The Feeling of Epic

[RandomCasualty]

Getting long combats is tough. About the only thing I can think of is increasing DR or AC to the point where you effectively can't be hurt except by attacks that take a long time to execute. So it may take a casting time of 1 minute to activate your super anti-epic laser or something which is needed to take out an epic character.

The purpose of that would be to indirectly increase the length of rounds. Because while it's cool to have battles that last 2 hours, rolling them out at 6 second intervals is boring as hell.

As far as fighting big armies, the best way is to use something like swarm rules to handle the that. Since at that point setting up 200 individual warrior minis just is not worth your time.

[rapanui]

Stupid question: when you are actually executing an Epic fight, how long do we want it to take in real time? Obviously, meticulously resolving the result of every 6 second round in a week-long bout between Living Mountain and Xor the Demon Prince is not practical. But "scaling up" means making statistical assumptions about how the attacks being executed at the 6-second round level are resolving. Furthermore, if you scale up and use statistics (assuming every 20d6 fireball actually does exactly 60 points of damage, or whatever) then the system becomes very deterministic.

In fact, as your hit % goes higher and your damage % goes lower, the system becomes increasingly deterministic. Which is fine by me, but we have to define an absolute cut-off.

[Josh_Kablack]

1201902771[/unixtime]]They are not contradictory. Take, for example, E6. Characters gain more abilities (Sculpt Spell) while not advancing raw numbers (Caster level).

I have no clue what that E stands for , but Sculpt Spell has a number of combos that provide effective numeric increases. Sure, they are usually increases to number of targets, but there is little overall long-term difference in a power increase that lets you hit your 2 targets for 50% more damage and a power increase that lets you deal the same amount of damage to 3 targets instead of only 2.

Taking two minutes to page through the PHB, my quick-combo for Sculpt Spell is Forcecage, which doesn't deal numeric damage at all, but removes characters from combat.

[Koumei]

E6 is a fan-made variant where you stop gaining levels at level 6. After that, every 1,000 XP (or was it more) grants you an extra feat - you still need to meet the requirements.

So casters go "Score!" and take a whole heap of Sudden Metamagic feats, whereas the fighters sort of shuffle their feet a bit when they run out of ones they meet the requirements for.

[Bigode]

Koumei: WHY start right at "able to prevent city-razing alone"? Isn't there heroic and varied activity below this power level?

More importantly: do we want/need rules for when a level is gained at all? What's the problem with "set a growth rate before playing"?

[SunTzuWarmaster]

I like the idea of havig multiple actions. That way you can have the "I am focusing for 10 rounds looking for the spot to pull of the Death Attack" effect while still attacking. Kinda like Drizzt and his stupid cross-down kick thing.

[Bigode]

Uh, congrats for having the balls to call your own example stupid. But really, do we want the game to be harder to both balance and learn?

I'd have written that perhaps at greater length elsewhere, but: I'm leaning towards standard/immediate/free actions - standards are where most stuff goes, immediate basically to allow for counters (and I'd shove AoOs right in it) and implement Frank's press concept, and free for stuff we're supposed to be able to say we're doing without it mattering a lot. And I know from personal experience that THAT already pushes it for likely most players.

[Koumei]

1201949941[/unixtime]]Isn't there heroic and varied activity below this power level?

Not in my experience, no. Anything weaker than a group of trolls or a single medusa can fuck right off, in my books. That is the point where awesome is beginning to start, and if we can let the rules work with it, it will only go up from there.

But I have no interest in fetching a bucket, talking to the 4 main NPCs for copper pieces, buying the guard some crossbow bolts, fighting my way through a petting zoo or trying to convince myself the group of orks, kobold ambush and ogre (the boss) were cool enough to even write about.

[Bigode]

Koumei, the life of a 1st-level D&D rogue can certainly be far more interesting than all but the last example, and I'm fairly certain there're people able to make an humanoid band interesting.

[rapanui]

I agree with Bigode. In general, low-level play doesn't have to be about lame FedEx quests and kobold slaying. Back in the day when I actually used to play, I was usually impressed with the low level adventures published in Dungeon and the like.

[Koumei]

Here are the low-level quests I've played:

*The party being almost TPKed by vampire spawn (specifically, they dominated one of the wizards, who Ice Stormed the entire party. Hey, look at that, no save).

*A pit fight, followed by "wander into the ruins and face some ghouls and skeletons".

*A zombie invasion. There are other systems for survival horror. Systems that assume shotguns and chainsaws.

*A... I can't even remember what the reason was for us wandering along and getting attacked by goblins.

*Sigil Prep (that folded before the first class even started)

*You all wake up in a dungeon. Human guards, try to escape, NPC does the coolest stuff, etc.

---

And while I have used Ogres as a boss encounter, they combined to make a CR 17 or so. They were Truth (Warhulk with an enormous flail. The truth hurts, and is quite blunt), Justice (Master Thrower/Hulking Hurler, throws pairs of scythes at the party. No real link from Justice to scythes) and the American Way (Master Thrower/Hulking Hurler, throws bombs at everything).

And even then, they needed a mastermind to actually direct them, and their tactical options certainly didn't make them a CR 17. Or a CR 10.

---

So I don't want games stuck in the small band of suck as was suggested before. For all that my input is worth, I want things starting at awesome and going up from there.

Because I'm seriously not going to play a low-level game if low level is even remotely like it is now, and I have a hard enough time already finding games I'm willing to play without bullying a DM into creating one for me.

And they do it, too, because they're suckers and my character ideas are frequently awesome enough.

[Crissa]

Koumei, that's the "You had a terrible DM" fallacy.

-Crissa

[JonSetanta]

A bad, inexperienced DM can ruin even the best made game.

[Koumei]

A whole bunch of them, apparently.

Whereas the high-level games were great fun, ranging from "Planescape, but without the shit elements that ruined all the fun for everyone else here." (converting a bunch of Dark Sun people to a FR deity and selling orison-made water for a nice profit, then giving a ruins-shit mage/botanist a decanter of endless water? Fuck yeah!) to "Hey, Demonbinder who proved she can't be corrupted by them, or at least hasn't yet, and has even had a good influence on some of them... do you think you could go and fetch this amazing artifact for us? See, us Celestials aren't allowed to interfere with this - we can't even touch it after you fetch it, so we'd be really happy if you could steal it from the demon cult and then just keep it for yourself."

But I still don't even see any of the low-level challenges as being exciting, except for 3.0 Dryads, and that's exciting in a completely different way. So regardless of previous DMs, low-level just isn't going to do it for me unless the game revolves around finding Dryads and similar things to sex up.

You'd be amazed at how often that doesn't happen. Actually, on Elliquiy the chances are much better, but there you go.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Here are some low level adventures I've played in:

Sneak the whole party into the well-patrolled keep to assassinate the renegade Baron, who had decided that the ongoing civil war meant it was a great time to stop paying taxes to the king, and make it out alive. We managed it without actually killing any of his soldiers.

s a follow-up, escape through the wilderness with several patrols of soldiers following us. That took several days.

A bunch of different investigations. These tend to work really well at low levels, if the DM puts in enough clues. We only had to resort to violence occasionally.

[JonSetanta]

1202002888[/unixtime]]
But I still don't even see any of the low-level challenges as being exciting, except for 3.0 Dryads, and that's exciting in a completely different way. So regardless of previous DMs, low-level just isn't going to do it for me unless the game revolves around finding Dryads and similar things to sex up.

You'd be amazed at how often that doesn't happen. Actually, on Elliquiy the chances are much better, but there you go.

On that note, I have a confession; I visit /d/ sometimes for monster encounter ideas.
They are... memorable.

[rapanui]

Dude. No.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

Low level adventures:
The goblins stole one of the Twelve Swords (Stonecutter), kill the goblins, retrieve the sword. Ended up with us CUTTING our way out of the dungeon (Apparently Stonecutter was asword that cut stone as easily as butter) while holding off the goblins with an ogre that we had charmed onto our side. 5/5

Negotiate/Assassinate the enemy leader that is deforesting the forest previously protected by an Ent (one Ent against the enemy encampment isn't enough, but if they didn't have a leader...). We attempted negotiation, failed. Assassinated him, waited for the next leader to be picked, restarted negotiations. 4/5

Trapped on an island, you yearn for adventure, get to a major city and away from the farmland through the enchanted forest that has cut trade for as long as anyone can remember. Ended with the cleric doing a good job holding off the various undead while the main other adventurers kept the snakes/other animals at bay. Required making a boat/raft, and figuring out simple problems like how to cook when everything is wet. 3/5

A portal has opened up to the demon realm. It is small right now, but Quasits have poored through enough to risk overtaking a nearby town. Save the town, kill the quasits, close the portal. Ended up with them negotiating for flying mounts and dropping giant nets on the quasits while the gaurdsmen killed them as they hit the ground. 4/5.

Hobbits have fled their normal village after gradually turning evil and resorting to cannibalism, etc. Discover the source of the problem, fix the town, persuade the hobbits to go back, loot the necromancers. 4/5

Bandits are stealing the kings gold from trade, kill them. This would be a 1/5 adventure if we didn't decide to join the bandits and eventually overthrow the king. 4/5

An unknown dust is turning kobolds into zombies, wtf? Turned out that if you kill a kobold that has breathed enough "devil dust", they become zombie. Epic battles ensue where you have to kill everything twice and try to stop the mining of the stuff. This was a friend of mine's adventure, so I can't rate it.

You can have good low-level adventures. I actually like things right around levels 5-10. After that (well, a little before), it starts into the "rocket tag" or "MtG" style of play, which is cool for about 2 sessions.

I HATE Immediate actions. I think that you should be able to counter something without it detracting from your offensive potential. I hate it when I can't concentrate on a spell (swift action) because I had to stop someone from hitting me (Stay the Hand). Just make Immediate actions like swift actions, you get 1/round.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Okay, how do we get our three-day-long duels, while not playing out every six seconds of that fight?

I think for elegance's sake, such a fight should be mechanically very similar to other fights, but the time units are just bigger for some reason. That reason could be:

• Long Ticks: There's an actual divergence between offense and resilience as levels go up, so it takes large numbers of what used to be 'rounds' of attacks to do meaningful effect, so we take a step back and resolve aggregates of those rounds as if they were one round.
• Slo-mo: Characters at certain levels get, for free, abilities that make attacks against them take progressively longer to resolve. This has serious issues when it comes to interacting with the rest of the world, but maybe a better mind than mine can resolve those.

[Falgund]

Low level adventure:
Retrieval of an item stored in a Kobold temple (in fact a frozen grotto). The entrance of this temple is sealed with a magical word (response of an hard enigma written in draconic), and blocked by a goblin tribe, at war with the kobold tribe since they kidnaped the son of the goblin chief. They kidnaped him since the daughter of the kobold matriarch disapeared, after been seen the last time with the son of the goblin chief (they were ... friends). The magical word is only known by the kobold matriach and the son of the goblin chief (his friend told him). The daughter of the kobold matriarch is inside the temple (known only by the son of the goblin chief), killed by a young white dragon recently living in the temple.

After diplomating/sneaking/killing with the two tribes to have access to the temple entrance and to the magical word, the adventurers are attacked by the white dragon using guerilla tactics.

[Koumei]

Some of the quest ideas there were interesting, but as soon as the villains were unveiled, I would have just wandered off to do something interesting instead of fighting them.

"Hmm, battle with my nobody against some kobolds, or go and play Pokemon Diamond? Well, I have been wanting to catch a Skitty, so..."

And the reasons people present or hating high level has so far been because of the mechanics - which is precisely what we're changing with New Edition.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Yeah, except the whole point of Frank's first post in this thread was that the mechanics have to get more complicated at higher levels, because the alternatives are that the game is exactly the same (but with number inflation), or that the game gets simpler. And I like the feel of the game at low levels (not so much level 1, but even level 2 is pretty good).

battle with my nobody against some kobolds

How is your character a "nobody"? I call shenanigans, especially if your final battle is against "some kobolds". If you don't care about your character, then obviously the story won't hold your interest, but if you're willing to have a reason to be there, maybe get some genuine dislike going for the BBEG, then you can totally have satisfying encounters even at low levels.

Of course, I don't think every adventure has to end by default in a combat showdown with the big bad, but that's a whole different story.

Edit: to be fair, though, "would I rather be playing pokemon" is a pretty high standard to hold a game to.

[Crissa]

Yeah, I think 'battle my nobody with friends' or 'play video game alone' I think the latter is very... Self centered.

-Crissa

[Talisman]

One way to keep epic-level combat epic in feel would be to make epic-level antagonists more like puzzle monsters - there's only one way to beat them, and it's not "hit them again and again." Ideally, this should be a method that requires epic-level resources of some kind.

Naturally, the antagonist would be using epic-level attacks - which is why epic-level PCs should become almost puzzle-monster-like their own selves. An epic paladin might be immune to mundane weapons; only weapons tempered in demon bile can harm his god-blessed flesh.

I also like the idea of "epic rounds," each representing, perhaps an hour of normal time. If a tough non-epic fight lasts for 5-10 rounds, an epic fight might last a full day. Battling for days on end is a little silly, IMO.

[Koumei]

True, there are many things I'd rather play Pokemon than do.

If you're fighting kobolds because that's a challenge, then you're a nobody. Congratulations, you can kill something that is as dangerous as a house cat, and that means... you're a person wandering around in the real world?

Seriously. I hate the real world. I hate real life. Anything that is too similar, beginning with "As an individual I'm not very important", can fuck right off.

There is nothing that can make "fighting kobolds" cool or impressive. Nothing. And that means the character is either wasting their own time when they could be doing awesome things, or they are so weak that you shouldn't care about them.

So sitting there and playing it with friends actually turns into "getting distracted from the game by anything possible." So people sit around the table talking about television, other games, just about anything. Or joking about things.