How to justify multiple daily fights at high level

[King of Nowhere]

it's normally assumed people should have multiple fights in an adventuring day. However, past the low levels, you can't really justify that.

Take, for example, attacking an enemy lair. As soon as you make an appearence, everyone will come to focus you. It really makes no sense that there will be 2-3 mooks in every room that you can kill without anyone else noticing. Ok, it could make sense if the party uses stealth tactics - like covertly casting silence on the whole area before engaging - but that can work really well against low level mooks. If you are high level, it makes little sense to even roll such a fight. So, you can advance that way until you find a level-approopriate encounter. And it's unlikely you'll be able to keep that under wrap. Not if the opponents behave smartly, which they should, if they reached high level in the first place. Unless you trivialize the encounter with good strategy, but then it's not really a combat encounter.
And in any case, if you're high level, those "mooks" are at least 5th level. Which means, too rare and valuable to use as mooks. You don't leave them hanging around random rooms. If they are constructs or undead or similar, they are too expensive to just leave around like that.

In a different kind of adventure you fight big monsters. Obviously those big monsters are kinda rare, because otherwise they would wipe out civilization. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that the party would find several of them in a row. Anyway, if the party has a goal of going somewhere, they can teleport there straight away and skip the encounters. And if the goal is fighting the monsters, again they can teleport away after one fight.

Sure, you can build special circumstances where they can't, but they are special. In the vast majority of cases, there is no sensible reason for the party to fight (seriously) more than once per day. If the enemies are sentient, they should try to rush them with everything they have at once, or let them be, for throwing at them level-appropriate encounters is a pure waste of resources. If the enemies are not sentient, encountering several monsters of high enough power is hard to justify unless the players weren't specifically looking for them.

I know this is a general problem, as any high-op concept I ever saw assumes long preparation, throwing as much power in as little time as possible, and then going back to base for more preparation. Even at the mid-low op I run, the vast majority of adventures see a single fight per day.
I was wondering how other DM justify the 5 level appropriate daily encounters that the game seem to assume - or even if they bother justifying it at all, rather than glossing over it.

[JoeJ]

The easiest fix is to play a game that doesn't assume that.

[Quellian-dyrae]

Well there's a few options.

First, an adventuring day doesn't have to take place in an isolated dungeon. If the characters are crossing a giant-inhabited mountain range, or a dangerous forest, or a stretch of a lower plane, or whatever, there can be a bunch of individual encounters that have no opportunity to coordinate because they're separated by miles. That also, as it happens, probably helps with the fifteen minute adventuring day. If you're trying to get somewhere, you probably can't afford to burn an entire day resting every time you have a single fight, and you certainly can't go back to town each time (granted, spells like Rope Trick mean you might not have to, but still). Likewise, in a war-style situation, there's gonna be lots of things going on that PCs can go between, but the enemies have more to fight than just them.

Even in a dungeon, the enemies may not be perfectly coordinated or have knowledge of what's happening. If there's some space and some walls and doors between each encounter room, they might not hear even a pitched battle. Or maybe the next group hears it, but they have no reason to assume whoever's fighting is going to win. Depending on how smart/strategic/coordinated they are, they might certainly start preparing, or send a scout to see what's happening, or so on, especially as they clear more rooms. But actually whelming your entire force takes time. A combat round is six seconds.

And even if you can whelm your whole force, rushing the invaders straight-up isn't necessarily a good idea. Do you have to go through a door or hallway to get to them? Now they've got a choke point to use to rain AoOs and area attacks on your forces. What if they've buffed up heavily, or have some lingering battlefield control spells from their first battle? You can be sending your forces into a prepared opposition. And attrition can be a valuable thing in D&D and games like it. If you throw everything you've got at them, they can throw everything they've got right back at you. Sometimes letting some expendable minions burn off some spells is a better idea. And sometimes a modest threat can accomplish more than they would as just one more part of a major one, because they aren't facing the same level of offense. If it's just two goons, the casters won't have to break out the big guns, which may give them an opportunity to last a couple rounds longer, bleed off a few more hit points and healing resources.

A caster might scry as the characters are making their way through, use the earlier encounters to see what sort of enemy is coming, gauge their capabilities and come up with a plan. And you have to figure most villains are going to feel fairly secure in their defenses; up until this point they've presumably been working. Nobody's perfect, a villain could easily underestimate the threat of the heroes until it's too late.

Maybe the simpler encounters are just holding them off while the villain gathers a serious force and prepares with buffs and whatnot, so instead of a single EL+4 encounter they wind up facing a few ~EL encounters and a prepared EL+2 finisher.

Yeah, sure, if you're dealing with like a fortress with sentries and windows and arrow slits and a courtyard, probably the most reasonable response is for like...all archers to man the walls, all soldiers to get in there and hit them, casters to launch spells from the roof, hit them with maximum force from multiple angles. But even then it's going to take some time for everybody to get orders or learn about the attack and assemble, so you'll probably have an initial encounter but every round or two more enemies come pouring in, or something.

This isn't to say you can't set up a situation where pretty much the entire enemy forces rushes the PCs straight-up (or quietly withdraws to the most heavily fortified room and waits for them to arrive). But there's plenty of reasons you can use for why they wouldn't.

[Darth Ultron]

Well, there are two ways to run the game in the rules:

Scaled: Everything in the world goes up in levels/power as the PC's do. So the castle guards are 3 level fighters when the PC's are first level, but gain two levels every time the PC's level up. Farmer Makgee has giant rats in his barn when the PCs are first level, and half shadow dragon cranium rats when the Pcs are 5th level.

Status Que: The world is full of different power levels always. At first level the castle guards are 10th level. Farmer Magee has half shadow dragon cranium rats, always.

For the first one the world will ''alter reality'' so the PCs allways and only face things of thier level and challenge.

The second one is a lot more on the players to not ''bite off more then they can chew''. When the 3rd level PC's encounter a beholder...they back away and don't fight it.


So if you do the scaled world...everything goes up as the PCs do.
Status Que-All the powerful stuff is already there.


Story wise, the high level PCs should NOT be doing dull and mundane things. At like 15th PC's don't go investigate the ''noise is farmer Mgees barn".

At like 15th the PCs should be on the Elemental Plane of Fire trying to stop the Fire Fall Invasion force from attacking the Pcs home world.

[Jay R]

You are assuming "the enemy" is a united group. This is not necessarily the case.

The first encounter is a couple of rhinos, or gorgons, wandering through the woods. The noise attracts the attention of a nearby necromancer, who investigates and attacks. A witch hears about this battle from forest animals, and realizes that this is a great opportunity to get rid of that pesky necromancer (if he wins), or to defeat the party so she can ransack the necromancer's lab if the party wins.

Or you can defeat the sorceress, then investigate her vault, only to discover that somebody has just opened it and fled. So now the party wants to track the thieves who got all the loot, before they can get away.

Or a group of carnivores are attracted by the spilled blood.

The next encounter in the game I was most recently running was going to be a baron with 40 warriors coming up to claim the ruined castle that the adventurers are currently clearing out, while a hidden force of starving gnolls look on and realize that the party and the baronial force are the only food they've seen in days.

[Frozen_Feet]

Easy: enemies and assassins hired by your enemies from all across your career teleport to you to get a drop on you.

What, you thought the PCs were the only proactive faction? Perish the thought!

But really, the premise of this thread is just an example of stupidity causes by taking certain kind of metagame as gospel. "Four level-appropriate encounters per day" is not, and never was, a hard rule or an assumption that should hold all the time. It's an average across multiple adventuring days. The actual recommendation varies both amount and difficulty of encounters. Some of these encounters are meant to be random; as Jay R points out, nothing says these encounters all come from a single faction, and I could add that they won't necessarily happen even at the same location! A high-level party is capable of visiting several distinct dungeons in a day should they feel like it.

[Anymage]

Multiple daily fights are an artifact of dungeons, where different encounters don't necessarily have the communication or inclination to work together. You can simulate it at higher levels with time pressure, but then you create a whole time management minigame that's hard for you as the DM to predict. (If the party has one week to gather components for a ritual and needs thirty items, it's hard to predict how many the party will fetch in a given day or how fresh they'll be for any given encounter.)

If you don't like dungeons and really like set piece battles, use the 5e rest variant or backport it to your preferred edition. You only get one real encounter a day (most guards being trivial enough to not count as an encounter), but if you don't have the week's downtime you need to recharge spell slots and similar resources it winds up being mostly the same.

[King of Nowhere]

The easiest fix is to play a game that doesn't assume that.

I already do that. Was looking for variety, though.

Easy: enemies and assassins hired by your enemies from all across your career teleport to you to get a drop on you.

What, you thought the PCs were the only proactive faction? Perish the thought!

Impossible to perform. My pcs allied themselves with a major nation, which has a very safe bunker. they spend their whole time hunkered there, except for brief times when they teleport out, have a brief fight, and go back in.

If they were to not do that, then they'd probably not last the night. They managed to piss off, like, half of the world's greatest powers, including, but not limited to, no less than 5 casters capable of 9th level spells. They can only survive because they got equally powerful allies in the process to shelter them from organized retaliation. And I am afraid in the long run "you spend weeks in the bunker waiting for the right time. then you pop into place, fight for 5 rounds, loot the corpses, then pop back into the bunker very fast before your enemies can gank you" will become stale.
Although I do have some alternative ways to send them on more traditional adventures, I can't rely on those all the time.

I have many proactive sides in my world, but the scheming is mostly political at the moment. The players just rebuffed a scheme that would have caused them to be abandoned by their allies if successful, for example. However, 60% of the players don't really follow all the plot's intricacies, and I must include some more traditional situation for their sake.

[Pelle]

Impossible to perform. My pcs allied themselves with a major nation, which has a very safe bunker. they spend their whole time hunkered there, except for brief times when they teleport out, have a brief fight, and go back in.

Sounds like you have ended up in a failure state / boring equilibrium. Time to start a new campaign?

If the best strategical option for the characters is boring for the players, then just establish or figure out a reason for why it won't work. Just make things time critical so they fail to meet their goal if they retreat too early. I can imagine it is challenging if the pcs aren't motivated to care about anything unless they know they can win...

[Yerok LliGcam]

just roll up encounters.

why should a high level player not have to deal with low level critters? just cuz they're some powerful fill in the blank doesn't mean that low level critters with natural inclinations don't come into play.

i don't know a SINGLE player who'd grin and say "OH YEAH! BRING IT ON!" if i were to charge their lvl 10 character with a bunch of level 1/4 goblins that are just in the woods when they go by

the point it, you're assuming that high level means something.

in the end. levels are meaningless. it just means they're more experienced. doesn't disqualify lower level peoples from taking an interest in them.

Gandalf and Thorin, they're amazing high level characters, and that didn't mean that they didn't deal with lowly goblins.


also another thing,


hoards.

5-10 goblins is killer on lower level players mechanically speaking, but for a couple high level players, that's a fun exersize and i do'nt know a single wizard who hasn't imagined coming across a hoard of orcs or bandits and trying out their awesome new high level spells to absolutely WRECK those lower leveled enemies.


so how do you justify multiple fights at high level?

you just ignore levels.


and if you want your players to have a good time that's a little crazy too, don't be afraid to throw realistic situations of much higher level monsters at them.

My players know full well that there are encounters they're better off running from, it doesn't upset them. it makes them feel part of a living breathing fantasy world when a giant and a dragon are fighting in the woods and they charge in, and the dragon gets upset and throws a tree at them.

you'd be surprised what can happen for your players excitement in the game when you just throw levels out the window.

[hymer]

Another suggestion: Switch the situation on its head. Have the PCs stay in one place, protecting a macguffin, e.g., as waves of enemies rush in to try to take it from them, or prevent it from opening, or whatever the story is. The waves will get bigger, as it becomes clear that the early ones fail, and they gather greater numbers before they strike. Then have one climactic, last try of the biggest wave yet, with a big bad hanging on the sidelines throwing in a bit of support, but not risking to subejct themselves to full PC firepower - or trying to lure them away if the PCs are likely to be sidetracked.

[Mastikator]

The alarm bells go off and now you're not fighting a room at a time, you're fighting the entire barracks- castle- regiment- army- nation- continent- world. The higher the level the faster the reinforcements arrive. They swarm you and it only slightly counts as "multiple fights" because every now and then you get a 20 second breather. Before the end you realize perhaps this was not a smart idea.

[JoeJ]

Stop trying to make encounters "level appropriate." Have the encounter be whatever would reasonable be present at that particular place and time, and let the PCs decide when to fight and when not to. And if they guess wrong, high level characters should have plenty of ways to disengage and escape.

[Segev]

Problem 1: Why wouldn't all the monsters dogpile the party the moment they show their face at the dungeon?

Answer 1a: Not all the monsters are that coordinated. The less intelligent ones are lairing up and hiding to protect their territory, not lashing out to help defend their rivals'. The more intelligent ones are planning to jump the party after they've been softened up a bit, maybe waiting to see what spells wear off and trying their luck later.

Answer 1b: There's just not enough room. Castles under siege had ranks and ranks of defenders, holding various positions, some of which saw little to no action at any given point in time. They aren't called away from their posts to help with the attack on the south wall; they stay where they are to respond to new attacks that might come from there.

Problem 2: The party can just retreat and force everybody to wait on them to take an 8-hour break and recover all their daily resources.

Answer 2: THe world doesn't wait for them. There are other things going on. Not every goal is just sitting around waiting for the party to get around to it. Time-sensitive goals are useful, here. Also, if they bunker down like this, the enemy can set up to come after them (if they're doing it in the enemy dungeon) in a coordinated fashion. If they don't, then the enemy can repair the damage they've done and prepare for the party's return, knowing that it's coming. They can even attempt methods of striking back, personally. The party retreated to their stronghold? The farms supplying the keep in which they live were just scorched by fire elementals sent by the evil shamans of the dungeon they ransacked.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Have your adventures be in places where everything is just naturally badass? The Abyss springs to mind, since it's infinite and uncharted and all, but any of the [evil] planes will do (or their equivalent in other game settings).

[King of Nowhere]

Problem 1: Why wouldn't all the monsters dogpile the party the moment they show their face at the dungeon?

Answer 1a: Not all the monsters are that coordinated. The less intelligent ones are lairing up and hiding to protect their territory, not lashing out to help defend their rivals'. The more intelligent ones are planning to jump the party after they've been softened up a bit, maybe waiting to see what spells wear off and trying their luck later.

the problem with this scenario is, what are all those hugely powerful monsters doing all stuck in one place? If they are rivals, how can they live so close anyway?

Answer 1b: There's just not enough room. Castles under siege had ranks and ranks of defenders, holding various positions, some of which saw little to no action at any given point in time. They aren't called away from their posts to help with the attack on the south wall; they stay where they are to respond to new attacks that might come from there.

High level fight does not follow the rules of real world fight. To repel a high level party you need high level troops(/minions/monsters/constructs/whatever). You don't have enough high level troops to spread out. If you are attacked by a high level party, it makes little sense to leave half your high level troops elsewhere just in case another high level party attacks. In any case, the fight lasts about half a minute. You just trust your passive defences to hold that much.
What makes the difference with real world fighting here is that real troops need large numbers, and you can't fit too many in a narrow space, while high level people for high level combat can't be that abundant. Also, high level combat is much faster than real combat.

Problem 2: The party can just retreat and force everybody to wait on them to take an 8-hour break and recover all their daily resources.

Answer 2: THe world doesn't wait for them. There are other things going on. Not every goal is just sitting around waiting for the party to get around to it. Time-sensitive goals are useful, here. Also, if they bunker down like this, the enemy can set up to come after them (if they're doing it in the enemy dungeon) in a coordinated fashion. If they don't, then the enemy can repair the damage they've done [emphasis mine] and prepare for the party's return, knowing that it's coming. They can even attempt methods of striking back, personally. The party retreated to their stronghold? The farms supplying the keep in which they live were just scorched by fire elementals sent by the evil shamans of the dungeon they ransacked.

Ok for timed objectives, though not all objectives can be timed. As for the bolded part, that's another way the real world works differently from the high level fantasy world. In the real world, you can recruit some more troops. Just conscript some farmers. Cheap. But if the party is high level, you must send them stuff that is at least decently powerful. And that means that those troops(/minions/monsters/constructs/whatever) are not easily replaced. You can't win a war of attrition against a high level party hitting your defences every day. Setting up a trap if they're too regular, that's something you can actually try

Have your adventures be in places where everything is just naturally badass? The Abyss springs to mind, since it's infinite and uncharted and all, but any of the [evil] planes will do (or their equivalent in other game settings).

this is one of the ways i have, though I have no "abyss" but an homebrewed lower plane where any form of astral travel is unavailable (the place doesn't follow an euclidean geometry and spells can't cope with it. on the plus side, even their many enemies can't track them with magic in there) and that reacts to living souls by spawning monsters whose strenght is proportional to the soul's strenght.
I already sent them there twice and I'm planning for a third time soon.

Anyway, it seems the basic answer is "if you don't want a 15-minutes adventuring week, you have to endeavour exceptional curcumstances"

[ExLibrisMortis]

"if you don't want a 15-minutes adventuring week, you have to endeavour exceptional curcumstances"

Extraordinary heroes require extraordinary villains.

[Darth Ultron]

the problem with this scenario is, what are all those hugely powerful monsters doing all stuck in one place? If they are rivals, how can they live so close anyway?

Well, not all rivals are Murderhobos, and a great many of them can live close together.

Even if the rivals are hostile, they might not be able to act for the simple reason that leaves themselves wide open to attack themselves. Take just five rivals: If A attacks B, then C can take the chance to attack A and D will take the chance to attack C and E attacks both A and B. So everyone lives in a careful stalemate.

Once you add fantasy into the mix, a lot of rivals won't care about the same things and be direct rivals. Very often Undead and Constructs won't care about 'life' based stuff. One rival might only care about magic, so they will ignore non magical rivals.

High level fight does not follow the rules of real world fight. To repel a high level party you need high level troops(/minions/monsters/constructs/whatever).

If your game is scaled correctly, the troops will all be the right level. So this is not a problem.

Anyway, it seems the basic answer is "if you don't want a 15-minutes adventuring week, you have to endeavour exceptional curcumstances"

I think you might be stuck on the 'exceptional'.

You are thinking that the whole world must always be super low powered mundane like 'Ye Old Earth' was centuries ago. So everyone everywhere is like zero or first level and anyone with a couple levels is a demi god ruling the world. A lot like ''the real world''.

In the ''real world'', everyone is like first level and has 3-5 hit points. So guards that have a simple sword can kill anyone with one hit..and that is really true for the world.

But you need to let go of this idea: that first level is normal and common and say 5th level is awesome. It is all relative, not static.

[Pleh]

I made a world with different natural challenges.

In most of the world, level 6 is about all you need to comfortably be apex predator. But wander too far into any of the cardinal directions and the area's average level steps up drastically.

This is only partly because of the local monster population. It's also because the environment itself starts making itself inhospitable as you venture off the map of the known world.

To the east are xenophobic bushido islander elves who kill all trespassers without warning and whose amphibious qualities allow them to make ambushes out of fog filled swamps. Further east is open ocean fraught with unearthly storms on the surface and populated with gigantic kraken below.

Go west and you'll have to climb the treacherous Sprawling Peaks. Many of the world's largest and most powerful solitary predators live in its furthest reaches, but none are more pervasive or ruthless than the viking dwarves that live there, warring amongst themselves in territorial disputes to satiate their mighty, and angry, ancestors whom they enshrine within elaborate tombs locked in perpetual frost.

To the south is a desert so vast that only the gypsy gnomes from the southern side can traverse. Of the 4 cardinal directions, certainly the friendliest as monsters are sparse and the environment kills you more slowly with heat, thirst, and starvation. But those that make it past the desert face a savage race of Taurians; Centaurs and Minotaurs form a brutish, pseudo Roman empire whose strength is matched only by its tactical cunning. If you thought the minotaur a threat, you've never known the fear of a unified taurian infantry charging in formation and thundering like a stampede over the hills, knocking down small trees in their wake.

But the deadliest biome is the blighted arctic to the north. The land here is locked in Uttercold, causing all those poor souls lost to the perpetual blizzards to rise as frostbitten zombies. Being a necrotic storm, even druids and clerics of nature have trouble commanding this weather and heroes that venture here unprepare feel the air itself leeching away their life force with every breath and every breeze. Yeah, there's a wizard's tower hidden somewhere in these dead and frozen lands. They experiment with arcane knowledge and inadvertently caused the most recent ice age. They are planning to retry the experiment soon.

So feel free to stick to the safe, central, E6 lowlands, where humans and other standard races live in poverty attempting to subsist off of the harsh and mostly fruitless land that they have no option of leaving.

Adventurers, stop by for the Winter Solstice, where the commoners celebrate the blessings of summer, preparing to retreat into their homes for winter, when the dwarven vikings will descend from their mountain homes to pillage, preparing for the day their ancestors return from the spirit world to evaluate their estate and bless faithful descendants (or haunt them for failure).

[DeTess]

Just out of curiosity, why can't all objectives and goals have a time limit? You don't send a high-level party to deal with some inconvenience that would be nice to get rid of (unless there's a lof other high-level parties, in which case any high-level wizard can summon those replacement high-CR monsters you where wondering about). You send them to deal with all of the major immediate threats, and the thing about immediate threats is that they tend to do bad stuff if they're left alone for too long.

[King of Nowhere]

I think you might be stuck on the 'exceptional'.

You are thinking that the whole world must always be super low powered mundane like 'Ye Old Earth' was centuries ago. So everyone everywhere is like zero or first level and anyone with a couple levels is a demi god ruling the world. A lot like ''the real world''.

In the ''real world'', everyone is like first level and has 3-5 hit points. So guards that have a simple sword can kill anyone with one hit..and that is really true for the world.

But you need to let go of this idea: that first level is normal and common and say 5th level is awesome. It is all relative, not static.

levels higher than 5 are exceptional, period. Sure, when you go into large cities you can find a lot of people who are higher, and when you enter the higher echelons of plotting at nation-wide levels you will deal with several dozens people above level 15, but that's because teleportation and sendings bring high level people together.
A powerful church may have up to 100 clerics above level 10, but those are the exceptional ones among tens of thousands of clerics of that religion, spread over several nations. Certainly they are not the common priest that performs the rites in a random town, and certainly they are not expendable or easily replaced. they take time and training and you have to start with hundreds of low level cleric to get one to rise so high. You generally get a couple new ones every year, and they replace those that die of old age. Lose a dozen of them, and if you can't raise them you'll take years to recover. Even if you can raise them, losing their equipment is a significant blow and will make your whole organization less powerful.
If your average city guards are level 10, I won't say you're playing the game wrong because everyone plays differently, but you're certainly operating under very different basic premises. Not to mention it begs the question, if the average soldier here is so much more powerful than the average soldier there, why don't they invade? (incidentally, in the worldbuilding presented by pleh, there is a good reason why the minotaurs don't invade: the logistics of supplying an army across a desert are pretty bad to deal with. although if they have a llarge number of mid level casters, then create water and create food may just trivialize it. There is also a good reasons the bushido elves stay on their islands: they are so xenophobic they just want to stay there and pretend the outside don't exist. But I can't figure out why the viking dwarves haven't invaded yet).
Not to mention, if the level of the environment increase with the level of the characters, I don't see much point to leveling. If it still takes the same number of city guards, or bandits, or random monsters to subdue you, you may as well skip the whole leveling mechanic. The way I see it, as you grow in power you should go from dealing with small local problems to large, worldwide problems. and the whole general setup changes from "we get a dozen of those every month" to "this is a very rare occurrence, thanks to the gods".

[Pelle]

levels higher than 5 are exceptional, period. Sure, when you go into large cities you can find a lot of people who are higher, and when you enter the higher echelons of plotting at nation-wide levels you will deal with several dozens people above level 15, but that's because teleportation and sendings bring high level people together.
A powerful church may have up to 100 clerics above level 10, but those are the exceptional ones among tens of thousands of clerics of that religion, spread over several nations. Certainly they are not the common priest that performs the rites in a random town, and certainly they are not expendable or easily replaced. they take time and training and you have to start with hundreds of low level cleric to get one to rise so high. You generally get a couple new ones every year, and they replace those that die of old age. Lose a dozen of them, and if you can't raise them you'll take years to recover. Even if you can raise them, losing their equipment is a significant blow and will make your whole organization less powerful.

This is a very reasonable way to set up your setting. I do the same. Thing is, it is boring for high level play (I just end campaigns after level 10 or so). If you want high level play to be interesting, you need to either change the setting so it will be so, or you need to creatively figure out a reason for why the high level adventure makes sense.

[Jay R]

Impossible to perform. My pcs allied themselves with a major nation, which has a very safe bunker. they spend their whole time hunkered there, except for brief times when they teleport out, have a brief fight, and go back in.

If they were to not do that, then they'd probably not last the night. They managed to piss off, like, half of the world's greatest powers, including, but not limited to, no less than 5 casters capable of 9th level spells. They can only survive because they got equally powerful allies in the process to shelter them from organized retaliation.

So you gave them a safe place to rest, a way to get there immediately after combat, and enemies too powerful to take on except with full power. And now you want a way for them to have multiple fights per day.

Sorry; we can't help you. You worked hard to create this one-fight-per-day scenario. Your players are playing it the only way it can be played.

[Segev]

the problem with this scenario is, what are all those hugely powerful monsters doing all stuck in one place? If they are rivals, how can they live so close anyway?

High level fight does not follow the rules of real world fight. To repel a high level party you need high level troops(/minions/monsters/constructs/whatever).


(...)

In the real world, you can recruit some more troops. Just conscript some farmers. Cheap. But if the party is high level, you must send them stuff that is at least decently powerful. And that means that those troops(/minions/monsters/constructs/whatever) are not easily replaced. You can't win a war of attrition against a high level party hitting your defences every day.

This honestly sounds more like, "It's impossible to challenge a high-level party at all," than, "How do you get the number of encounters in a day?"

Play the foes they're facing as high-level foes. Everything you say about high-level parties can and should apply to high-level foes for those parties.

If you really want to see how to arrange it, arrange for your party to get their own stronghold. Encourage them to develop its defenses. Then play it like a reverse-dungeon, with the defenses and minions the PCs set up as defenses, and the PCs themselves as boss monsters for your NPC creatures that are assaulting it. Use the tactics you fear the PCs will use to trivialize or avoid the requisite number of encounters/day. See how the players respond.

Anyway, it seems the basic answer is "if you don't want a 15-minutes adventuring week, you have to endeavour exceptional curcumstances"

Well, yes. Non-exceptional circumstances will result in the high-level PCs facing off against low-level threats, since those are what's most common in the world. The sorting algorithm of challenge rating is not entirely illogical: the powerful seek out greater rewards, which only the powerful dare seek because the competition is otherwise too powerful for the seeker to overcome.

One Piece, as ridiculous as it can be, is actually rather realistic in this one aspect: the closer one gets to the eponymous One Piece, the more the challenges are fierce and dangerous, because EVERYBODY is trying for it on some level, and the weak are beaten out by the strong earlier on, so it filters for the very strong as you get closer, so the challenges are greater and greater as all the strongest are concentrated towards the goal.

[Darth Ultron]

levels higher than 5 are exceptional, period.

Right, this is where you get the problem. You see the world as all low level people, with only a couple exceptional people. So your view is all the guards, worldwide are like 1-3 level or so, with maybe a couple scattered elite guards of 4th level and very rare ones 5th or above. The same with any class really, so the world has few high level folks. And then the 8th level PCs are demi gods and can rule the world.

This is the Classic way to play D&D, or maybe even more the Dragonlance way. Dragonlance, Kyrnn, does present such a world: the whole world is under 5th level and most are only 0 or 1st.

As I said there are two main Other Ways:

1.Have the whole world level up too. Pick a 'level' you want for the game, and have the world always be that as the PCs level up. A common one is the ''2 levels'', so most guards are 3rd level when the PCs are 1st.

2.The world is full of people from level 1-20. A non combat type character levels up slowly. A 20 year old adult is 1st level, and roughly gains a level every two years or so...maybe a bit more or less. So at 20 farmer Joe is a 1st level commoner, at 35, he is a 11th level commoner. More combat or adventure types gain levels a bit faster...a bandit can be 5th level by 25, for example.

Keep in mind the most of the time, the PCs will over power most ''common folks''. Sure Farmer Bob can take out a 1st level PC, but after 3rd level or so the PC's are more then tough enough to take on Farmer Bob.

The world will still have plenty of mooks in it, as many as you need, of course. But the back bone of the world will be the high level intelligent characters.

To use guards as an example. Say 5th level is the average guard level. So most common things in a city will have 5th level guards, with a mix of 6 and 7 and 3 and 4's too. Guards of levels 1-2 are 'trainees' or very cheap guards for small things. Any thing of real value, like a bank, will have the 9-10 level guards, with a mix of lower ones. Bodyguards are at least 5th level, as are gate guards. 11 and above are the rare exceptional ones, guarding the mayor or such.

If your average city guards are level 10, I won't say you're playing the game wrong because everyone plays differently, but you're certainly operating under very different basic premises. Not to mention it begs the question, if the average soldier here is so much more powerful than the average soldier there, why don't they invade?

Everyone has the same level split...world wide. And yes, the premises is what needs to change.

If you have a world that you want to be all low and zero level everything...and you have say 15th level PCs...and your asking how to justify multiple daily fights for 15th level PCs while absolutely keeping the whole world all low and zero level everything, then you will need to change that premise.

Though, technically, your ''world premise'' should not allow for high level PCs too.

Not to mention, if the level of the environment increase with the level of the characters, I don't see much point to leveling. If it still takes the same number of city guards, or bandits, or random monsters to subdue you, you may as well skip the whole leveling mechanic. The way I see it, as you grow in power you should go from dealing with small local problems to large, worldwide problems. and the whole general setup changes from "we get a dozen of those every month" to "this is a very rare occurrence, thanks to the gods".

This is 100% true. As the PCs level up, they should be much more into large problems.

Though the trick is, in an adventure game....you have to have the PCs do something. If you do the Dragonlance way, you need to do the bit where PCs retire after level 10. After they are demi gods and can chance the world with a blink..there is no point of playing the game.

And games are mostly about challenges and combat. Sure you can have tons and tons and tons of role playing...but if you do so, you might just want a role playing storytelling game.

[Kaptin Keen]

In my E6 games, specifically, I let players know outright that ... basically, never assume any NPC is higher level than 1 or maybe 2, and assume that most NPC's don't even have class levels (in anything other than commoner).

I also see absolutely no reason to 'justify multiple daily fights' at any level (no longer restricted to E6). My fights are plot related - or not there.

Another way to say the same thing would be that, if you're really into fights and game mechanics and the whole testing the hammer of your optimi-zen vs. the anvil of the GM's ditto ... I'm surely not the GM for you =)

[RazorChain]

Just ignore it if you don't like it. It's just fighting for fighting sake.

It's like Kaptin Keen says if here isn't a meaning to a fight then you can just skip it all together. If the ONLY reason is to drain resources before a boss battle or some such why not just make the boss battle harder?

Because yes, when you hit level 20 it's going to be hard justifying a 5 fight encounter adventuring day.

[DeTess]

Just ignore it if you don't like it. It's just fighting for fighting sake.

It's like Kaptin Keen says if here isn't a meaning to a fight then you can just skip it all together. If the ONLY reason is to drain resources before a boss battle or some such why not just make the boss battle harder?

Because yes, when you hit level 20 it's going to be hard justifying a 5 fight encounter adventuring day.

Because sometimes, that's not possible. Not because you can't tweak the boss battle, but because any tweaking of the boss battle to the point that he can fend of the nova from a high level party fighting combat as war would basically guarantee a TPK if the PC's get the slightest bit unlucky.

You'r right when you're playing at lower levels and/or lower optimization levels, but from the OP's description it seems that his party is using a lot of the high-OP tactics, and balancing a single battle against that is just about impossible.

[Segev]

As a general rule, the resource-drain of the N-fights-per-day is important to game balance because class balance is designed around it. Too few, and characters with a higher number of daily resources will be more powerful due to their lack of need to conserve them, while those with fewer daily resources but more "staple" resources (that refresh more easily or which don't exhaust at all) will be comparatively weaker, since their powers are balanced for being useful more often and needing less conservation. If you can spam the "once per day!" big attacks, you don't need the many-times-per-day medium or small attacks.

There are a number of possible homebrew/house rule solutions, including 5e's "longer rests" rule that makes "short rest" mechanics into dailies and essentially turns "long rests" into weekly events. One can also rebalance resources to exist in higher quantities but not refresh until one levels (based on the notion that leveling up happens after ~M encounters, so this will more properly balance resource expenditure).

Having non-combat encounters that nevertheless require resources to be expended to overcome them is another option.

Having encounters - combat or otherwise - which are fairly trivial, but which the resource-tracking PCs need to be cautious about can go quickly, too. Do they spend the buff spell, or just let the fighters fight? Do they protect themselves, or just hide in the back and hope for the best?

The main thing is to be AWARE of WHY the rules are as they are, and why the expectation exists. Then you can tweak things to work for your game.

[King of Nowhere]

You'r right when you're playing at lower levels and/or lower optimization levels, but from the OP's description it seems that his party is using a lot of the high-OP tactics, and balancing a single battle against that is just about impossible.

Actually it's an eclectic mix of high-op strategies, low-op tactics, and a bunch of homebrew and houserules to keep the power level consistent.
At the level of strategical play, it's all scry and espionage and mindgames to try to get a jump on the other guys. I fondly remember when the pcs hired an npc spy to gather info and set up a trap for the enemies, but the enemies discovered the spy and set up a trap for the party, but the party found out and called in some allies to set an even bigger trap, but the enemies figured it out and hired mercenaries to spring a trap for the bigger trap. It resulted in a fight involving over 60 characters of level 11-15, which I decided to zoom in on the party against the main enemy group to keep it manageable. it was epic. that's because it seemed a logical consequence of how a war would go in the kind of world I pustulated.
On the other hand, actual combat is on the lower end of the scale, because half the players have no system mastery whatsoever, and everyone else was much less experienced when we started. And I'm baning the higher-end builds and combos because otherwise it would trivialize the current pc builds - I'd either have to force everyone to remake their character, including forcing the people who are only in it for the ride to get some system mastery, or I just stick to that optimization level. As a result, the best martial strategy is two-handed fighting (maybe a bit of lockdown, but I had to ban a full lockdown build, much less uberchargers) and the best caster strategy is blasting, throwing save-or-die (with high chance of saving throws succeeding) or supporting the martials

Incidentally, removing the best offensive strategies while giving plenty of loot to everyone, including npcs (it's a high magic world, magic items are common), increased a lot the survivability during fights. So high level fighting are not the rocket tag game that is usually described, but they generally last a half dozen rounds. More if there are many healers. And we all liked that, beause a prolonged fighting is more exciting than one where winning the initiative is half the game.
High wealth and alliance with two of the world's major churches also means that resurrections are not a problem. And I persuaded everyone to invest in a few tattoos of teleportation (including variants like still, silent teleport or quickened dimension door). So I don't have to worry too much about making encounters too hard; if I accidentally kill half of the party, as long as a couple of people are still alive to grab the bodies and flee, it's no more than a speed bump.
So, my table pretty much defies all the common assumptions about optimization levels and different strategies. Meaning, unfortunately, that a lot of good advice found on this forum just does not work that way at my table, cannot be allowed to work at my table to not break this careful balance, or has to be repurposed a bit.