The Feeling of Epic

[Username17]

OK, so I was thinking about the idea that a Shapeshifter should be shifting his shape at level 1. A Fire Mage should be throwing fire at level 1. And so on and so forth. I don't want to play five or ten levels of "guy who hopes to achieve my character concept one day." I doubt anyone does.

And yet, the question then remains: how does one feel powerful for getting to high level if you can do your thing from low level? The fact that your numbers are bigger doesn't really matter if the enemy numbers are also larger.

• Piles of Bodies - Let's face it: killing a dude may be bad ass, but killing a hundred dudes is epic. If you are getting to higher levels and fighting more enemies you are feeling more powerful.
  
  
• Oodles of Options - It's all fine and dandy to transform into a wolf and bite people in the face, or shoot mind bullets right at a yak, but there's no reason that either of those things couldn't be done by a first level dude. However, the ability to do both (whether simultaneously or consecutively) comes with a feeling of accomplishment after laboring under the tyranny of having just one of those arrows in your quiver.
  
  
• Men in the Field - Nothing says "I am a bad ass" like bossing others around. A character who is moving additional pieces on the table is a leader, a king. And more importantly: he feels powerful.
  
  
• Duration of Pugnation - Really epic battles don't tend to begin and end in the same swing of a half brick in a sock. They go on for hours or days. That's how you know that they are epic. As things edge off into padded sumo shenanigans they actually feel more frought and more high end.

And the important thing to note here is that no one of these things doesn't involve playing a higher level combat without it being more work.

-Username17

[Prak]

Well, the men in the field thing is somewhat what I suggested as a fix for the "Undead Horde" problem. On the other hand, maybe a necromancer wants to play Xerxes to the enemies' greece. So at high level characters can be carried into battle on chairs carried by their underlings and just command squads. Perhaps when epic characters use mooks combat should become "Mass Combat" and when they wade into combat themselves, it should become "the Burly Brawl" from the Matrix(reloaded). Maybe epic combatants become their own squad, which is to say, epic characters use Mass Combat rules with a single character, while Leaders use those same rules to command squads of mooks.

so that's Piles of Bodies and Men in the Field.

Oodles of Options strikes me as just being the end result of being high level in Tome, as every character will have alot of options, even organic ones that took a few levels of Warlock, a few levels of Fire Mage and a few levels of Werewolf to become a Hellhound Shifter of Death. So maybe multiclassing should be more common(possibly even encouraged with minor bonuses) in epic play.

Duration of Pugnation is the difficult one. Because, yes, we want our Epic Mage Duels to last weeks as we blast the landscape. However, now that I think about it, this can be accomplished by high ACs, high HP, and VERY advanced tactics, like player 1:Fireball. Fireball, Meteor Swarm; enemy: Game ending spell-Player 1: counter with Epic Shield this shit should happen all the time, possible even encouraged with mechanical bonuses and rewards obtained through "renown". When bards start singing of the five week battle of Enthanos versus The Necroking, that feels epic, and maybe you should get more extreme starting reactions from npcs, or something.

[JonSetanta]

Dudes, a nation of pugs is just sick.
Ever seen how much those little buttlickers shed in one day?
That's a CR 20 encounter right there, cleaning that fur off your clothes.
And another Epic encounter keeping them from staring at you with fish eyes while you eat.

You could have ghost pugs that phase into your backpack and devour your rations.
That's a damned good Epic encounter right there, since they could starve a city in mere hours.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Can we make it so that you don't have to advance the characters if you don't want to? I'm really growing to like games with either no level gain, or games that stay within a relatively tight power band (say, levels three to five).

Honestly, it would be really neat if we could go back to the times when beating a dragon or a lich meant you were totally awesome by definition. These days, you can have CR 3 Dragons and CR 5 Liches, which is utter garbage.

[Koumei]

Jacob: Only if that tight level band is 15-20. Low level is shit.

Riding dragons has to be an option. For the truly hardcore, standing with each foot on a separate flying dragon, while wielding a fire elemental in each hand and wearing a miniature cathedral (with very small inhabitants. Very small fey or whatever) for a hat. And the cathedral has lightning cannons - as all cathedrals do.

Possibly there should be a way of making the combat take days in-game, but keeping things relatively the same out of game. I don't know how to do it, we don't want Dragonball Z where the characters stand there for 3 days charging up, but we also don't want to roll for 43,200 rounds of combat just to have those three days happen.

[KauTZ]

Shouldn't Oodles of Options always be there though?

It works in so many ways. If your shift your form into a wolf at level 1, at level two maybe you could also shift into a bear. Or you can give up the option to shift into a bear for the moment, and be able to shift into a dire wolf, or whatever. You can "specialize" in wolf shifting, or be a generalist. Everything is level appropriate though, it's just that wolf shifter turns into a celestial, half-angel, dire wolf, at the cost of being able to turn into a bear, and a roc, and a seal whenever he wants.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I do agree that the idea of Great Heroes having Epic Battles that destroy worlds and last for days works great in stories.

However, to work in a game you'd need a very different combat scale so that players don't just say 'Alright, I'll use Summon Banshee Whale until he dies from the baleful whale song or the weight. That'll take, oh, about 37,582 rounds going by the average.'

Because the number of days we're talking about actually seems to coincide pretty well with the number of rounds in normal combat, we could just make all the numbers bigger and have an epic 'round' represent a full day's work. That would be beyond even the scale of armies, which sounds about right. You'd probably have a different action set than 'attack, move, swift', and that's cool too.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

It is epic to tame or control monsters that were previously difficult. This is shown in the above dragon example, and through the following. Player 1 has to fight the knoll hordes back at level 3 just to escape by the skin of his teeth. At level 10 he walks in, Mass Charms them, and forces them to fight in the war he accidentally started.

Walking. Not being in a rush, not feeling threatened is epic. You know a guy is hardcore when he walks into the bar, sits at Joe's seat, and orders a water. He has little to no concern of what others will do to him or about him.

Curing/creating large populace-faced problems. It is epic to solve world hunger, cure cancer, conquer a demi-plane, eradicate Shadows from existence, breeding the super-orc, etc.

Explosions/power. A shapeshifter can shift shape at level 1. Yea. Right. Into a WOLF, don't make me laugh. It's epic when he becomes a DRAGON, or a 10-headed HYDRA, or 4-winged, double-headed, fire-breathing monstrosity.
A level 1 fire mage, can what? Light a building on fire? Whatever. An epic fire mage would just blow the thing up, or incinerate it on the spot.

Simultaneous attack strategies need to be reiterated. A level 1 telekinetic may force choke you for 3 rounds, but a level 10 telekinetic also throws you across the room and pummels you with blunt objects at the same time.

[Crissa]

Defenses need to be per round, not merely a small chance of win.

A 10% chance not to be killed isn't the same as being invulnerable 1 out of 10 minutes.

-Crissa

[Jacob_Orlove]

1201835727[/unixtime]]Jacob: Only if that tight level band is 15-20. Low level is shit.

Ugh, I totally disagree. High level play is a chore, and doesn't even make for good stories most of the time. I mean, you're relatively worse at almost everything you do, but at the same time, there's no challenge. You go from having your skill modifier be like +6 best skill vs -1 worst skill, to +36 vs -1. That's dumb. In skills and pretty much everything else, people go from having "good chance of success at what you're good at vs moderate chance of success at what you're bad at" to "autosucceed or autofail". Bleh.

And honestly, all the interesting attacks are low-level, yet you don't have to worry about putting up twelve layers of arbitrary defenses every morning. And there's the magic item christmas tree.

[Koumei]

The majority of those are problems with the current D&D system - and what we're doing is making a new one.

Whereas killing cats for a living and being scared of goats always has been, and always will be, really fucking stupid.

So if level 1 is "The party of you, with effort, could kill a dragon that could burn a city to the ground." and level 3 is "You could conceivably take over the entire world with no-one to stop you except for a few other level 3 people." then I'll agree with you.

I was thinking before that in the current system, what you'd want for Epic is for *ALL* numbers to stop growing. Period. This goes for monsters, too. You can get bigger, but this won't alter a thing other than how much space you take up, your speed, how many squares you could squish at once, and how cool you look.

Ability scores, HP, BAB, saves, skills, DR, damage, SR, CL, energy resistance, fast healing... whatever. It all freezes. Now, all that happens is everything starts getting bigger-scaled, with more cool abilities, and with bigger areas of effect and environmental effects (so, your arrows do no more damage, but somehow they go through the targets and fly off - when they land, they might go down so far that a volcano forms. Breath weapons not only raze the countryside, but cause hurricanes in other nations).

Epic-scale, but with the same numbers. And in the new edition, we could stop numbers from scaling even earlier. Or possibly just make a system where it all scales at the same time, or not at all, and then it never becomes a problem.

[Username17]

I'm not sure we want the numbers to stagnate. I am currently leaning towards characters taking more wounds and requiring more wounds to drop at higher levels. So people get generally easier times hitting people with attacks that exceed their wound threshol (which could be as simple as characters gradually getting more different attack options, allowing themselves to customize their attacks to the lower Armor Classes of more opponents), but enemies also take more wounds before they drop for good.

So at low levels you go mis, miss, splat. At high levels you you go thunk miss thunk thunk splat.

-Username17

[Crissa]

So we want accuracy to scale from 25% to 75% while deadliness goes from 75% to 25%.

That's like having +0 vs 16 on a d20 while you have 2 wounds and are rolling a d4 wounds and going to a +15 vs 21 and 8 wounds without changing the dice.

-Crissa

[Koumei]

That sounds pretty good to me. Given we're building this from the ground up, we don't have to put up with any existing problems as to why X can't work.

Incidentally, I imagine this is a bit of a pyramid effect - with most of the slow work happening at the beginning, and it getting quicker and easier from there, but are we still likely to beat WotC in the race? My sister was asking how the progress was going, and I had to admit we didn't have a core system to work with (unlike them... apparently) but on the other hand, have been thinking things out (also unlike them).

[Username17]

The basic resolution system is pretty coded:

Roll a d20 and add bonuses. Compare result to relevent Armor Class.

• If success, you hit. Roll Damage die.
  
• If failure, you miss. Automatic effects still go off.
  
• If you succeed by N, you get a critical hit where your damage die is increased by a flat number.
  
• If you fail by X, you get a total failure where your Automatics don't go off.

If you get to the damage rolling step, roll your damage die and add bonuses.

• Inflict that many hit points.
  
• If you do enough damage to hit the Secondary Threshold of your target, you inflict your attack's Secondary Effect.
  
• If you do enough damage to hit the Wound Threshold of your target, you inflict your attack's Wound Effect.
  
• If an opponent is brought down to half hit points, their Secondary Threshold drops.
  
• If an opponent is brought down to zero hit points, their Wound Threshold drops to 1.

Each ability is written up in the following format:

• Ability Name
  Attack: Ability Score at Range
  Defense: Target's Armor Calss
  Damage: Different Ability Score, static number
  Automatic: Something Minor
  Secondary: Something Bad
  Wound: Usually "Yes" - occassionally a special effect.

And what that looks like is:

• Fire Breath
  Attack: Wisdom to 6m cone
  Defense: Fortitude
  Damage:Constitution - 2
  Automatic: Downgrades flamable cover in area, targets on fire.
  Secondary: Causes Panic
  Wound: Yes.

And what that means is:

• This ability is named "Fire Breath"
  Attack: Your attack roll is modfied by your Wisdom Bonus and is applied against every target in a 6m cone.
  Defense: Your attack roll is compared against the target's Fortitude Armor Class (so higher Constitution lets you shrug off the fire damage).
  Damage: The damage roll is modified by your Constitution, and is reduced by 2 across the board.
  Automatic: Everyone gets the "On Fire" condition, and flammable cover like brambles and such is reduced by one level (heavy to medium, medium to light).
  Secondary: Any target which takes the damage and takes enough to exceed their Secondary threshold gets the Panic condition.
  Wound: If this effect does enough damage to a target to exceed their Wound threshold, they take a wound.

We are wrangling over number inputs, because there are an infinite number of numbers that can go in that slot. And we at some point need to put up a master abilities and conditions list. We could honestly easily come up with something playable well before 4e hits the shelves. Such is the advantage of goal oriented design over exception based design.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Cool. This makes me happy. If we get this finished before 4E hits the shelves, and this is better, then really, the only excuse WotC will have is "Yeah, we kind of suck."

[Crissa]

Oh, we probably want ranges/areas to scale by some small amount, probably via a stat. Just so it's automatic, and the huge dragon or tiny drake has a level/size appropriate weapon. Or character. Nothing says growth like being able to pimp out some silly ability... And it also means you can't measure distance by a random fireball. Joe's, maybe, but not by a caster you don't know.

-Crissa

[CatharzGodfoot]

1201866175[/unixtime]]Oh, we probably want ranges/areas to scale by some small amount, probably via a stat. Just so it's automatic, and the huge dragon or tiny drake has a level/size appropriate weapon. Or character. Nothing says growth like being able to pimp out some silly ability... And it also means you can't measure distance by a random fireball. Joe's, maybe, but not by a caster you don't know.

-Crissa

I can see adding an attribute to range, but scaling too much with level marginalizes the idea of melee combat. If you want attack size to scale with creature size, do that.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I can see adding an attribute to range, but scaling too much with level marginalizes the idea of melee combat. If you want attack size to scale with creature size, do that.

No, range definitely has to scale with level. That's how Herakles can threaten the Sun with his bow. The ability of melee combatants to engage also has to scale, that's all.

[Falgund]

For Duration of Pugnation, going for hours or days is not enough, the strategies and special effects should change with time. Having a 3 hours battle where the two opponents only throw fireballs at each other without moving is not epic, its boring.

Thus, in long battles, different moves should become more or less effective depending on dynamical circumstances, thus also need Oodles of Options.

Per example, Loading times for better abilities ("This ability only works after 5 rounds of fight", "only after using other_ability 3 times in the last minute"), or abilities with conditional bonuses ("This ability have +1 to hit if you missed this opponent with your last attack", "+1 to damage if your opponent did not move since last round")

[Josh_Kablack]

1201853311[/unixtime]]


I was thinking before that in the current system, what you'd want for Epic is for *ALL* numbers to stop growing. Period. ....

Ability scores, HP, BAB, saves, skills, DR, damage, SR, CL, energy resistance, fast healing... whatever. It all freezes. Now, all that happens is everything starts getting bigger-scaled, with more cool abilities,

Those are contradictory design goals.

So long as any two(or more) abilities in the entire game function better in combination than they do individually, characters have the potential to gain in power (ie get bigger bonuses) by gaining new abilities.

And since the number of potential ability combinations is a factorial of the number of abilities in the game, you are not going to be able to review all of them for cases where they may break the design scale.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

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

[CatharzGodfoot]

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

Except characters do advance raw numbers, which is direct evidence that the design goals are hard to achieve at the same time.

[Crissa]

Heracles threatens the sun from new abilities.

But I'd like a stat modifier (which we agreed would be small) or level modifier to boost range/area, if only to give individuals flavor.

±50% total possible change would be appropriate.

-Crissa

[Aycarus]

1201822921[/unixtime]]Duration of Pugnation - Really epic battles don't tend to begin and end in the same swing of a half brick in a sock. They go on for hours or days. That's how you know that they are epic. As things edge off into padded sumo shenanigans they actually feel more frought and more high end.

This one is hard. The other ones are simply a consequence of a level-based system taken to high levels. But I can't think of a system that has actually pulled off time scaling.

Anyway, here's my two cents on how I'm picturing this particular point to be played out. Part of what you need to do on these scales is simultaneously make lower level abilities obsolete / ineffectual while simultaneously increasing the duration of epic level abilities. Namely, if an epic level doom spell takes 10 minutes to cast, you need to justify why the caster is not taking any damage when his opponents continuously cast 1 round fireballs at him. Simply scaling the casting time of a fireball fails here, since lower level casters then take less time with their spells and hence have the advantage.

In this regard, it is possible to have abilities take more or less time depending on their strength, but this then reduces to the "weapon speed" problem. If I can perform three lower level abilities in the time it takes you to perform one high level ability, the combined total damage/power of my abilities should be strictly less than that of yours (otherwise you've got to act three times AND done the same thing I did once).

I think part of what makes epic battles epic (and part of what makes their duration so long) is the fact that they're atypical. Namely, just bashing at each other is not an effective way to get anywhere in the battle. Though I don't know how one would implement this in-game -- but it does mean that being epic is more than just having big numbers, cause your opponents will have big numbers too. Your success is instead determined by how you use your powers.

One suggestion for epic levels is to make AC advance faster than BAB. Then part of the emphasis in the battle is to get as many bonuses as possible to your attack roll while simultaneously dropping your opponents AC via situational modifiers / temporary buffs / etc. But this also means that you spend rounds and rounds just vying for a good position, which is significantly less fun and more time consuming than just rolling the attack die.

Anyway, in summation... increasing the duration of the combat while making the player feel more epic (and not feel ripped off) is hard. I'd be really curious to hear "good" ways on how this could be done.