds. Instead, I want you to think about a different concept called the action economy of a high-level fight.

Action economy, by the way, could be an episode all its own, but it's probably too esoteric for 24 minutes. For that reason, stick with me for just the next few. In D&D, a party of four PCs has four actions, four bonus actions, and four reactions per round. These could be attacks,

Movement, extra attacks, reactions, dodge, attacks of opportunity, second wind, et cetera. Now, imagine the party is facing one big monster, one big dragon, one big demon, whatever it is. The CR says it should be an equal fight, but there's always going to be an action imbalance leaning towards the party with the higher numbers. A PC party of four gets 12 potential actions, while a single bag bad gets three, plus maybe any legendary or lair actions that may exist. Even if the big bad got one of each, each round, the party can do 12 things at a time, the big bad can do five. That means the party generally has an advantage

because they can simply do more each six seconds, even if they aren't as cool as turning someone to stone or melting them with acid or disintegrating them with an eye ray. The party can't do that, so it's even, right? Not really. Think about how many attacks the party can get off that round, spells they can cast, cool shit they can do in the time the beholder can see,

an eye ray or two, and then maybe move. To make a fight appropriate for higher-level parties, you have to balance out the action economy. Legendary and lair actions help, but here's where I'd start throwing in some minions as well, some sort of lower-level creatures that assist the batty in combat. Think lieutenants or pets or summon creatures, what have you. Give them varied, weaker monsters that can distract the party,

spread out their attacks amongst multiple creatures, and give the powerful creature a fighting chance. You know, like Ramora's stick to sharks or hirelings for a crime boss. This makes fights more memorable and it gives you a better chance of at least providing some challenge to the high-level party before they win. By the way, there are multiple ways to add minions. You could add a weaker version of the same creature. The Hobgoblin King has a bunch of hobgoblin attendants with goblin and hobgoblin attendance to them and so forth. Similarly, the Undead Queen Winterwhite has a bunch of whites and ghoul attendants.

Sure, nothing wrong with doing that at all. all. But also consider different creatures that might complement each other well. The stone gullum has a black pudding that lives in its hollowed out torso, or the fight with the ogre magi is complicated by having ropers that live on the ceiling, but aren't strong enough to grab the ogre, but the PCs are potential prey. You can also give a listen to episode 45 if you want to use fourth edition's ideas of minions in their game. I'm a huge fan of that technique, and I've used it many times, because you could have the entire ghoul, colony descend on the party to try to protect the queen winter white but that way you can give

the PCs the fight of their lives without having to memorize okay what how many hit points all these things have and what's their attack bonus and that kind of thing no give that episode a listen if you want my tips for running minions at higher levels though i do strongly encourage you to customize the powerful creatures and make them even scarier unique with terrifying ability the PCs have never seen before. There's a joke meme out there about a DM talking to an eight-year-old kid who describes a spider dragon, a massive black dragon with eight-legged, big pinchers, dripping with poison and a breath weapon that is millions of tiny spiders.

I apologize, by the way, to my arachnophobic listeners, but that sounds like an awesome creature just though at the party. Swarms are dangerous anyway, and now you have a giant black dragon that can climb walls, maybe spin webs, breathe multiple spider swarms at the party, maybe the acidic poison on their pinchers, that kind of thing. Again, apologies if you have a fear of spiders, but my point is give high-level opponents unique abilities. If you're hunting for ideas, look at the creatures of a similar challenge rating to the big bad. But Jeremy, you said that challenge rating isn't necessarily reliable at high levels. I know what I said, and shut up. You can still steal ideas,

that are, in theory, balanced with that level of opponent. You'll just need to be ready to adjust things behind the screen if the fight starts going badly one way or another. My next tip, I've mentioned before, but it's especially true for high-level campaigns. Try to make the terrain or battle map or area of the encounter part of the combat. Utilize complex terrain features

like varying heights and cover and varying wits, chasms, obstacles, flowing water, or lava to make combat more interesting than just a flat plane or anybody can move wherever they want to for advantageous positioning. To make the combat even more difficult, lay out the terrain in such a way that it's difficult for the PCs to get an advantage on the batty's. Put the PCs behind a choke point and make them burn that memorized fly spell or levitate potion to get more frontline fighters involved.

Have attackers converge from multiple directions so the PCs can't just put the fighters in front and the squishies in the back. Creative combat locations force PCs to use their resources creatively to solve problems and that's what you're going for in high-level games. One time I was in a high-level party and we were fighting a couple of ropers that hang from the ceiling and pull characters up in the air to bite them.

The problem is, if you kill a roper that has one of the PCs in its grasp, they'll both fall and that can kill the character as well. These ropers, by the way, happen to be over a deep crevasse, which would mean certain death if our characters fell into it. So my druid cast wall of stone to create a bridge under the ropers, so yes, the fall would hurt, but it's not going to be hundreds of feet causing instant death.

It was a well-designed encounter by my friend and GM Tom Robinson, which required some creative use of the limited resources that we had. Finally, let's talk about how high-level games will change your prep. If you've never run a high-level game, PCs have tools and capabilities that can absolutely shatter a railroaded adventure. They have long-distance scrying and messaging capabilities to get information to and from distant locations very quickly. Plus, they have teleport, plane shift, and other travel mechanisms that eliminate types of

transport that can otherwise be prepped ahead of time. You want to prep a fun stagecoach fight? Nope, they're teleporting to the distant city. F your prep. More so than low-level campaigns, you have to prep. situations, factions, and challenges ahead of time, and then adjust them to what the players do. You have to fall back on the rule of three. Editor Jeremy here, and I just realized I've never done an episode on the rule of three.

Okay, here's the short answer. Have three things ready at the beginning of a session. Three generic combats, three generic NPCs, and three possible locations. More on this in a couple of episodes, so get ready for that. My gosh, I cannot believe. this is one of my foundations of GMing, and I have not talked about it yet. God, I should have talked about this ages ago. What do I mean by situations, factions, and challenges?

The situations could be a combat, a social interaction, and a trap or hazard. Have the stats you need nearby so you can run those very quickly if you need to. For factions, have in mind what the big bad and their organization is doing to try to accomplish their goals and any other organizations that might be important to the campaign. Maybe the Thieves Guild is trying to use the chaos caused by the big bad to their own advantage, or the government is using the situation to maneuver for more power, or the rat people who have been barely eking out a life in the sewers, use this opportunity to pledge their help and better their situation.

For challenges, it could be anything that presents a difficulty for the player characters. A social event, influencing a member of the council, negotiating a peace treaty or the old-fashioned stab something with the pointing end until it stops twitching and loot the corpse. No matter what you do when you're GMing high-level campaigns, always remember, these characters are famous, legendary, powerful, maybe some of the most powerful people on the planet. If they want to do something awesome, you should let them do it.

Make NPCs react believably to their presence. A 17th-level character, maybe the most powerful sorcerer of this nation has ever seen. Give them their flowers for their accomplishments, and if they find a creative way to solve a problem, reward them for it even though it's not what you prepared. High-level D&D is epic fantasy storytelling, and it requires a shift from tracking copper pieces to tracking the fate of nations. Focus on escalating threats, balancing action economy, and preparing for legendary game sessions.

With a little effort, I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. Thank you so much for listening. like to get your feedback, either via social media or email, feedback at taking20 podcast.com. What topics would you like to hear me cover? Is there a particular tabletop news item you'd like me to discuss? Please send me a message and let me know. Tune in next episode when we're going to talk about high-level player characters, how to run them effectively. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Turkey. A neighbor bought his turkey live and it actually ran away from them the day before Thanksgiving. As it ran away, I couldn't take my eyes off of it.

It was like poultry in motion. This has been episode 265 talking about running high-level campaigns. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 podcast is Copyright 2025 by Jeremy Shelley. The opinions or views expressed by guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the host. References to game system content are copyright their respective publishers.