The Feeling of Epic

[Prak]

1202238470[/unixtime]]

1202165330[/unixtime]]

1202151488[/unixtime]]Prak, now you're using crazy apostrophes.

eh? what do you mean?

I think she means the fancy apostrophe’s that Microsoft Word adds to documents when you use it as opposed to the vanillia regular ASCII apostrophe's.

oh, I was using word to type up my responses because it's easier to quote and respond as I read, that's probably what's up.

[RandomCasualty]

The problem with changing the length of the rounds is when someone who is non-epic fights someone who is epic. WHere do you draw the line? At what point do you become totally invulnerable to base attacks? And then what does the epic guy do?

It seems almost like we're creating a rifts system with megadamage or something, where at some point you've got to bust out MD attacks to harm an epic character, and MD's are just plain slower.

I don't know how we'd make something like that work.

[angelfromanotherpin]

1202247041[/unixtime]]The problem with changing the length of the rounds is when someone who is non-epic fights someone who is epic. WHere do you draw the line? At what point do you become totally invulnerable to base attacks? And then what does the epic guy do?

It seems almost like we're creating a rifts system with megadamage or something, where at some point you've got to bust out MD attacks to harm an epic character, and MD's are just plain slower.

I don't know how we'd make something like that work.

People who are both epic agree to move to long ticks, because that's the time frame on which they affect each other without driving the players mad. An epic dude fighting less epic dudes can still school them in their own time frame.

[RandomCasualty]

1202248037[/unixtime]]

People who are both epic agree to move to long ticks, because that's the time frame on which they affect each other without driving the players mad. An epic dude fighting less epic dudes can still school them in their own time frame.

The problem is, when does this change occur? How gradual is it? Do people get slower and slower attack methods as they level? Or do all of a sudden you just go to 1 minute casting time effects?

And once you go there, doesn't this basically move away from use of a battlemap? The problem is that it seems like now you're moving more towards a rules lite game like BESM, where the fixed battlemap stuff, made for short round resolution, doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense anymore. Combatants fighting over 1 round are going to be moving around a lot, and epic battles especialyl will feature people being thrown through walls, flying around buildings and similar stuff.

It seems like it's going to be an entirely different game at epic where you just say "Toss your battlemap and round structure, we're playing epic now"

[angelfromanotherpin]

The problem is, when does this change occur? How gradual is it? Do people get slower and slower attack methods as they level? Or do all of a sudden you just go to 1 minute casting time effects?

I think gradually slower and more powerful effects are the way to go, since that's more likely to be functional all the way up the levels.

And once you go there, doesn't this basically move away from use of a battlemap? The problem is that it seems like now you're moving more towards a rules lite game like BESM, where the fixed battlemap stuff, made for short round resolution, doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense anymore. Combatants fighting over 1 round are going to be moving around a lot, and epic battles especialyl will feature people being thrown through walls, flying around buildings and similar stuff.

I don't see any reason why moving to longer ticks shouldn't also change the scale of the battlemap. That doesn't mean you throw it out, it just means each hex contains more stuff.

[Crissa]

I think a gradual system of giving more 'long' options - similar to the n-rounds-tmust-pass-to-trigger, or requires-set-of-maneuvers-succeeded - that are added to the players as time goes by.

Then as round by round combat becomes more static - because defenses have ramped to the point that one will only succeed in knocking down an opponent over so many rounds - the longer actions will become more important.

We should then have a system of 'simpler' resolutions where you match long options vs long options instead of short options, and that would be our longer 'rounds' - which would also need a new name.

I'd suggest perhaps that epic long rounds also have an even longer set of possible actions so that 'locked in eternal combat' or 'exhausted for years' is a valid tactic for epic characters to choose.

In other words, three levels of combat, with two levels of resolution: Rounds, long maneuvers, epic actions; Rounds, long rounds.

Which you choose to do should depend more upon the opposition than your exact level: Two level one characters might actually end up in an epic action aside from the fact that they can only fight for n rounds before being exhausted; it might be quicker for a level 10 to deal with imps in long maneuvers but prefer round-by-round vs a tougher opponent, depending upon class. Fighter might want long maneuvers to deal with imps, but rounds vs tough; Wizard might want rounds vs Imps, but long maneuvers to deal with the tough.

-Crissa

[Draco_Argentum]

1202197809[/unixtime]]Yeah sometimes you can have a badass who just happened to be a kobold, and maybe you even pit them against the Kobold legion of doom composed of kobold supervillains. But that's the individuals you're concerned with, not kobolds as a race.

The same applies to all vanilla humanoids. Really anything that there is lots of is by definition not epic.

[RandomCasualty]

1202371694[/unixtime]]

The same applies to all vanilla humanoids. Really anything that there is lots of is by definition not epic.

Yep. Basically nobody is going to be impressed when you say "I wiped out a camp of human bandits." I mean, not an epic scale.

But if you say, "I killed Elminster the archmage." That's a feat that's going to be talked about.

I suppose kobolds could be the same way if the campaign world had known named kobold badasses.

[the_taken]

Idea:

• The number of rounds it takes to perform a move is dependent on it's attack bonus/level.
  
• A character can only have a move if his/her level is equal to (twice?) the move's level.
  
• A character's defences are still directly derived from his/her level.

This means that at level 20 your most effective moves take 20 (or 10) rounds to perform, meaning that fights last longer without actually adding many more rounds of dice rolling.

[tzor]

I think I disagree with the notion that large numbers isn't epic, but when I do I realize that in order to consider this we have to significantly abstract the notion of combat within the game ... after all this isn't a simulation game.

The "war of the five armies" in the Hobbit clearly is an epic battle. Unfortunately in the Hobbit this is really a moot issue since the book is more about Bilbo's hiding while the whole thing goes on about him.

D&D, however is not desiged for "mass battle" simulation. There were a number of attempts to abstract combat, birthright had one system for example and there were a plethora of non official attempts, but the real problem is to create a system where groups can fight against groups and at the same time characters can fight against groups as well.

I think that is another thing to consideration in the notion of epic; abstraction. The detail you need for a first level combat is simply annoying when combat extends across multiple dimensions in more ways than one. Simply being more powerful and having more "options" is not enough if this only means more "work" to determine the outcome.

There is a reason why D&D is not a combat simulation game. The more detail you put into combat the longer combat takes and the more "detached" a player feels from that combat. The opposite is to make combat very abstract but in effect "real time" so the player becomes very immersed in the combat. D&D is somehwere between the two. You don't want to become less immersed in combat as you increase to epic, in fact you want the opposite. You want to even go beyond real time so that you can do those battles that went on for days in the span of an hour or less.

[shau]

One of my DMs taught me to fear any race that was small. Especially if it had darkvision. Trying to fight something with total concealment while blind is a ruinous day.

Remember kids, if your DM says it is a 2 and a half foot wide hallway do not go in.

Re Epic: I am not sure that having big super attacks will work right. I can only see them working if all low level effects go away. It would be bad if the BBEG's super death cannon that took ten minutes to charge up missed due to a well placed fog cloud.

[JonSetanta]

1202426413[/unixtime]]One of my DMs taught me to fear any race that was small. Especially if it had darkvision. Trying to fight something with total concealment while blind is a ruinous day.

Remember kids, if your DM says it is a 2 and a half foot wide hallway do not go in.

There are tactics to use when you can't see a foe.
Grappling, area attacks, get into a place where you can (as long as you're not blind), Blind Fight feat, good Listen checks, Blindsense, immobilize your foe, etc.
But remember, being blind effectively gives all your targets total concealment from your perspective, and their status of concealed or not doesn't matter since it's a sight-based condition.

And my usual solution for 2-3 foot hallways is to.... make it bigger.
With explosions.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Adding manditory charge times just makes the game into DBZ. Which is fine if that's what you're into, but I'd like Epic Combat to move fast and furiously, and for that to be the case, I can't spend five rounds chargin ma lazor.

-Desdan

[Jacob_Orlove]

Here's my problem with all of this:

Okay, we're making a game, this game has a combat system. Presumably, it is a good combat system. Now we want to have the system change partway through. Will that be an improvement? If so, why not start out with the other system? Will the change make things less fun? If so, why change?

The reason for the change is because we want the second part of the game to be different from the first part. We want regular characters, and EPIC characters, and we want to feel the difference, especially in combat.

The only way that a different combat system will work at higher levels is if combat itself fundamentally means something different at those levels than it does at lower ones. It can't be the same at all.

That means we need some kind of fixed break point and at that point combat changes entirely. This point need not be fixed to a particular level, and in fact it probably should not be. Turning EPIC should be more like getting divine ranks than like hitting level 20. You should be able to play the entire game (level 1 to maximum) without going EPIC, or play the entire game while already EPIC (again, level 1 to maximum)

[Crissa]

Uh... I didn't say you'd spend five rounds charging your super-laser. I said 'when you completed the pre-requisites, it would happen'.

Lower level effects do need to go away... But why can't you dive into the smoke and fog of war and be missed by the big blast?

Anyhow, how I was purporting for low-level effects to go away was by the mere fact that the standard attack/defense would go off the chart and sure you could hit him but the change to hurt him - his blocks - would make that attack fruitless.

Fast and furious execution doesn't mean it can't take hours or days in game time.

-Crissa

[Prak]

yeah, hell, it could be like "Last Resort" in Pokemon, you can only use it after using each of your other attacks.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

1202457795[/unixtime]]Uh... I didn't say you'd spend five rounds charging your super-laser. I said 'when you completed the pre-requisites, it would happen'.

Yes, I know. But other people were saying that epic abilities should require charge-times.

-Desdan

[Orion]

Did we ever set a specific length a combat round needs to take? If not, can we make it arbitrary?

I imagine "epic" as a variant ruleset with the following

-- abstract position, something like phonelobsters' big squares

-- rounds take a really long time -- from a minute ot an hour to a day, depending on narrative demands

-- somehow, powerful story abilities are available.

But, particularly if all shticks are available from level one, we can cheat by re-using the same rules. You start an epic game at Epic level one, using almost eaxctly the same chargen system as regular level one, excpet that all your abilities have crazy names you make up.

You have a separate epic monster manual, and everything non-epic is an inconsequential mook.

[the_taken]

1202469359[/unixtime]]Did we ever set a specific length a combat round needs to take? If not, can we make it arbitrary?

Frank created a term called Imp Time, which is the unit of measurement for how long it takes to remove a mook (like imps) from the fight. Monsters take 2 ImT, and others can be looked up in the wiki. How many rounds Imp Time is has not yet been defined.

[Bigode]

1 imp time = 1 round of solo combat with a horde monster.

[the_taken]

1202485202[/unixtime]]1 imp time = 1 round of solo combat with a horde monster.

No. At no point is Imp Time clearly defined.

It's been suggested that Imps are always insta-gibed.
It's been suggested that Imps have a low threshold and very few wounds. (some what resilient)
It's also been suggested that monsters are just a higher level's Imps.

But at no point is it (Imp Time) clearly defined. The only thing that's clear is that a faster RoF and/or bigger AoE reduces ImT.

[Bigode]

On the last paragraph, it's implied that 4 imp times is being attacked by 4 PCs during 1 round.

[the_taken]

That's just an example to illustrate how tough Masterminds have to be compared to Imps to be a viable encounter, especially a climactic one.

[ckafrica]

Just a thought, what about having quantum leaps at certain points where there is a substantial shift in power. you could have the fighting normal people, heroes of the realm and then amoungst the gods, though some levels in between would also be good. Powers at each leap would become substantially more powerful and you would completely shift the realm of play. To leap would require not just require X experience but some substantial action to move to the next quantum level.

any thoughts?

[Username17]

I would sort of like all leveling to be based on events and quests rather than XP.

That being said, it would be very much like D&D 4e's Paragon and Epic Tier. Although presumably it would involve actually sticking to a formula.

---

A possibility would be to allow people to conduct "Legendary Combat" and "Epic Combat" at any time, where squares get "really big" and stupid big. The problem being that people who aren't themselves Legendary or Epic generally don't have the kinds of abilities or numbers required to actually do that well.

-Username17