Intro
DMs, we need to talk, because these high-level players are out of hand.
I put so much effort into an encounter. I throw one really good fight at them, and what happens? They supernova every ability they own, flatten it without breaking a sweat, and take a long rest. And then what am I supposed to do — the same thing again, and again, and wonder why nothing’s landing? I once threw a CR 30 monster at a mid-teens party. They handled it. No problem.
If that’s roughly how you feel, I get it. But don’t give up. There are five tactics I use to challenge high-level parties, and none of them involve finding a bigger number to throw at the table. There are just a few things we need to change about how we approach high-level play versus low-level play, and we’ll all be fine. Chin up, champ.
First, the Cornerstone: Resources vs. Obstacles
Before any of the tactics, there’s one idea everything else sits on top of.
Balance comes down to the resources your players have available and the number of obstacles you put in front of them. As long as the obstacles are equal to or greater than the resources, your players will feel challenged.
That’s it. That’s the whole engine.
And here’s the part that makes it work: when your players hit zero resources, they don’t become useless. Things just get harder. That’s the feeling you’re chasing — not "we might die on round one," but "we are running on fumes and we still have to do this."
Low-level play hides this, because low-level characters have so few resources that a single good encounter drains them. High-level characters have so many that one encounter barely dents the pile. Everything below is about draining the pile.
Tactic 1: Multiple Encounters
The most reliable way to challenge a high-level party is to wear them down across several encounters instead of betting everything on one.
Your players are powerful, but their spells, abilities, and hit points are not infinite. Over an adventuring day — even one that spans multiple sessions — build a series of encounters that escalate. The first few might be easy. That’s fine. Easy encounters still cost hit dice, spell slots, and hit points. By the time they reach the final fight, they’re low on everything, and suddenly that fight is a real decision instead of a damage race.
That’s what stops the supernova. A party that has burned through four encounters can’t afford to open with third-level smite, third-level smite, third-level smite.
Don’t forget the story that happens during initiative
We spend a lot of time thinking about the narrative structure of a campaign, and then we get to combat and forget all of it. But there’s a very clear story happening in those moments.
Think about any fight scene you’ve watched in a film or read in a book — it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So why compress that into a single encounter when you could stretch it across several?
The example: the party faces a horde of undead outside a fortress, only to realise the horde is just the front door. They cut through it and breach the gate — and as they do, a faction they betrayed twenty sessions ago flanks them on the walls. They weren’t prepared for that. They deal with it, bloodied and drained, and then they get to walk in and face the big bad.
By the time they reach the boss, they’ve spent so much just getting there. That final encounter becomes gripping instead of routine.
Tactic 2: Secondary Objectives
Don’t make every encounter purely about beating the enemy. Give the party something else to worry about, and watch them have to split their focus.
Protect a VIP. Disarm a series of magical traps. Retrieve an artifact mid-fight. The point is that the party can’t pour every resource into damage. Instead of spending a fourth-level slot on blight, the wizard now spends it on dimension door to get an NPC out alive.
Make the objective carry consequences
The best version of this gives the objective teeth.
You’re fighting a powerful dragon, but the dragon can’t be killed while ancient runes siphon life into it. So the runes have to go. But destroying the runes starts collapsing the cavern everyone is standing in. Now the party has to break the runes and kill the dragon fast enough to get out.
And you can layer further. Somewhere in that hoard is a magical weapon they’ll need to cut through the bramble corruption protecting the real villain — because this dragon was only ever the general.
Stack objectives like that and the encounter stops being about killing the boss. It becomes about delaying the boss, crowd-controlling the boss, holding it still long enough to finish everything else. Which is a completely different and much more interesting problem.
Tactic 3: Threaten What They Love, Not What They Have
This one’s my favourite, and it follows directly from secondary objectives.
At high levels it is genuinely hard to threaten the players. They have triple-digit hit points. It’s no longer a goblin’s arrow that might kill someone — it takes seventh-, eighth-, ninth-level spells to reliably drop a character, and often not even then. I’m not saying a level 18 party should be one-shot by a goblin. But the danger is gone, and danger is what makes people care.
So stop threatening the characters. Threaten an NPC or a place tied to them.
The players probably aren’t going to die. But if they don’t act fast enough, if they don’t fight hard enough, someone they love will.
How this looks at my table: in The Adventures of the Salamander Coast and The Isles of Ivarion, we’ve been playing for three and a half years. My players have made allies everywhere. They care about dozens of people and places. So in these final sessions, they sit down and I tell them: there are two places in danger. You can go here, or you can go there. You cannot save both.
Then they have to choose. They have to condemn people they love. And nobody at that table is bored.
Tactic 4: Environmental Hazards
Combat isn’t only about the enemies, and at high levels it really shouldn’t be. Make the battlefield itself turn against them.
High-level parties are used to powerful foes. They are not used to the ground changing under them.
This is where high-level D&D needs you to lean all the way into high fantasy. If your level 17 party is still fighting in a forest, near some trees, with a river over there — you’ve got to change that. Something else has to be going on.
Run four or five encounters on top of an airship, where a character who falls is gone unless somebody burns a resource to go get them. If you fall five thousand feet in D&D, you’re not just out of the fight — you’re taking a serious amount of damage on the way down.
Beyond sheer height: collapsing caverns, raging storms, magical anomalies that disrupt spells and abilities. These push players toward the utility and situational spells they never touch, instead of reaching for fireball and lightning bolt again.
The example: the party is fighting up a mountain to kill a corrupted storm giant king. Storm giants, wind elementals, balls of lightning — and the entire climb, the king is hurling boulders down at them.
That hazard does two jobs. It makes the ascent genuinely dangerous, and it gives the players a personal grudge. The fight stops being about what he did to a village twenty sessions ago. Now it’s this guy has been trying to kill us all the way up this mountain.
Make your players angry at the monster. Not at you. Ideally.
Tactic 5: Balance the Action Economy
Last one, and it’s critical at high levels: the number of actions your enemies get should be comparable to, or greater than, the number your party gets.
Put a solo boss against a high-level party — especially one with a paladin — and your villain is dead before you finish saying "roll initiative." Smite, smite, a lucky crit, done.
The fix is more bodies. Add enemies so the party has to distribute its attention. Now, instead of six players focusing six actions on one target, two work the boss while the other four deal with brutes, scouts, and mages peppering them with damage. Those extra enemies are also chewing through hit points the whole time.
This is good advice for every encounter, not just boss fights.
A Quick and Dirty Way to Estimate Balance
There’s no clean formula for this, and I’ll be honest about that. I’ve run for the same parties for three and a half years, so I can glance at a character sheet and know roughly what they’re holding.
If you don’t have that, here’s a rough starting point:
- Resources ≈ party level × number of players. Five players at level five is about 25.
- Obstacles ≈ CR × 1.5. CR is a flawed system, but it’s usable as a rough guide.
Then apply the rule: obstacles equal to resources is a challenge. Obstacles greater than resources gets you into challenging, very challenging, and deadly.
This won’t always be accurate. What it will do is get you thinking in the right terms — and after the first encounter lands harder or softer than you expected, you can adjust the next one.
Above all, watch your players’ resources. That’s what makes them so devastating at high levels. A level 1 wizard agonises over when to spend a first-level slot. A level 15 wizard does not think about first-level slots at all.
Closing Thoughts
Five tactics: multiple encounters, secondary objectives, putting the people they love in danger, environmental hazards, and action economy.
Every one of them keeps your players engaged and on their toes, and none of them require you to find a bigger monster. Do these and it won’t matter how powerful your party gets — they’ll still be in for a fight.
So what are your go-to strategies for keeping high-level parties honest? I’d genuinely love to hear them in the comments on the video. And if you know a DM who’s struggling with prep, send this their way.