Low-level gaming that is E P I C

[infected slut princess]

I would like to use this thread for people to share ideas about making low-level D&D EPIC and AWESOME. I look forward to reading your ideas.

So my gayming group has reunited for a mini-campaign, D&D 3.x.

The PCs started at level 2 and are currently level 4. I believe the campaign is on track to end at level 6. Interestingly, most gaymers say their favorite levels are in the "mid-range," like level 6-11, and we will not be doing much of that.

Low-level D&D gets a bad rap -- a stepping stone to "the good stuff". So one of the primary goals with this campaign is to make it feel as EPIC and AWESOME as possible at low levels.

One observation I've made so far is that hit points and critical existence failure work really well to allow for really "over-the-top" descriptions and making things seem more awesome than they actually are. Even magic missile can seem pretty epic and awesome if given the right narration and build-up. A fight between level 3 characters can "feel" more like, say, Dragon Ball Z than Game of Thrones given the right "flavor text", regardless of underlying mechanical reality.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Old post of mine becomes relevant again...

Should I shoot for epic right off the bat?

Yes, absolutely.



I'm running a Tome game, and in the first session two kingdoms neighboring where the PCs live were destroyed by a cricket the size of a mountain that eats the fertility out of soil. All the higher-level heroes in the vicinity either fled or died fighting the cricket, but the PCs were recruited to enter the Cricket through a hidden flaw in its armor and rampage around inside it fighting off its enormous immune system and parasites. Which it turns out is a lot like running through a dungeon with challenges of CRs between 2 and 5.

So the challenge is no more than the players are used to, but the trappings of the adventure are on a much bigger scale than they're used to dealing with, or ever expected to be at 3rd level. And they love it.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Just be careful that you don't actually do what God of War does and just have a bunch of rigid setpieces that the players have to be strung along.

Changing the trappings is baby stuff, though. You're asking for mechanics, right?

[Dean]

Your solution is the opposite of what you think it is. To make things seem more "epic" you need to set a stronger base tone. God of War is only "epic" because in the west you have as much education on greek history and mythology as you do literally fucking anything.

The stupid thing to do, which is why it's the thing everyone does, is think that you can make something epic by just making everyone be Dragonriding spelljammers who are doing wuxia video game combo's at each other with their giant sized weapons, all battling 1000 foot tall nuetronium golems. That shit isn't epic it's boring. It bores people super fast because it's simulacra of entertainment without any actual entertaining substance. It's marvel/disney shooting giant planet sized lasers into space in every adult movie. It's not impressive it actually deadens one to feeling anything.

For things to feel epic in any game or setting they have to be a huge distance from where you started in that game or setting. "Epic" is how far something is from a base reality. You might say that "Signing forms" might be a good definition of something that is literally the most boring, non epic possible thing you could imagine in the world. But in EVE online getting a clan to not back out of signing agreements to pay you billions for some fake ship blueprints you've conned them into buying could feel so insanely heart pumping and epically awesome you could barely take it. It can feel that epic and incredible because the stakes and setting and actors and motivations are completely understandable cause they've set all those things to basically just be real world stakes and motivations and people (because Eve kind of sucks as a game).

Lifting giant swords is meaningless if no one lifts regular swords, or the world isn't one that has been established concretely as one where people lift regular swords. The ratio between the size of sword and wielder isn't what makes something epic. If that were true you'd just set all sword sizes to 1000ft long in your descriptions and, thereby, create that much more epic swords. But that's not how it works. One guy wielding a 7ft sword in an otherwise super historically accurate setting is going to seem like an absolute badass and your characters would love to be that guy. But since we want elves and giants and other fantasy shit with less clear rules our "epic" super strength showing awesome swords do need to be even bigger, and our epic super strong characters do need to be even stronger.

So to make things feel epic you either ground your stories better, make the stakes and rules of the exceptions even better understood, or just describe your shit in a more grandiose and poetic way. Those are the three ways. Done.

If your entire question was "What resource can I look into to describe things more grandiosely and poetically if I don't want to do better world grounding" then the answer is very simple: Zelazny. His Creatures of Light and Darkness, or his Lords of Light or his Amber Chronicles.

[Chamomile]

D&D already has a baseline. Unless you're playing exclusively with brand new players, like, "haven't even seen much of Critical Role" levels of brand new players, they'll have an idea for how D&D campaigns are supposed to start, with goblins kidnapping townsfolk and orcs raiding caravans and such. It's not super hard to escalate on that, although you do potentially run into a problem of where you go next. If you only really have one idea for an epic encounter and you use it at level 3, then you've still got to figure something out for level 4.

[hogarth]

One observation I've made so far is that hit points and critical existence failure work really well to allow for really "over-the-top" descriptions and making things seem more awesome than they actually are. Even magic missile can seem pretty epic and awesome if given the right narration and build-up. A fight between level 3 characters can "feel" more like, say, Dragon Ball Z than Game of Thrones given the right "flavor text", regardless of underlying mechanical reality.

You discovered the secret: 99% of what EPIC play is involves adding the word EPIC in front of the same shit you do at low level.

[Thaluikhain]

One observation I've made so far is that hit points and critical existence failure work really well to allow for really "over-the-top" descriptions and making things seem more awesome than they actually are. Even magic missile can seem pretty epic and awesome if given the right narration and build-up. A fight between level 3 characters can "feel" more like, say, Dragon Ball Z than Game of Thrones given the right "flavor text", regardless of underlying mechanical reality.

On a not totally unrelated note, some while back you could get GW's game about Knights fighting each other (Knights, in context, being those big expensive war machine a level down from Titans), and it occurred to me that you could just use Space Marine models with those rules and save a few hundred dollars. Well, big bases or something might be needed.

So, yeah, keep the same rules, give them new names, and for a given value of epic it'd probably work.

[Mechalich]

'Epic' is a storytelling mode, derived from the long poetic epics such as the Iliad or similar prose narratives such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The central structural element of an epic is that the heroes do things that are important. This doesn't mean they are flashy or spectacular or even particularly awesome. Tywin Lannister is an epic villain and most of his achievements involve letter-writing and title-granting, and similarly prosaic political maneuvering, but they matter in the context of the ASOIAF universe because of his position.

Making a game more 'epic' then means increase the importance of whatever the characters are doing within the game world. This is usually done by putting them in close proximity with important people.

That is very different from making a game flashier, or more spectacular, or 'moar awesomer' all of which can be done simply by adding on a bunch of adjectives and visual descriptors that don't really mean anything, but this does have the potential consequence of ending up with all frosting and no cake.

[Blade]

I see two distinct concerns in this:

1. Making the mechanics more interesting. I don't know enough about D&D to judge, but my experience with fights in low-level Earthdawn was that you just spammed the same move over and over, hoping to get 2 good rolls in a row so that you could move forward.

2. Setting the tone right. The epicness is relative, not absolute. If you've got an army of giant robots, you need to save the world from giant monsters to be epic. If you've got four people who just learned how to use their swords, saving a town from a bandit attack can be epic.

For this, you can act on:
- The challenge: if your adventures are "tutorials" where the players face little to no risks, it won't feel epic. They have to feel like they're facing a real challenge.
- The form of the opposition: no matter how strong they are, (giant) rats and goblins will still feel more like little pests than worthy opponents. A group of bandits or a zombies can be just as weak but (with maybe a little bit of dressing up) will feel more like an actual challenge.
- The impact: Saving nondescript medieval village #3 from a group of bandit feels like a puny task for starting adventurers. But if you flesh out the village and its inhabitants (and the bandits), it can suddenly feel far more epic.

[infected slut princess]

Thanks for the comments. I deliberately kept the definition of "epic" open-ended because different people think of different things.

On the subject of "importance" vs "flashiness":

Making a game more 'epic' then means increase the importance of whatever the characters are doing within the game world. This is usually done by putting them in close proximity with important people.

That is very different from making a game flashier, or more spectacular, or 'moar awesomer' all of which can be done simply by adding on a bunch of adjectives and visual descriptors that don't really mean anything

to me, epic in D&D is both of these: the "moar awesomer" and "doing important things."

Now tying epicness to "flashy stuff" might seem shallow, and maybe it is, but the iconic D&D campaign goes from less-flashy at low levels to more flashy higher levels. Since we won't be moving beyond low levels, I wanted that flashy stuff to be found in the low levels too.

As for "doing important things," this has been a priority from the beginning. The storyline uses a rather conventional "ancient dark power is awakening!" plot so the heroes can save the world (or at least the kingdom). I've also been careful to have all their minor side quests show some meaningful effects in the setting, so that the players feel like their characters are important in the world, and so the NPCs act like their characters are important as well. Another side of this is building importance through how NPCs talk about other NPCs to build up reputations of other heroes and villains.

Also, since I'm using some parts from canned low-level modules, I've scrubbed out anything from them that feels like a bullshit low-level encounter, such as dire rats and fire beetles and such. Fighting Small (as in D&D size Small) vermin is fuckin LAME and insulting to epic heroes. You can make the level 3 orc leader _feel_ pretty epic even though he's, well, a level 3 orc. You cannot do so with dire rats.