High Level Play and Scaffolding

The problem of high level playWhy do players struggle when they leave the dungeon and enter the wider world? RPG provocateur Sam Sorensen’s bsky thread on domain play prompted my thinking here. It's enough of a complete thought-arc that it should probably have just been a blogpost. Anyway, I'll quote it in full in case this blog outlives bluesky. (Sounds crazy, but you never know, right?) one thing I have noticed in my experience running long RPG campaigns is that most players are pretty uneasy being Extremely Powerful. like "D&D as power fantasy" is a common through-line, but I've found that once they hit a certain threshold things change very sharply and you enter new territory -- like PCs in my campaigns have reached some truly astonishing power levels—a voice whose commands must be followed, transformation into a bird larger than a castle, near-invulnerability to physical harm—and the resulting play is always really strange and off-kilter and outside normal expectations -- I think…