By Jason Campbell

I’ve been running a weekly 5e campaign in Monte Cook’s Ptolus setting since January 2022, the player characters are currently 18th level. It can be difficult to run a 5e game with higher level characters while keeping the game challenging and the players engaged. This campaign diary series features notes from my players and I about the challenges of playing high level 5e.

When the Story Stalls

At the end of last week’s session an apocalyptic event released 99 arch fiends to the planet. This week began with one of those fiends attacking the city, so most of the session was that battle (challenging battles for 18th level PCs take a long time.) The PCs had a silver dragon fight as an ally. At the end of the battle the PCs discussed their next steps and the players were obviously unsure about what they should/could do.

Moving the Story Along

Over the months of playing this campaign the PCs have learned quite a bit about the lore of the world including predictions of the future and rumors of powers to fight the coming evil. Sometimes players can be overwhelmed with too much information the same way they can be hampered by not having enough. To help the players, I had the silver dragon talk a bit about what they knew about the past to give them some ideas for possible actions. So the dragon wasn’t literally telling the PCs what to do I had his knowledge be limited.
At that point he turned to ask the PCs if they had learned anything about their fates. This prompted a discussion between the players about what they remembered and led them to conclude what action would be likely to help their cause. By having the dragon ask prompting questions instead of dumping information the story is put back in the players’ hands.

What do you think? Have you ever had the GM need to help to move the story further? How did it go?