Wizardknighting High Level D&D

[This is the second in a series of posts. Reading the first one is useful but not necessary.]

High-level play is a perennial problem for D&D. This is partly just a consequence of inherent or structural factors - most campaigns start at 1st level so there is just way more advice and material available with respect to games involving low-level PCs, and there is anyway a general bias in the human psyche toward preferring stories in which the main character begins as a callow neophyte and arcs towards heroism rather than starting out as a megastar to begin with. (Roger Zelazny is the main author I can really think of who repeatedly bucks that trend, although even his ubermenschen - Corwin of Amber or Sam of Lord of Light - start off as hampered by memory loss or similar and grow to a position of greater strength.) 

And partly it’s a problem to do with the rules themselves. By the time PCs have high AC, low saving throws, and lots of hit points they’re very hard to kill and combat can become a slog without constant tactical experimentation and cunning that places a drain on the DM. And once magic-users start to get access to 4th and 5th level spells they become essentially demigod-like, especially if there are two of them in the party and they can create synergies accordingly. 

This means that what tends to end up happening is that the DM has to devote his energies to thinking of ways to hamper the PCs through increasingly desperate wheezes - usually through positing super-villains or resorting to deus ex machina. This in turn transforms the campaign into a kind of caricature of a Superman comic, in which every week the PCs are confronted with some enemy wielding a new version of what is basically kryptonite (either in the form of ever more powerful magic items or abilities, or enhanced cunning). This changes the balance of the game entirely, and not in a good way. Low-level D&D really works because it’s about rogues, and rogues roaming a sandbox easily set their own goals. High-level D&D tends to reverse that - it’s about superheroes, and their goals almost inevitably therefore start to derive from the DM-as-quest-dispenser (an evil archmage has kidnapped a favoured NPC; a zombie plague appears; a mysteriously skilful thief steals the PCs’ treasure, etc.). This saps their agency and also frankly just gets boring. 

During the 2nd edition era TSR put out a book with pointers on how to run a high-level campaign - High Level Campaigns, it happened to be called - and it is full of the kind of advice one would expect. A good adventure, we are told, 'unfolds like a novel or short story', and 'contains plenty of excitement, especially at the beginning and the end'. We then learn that 'effective preparations start with an adventure plot'. It's hard sometimes to remember that this is how everybody thought in 1995, and most people still think now. But in any event the book is basically useless for anybody whose OSR-influenced campaign is heading into high-level territory.

What, then, can one do instead? 

In The Wizard Knight, the main character, Able, ascends to demigod-hood halfway through the story. (I’m not giving anything away - it’s flagged extensively throughout.) He returns to the human world having spent the equivalent of two or three decades in Skai, the equivalent of Norse heaven, and now has the power to increase his size many times over and to heal sicknesses and injuries - and he also gets to ride around on a giant telepathic unicorn that can fly. He basically goes from being, say, a 3rd level fighter to a 20th level paladin. 

Wolfe handles this in three ways. First, Able has to make a promise to the god of Skai who he has been serving, the Valfather, that he won't use his powers. It's only on that basis that he is allowed to return from Skai in the first place. This, naturally, becomes important to the plot in various ways. As an idea for a campaign in a game like Pendragon the concept of PCs voluntarily vowing not to do certain things because of promises made to gods, and struggling to stick to those vows, would work really well; for D&D, it perhaps is less fitting, though of course that depends on the tone of the game.

Second, it becomes important for Able to be able to ascend upwards through the layers of existence so that he can eventually get to Kleos and ultimately Elysion. His long-term goals therefore shift over the course of the novel. High Level Campaigns recommends traveling between worlds, or planes, as a good focus for high-level D&D, and this has after all often typically been the function of planar travel throughout the history of D&D - an answer to the question, 'What does my 12th level PC do now?' 

Is there, then, a way to incentivise this kind of gear-shift by - heretically - changing the XP advancement system from one based around GP = XP to one based around going up levels through interplanar travel, once the PCs reach a certain level of experience? Maybe, for example, the rule could be that PCs advance as normal to 9th level through garnering gold, but from 10th level onwards, they advance by getting XP for going from plane to plane. Since going from plane to plane itself involves trying to find keys to portals and so forth, and since there are potentially infinite planes, the campaign would thereby remain being mostly player-led.

And third, in the second half of The Wizard Knight, Able - having achieved great power and status - changes his objectives regarding those around him. He begins to see it as part of his mission to be a good example to them and help the young ones in particular grow into knights themselves. Another heretical idea therefore suggests itself: what if at 9th level (or whatever) PCs no longer gain XP from gold or their own actions, but from helping their own henchmen advance? What if each time a henchman goes up a level, the PC gets XP? 

The final observation is that part of the joy of the second half of The Wizard Knight is trying to imagine what it looks like for somebody to be riding around on the back of a flying horse while wielding a magical sword that summons an entourage of ghost warriors, and fighting an army of giants. That ought to be fundamentally appealing to anybody, and it's easy to lose sight of the fact that high-level D&D posits precisely that type of event as a natural part of its domain.