So...how DO you challenge a party above level 4?

[Corebreach]

... A competent party at any level that can cast Rope Trick can go through their four fights a day and still have at least half power left. So they don't even need to hit the 'rest' button after every fight, though they can if they want. There are also numerous means to trivialize the time spent resting and to trivialize any sort of time limit as a caster. It is not unusual, or even that uncommon to complete 1, 2, or even 3 full levels worth of adventures within half of a single in game week. And that includes research time to learn what you're facing.

Wild animals still can't get in. They can track your scent up to the spot below the opening. They can't see the opening, they can't get in even if they somehow figured out to jump 5-30 feet straight up, and even if wild animals somehow have been randomly Awakened to figure it out... how many animals can threaten a level 5+ party? None of the normal ones can. Some of the dire variety might. But 'random encounter with dire awakened animal who jumps up into your safe sleeping area' is an obvious sign your DM is power tripping because he cannot handle players having actual options ... and the game changing fundamentally every few levels instead of 'same stuff, bigger numbers'.

What these people tend to do is a Schroedinger's DM routine: instead of having honestly planned the number of monsters in a certain area, they just wait for the spellcasters to be out of daily resources and then "Two Umber Hulks jump out of the ground!", giving the mundane warriors a way to be useful.

Let's say a DM does want to "handle the game changing fundamentally every few levels". What does he do? How does he offer appropriate challenge to a party that can auto-avoid any enemy it doesn't want to fight, can auto-kill any it does (because it has casters in it), views any foils to these plans as blatant contrivances which justifiably should not be put up with for long, and whose characters gain levels at an average rate of almost one per game day?

I don't expect a complete answer. This is a huge question. Either way, this doesn't seem solvable without either using another RPG entirely or playing what is essentially a different RPG every gaming session.

[SquelchHU]

Other casters. That's it.

Of course the attacker still has a monumental advantage. That's why they blow through it in 1 day instead of 3.

[Woundwolf42]

While combat may be lions share of DDO, Its intended to be only a PART of D&D. Most new DM's tend to forget this. If gaining levels and loot are all your PC's are interested in, just hand them a copy of DDO and go find a group of people who actually want to roleplay D&D the way it was meant to be played. If you DM a game like its a PnP version of Diablo, where all your PC's do is move from one fight to the next, escalating the difficulty of the encounters, your gonna end up with massivly overpowered and very bored PC' fairly quickly. Once that happens, the only way to continue the challenge is continue the escalation til all you have left to throw at them are Dragons and the like, and suddenly the story has gone out the window and no one can tell you where the hell the dragon came from, or why were fighting it in the first place. But if you can find way to slow down thier level progression without making the game boring, you'll find they wont even notice how long its taking so long as they're having fun, and advancing thier characters thru roleplaying.

Give the party a nemisis that always manages to omehow come back or escape oblivion (liches and mages are great for this).

Get them involved in a war as generals where they dont do much actual combat therefore dont get unholy amounts of XP, award them XP based on thier tactics and strategies. Even more fun? Have them act as General on opposite sides of a war, and watch them try to outmanuver each other, the competition for who will survive to be a bigger legend in the worlds history will overshadow any greed for xp/loot they may have had before hand.

My favorite? Nudge them into the politics of the realm.

Powerful characters can come from surprisingly unpowerful stats, provided they can roleplay. Who would you fear most? The Level 14 fighter who can most definatly kick your head in, but probably wont cause you're not a physical threat, or the Level 4 Rogue who can bend the King's ear and have everything you own taken from you and your butt thrown in the stocks, simply cause it may benefit him in some how to have you out of his way?


Roleplaying seems to be a dying art these days, I've played in many PnP groups thru the years, and played with many people who play every character they roll up exactly the same way, the place thier own personality into whatever flavor of the month character they happened to min/max thier way onto paper. Hell I grouped with a guy once who played 4 completly different character builds, but you'd swear it was the same character if you saw him play. We used to call him Grant Clone #1, Grant Clone #2, Grant Clone #3, etc. No matter what he wanted us to think his character was or did, It was always Grant.

Some of the best gaming groups I ever had, no one got above level 5-7. We were so involved in the world our DM had constructed, and making our individual characters an integral part of its history that half the time, given a choice between dungeon crawling and roleplaying with NPC's to further a storyline, we'd take the storytelling all day long.

If you cant outthink your players in combat to slow them down, remove the combat. Or at least lessen it to a degree by substituting other aspect of such a vastly rich world. Improvise, Improvise, Improvise!

[Woundwolf42]

On the otherhand, if they simply refuse to roleplay you can always go a few different routes.

Make em think thier way through an adventure instead of crashing through it.

Start thinking up some seriously evil messed up traps that cant be disabled by a simple die roll cause of thier redundancy/complexity. I personally like backwards traps, traps that are only activated by going the other way in a dungeon, towards the front door. These are especially nasty if they are near a dead end or a room with an encounter. No one ever thinks about traps on a path they have already walked. Or even traps that cant be disarmed! Like an ambush at the top of a sloped hallway, and the party will have no choice to retreat down the slope due to being pelted with ranged weapons, or falling boulders. Now they are in a situation they can't simply charge ahead through without some thinking.


If they still refuse to slow down and ue thier heads instead of thier dice, you are the DM, improvise a way to humble them into thinking things through without such a severe punishment that it's obvious you are cheating. Throw them into incredibly challenging puzzles and borderline no win situations that always have at least 2 ways out, but only if they stop to think about them.

If nothing else works, its time for the humbling party, a group of NPC's who are each seperately rolled up as a PC that are intent on taking down the group for whatever reason (Bounty, People the party have wronged in someway, or even friends or loved ones of people the party may have had a hand in killing). Think of the party's weaknesses, be it their teamwork, or even individual character weaknesses. Think of a counter to each character in the player's party and add him to the humbling party. The NPC's all have the added advantage of being controlled by one person, so teamwork comes naturally to them. Having these guys hound the party and almost (but not quite) kill them a few times, and you'll most likely see a change come over your players. They will start to realize they cant brutalize thier way through these guys and start to plan ahead and work together. They will also start to roleplay wether they want to or not. As they are now getting involved with NPC's rather then simply killing them and moving on.

[Aspenor]

Other casters. That's it.

True, this is the only way to counter Rope Trick (and turns out to be a pretty hilarious way to do it and quite threatening).

PC: I cast Extended Rope Trick, we all climb in and rest for 8 hours.

DM: /rolls dice just for the hell of it
DM: In the third hour of rest, you all fall 10 feet in your sleep and land hard on the ground. You each take 1d6 damage. /rolls damage
DM: In addition to that, now, all of you make a reflex save. The air around you has burst into flame.

PC: What happened to my rope trick?

DM: Targetted dispel magic. This guy has See Invisibility. You have all been hit by Fireball in the surprise round.

PCs: ****.

However, Rope Trick has its limitations. You can't carry your Bags of Holding or Heward's Handy Haversacks into the spell, unless you think being on the Astral Plane as a level 5 is a good thing of course.

Is it a little bit of a "Angry Reactive DM" thing to do? Yes. Who cares? The game is about having fun and challenging the players. If they think they can put on cruise control and breeze everything, guess again. If I am DM and I notice you're using optimized spells and tactics, expect me to come with optimized NPC's using optimized tactics. Guess what? I can optimize better than you can, so don't start with it and I won't have to go there.

I had an optimized party recently, didn't bother me a bit. I gave them encounters above their level and rewarded at ECL experience. I threw a Shadowcraft Mage at them, that one humbled them quite a bit. I didn't kill them, I just let them know they weren't as tough as they thought.

[DireWolverine]

Other casters. That's it.

Of course the attacker still has a monumental advantage. That's why they blow through it in 1 day instead of 3.

Really? I can counter Rope Trick with one mundane fact of life.

Time limits.

If you absolutely *have* to complete your quest in 6 hours, you *can't* Rope Trick your way through nova-ing encounters. If you have to save the hostage in the next two days, and you'll have to fight your way through a dungeon filled with baddies to get to him, you can't Rope Trick after every fight or two... you'll just run out of time. And I, as a DM, have no problems whatsoever with having the party *fail* a quest, given that they were told up front that they had a time limit.

You can do the same with non-declared time limits, too; as the party dawdles it's way across the map to the quest location, Rope Tricking after every encounter or two, the villains advance their plans... making the defenses you run up against tougher, the defenders more numerous/better equipped, the traps deadlier. Get your players used to the idea that the world does not run on their schedule, and they'll respond to it by not being so cheesy.

It really all boils down to whether DM stands for 'Dungeon Master' or 'Door Mat' in your campaigns...

[Aspenor]

Really? I can counter Rope Trick with one mundane fact of life.

Time limits.

If you absolutely *have* to complete your quest in 6 hours, you *can't* Rope Trick your way through nova-ing encounters. If you have to save the hostage in the next two days, and you'll have to fight your way through a dungeon filled with baddies to get to him, you can't Rope Trick after every fight or two... you'll just run out of time. And I, as a DM, have no problems whatsoever with having the party *fail* a quest, given that they were told up front that they had a time limit.

You can do the same with non-declared time limits, too; as the party dawdles it's way across the map to the quest location, Rope Tricking after every encounter or two, the villains advance their plans... making the defenses you run up against tougher, the defenders more numerous/better equipped, the traps deadlier. Get your players used to the idea that the world does not run on their schedule, and they'll respond to it by not being so cheesy.

It really all boils down to whether DM stands for 'Dungeon Master' or 'Door Mat' in your campaigns...

+1

There are many ways around the typical "tricks" players use. It's really up to the DM whether he wants to let the players walk over him or not.

[SquelchHU]

Other casters. That's it.

Of course the attacker still has a monumental advantage. That's why they blow through it in 1 day instead of 3.

I'm quoting myself so that I can elaborate on my earlier points more clearly.

I am operating under the assumption Corebreach wants to continue playing D&D, and therefore does not want to play another system or no rule system at all. Therefore, posts that can be fairly summarized as 'Screw the rules, let's play freeform and call it D&D' are not valid or relevant. Particularly if they blatantly advocate covert cheating. You know who you are.

With that said...

First of all, the bit about 'other casters countering them'. Well, See Invisibility is a caster ability and so is Detect Magic. The latter would probably have to be an At Will SLA to be on at the right time, but warlocks are casters for the purposes of this discussion. There are some other things to counter Rope Trick but these are higher level, and also caster abilities.

I am reminded of that Jackie Chan cartoon with the grandpa that waves around some blowfish thing and his catchphrase - "Magic must defeat magic!" Level 5 is the first level it becomes obvious, and it only becomes more pronounced from there. But Rope Trick is not the only reason non casters become irrelevant. It isn't even the primary reason. It is one of many things that stem from the enemies evolving, and some of your side evolving but some not. Those that do not adapt die. Remember this statement, I'll be coming back to it.

Another important thing to consider about D&D conflicts. The attacking side has a massive advantage. Monumental even. And it only grows even larger at higher levels. This is also a thing of magic - mundane stuff plays little to no role here, and same for mundane people.

See, the shorter term buffs (anything a minute/level or lower, 10 minute/level stuff is in here at lower levels) are usable by attackers but not defenders. This is because the aggressor can accurately predict when a conflict will take place, but the defender can only attempt to be as vigilant as possible and full alert at all hours is not possible. So you have one force with long and short term buffs and the other with just long term, if that.

I say if that because D&D has this silly misconception that non casters are still credible threats beyond the first few levels, even though even a cursory inspection would prove this false. Therefore, especially if you have a DM that doesn't know better you may very well continue to find yourselves up against creatures that cannot participate in the tactical (read: magic) game and are therefore easily streamrolled. This often evokes a kneejerk response from said inexperienced DM, causing all manner of other gaming problems. But that's another topic to elaborate on if you want.

And this gap only becomes wider because more such spells become available.

How wide?

Wide enough for the same party to defeat a series of encounters that was intended to take multiple days in one, with resources to spare despite handling it poorly, then be almost as threatened by something around 10 levels lower than the first encounters. The difference? The PCs kicked ass when they were attacking and got their asses kicked when the enemy was the one attacking. Enough to almost overcome 10 full levels of difference. That's huge.

Now, Rope Trick is often overblown. People seem to believe in some fallacy where you fight once and hit the rest button with it and repeat over and over. While you can do that, and there are very few counters to it no one actually does so because it's a Catch 22 - the incompetent players don't know about it, and the competent ones don't need it.

What Rope Trick and similar spells are actually used for is to preserve campaign continuity by ensuring the PCs are not on the wrong end of attacker advantage, as getting ambushed is the surest way to a TPK. As in you could threaten your party 'less' by throwing dragons multiple levels higher at them. And dragons are rather solid as is. It is a very dangerous world, so hiding from it when not directly interacting with it is a very reasonable thing to do. Otherwise you could seriously be defeated by level 1 tactics, and that's just sad. It is also one of many examples of 'the game fundamentally changing every few levels' because while a level 1 can die to 'some random idiot sneaks into camp and slits your throat' the level 5 isn't accessible for this (Rope Trick) and the level 15 couldn't be gotten with that trick even if they chose to leave the Magnificent Mansion (Heavy Fortification = immunity to coup de grace, assassin death attack, and the entire Rogue archetype).

Now the obvious fix is to also allow non casters to evolve, but that is its own very long debate.

As is though, that's how it works.

Just imagine if the wizard in Aspenor's hypothetical situation cast anything other than a damage spell. That's TPK central right there. Party not buffed, enemy buffed, enemy opening with a decisive move? Hope you have another character ready. I wouldn't know, but I doubt even real world combat is quite that deadly. Pretty close, but not quite.

Now, since there are also people that believe in the time limit fallacy I will break this one down as well.

First, trivializing the time spent resting. The obvious choice is planes with alternate time progressions. Leave, rest, come back and it's only been 6 seconds on the Prime Material. If the time limit is so tight 6 seconds would make or break it it's far more likely something else would delay enough to fail. This is a fairly advanced tactic limited to high levels though.

Next, trivializing the time limit. Any party level 9 or higher when told to 'fight their way through the dungeon to rescue the hostage' is going to look at you funny, cast Teleport, gank anyone guarding the hostage, grab em, cast Teleport again and what do you know, your level 1 quest was completed in 12 seconds. Lower level parties won't necessarily be able to Teleport (there are ways) but 6 hours or 2 days or whatever is still more than enough time. And if you actually set the time limit tight enough to be meaningful to spellcasters you've just further reduced anyone else's ability to participate as anything they can do they take far longer to do. That's also some really tight time limits. We're talking something like 'You have 30 minutes to find and defeat the level 30 demon and his minions, or you're screwed' to the non epic party. That introduces its own set of problems.

About the best you can do is recognize and accept that past level 5 or so, non casters stop being relevant players in 1: The game. 2: The world. 3: The campaign. and have everyone operate accordingly, so that's more or less all you encounter past that point. It's still not perfect, but it does somewhat block the steamrolling. Not to mention, at any point where the rules and the setting are in conflict it reflects poorly on the setting, and by doing this you make the rules of the world follow the rules of the game. Odd as it sounds, you're promoting suspension of disbelief by doing this. And while it would be nice if non casters scaled as well to keep up, the fact is they don't and the world should reflect that.

Then there's 4th edition, which is the opposite in every way.

Level 30 is level 1 with bigger numbers. No changing fundamentally at every few levels, or at any level.

Getting ganked is not a threat, same as anything else. You can go 'afk' for several rounds in front of a mob and still not die. Instead of combat that is exceedingly deadly, you get... paintball? Which is fine as a game, but is not fine when someone tries to pass off paintball as real firearms combat.

No one gets any real abilities. You might think you do, but you don't.

And so forth. I know a bunch of people are going to latch onto this little section, but this is merely a side point for contrast and not the entire or even the main topic.

[DireWolverine]

Ah, right. I forgot who I was trying to argue with. Since shifting goalposts are meaningless, and make it impossible for me to fairly debate you, I'm not even going to try. I'll just take a cue from your name.

/squelched

[Xenus_Paradox]

[Aspenor]

Just imagine if the wizard in Aspenor's hypothetical situation cast anything other than a damage spell. That's TPK central right there. Party not buffed, enemy buffed, enemy opening with a decisive move? Hope you have another character ready. I wouldn't know, but I doubt even real world combat is quite that deadly. Pretty close, but not quite.

Now, since there are also people that believe in the time limit fallacy I will break this one down as well.

First, trivializing the time spent resting. The obvious choice is planes with alternate time progressions. Leave, rest, come back and it's only been 6 seconds on the Prime Material. If the time limit is so tight 6 seconds would make or break it it's far more likely something else would delay enough to fail. This is a fairly advanced tactic limited to high levels though.

Next, trivializing the time limit. Any party level 9 or higher when told to 'fight their way through the dungeon to rescue the hostage' is going to look at you funny, cast Teleport, gank anyone guarding the hostage, grab em, cast Teleport again and what do you know, your level 1 quest was completed in 12 seconds.

As mentioned above, a remotely competent DM will not have any of these things occur in his game.

My example was assuming a level 5 party, btw, not higher, as a higher level party would be embarassed to use Rope Trick.

Planes with alternate time progressions? Good luck getting there at level 5. Even with these in play......

I can use them better than you can when I'm DM.

Teleport? Sorry, you are not only unfamiliar with the location, but if you had the brains to try to Divine the location, you were given a false location due to defensive magic.

The sweet spot of D&D 3.5 where a competent DM can keep the caster in check lies from 5-12. Before 5 players are too weak. After 12, the game gets out of hand a little bit but a competent DM can still make it a challenge.

Although I do agree that past a certain point a non-spellcaster can't hold a candle to a spellcaster, expecting the tactics you're citing to be auto-win is false when you put a competent person behind the DM screen.

[SquelchHU]

As mentioned above, a remotely competent DM will not have any of these things occur in his game.

My example was assuming a level 5 party, btw, not higher, as a higher level party would be embarassed to use Rope Trick.

Planes with alternate time progressions? Good luck getting there at level 5. Even with these in play......

I can use them better than you can when I'm DM.

Teleport? Sorry, you are not only unfamiliar with the location, but if you had the brains to try to Divine the location, you were given a false location due to defensive magic.

The sweet spot of D&D 3.5 where a competent DM can keep the caster in check lies from 5-12. Before 5 players are too weak. After 12, the game gets out of hand a little bit but a competent DM can still make it a challenge.

Although I do agree that past a certain point a non-spellcaster can't hold a candle to a spellcaster, expecting the tactics you're citing to be auto-win is false when you put a competent person behind the DM screen.

Level 5 features quite a few of the decisive spells I mentioned. I assumed level 5 when I said that.

You correctly guessed what I meant when I said coming back seconds later. However I also specifically cited this as a high level thing, so I don't know why you would think I said it was available at level 5.

What defensive magic are you using exactly? Mind Blank is higher level than Teleport and must be cast on each and every person in there or it's possible to find you quite easily. That isn't feasible unless it's just you, or we're talking level 21+ here. Nondetection is foiled by a caster level check and has the same flaw as Mind Blank. Anticipate Teleportation covers a small area and more to the point is an emanation. If they appear on the other side of the wall relative to the target's position they cannot be anticipated because emanations are blocked by solid objects. Greater Anticipate has the same flaw and is higher level.

The only one that kind of works is Forbiddence because it covers a decent size area but is still higher level, and still requires absolutely every organization or what have you you face to have access to sixth level Cleric spells. So now not only must enemies be primary spellcasters to keep up, they must be one specific kind of caster or have access to the same.

I really do want to know what the uber spell you're using here is, because the most I could find was some people's house rules to nerf teleport. Which is nice, but irrelevant to the rules as they exist here and now.

As for the tactics I'm mentioning - auto win? Not quite. Making things monumentally easier, such that you could gain a level per game day or faster simply by storming the dungeon faster than the DM anticipated? Absolutely. And these aren't push over enemies either - I know the tricks too, and made a variety of vicious enemies (who are invariably 1-2 rounded by this tactic anyways) so it's not as if I were making the enemy easy to defeat. It helps when you really do have an answer to anything. 'What's that? You have mid 30s all saves, Evasion, Mettle, and 250 HP? No save, I win.' And that's exactly what happens.

But see, I don't believe in cheating my players. If they perform better than expected, they get rewarded better. Simple as that. So I'm not going to nerf their XP for a battle they won or whatever simply because I did not like the way they won it. Hell, I won't even not like the way they won it - if they win, they win, and that's awesome. They worked for it, so why would I be adversarial and cheat them out of their accomplishment? It's not as if I'm treating some melee guy that does only 75 damage a round as a valid level 20 challenge or anything.

Now back to the Teleport thing. One thing that actually does stop it is no longer using any site based adventures. If it's 'go to x and do y' ditch it now, because the going to x part means divinations will make a joke of it. This is another example of the game fundamentally changing every few levels - you can no longer have the enemy or the adventure occur at a static location. They need to be moving around. Just like you do. Luckily the system already encourages you to keep moving as things like settling down in a home cost money that is not being spent on new magic items, causing you to be less effective than you should be.

On another side tangent, this is one of the many ways you can tell the people at Pathfinder have no idea what they were doing about anything at any time. One adventure they produced involves 'walking around in swamps, helping some meaningless backwater village for no reward of worth' and if the PCs try to leave the DM is encouraged to try to trap them with environmental effects, another involves 'being trapped in a snowstorm in some village and being forced to help them out' and still another is basically incoherent in its writing and frequently contradicts itself, but thinks that a bunch of humanoid non caster mercenaries who are at most your level - 6 can threaten you at all.

All of these are at least level 9. The last one is level 15. And they actually think these are level appropriate challenges that won't be laughed at and/or solved in 12 seconds. Or that the PCs are walking at all at level 9+. They certainly are not when they don't want to be!

In fact most of what they write is clearly written under the assumption they think higher level = bigger numbers, and that's it. And when it is made painfully apparent to them there's more to it than that they step in and arbitrarily nerf your real options because they can't handle it. Which makes me wonder why all the people that like it don't just play 4th edition, since it at least was written with that paradigm in mind.

[Aspenor]

I'd like to know your stunning spells for level 3, just out of curiosity of what you think is powerful. Yeah, I know fireball is not exactly as powerful as most players like to think (wizards have better things to do usually). I am really just interested in seeing if the spells you speak of align with my personal favorite Level 3 spell.

What I was talking about was not specifically blocking teleport, but rather magical obfuscation of divination magic. Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum protects from both scrying and detect thoughts for all those inside 30 ft cubes/level. Locate Object and Locate Person do no more than give a directional sense for the subject's location, making them virtually useless for gaining the information needed to accurately teleport.

Teleport requires familiarity, it is blatantly stated so in the description. Unless the DM is incompetent and bringing characters to the same locations over and over again, it is going to be useless. In my campaigns, you would never know where you were going to teleport if you tried this stupid manuever.

Greater teleport is slightly more problematic, but not insanely so. However, if your players make a habit of greater teleporting in places, you are a fool for rewarding them for repeating the same tactic over and over. After a few occurrences of this type, they would find their greater teleport tactic to be their demise (news of adventurer tactics gets around).

Additionally, I never penalize players for using a tactic I didn't like. As DM, however, I do have the right to adjudicate what they deserve for completing objectives. I made a conscious choice to run a high-power, high-magic and lethal campaign. I let the PC's run a little crazy, and in turn increased the ECL of most encounters since, in all reality, they were fair encounters and not causing undue trouble. They got what they deserved, not necessarily what the books said they deserved, but what I decided they deserved (which is what really matters).

[SquelchHU]

I'm not a big fan of the level 3 spells to be honest. Yeah, you can cripple parties with Slow by ensuring non casters can't even touch you and casters cannot both move and cast eliminating one of their major defenses, but most of them are Fortitude based and therefore quickly become obsolete since enemy Fortitude saves are the highest on average, and poison is one of the most common immunities. Glitterdust and Web are still admirable encounter enders though. Yes, they technically aren't dead yet, but they aren't doing anything that matters for at least a round or two and that's good enough to call them dead. Yes, you had access to these two levels ago, but I said level 5 features many encounter enders, not that they just became available.

As for the divination blocking stuff, that does cover a decent enough sized area to be worthwhile. So that would stop it. Though really none of my players ever tried the scry and fry. They used divinations for indirect information gathering, including where they needed to go then Teleported outside the complex and stormed the place with buff timers counting down. Much like a typical DDO mission actually. They could have scried some of them, and tried once or twice but they didn't go teleporting on his head afterwards. There's not a whole lot of need to when you can get more information from asking the gods about it. Merely that it is possible, and the defenses against it are extremely limited. More to the point, the fact the attacker has such a monumental advantage is what makes Rope Trick and Magnificent Mansion earn their keep, so you can hide from the world when not directly interacting with it, that way you can avoid being on the wrong side of that.

[Karavek]

There are IMO basically two ways to DM.

1. You are just a referee and narator. You plan as best you can and stick by those plans and if players out think you so be it. You are not out to get them nor are they trying to ruin your fun, things just happen and niether side exactly plans on the outcome.

THis can be rather alot of fun in a groups early days as each learns what will and wont fly within the group both in game and around the table talk. However I found as time goes on and all become comfortable the problems of the team seeming to handidly defeat any thing you throw at them rises with no end in site short of overwhelming force and a party wipe to reset things.

2. Your the DM! They are the players. And your purpose is to break thier spirit and use thier love of the game to drive them to the edge of insanity. This does not mean you cheat or stack the deck unfairly. However a well crafted villain, usually a fighter mage mix can pretty much endlessly stalk and harrass the best adventuring party.

You pretty much make an NPC villain your character and do just as any good player would do. learn how to use every facet of that characters powers fully. Combine that with him being the head evil NPC with virtually limitless rescources and the answer yes everytime you see something that says only with DM permission means your arch villain becomes your dream character and the player groups worst nightmare.

He can take many forms and be many places at once. he can be the torch bearer guiding the party down into thier first dungeon who seemingly dies to a pit trap. Later he is that inn keeper who shares a whispered tale fora few gold about a lost tower in the ancient forest. Every step the party takes is one guided not by an ally but by a foe and hence never are they safe, never are they hidden.

Scrying spells are always said to be most effective on well known targets, add in personal possessions and even possibly blood and hair and no where in the multiverse can one hide from a truly accomplished master of the arcane.

Finally the ultimate end game. That every quest the heroes have completed, each foe layed to waste and each land saved only aids thier end challenge. As they gained in power so does thier hidden patron who guides them like unwitting puppets. You spend your week inbetween each game session thinking not of how to challenge the party but how your character will use them.

The final battle then is all the more brutal as you have no interest in seeing your lovely villain fall but yet you must abide by whatever rules your group plays by in this final hour and hope that if you do indeed win its because of lucky rolls and a good plan and not because you had the deck stacked so unfairly they had no chance.(I did that a few times and whether the party knows it or not you the DM never feel good when you know you got carried away and made the fight unwinnable.)

[donfilibuster]

Without the heroes the dungeon is just a big basement.

[adamkatt]

By upping the RP to Rated "R"!

[Mairuku]

The best way to challenge a group is to make them use their brain meats instead of their fist meats.

Puzzles are a deviously simple way to stump a party. Throw in a simple logic puzzle and they'll spend at least an hour trying to figure it out. And if you make consequences, like HP loss, part of the puzzle, then they'll really wind up on the short end of the stick.

Or, throw an encounter at them that they'd never be able to overcome without cunning and intellect. One time, our DM had us end up in a ruined dwarven city facing a wall with hundreds of kobold archers on top of it. The fact that we got through there is a miracle in and of itself. Our cleric got lucky with his Dazzle spell. He he he.

Mike/Mairuku/Amere

[Borathan]

True, this is the only way to counter Rope Trick (and turns out to be a pretty hilarious way to do it and quite threatening).

PC: I cast Extended Rope Trick, we all climb in and rest for 8 hours.

DM: /rolls dice just for the hell of it
DM: In the third hour of rest, you all fall 10 feet in your sleep and land hard on the ground. You each take 1d6 damage. /rolls damage
DM: In addition to that, now, all of you make a reflex save. The air around you has burst into flame.

PC: What happened to my rope trick?

DM: Targetted dispel magic. This guy has See Invisibility. You have all been hit by Fireball in the surprise round.

PCs: ****.

However, Rope Trick has its limitations. You can't carry your Bags of Holding or Heward's Handy Haversacks into the spell, unless you think being on the Astral Plane as a level 5 is a good thing of course.

Is it a little bit of a "Angry Reactive DM" thing to do? Yes. Who cares? The game is about having fun and challenging the players. If they think they can put on cruise control and breeze everything, guess again. If I am DM and I notice you're using optimized spells and tactics, expect me to come with optimized NPC's using optimized tactics. Guess what? I can optimize better than you can, so don't start with it and I won't have to go there.

I had an optimized party recently, didn't bother me a bit. I gave them encounters above their level and rewarded at ECL experience. I threw a Shadowcraft Mage at them, that one humbled them quite a bit. I didn't kill them, I just let them know they weren't as tough as they thought.

Easy way to deal with rope trick is to let them use it, just make note of when they don't post guards for their stuff in containers they can't bring with them as well as things like their mounts and other beasts of burden.

Coming out to discover that someone walked off with the unattended goods can lead to a nice side quest or two, or just teach them a lesson they probably won't soon forget about things.

Also, use terrain, environment, and plot as ways to keep them from going to far. For instance, put them in a city that has "recently" dealt with unchecked wizards and are very suspicious of any caster while having the elite guards even having abilities tailored to dealing with them.

Terrain can play a lot, I'd set one battle inside a clocktower full of moving parts that the players had to deal with as they fought an enemy scout. Mentioning oiled gears convinced the usually trigger happy sorcerer that lobbing a fireball while inside a tower full of highly flammable stuff was a bad idea.

Environment can also work, you can even work it into the abilities of a foe. With 3.5 I turned an adventure into an experience by granting a rather deranged spirit shaman that the party was facing the ability to swap randomly between several environmental effects that would cover the entire battlefield starting the next round only to be replaced when the ability was used again or when the guy died. Just glance through the environmental books for some interesting weather effects.

[Magusrex777]

Level 5 features quite a few of the decisive spells I mentioned. I assumed level 5 when I said that.

You correctly guessed what I meant when I said coming back seconds later. However I also specifically cited this as a high level thing, so I don't know why you would think I said it was available at level 5.

What defensive magic are you using exactly? Mind Blank is higher level than Teleport and must be cast on each and every person in there or it's possible to find you quite easily. That isn't feasible unless it's just you, or we're talking level 21+ here. Nondetection is foiled by a caster level check and has the same flaw as Mind Blank. Anticipate Teleportation covers a small area and more to the point is an emanation. If they appear on the other side of the wall relative to the target's position they cannot be anticipated because emanations are blocked by solid objects. Greater Anticipate has the same flaw and is higher level.

The only one that kind of works is Forbiddence because it covers a decent size area but is still higher level, and still requires absolutely every organization or what have you you face to have access to sixth level Cleric spells. So now not only must enemies be primary spellcasters to keep up, they must be one specific kind of caster or have access to the same.

I really do want to know what the uber spell you're using here is, because the most I could find was some people's house rules to nerf teleport. Which is nice, but irrelevant to the rules as they exist here and now.

As for the tactics I'm mentioning - auto win? Not quite. Making things monumentally easier, such that you could gain a level per game day or faster simply by storming the dungeon faster than the DM anticipated? Absolutely. And these aren't push over enemies either - I know the tricks too, and made a variety of vicious enemies (who are invariably 1-2 rounded by this tactic anyways) so it's not as if I were making the enemy easy to defeat. It helps when you really do have an answer to anything. 'What's that? You have mid 30s all saves, Evasion, Mettle, and 250 HP? No save, I win.' And that's exactly what happens.

But see, I don't believe in cheating my players. If they perform better than expected, they get rewarded better. Simple as that. So I'm not going to nerf their XP for a battle they won or whatever simply because I did not like the way they won it. Hell, I won't even not like the way they won it - if they win, they win, and that's awesome. They worked for it, so why would I be adversarial and cheat them out of their accomplishment? It's not as if I'm treating some melee guy that does only 75 damage a round as a valid level 20 challenge or anything.

Now back to the Teleport thing. One thing that actually does stop it is no longer using any site based adventures. If it's 'go to x and do y' ditch it now, because the going to x part means divinations will make a joke of it. This is another example of the game fundamentally changing every few levels - you can no longer have the enemy or the adventure occur at a static location. They need to be moving around. Just like you do. Luckily the system already encourages you to keep moving as things like settling down in a home cost money that is not being spent on new magic items, causing you to be less effective than you should be.

On another side tangent, this is one of the many ways you can tell the people at Pathfinder have no idea what they were doing about anything at any time. One adventure they produced involves 'walking around in swamps, helping some meaningless backwater village for no reward of worth' and if the PCs try to leave the DM is encouraged to try to trap them with environmental effects, another involves 'being trapped in a snowstorm in some village and being forced to help them out' and still another is basically incoherent in its writing and frequently contradicts itself, but thinks that a bunch of humanoid non caster mercenaries who are at most your level - 6 can threaten you at all.

All of these are at least level 9. The last one is level 15. And they actually think these are level appropriate challenges that won't be laughed at and/or solved in 12 seconds. Or that the PCs are walking at all at level 9+. They certainly are not when they don't want to be!

In fact most of what they write is clearly written under the assumption they think higher level = bigger numbers, and that's it. And when it is made painfully apparent to them there's more to it than that they step in and arbitrarily nerf your real options because they can't handle it. Which makes me wonder why all the people that like it don't just play 4th edition, since it at least was written with that paradigm in mind.

I am sorry, but you are an awful DM. Really bad. Worse because you do not even realize it. The only way to cheat your players is to create a campaign where the rules are more important than the story. You are clearly a rules lawyer, it's sad PnP can be so much more than you give it credit for. For you, clearly earlier editions of DnD are clearly better than 4th. You are unable or unwilling to use the tools 4th edition gives. You get players to role-play and get invested by rewarding the desired behavior. Using silly game mechanics to trivialize what could be a fun and challenging adventure is the DMs fault. You do not allow, cheating them would be allowing them to do stupid things. My players always played, they adventured, they were not looking for ways to trivialize things. I always created campaigns where people wanted to do more than roll dice so rules or edition not so important.

I always laughed when I saw people running games and the rule war erupted....no no no he gets -2 on that roll, on page 187 of the Unearthed Arcana it says blah blah blah, no it doesn't, yes it does. Out comes the "book" ...Well it says..."hmmm" I thought it said... no it doesn't, it means that...Yeah that sounds like fun lol Watching people turn a heated combat where split second decisions or ideas could radically effect the outcome are instead arguing over rules. I put people on the spot, if you can't tell me precisely what you are going to do, you are hesitating, ill get back to you, sit there.

As a DM your first priority should be that everyone has fun, that is your job. I don't mean monty hall either. Challenging and failure, even death can be fun if handled properly and I would never let any rule get my way. I always considered mine and my player's time more valuable than that. I can take any game system in any edition and make a great campaign. Preferring one over the other, sure I have no problem with that. 4th edition sucks, no 3.5 sucks and 4th edition sucks, 2nd edition or nothing. All you are doing is identifying yourself as a bad player or DM IMHO.