How to Handle an Overpowered Party The Right Way

Introduction:

Greetings Dungeon Masters! I hope you are having an excellent day! Today we are going to discuss an unfortunate fact of being a dungeon master. That fact is that much like ourselves, none of our campaigns are going to be perfect. 

We all have had a boss fight that should have been epic and intense, one we were really excited to challenge our parties with. The fight comes at the climax of a chapter of the campaign, but we couldn’t roll above a 3, so the party ended up wiping the floor with your underwhelming boss. This sucks, but at the end of the day, the party feels accomplished, and the campaign goes on. 

But the looming question is, what happens when there is a deeper problem with the campaign: the party has become too powerful for their level?

In case you aren’t familiar with what I am speaking of, I am going to give a quick anecdote of the most common cause of the “too powerful party” problem and the main focus of this article: magic items.

A friend of mine started a homebrew campaign in a very interesting world that he hand-crafted. He had special rules though. To start the campaign, everyone owned and was attuned with one magic, but it had to be a weapon or arcane focus. To start, it was magic, but had no enchantments or effects. After dealing a certain amount of damage, it would “level up” and gain a single common effect which was taken at random from a magic item table. Next level would be uncommon, rare, and so on. This sounds like a fun system until we began to farm experience for our weapons. It’s not that we became murder-hobos, but any potential enemy we could fight, we did. We did everything we could to power level our weapons. 

By level 4, several of us had very rare enchantments. For example, I had a staff we called the “Astral Quill of the Magi.” I could teleport to the Astral Plane at will and had various 3rd to 6th level spells that I could cast once a long rest. It may be surprising, but I was one of the weaker members of the party. As you can see, this wasn’t sustainable for the campaign as almost every encounter became a breeze, but also only made the problem worse. The story of the campaign became menial because there was no challenge.

The question is, what should the DM do to fix this problem? I am going to put forth 3 potential solutions that I believe are the most effective ways to deal with it.

Leaning Into It:

First and foremost, the move for you may just be to lean into it. You know the party is overpowered. The party knows they are overpowered. You need to make the world the campaign is taking place in, know they are overpowered. For example, one option is to line the party up with harder encounters. Perhaps there is some sort of monster that is attracted to the powerful magic of their weapons and wishes to consume them. The more powerful their weapons, the more powerful the enemy. Make this an encounter that nearly kills them despite their magic items, but find out the reason it was hunting them was because of their items. Perhaps their exploits and power attract the attention of the BBEG that shouldn’t come up until the end of the campaign. BBEG comes in, defeats the under-leveled party and takes the items for themselves, but leaves the party alive. Perhaps they are staying at an inn and one ambitious commoner takes the opportunity to sneak into their room while the party sleeps and steal one of them or if the party is low enough level, even worse. Remind your party that power draws unwanted attention for rather unsavory figures.

An In Game World Reason for Their Magic to Wane:

This next solution is probably my least favorite of them, not because it is a bad solution, but because your party will most likely see what you are doing and may have mixed reactions to it, especially if they don’t know it is coming. It is to come up with an in-world reason that their magic items stop working. You, as the DM, need to come up with a sufficient reason for it happening and make sure the party knows that it isn’t just affecting them, it is a worldwide calamity. Perhaps whoever your god of magic is became increasingly dismayed at the worldwide abuse of magic he witnessed, so decided to curse magic items everywhere. Perhaps someone used an upcast wish spell to avert a disaster caused by the excess use of the magic items. Ultimately, you need it to seem like something is happening in the campaign to cause it, not that you were just trying to take away their magic items.

Talking With Your Players:

The final way is the one that I would give my personal stamp of approval. I think it truly is the best solution to the problem of overpowered parties. Simply talk to your players about the situation. As stated in solution 1, you know the party is overpowered and the party knows the party is overpowered. Sit down and talk to them about it. Tell them how you feel about the current situation. Explain to them where you are at in the campaign vs where you want it to be. Let them know that you made a mistake in doing X,Y, and Z. Ask them if they would be willing to do a reset of sorts to get the campaign back on track. Odds are your party understands all the work you have put into setting up this campaign. They do not want to see the campaign fail. D&D is not just a project for the DM to give the players a fun time. It is up to both the DM and the players to work together to create an experience everyone will enjoy!

Conclusion:

It is up to you what you wish to do about it. I think that any of these three solutions can work. It is up to you to decide what course is best for your situation. Sometimes your campaign will go sideways. It happens to the best DMs there are! Keeping your head up is crucial to doing better next time. Do not get down on yourself! At the end of the day, the most important thing is that all parties involved are having fun, sharing a tale, and maybe making a new friend or two along the way!

Follow the DM's Dungeon on Instagram for more tips and trips, and follow our DM's Academy for the next exciting installment. Comment down below your personal experiences with an overpowered party and how you handled it! As always Happy DM'img!

-Shawn Rosengren