Contending with high-level play

Before anyone embarks on this blogpost, be aware that Shim is writing this in the middle of the night, having entirely failed to get to sleep, and may not be particularly reasonable right now.

I'm now in what I think is my eighth year GMing the Necropolitans campaign - a quick run through the prewritten Serpent's Skull adventure path, I told myself - and contending with a group of 16th-level characters, with appropriate* loot and several mythic tiers**, who are all undead, run by experienced players with a great knowledge of the system and how to build effective characters and use them effectively. And when I say contending with, what I really mean is failing to contend with.

* some of my players would probably disagree, at least looking at the numbers. OTOH they do have a large volume of loot that they never actually use, and no suggestions for other magic items they would like to obtain, so shrug.

** mythic kept coming up in conversation, it fits the theme of being on a mission from Anubis, and there was a certain degree of "why the hell not".

I've been trying to work out how I feel about this, and I'm still not settled, but there's definitely a degree of frustration here which I am trying hard not to let fall on my players, who are blameless.

I think a significant part of this boils down to feeling inadequate as a GM, particularly when it comes to the quite tactical combat which has never been my strength. Fights in Pathfinder tend to last for hours of real time - the last two sessions were the party fighting through a bandit lair, and represents about eight hours of mostly straight combat. As the GM, it's my job to make that feel fun, interesting, challenging, and so on.

I don't really feel like it is often those things.

There are several aspects to this issue that I will now poke with a stick.

One aspect of this is that I've completely lost any sense of the maths. I'm constantly going "your touch AC is what, now?" as some threat utterly fizzles in the face of Numbers Go Up. Lacking bounded accuracy and favouring stacking, PF has no objection to PCs getting +40 or so to a roll, but they might also have a +5. I find it increasingly hard to judge what might be a remotely reasonable threat or obstacle. The same issue means that the PCs' output is wildly variable: most of them can reliably deal well over 100 points of damage in a round given the right conditions, but a couple of them drop to the 10s in suboptimal circs. I can accidentally stymie someone by having a creature that hardly represents a threat but they simply can't get past.

Beyond that, I'm finding it very difficult to present challenges that feel meaningful because they have such a broad and powerful array of tools. Wizards are part of that, especially with the added flexibility mythic gives all the spellcasters (cast spells you didn't actually prepare today, etc.) but high-level characters accumulate an array of exceptions and special abilities that trivially negate obstacles. Let me run through some of the abilities I happen to know they have as a group:

• Immunity to poisons, diseases, fatigue, exhaustion, and sleep.
• Immunity to the entire suite of sneak attack abilities.
• Do not breathe.
• Do not eat or drink.
• Walk through dense undergrowth without hindrance.
• Immunity to at least one type of elemental damage (2 characters always, another can easily turn it on, plus spells).
• Immediately divine truthful information about any topic.
• Negate a critical hit.
• Follow an opponent who attempts to step out of reach to avoid dying.
• Fly over any mundane obstacle (and in most cases, hover an inch above the ground like fucking Superman at all tiems; what are these "fantasy genre conventions" you speak of?)
• Teleport without spellcasting or using an action for distances larger than most battlemaps.
• Teleport flawlessly to anywhere familiar.
• Locate any creature that is alive anywhere, and incidentally confirm whether a known creature is still alive somewhere without possibility of error.
• See any living or undead creature nearby, even if magically invisible, distinguish those states, and incidentally see through illusory creatures without possibility of error.
• Flawlessly reveal the true form of any creature with a magical lantern, making serious deception largely impossible.
• Destroy magical force effects at will, even those otherwise immune to damage.
• Telepathy, allowing whichever character is aware of a threat, invisible creature, spell being cast, the specific weaknesses of a creature, etc. to instantly inform everyone else of it (because speaking is a free action).
• Automatically succeed at casting spells regardless of distractions, magical disruption, typhoons, being snared in spiderwebs, on fire, and several dozen people standing right in front of you with battleaxes all at the same time (these are handled as separate problems with no synergistic penalties).
• Negate an enemy's spell reflexively.
• Automatically pass all skill checks for which DCs have been provided.
• Move sixty feet and punch somebody to death in less than one second, and then take your actual turn.
• Cast several spells and also use several other hostile abilities in a single round.
• Make a creature unable to use their hands, at will, effectively defeating any weapon-user.
• Reshape any object made of wood, stone, or metal.
• Open any lock that exists in the game.
• Convince any ordinary person and most extraordinary ones of things that are literally impossible.
• Dispel any magical effect.
• Store things in private universes to keep them safe.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some important ones.

As I hope this shows, I am running very short of things that present an actual challenge. Instead, we mostly have things that require ticking off one use of a resource: a spell slot here, a point of mythic power there. There's almost always a spell that specifically circumvents any challenge that exists; Pathfinder, like similar games, really wants spellcasters to be able to overcome every type of challenge, or possibly the designers just kept seeing unfilled spell niches and jumping right ahead.

EDIT: On reflection, this is partly because most of these abilities are "hard counters" to an obstacle. They don't make it easier to deal with X, they simply remove X as an obstacle. Tangled forest? Fly. Pit trap? Already flying. Illusion? See through it automatically. Invisible foe? Not invisible to us. Poisonous fog? Irrelevant. Underwater cave? Don't breathe. Wall of magical force? Now it has a hole in it. Enemy sniper? Sniper no longer has hands to wield bow. Someone casting disintegrate? No, they don't. One of the people here might be a lycanthrope? It's her, officer. Need to find a suspect? Over there, in that lead box under the volcano 500 miles away on the Elemental Plane of Hiding. Policy is really strongly against you being able to walk into the palace and speak to the emperor? You can come up with some ridiculous lie that will get you inside and make somebody believe it.

So not only do we have a resource ticking-off model, but it feels a lot like a card game, simply pulling out whichever ability cancels the next obstacle.

Couple this with the fact that hit points are also a resource you tick off as you get hurt, and it starts to feel to me like everything is simply resource management. Which... it is, really. On rare occasions I get (un)lucky and do serious harm to a PC, normally when a spectacular roll happens, or the wizard teleports next to a high-level melee specialist by accident. Then they get healed and return to normal mayhem.

Pathfinder doesn't do impairment much (there's no penalty for being on the brink of death), and it is vanishingly rare for any long-term consequences of anything to exist. This campaign has a few, all invented by me as fiat effects with no easy removal. Otherwise, even "permanent" curses are trivially removed for mid-level characters, let alone injuries or death. This tends to mean there is not much sense of threat. For me as the GM, there's not much sense of achievement either. I don't actually want to kill a PC, or otherwise render the player unable to participate for a while. There's a small satisfaction in getting in a good round of attacks (but not too good), or passing a saving throw and surviving another round, but it can often feel like I simply got the numbers right for once (or did I make them too high? perhaps they're too high?).

And we're speaking of combat, now, which is another problem area.

Doing the combat well calls for complex plans that account for the PCs' capabilities and has countermeasures. This was challenging enough at lower levels; it's beyond me now that their capabilities are so varied and extreme. Heck, even building and equipping a few NPCs for them to fight requires huge amounts of work, so their opponents are generally underpowered and have far fewer tools available than they should at this level. I simply don't have the time to plan it, select elaborate arrays of magic items and abilities and spells that will synergise, and so on. The PCs only have four characters to worry about, and literally years of real-time experience of what might work well.

I was listening to Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice (episode 153) and Roger mentions the moment where you look at the Forest of Arden and see the scenery flats. I think that's what's happening here. Yes, Pathfinder and its ilk are heavily about managing resources when you get right down to it, but originally I could largely close my eyes and see the forest. Now I just see painted canvas.

You get what to what now?

I've hit a point where it feels like I'm constantly baffled by what the PCs can deploy. This came to a head in yesterday's game, where I discovered that due to a combination of several abilities, one of the PCs can grant a +4 bonus to all attacks, damage, and saving throws for all allies, at infinite range, even when they cannot perceive that PC in any way, and cannot be prevented from doing so by any means short of unconsciousness or death.

My reaction is probably over the top (I like to think I was reasonable in the session, if slightly hysterical, and I said we'd discuss it later). It just feels like an examplar of the sort of problem I'm dealing with. That bonus makes it virtually impossible for them to fail a saving throw against "level-appropriate" enemies, amongst other things, which makes debuffing even more difficult to pull off. And there's no countermeasure. Nothing at all. I could send the PC to a different dimension and, as written, it would achieve nothing.

But it's just a numerical bonus. It's not even rendering an obstacle irrelevant or entirely negating the abilities of a key adversary. It's just a +4 to everything, forever.

I really want to finish this campaign off. I want to get through to the end and see what happens. But I'm increasingly feeling that I'd prefer to do that without involving any actual mechanics. And I don't think my players want that.

Maybe we can boil this down to a feeling (on my part) that nothing is actually a challenge. If there's something the PCs can't do, it's only because I specifically make it physically impossible by ignoring the rules entirely. So it feels pointless for me to labour at putting together obstacles for them, whether those are opponents to fight or something more abstract. Just about the only thing that really presents much interest is social encounters.

But the thing about social encounters, right, is that you need solid concepts of the people involved and their motivations and interests, and that also requires an enormous amount of work from the GM. Less so when you're dealing with well-known places and people, or familiar NPCs. But as high-level PCs, they are jaunting about the world encountering entirely new people in new situations, more or less every time. So to create an interesting social dynamic means trying to devise characters, motivations, contexts from whole cloth, constantly, for one-off meetings. "Here's a new society and their important people and the things they care about, and the ways you can influence them".

I'm tired.

But I got this down, and maybe now I can sleep.