The mechanical and game balance difficulties with high level epic play in D&D are well documented, but today we’re looking at something rather different.

Rather than the mechanical challenge, it’s the roleplay challenge at this level: our adversaries are no longer the scheming, grand vizier trying to take the throne, It’s the big tentacle monster thing that’s going to eat the world.

How do you interact with that? How do you roleplay with it?

This video is a bit of an overview, my top four dungeon master tips on how we can get things back down to earth or Faerun, if you prefer, to keep the player characters grounded while they are battling in the stars.

This is one of many of my unproven hypotheses, but I wonder if the reason why so many games finish around level 12 or so is that consciously or unconsciously, DMs struggle to find characters who can challenge the characters’ personalities, not just the hit points.

The highest level adversary in the DnD Monster Manual is the Arch Priest or the Arch Mage, who clock in at CR 11.

The problems of challenge rating and how to make balanced fights for your players are well-documented elsewhere, but there is still a yawning gap: If you’re playing at level 12 upwards, the characters are going to wipe the floor with them. It’s not going to be an interesting fight, so the temptation as Game Master is to bring in more and more epic enemies, which are less and less human.

Having enemies that your characters can hate, having enemies that your players can hate, is one of the best ways of keeping your players engaged and excited to be playing.

But an adversary who opposes player characters, not just because it’s who they are, it’s not just what their nature is, like a big purple worm, but someone who chooses to be abhorrent to have disgusting values to our characters, those are the ones that your players will love to hate.

The great big anthropomorphic personification in the room is Death, and fundamental of all good storytelling is that story is change. Life to death is one of the biggest changes that someone could go through. It’s obviously traumatic for the person involved, but it should be a big deal for everyone else in the group.

Assuming you have an adventuring party of people who do care about each other, this should be one of the ultimate stakes and a really good story beat. How do we make death meaningful at a high level when we have access to the wish spells reincarnation?

An easy way, though not my preferred way of doing this, is to ban reincarnation of any sort. This could be just a meta out of character, round a table ban and say “I’m not having Wish at my table”, or it could be something in world where, culturally, if someone comes back from the dead, then they are ostracised from everything.

However, my preferred option is to allow these spells rules as written, but to really emphasise the cost. Make it clear that just because this character is back from the dead, doesn’t mean that death won’t want them back again. It could be that their days are now numbered. You could go full Final Destination style with it if you like.

This opens up a fun avenue of storytelling – now this character is now a revenant and they know it. They know their days are numbered, so what can they do to make things better, try and put the world to rights before they’re claimed and pulled back into the afterlife by the forces that dwell there?

A big roleplay difficulty when working at a high level is to help things feel grounded, to help things feel personal and connected to the beginnings of the story, which you might have had years ago, when the characters are so far from home and have changed so much from the people they were when they started.

Luckily, so many of the solutions to this are made more available and easier to work with when we get to high level.

Telepathy spells open up from a pretty low level, and I love the idea of a character checking in with the family every so often, like someone away on a work trip, phoning in and saying “Hi, how’s the family doing? I’m off fighting some equal eldritch horror. Have you put the kids to bed?” as dungeon master, I’d be looking to use that kind of thing regularly.

Maybe in the middle of this epic sword fight they get a call from home and says “Hey, so you know how we said that little Thunderheart shouldn’t be getting a pet? Well, he’s kind of made friends with a baby Owlbear. What do you think we should do?”

Alternatively, make it a liberal use of Teleport and Gate style spells, where they can get back home and see the family at the weekend before fighting the eldritch horrors once more.

Something that works at every level of play and in every TTRPG system is Flashbacks.

I love using these to give little moments of roleplay in otherwise combat-heavy sessions.

If someone goes down on zero hit points and has nothing to do on their turn, we do a little bit of roleplay, as seen from their childhood, before jumping back into the action again.

Within the same mould as these flashbacks, I’d also use conversations with gods or devils, depending on your character’s persuasions. A little moment of guidance or taunting from their patron can go a very, very long way.

The climax or the crux – the crisis of our stories, is so often that difficult choice, that moment where so much hangs in the balance of what our characters are going to choose to do.

As game masters, we should be on the lookout for ways of making these moments happen in any way that we can, without things feeling forced. These tough choices can be harder to manufacture at high level play.

What we’re going to do against a purple worm, we either fight it or we just die? That’s not an interesting or difficult decision.

Instead, I’d be looking hard at the individual goals of the player characters. Do they have goals which are in contradiction to each other? They probably want to stay alive, but they also want to save their family and friends. Can we as game masters put those two against each other, force them to choose between one and the other? Maybe.

Thanks to my friend, Salty Nick for this example, the only way to defeat the evil terror for a thousand years, to send it back to where it came from, is to become it, yourself.

If the characters know that those are the stakes, that a huge self-sacrifice, and becoming an evil creature in order to do something good, is the only way for things to go back to normal, at least for everyone else.

I love that. That is so, so clever.