In Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant and similar fantasy roleplaying games, you go on adventures to find treasure and magical items and weapons so you can go on even bigger adventures. That's meant to be exciting. But with great power comes the potential for great boredom, because when you stop having to try to overcome obstacles there's not really a game any more. Some games and Game Masters try to mitigate player power with restrictions on anything wielded by player characters, as if there's an actual balance of power in an imaginary world. It's frustrating and disappointing to get a cool new spell or magical item only to realise that there are a dozen exceptions and limitations listed on it in fine print. That's the exact opposite effect high level play ought to have on players. Here are some ways to ensure high level play feels powerful and fun for your player characters.
I've written before about how fantasy roleplaying games tend to shift the roles of player and Game Master at the half-way point of lever progression. Players start out as monster food, but by level 10 in a 20-level system they're pretty near the top of the food chain. They get to call the shots. You might be running the world and the monsters, but the power dynamic has changed. Instead of players peeking around corners for fear of monsters, it's your monsters who are running when players approach. The Game Master is no longer the driving force in the game world. The players are.
And that's fine.
You got to kill player characters for 10 levels of play. You may have even pulled some punches (I never do, but some people do) to avoid killing them. Now it's time for all of your monsters to die. Use their special abilities early in combat. Get your use out of them, because they're not going to remain in play for long. This is the moment you've been training your players for! Embrace it!
You might think that giving players "too much" power might make the game boring for them or, just as bad, for you. As a player, it's easy to get bored when you have too much power. (To be clear, I'm not talking about that guy, who always seems to remember the rules that benefit him but forgets and argues against the rules that don't. I have no problem with munchkins, but I don't play with cheaters and I don't solve for cheaters.)
The Game Master can add bigger monsters, and more monsters, and traps, and all kinds of very serious threats to try to challenge high level characters, but really all you're doing is piling more numbers on the problem. If anything, all that does, is make the fights last longer.
Truth is, if anything's going to make a game boring, it's not overpowered players, it's adventure design. Killing monsters is just one aspect of the game, and it's not the most interesting part especially at high levels when combat starts taking two and three and eight hours. Seriously (and I can say this now), just play a wargame. It's not worth it in an RPG.
The strength of a roleplaying game is in its name: roleplaying. Characters can have every magic item in the book, they can have all the spells (even an unresticted Miracle!), and none of it compares with your own imagination (or somebody's published imagination, if you prefer). Exploration, discovery, and storytelling, as much as I struggle to conceptualize why it's so powerful (it can't be quantified! how do you build mechanics around something you can't measure?), is the main reason people come back to a game each week. And I say that as a wargame sleeper agent who only just got activated last year. I've always loved the combat of an RPG. I didn't show up for just the combat, but if I did show up to a con game and discover that the Game Master basically intended to run combat encounters with only obligatory plot hooks to justify getting from one to the other, you wouldn't hear me complaining. And yet when I talk to friends about a game session, it's 10% combat and 90% story, even if the actual story of the game only took up 10% of the session.
You can look at it from the other side of the looking-glass and it works just as well. I also play wargames now, and while nobody ever told me to come up with a story or to integrate RPG-like elements into my games, I always have, starting with the very first wargame I played.
The power of an RPG is story, and there's no way a story can ever be overpowered.
Knowing that the story is your most important dial on the control panel of your game, it's vital that NPCs and player characters all use the same set of rules. If the villain of the story is somehow able to scry on the party even though they're on a different plane of existence, then when they kill the villain they'd better be able to find the thing that was breaking the laws of the game's magic physics. If it was a mistake you made because you didn't know about that restriction, that's not a problem. Just invent an item that legitimizes breaking the rule, and hand it over to the player characters. Problem solved.
Nothing feels worse for a player to work toward a character build only to discover, once they get there, that the special power they'd had in their mind didn't work the way they'd expected. Heck, that doesn't feel good at level 1, much less at level 18. I've encountered this with new players before, and it's at the top of list of changes I'm willing to make almost with no questions asked. I want players to feel good about being high level, and if we have to invent some new rules or spells to make it possible then I'm happy to do that.
Another reason high level play can become boring is because player characters acquire too much to keep track of. This is one reason I think encumbrance is important, but not everything a player has to track fits into a backpack. They probably also have spells and special feats and traits and plot threads and magical items and legendary weapons and more. Being a powerful adventurer in a fantasy world sometimes feels more like being an administrative assistant at the local construction company.
Strive to help your players simplify character management. There's no one way to do this, but here are some things I've done in the past:
I've got more tips on high level play, but the thoughts in this blog post were actually inspired by the Shadows of Mordor video game. I played that game for about 50 hours and loved every minute of it. And then I started pursuing the main story missions in earnest, and started leveling up, and the game fell apart. Orcs that could withstand 10 power hits from me suddenly became 1 HP minions after I gained the ability to entrance them to my side. Quests that ought to have had 2 or 3 different solutions got put on rails, and the game forced me to replay and replay each quest until I got it "right" (other tasks in the game have multiple solutions, but all story quests are on rails). Herbs that had once healed me 100% became weaker. Poisoning the orc's grog had no effect on the orcs (when I gained the ability, I was promised that orcs drinking the grog would fight amongst themselves).
It was like a completely different game, and it was possibly the most egregious disincentive to high level play I'd ever personally experienced. That's just a video game, though. The benefit of a living thinking Game Master is the super power of the tabletop RPG, so spare a thought for high level play and keep your game fun.
Birthday Bundt Cake by Markus Spiske. Unsplash License.