As is becoming perhaps more common, I feel compelled to react to an interesting piece from elsewhere in the RPG blogosphere. High Level Play and Scaffolding takes a Bluesky thread from Sam Sorensen and uses it as a jumping off point to discuss why there are noted trends of hesitancy among players to move into “high-level play” in an OSR sense, that is to say gameplay which shifts from focusing on dungeon crawling and party-level combat and treasure hunting to play where the characters become leaders of mercenary companies, warbands, or even nations. Post author Zak H. frames this as a scaffolding problem, essentially stating that the mode of play that “high-level play” requires isn’t set up or framed by any of the levels or modes of play that come before it. I find that perfectly reasonable; it makes sense that dungeon crawling doesn’t prepare you for factional intrigue or morale management. What I’m more interested in is where this all fits into the broader hobby here in 2026.

The abovelinked blog post gets into this very slightly in the context of D&D, noting that ‘trad play’ (this really only means modern editions of D&D here) trades empire management for character sheet management, collapsing the mode of advancement strictly onto what the character does and how the character changes. How the hobby does higher-level play, though, runs a gamut that has been emphasized and re-emphasized with the emergent popularity of PbtA and FitD (especially FitD and Blades in the Dark). There are many other games out there which opt to engage with ‘higher-level’ gameplay, especially political gameplay, and do it with great success. This ends up being a bit of an inevitable response to anyone, OSR or otherwise, speaking specifically in the context of D&D, because many if not most of D&D’s problems have been solved with other games. When looking at D&D’s specific motif of high-level play, though, becoming a lord or general within the world you’d previously been exploring, I think there are some worthy questions about why that has declined in popularity compared to other modes of engagement with high-level play, be they more constrained or more nebulous.

More constrained: A home base

One arguable ‘answer’ to the D&D domain scaffolding problem is Forbidden Lands. Like many other games using Free League’s Year Zero Engine, establishing and maintaining a home base (in Forbidden Lands a Stronghold) is a strong core of the Forbidden Lands experience, with a sizeable portion of the game’s rules lavished on how you define your stronghold, what buildings and capabilities it has, and the cost in gold and manpower it takes to maintain. Strongholds in Forbidden Lands both provide palpable benefits as well as numerous story hooks, as they both define the characters’ relationship with their neighbors as well as present a source of wealth and power for others to resent and covet.

The transition from ‘domain’ to ‘home base’ is also seen in D&D, with 3e pivoting away from more comprehensive hireling and domain rules and towards the stronghold, including the ‘Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook’. A stronghold splits the difference, gameplay-wise, between political power and strictly character-driven advancement, serving to provide a sink for character wealth while also both expanding and multiplying their powers in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. In this way, it doesn’t deviate from ‘character sheet play’, it merely expands it.

The unavoidable difference between home bases and domain-level power is, when you look across games and gaming groups, more want the home base. YZE may always be a standard bearer for giving the PCs a home base but you’re seeing those mechanics in loads of different games; my group in particular recently dove into the ‘No Place Like Home’ DLC for Cyberpunk Red which is all about making a home base.

Home bases are a great illustrative example of the point that Sam was making in his thread that the linked piece quoted. Building a home base and investing in all the things it can provide you represents a frontier of how far you can expand the typical power fantasy of TTRPG advancement without getting into the messy, complicated aspects of actually having power over people. It is arguably a resolution to the described ‘scaffolding problem’, provide quantitative changes which feel like more grounded power without the qualitative change that demands you play differently. You can of course go at it from the opposite direction, having those political forces in play from the very beginning, but that often means engaging with it in broader, more nebulous ways.

More nebulous: Factions

While I call faction mechanics ‘more nebulous’, the reality is that they don’t have to be. Well, to be effective at scaffolding they may start out that way, but whether they stay that way as characters advance depends entirely on the game. Urban Shadows is a good example of this. At the beginning of Urban Shadows, the game’s rules do the equivalent of holding your head on both sides and pointing your eyes straight at the Circle Moves by making using them a prerequisite for advancement. The Circles in Urban Shadows, Mortalis, Wild, Night, and Power, are the larger cultural blocs in which the factions exist, and they define roughly how all the different possible supernatural beings in the game relate to one another. From those blocs each campaign will develop their own factions, and as the game progresses the factions become more and more important to the characters (and, incidentally, the characters become more and more important to the factions). This culminates in characters being able to start their own factions, and in doing so gaining a whole new set of tools with which they can consolidate their power in the city.

Urban Shadows is a great example of scaffolding because engagement with factions uses the same basic mechanical tools no matter which level of Status your character has. While getting to Status 3 and having your own faction gives you access to the powerful Faction Moves, the City Moves you had access to before work in the same basic way when it comes to the faction mechanics. Even better, this same mode of advancement is used in other PbtA games, with another Magpie game Masks serving as a good example of giving more advanced versions of pre-existing moves as a form of advancement.

Factions provide good scaffolding for more political, domain-driven play because there’s both a clear difference and also a clear connection between interacting with factions and running them. To go back to the more D&D-oriented archetype the original post was talking about, the faction turn mechanics employed by Kevin Crawford in games like Stars Without Number and Worlds Without Number can serve an important purpose if employed before the PCs are trying to engage with them directly. The faction mechanics, beyond their importance as potential story generators for a sandbox game, can also be used to illustrate how the mechanics actually translate to diegetic events that the characters can see. The faction mechanics also provide an offramp from having to go deep into bookkeeping; Worlds Without Number provides the same extent of hireling and construction rules that early editions of D&D do, meaning that the GM must make a determination when the PCs’ retinue becomes large and influential enough to be a faction itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly this is the same basic challenge that’s seen in early D&D, but at least now there are mechanics to help keep everything aligned.

Like Zak H mentions in his post, I appreciate advancement that recognizes that power is complicated. It only makes sense that the more powerful characters become the more they threaten the established order, and it doesn’t take long before a standing army is a more significant threat than any monster. Ultimately there’s a reason that intrigue became the driving force in a number of other roleplaying games outside the D&D sphere; the equally trad Vampire: the Masquerade has been about high-level play forever, though of course with its own liabilities. In the modern day, though, there are many games which approach this topic in really interesting ways, to the point where many of the issues that are seen with modern D&D specifically are intentional, and at least some of the reason that players don’t engage with higher-level play in an OSR or other D&D-esque fantasy context is simply because they aren’t interested.

For me, stories about power are most interesting when power comes with strings. My players may come up with interesting plans to slay a dragon or break into a corporate office, but the plans they come up with when it comes to taking out a political rival or consolidating their influence are downright fascinating. At the same time, and I think this is core across every game and genre, these are still role-playing games at their core. Managing your power base has to align with the story that the character’s player wants to explore, and for most groups it will work best as an option, not an inevitability. Hell, even if capability and wealth garner attention, couldn’t avoiding that attention be an equally interesting character arc? There is a lot to be said about the potential of high-level play, but whether or not it provides the most compelling story will be up to the character in question.

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