While chatting with a player in my Pathfinder game (Necropolitans), the topic of mindless* undead creatures came up as possible threats they'd deliberately choose to engage if detected, even when not necessary for their objective, because they posed a threat to innocents and definitely lacked any sense of morality.
Considering my options, I availed myself of the frankly terrible search capabilities for monsters, and checked the most powerful mindless undead. It was CR 8. And it's really an ooze.
My currently party are level 16 and would not even need to slow down to destroy a vampiric ooze. Oh, you can go and slap a zombie template on a big strong monster if you want; it caps out at CR 9. You can even make a zombie horde: CR 14, allegedly, though I find that vanishingly unlikely unless the party are literally forced into immediate melee combat with them and entirely lacks slashing weaponry (in my experience, one dedicated 14th-level melee character can probably take out the horde with one round of attacks, or you could apply A Wizard, or just... stand on a tall rock and throw things).
There might be some obscure undead I couldn't immediately spot, derived from an incredibly specific situation in a published adventure - "incredibly specific creature/item with a very specific background for one specific location in a published aventure" is a very common occurrence in Pathfinder content, great for completionists and inspiration, but tedious to trawl through.
(* That is, mechanically, undead without an intelligence score, who act only on instinct or as commanded by someone in supernatural control. Mindless creatures have immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, phantasms, patterns, and morale effects) whether harmful or benevolent.)
So What?
This got me thinking about the way Pathfinder characters simply outgrow certain challenges. I could talk about skills and travel and physical obstacles, and maybe I will, but for now I'm sticking strictly to basic combat encounters.
A Pathfinder party is fundamentally done with mindless undead creatures from about 7th level; any skeletons, zombies, etc. you drop in after that are for flavour, not texture. The occasional vampiric ooze - not, I think you'll agree, a ubiquitous monster one can drop in just anywhere - can string it out a little longer, but whatever the mechanics say, it isn't a "real" undead in the narrative sense.
Animals come off just as badly, despite being a staple of adventure fiction. The poor wolf stops being relevant by roughly 5th level, even in a pack, while apex predators like lions and polar bears limp along to 7th level. Many snakes have an artificially-high CR from poisons that are easily rendered irrelevant by prepared PCs, running out of steam even earlier. The mighty dire crocodile claims a CR 9, as does the legendary roc (a roc, a mere CR 9!), and giant squid are around that too. A few dinosaurs, and mastodons, creep up as high as CR 12-14 on the basis of massive strength and many hit points. In practice, though, a party of 7th-level adventurers has little to fear from them unless, like the zombie horde, a mastodon somehow ambushes them in their sleep. They might fight a Great White Whale, once, if the party ever goes near the sea at all, but a well-prepared party doesn't need to get into danger at all.
I know that very few campaigns actually survive into the high levels, but even around 12th level it becomes a real struggle to find anything to fight. This isn't just a matter of worthy adversaries; the PCs can literally ignore many weaker creatures, or outrun them, or fly over them - there's simply no personal reason to engage. Oh, sure, if you want to keep zombies away from the local village, or you find wolves in the sheep field. Then you can wander over and smear them into the ground.
Looking for worthy adversaries gets even worse. The GM has to start drawing on some of the most dangerous animals that have ever existed: spinosaurs, megalodons, and so on are CR 11-13, and will only present an interesting challenge if the party has some serious complications from terrain, other opponents, weather, and so on. Or, more likely, we lean into purely supernatural foes, throwing the PCs at demons and vampire lords and banshees. Or, of course, painstakingly statted-up NPCs with full arrays of feats, magical equipment, and special powers.
Most of the reason for this is that animals, like most mindless undead, are mundane. Their weapons are strength, speed, and numbers. They have no ranged attack capabilities, so they are powerless against PCs who can move faster, climb onto high objects, or otherwise avoid their grasp. Only a tiny handful have exotic abilities that might hamper, penalize, restrain, or otherwise interfere with the PCs activities, let alone anything more unusual, and even those are usually restricted to melee. Meanwhile, PCs of "appropriate level" use powerful ranged attacks, magical sleep, grasping thorns, make the ground slippery, impose magical dread or pain, or straight-up fly into the air. A cunning 8th-level party with longbows can launch a successful ambush against a spinosaur if they make good use of range, difficult terrain, and buffs, let alone a lucky web or spike stones or anything else that locks down the target.
Yes, a spinosaurus will do 20+ damage on a hit and swallow you whole, but it has to actually bite you.
Big Scary Monsters That Aren't
So one of the (potential, arguable) downsides is that as PCs gain levels, the GM has to turn away from using skeletons, zombies, or any kind of mundane animal as a threat. They need to throw in foes with magical capabilities to compensate for the PCs' ranged and magical capabilities, and the reality that you cannot make every battle be against a 50-foot dinosaur, especially because being a very large creature is often a net disadvantage, mechanically.
But the other is simply that the narrative arc is bent weirdly. At 1st level you fumble against giant rats and particularly fragile zombies. At 3rd level you fight wolves. At 5th level you fight lions and armoured skeletons. At 7th level you fight huge bears and zombie giants and you can take a T-rex in a fight. At 9th level you regard a T-rex or a roc, the terror bird of Middle Eastern myth, as a fairly average day's work. At 12th level you can handily take on a Spinosaurus, probably two or three at a time, and an entire army of zombies, and there are still eight levels to go, during which your power increases non-linearly, and all there is left to fight is demons and fey and NPCs.
A Tyrannosaurus rex is only a CR 9, for crying out loud.
This means that a mid-level player character is already capable of defeating the most powerful living creatures we know to have existed. Not only does that force the upper tiers of the game into a thoroughly supernatural or NPC-oriented mode of combat, but it makes the world feel weirdly safe. After all, the PCs are routinely fighting NPCs of similar level, so they can't be the only people to reach those heights of power! There's no room left for Tyrannosaurus rex to be a terrifying force of nature, and the dread demons and beasts and arch-fey of the world have been necessarily demoted from "legendary beings mortals cannot hope to conquer, here is a story of one guy who fought them but then, he was a demigod" to "hydras are a moderately challenging fight for accomplished heroes".
There is certainly no room left for anything to be a problem for an entire army to deal with, unless all entire armies consist of inexplicably low-level warriors who left all the monster-slaying to mercenary bands. The only thing you need armies for is to fight other armies. And you don't even need them for that, if you hire some high-level PCs to do it instead...
I quite like the concept of a setting where what happens when you discover a T-rex feasting is that you all stay very still and quiet until it goes away and then you run like hell. Where an enormous dinosaur is something you either deal with through a cunning plan and a great deal of luck, or raise an army to fight. Where a lion or a polar bear are still a challenge that an experienced hero takes seriously instead of being free to literally ignore it and walk straight past to stab a wizard in the face. Hell, Conan is the archetypal fantasy warrior and every battle against a jungle beast is a grim struggle to the death. He isn't shrugging off jaguars and thinking "that mid-ranking bandit I fought earlier was a much bigger challenge".
That is a world where there are, simply, bigger things than you. Bigger problems than any band of 3-6 adventurers can solve, and I don't mean social injustice. Where a world-saving band of 20th-level heroes achieves centuries of fame by slaying a couple of hydras and then retires to live in peace, because when a pit fiend shows up with an entourage in tow that is a job for an entire kingdom to solve, even if they do need to press-gang those adventurers into joining the fight.
It really feels like the higher levels of Pathfinder stretch desperately thin for content, requiring that everything revolve around preposterously powerful supernatural beings or extremely accomplished humanoid foes who have been there the whole time, honest, but mysteriously had no real impact on the world beyond the PCs. It drags heroes ever further away from any sense of being grounded in normality and into a handwavy place of everything being magic or planar rifts or whatever. It... okay, I think to some extent what it does is a bit like New Dr. Who, in that it creates a bubble around the PCs where there is an endless supply of high-level foes and powerful magical everything, none of which exists in the rest of reality. It makes the "story" too obviously about the PCs, and not about the world.
I just want to feel like a T. rex is a very big deal.
...it's tired and I'm recovering from surgery, I'm going to bed. Hope this is somewhat coherent.
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