3e / OGL What's wrong with high-level/epic play?

[Filcher]

Originally Posted by phloog

Mechanically speaking pretty much everything people have said here.

For me, in what appears to be a nonsensical phrase, epic play is boring.

I would suggest that to accurately represent current rules for epic play, but simultaneously streamline the combat and make it less painful, you do the following:

1) Roll for Initiative
2) In initiative order, each combatant rolls a d20. If the d20 comes up with a 1, that character dies from [some big effect the other team has]
If it comes up with a 20, their team gets a point.
3) When one side runs out of characters, the other side wins.
4) Each player drinks a number of beers equal to their team's point value at the end of combat

(more advanced players may choose to drink their beers as each point is scored...in this context 'advanced' could be in terms of understanding of the rules, or in terms of their body weight or level of liver damage)

Love.

It.

[Dedekind]

The huge number of feats and spells makes things a pain to get prepared.

[Cadfan]

Originally Posted by JDJblatherings

If the whole party is standing in a 10' or 20' cube waiting to be victims of the spell.

A lot of the "trump cards" are overblown by many folks. The evil wizard has to have the ruby dust material component, initiative and get within 60 feet or so of the party (they can be further later on). Force cage is a 7th level spell that can be defeated by a 5th level spell, a 6th level spell and provides the targets of the sell with cover they can strike out from with spells and breath weapons (if using the barred cage).

Fine. Just put some of the party into the force cage. Preferably the non spellcasting members.

It doesn't stop the basic problem- trump card v trump card combat until someone comes up with a trump the other side can't beat.

The more you point out things like, "But the fighter can get a Cloak of the Montebank!" the more you're just proving my point. Trump v trump v trump v etc.

[Drowbane]

The biggest issue I've experienced (from both sides of the Screen) is that DM Prep-work is HUGE if the party is to be remotely challenged. And if the party is challenged, there is a good chance of TPK.

Originally Posted by Piratecat

For us, it was the sheer scope of options combined with unmanageable math. The paladin charges with her lance... and then she spends five minutes calculating the damage multipliers and how they're affected by smiting, magic items, buffs, and feats. It got to be unwieldy.

I really don't understand this arguement, PC. IME, character sheets for high level PCs already have this kind of stuff laid out in advance. If you're a charging paladin, you know precisely what affects your charge dmg and have it already written out on its own line.

I've only seen Epic play a couple of times, but each time everybody had all that stuff figured out before hand.

This goes triple for Epic characters who have been played by the same player from low level. It is abit harder to get used to if your DM shoots out an Email saying "Saturday Game in two weeks, bring lvl 23 PCs" or something.

edit: back when the ELH was fairly new, one of our part-time DMs contacted the group with a request for 60th!!! lvl PCs. We should up with our superheroes in hand... it was goodtimes. My PC (Lo Pan, God-Emperor of Tianguo) dual-wielded Iron Golems to take out a Greatwyrm Force Dragon in the first round. (and wiped out 5 more the 2nd round. heh)

[mxyzplk]

Originally Posted by Drowbane

I really don't understand this arguement, PC. IME, character sheets for high level PCs already have this kind of stuff laid out in advance. If you're a charging paladin, you know precisely what affects your charge dmg and have it already written out on its own line.

I've only seen Epic play a couple of times, but each time everybody had all that stuff figured out before hand.

Well, it depends on the amount of work you want to put into it, which really is the issue. Sure, you can have all of your possible scenarios pre-calculated, but that's asking for a lot of accounting work to play a game.

Besides, so much of it is situational. For my character I precalculate their major weapon choices and options (2hvs 1h, or flurry vs normal, or charging if I do it a lot) but there's the dozen buffs/auras/whatnot that your party casts that aren't the same every time. Charge, charge if enlarged, charge if hasted, etc etc... And once you're high level you can expect to have many buffs at a given time. Since of course everyone has taken hours of time to figure out the exact optimal stacking buffs. The math to fun ratio starts to get off.

[Kerrick]

Mordenkainen's Disjunction.

Fixed that too. You can use it against a target, in which case it can destroy a single item (Fort save resists) or automatically dispel a single spell; otherwise it acts like a dispel with no CL cap. I also fixed some of the other problematic spells like gate (dropped the calling part), wish (boosted level, so it's not accessible to non-epics), and teleport (also boosted to L6).

Originally Posted by Drowbane

The biggest issue I've experienced (from both sides of the Screen) is that DM Prep-work is HUGE if the party is to be remotely challenged. And if the party is challenged, there is a good chance of TPK.

Yeah... I've seen that complaint a lot. It's got to be even harder making generic adventures because of the sheer variety of epic PCs.

I really don't understand this arguement, PC. IME, character sheets for high level PCs already have this kind of stuff laid out in advance. If you're a charging paladin, you know precisely what affects your charge dmg and have it already written out on its own line.

I think he means stuff like "paladin charge", "paladin charge vs. evil", etc. I heard about someone who used Power Attack and two weapons, and had every... single... combination... written out, but that guy was weird anyway. Something to reduce or simplify combinations like would be a good thing.

Originally Posted by mxyzplk

Besides, so much of it is situational. For my character I precalculate their major weapon choices and options (2hvs 1h, or flurry vs normal, or charging if I do it a lot) but there's the dozen buffs/auras/whatnot that your party casts that aren't the same every time. Charge, charge if enlarged, charge if hasted, etc etc... And once you're high level you can expect to have many buffs at a given time. Since of course everyone has taken hours of time to figure out the exact optimal stacking buffs. The math to fun ratio starts to get off.

Yeah, buffs and the stacking thereof get way out of hand at high/epic levels.

[thecasualoblivion]

We tried an epic game once. We spent a week creating tricked out uber characters at level 21. We used some downright stupid houserules, including up to 10 levels of Gestalt and the ability to ignore a level adjustment of up to +4. Playing a standard Tiefling, I was the closest to a core race the game had. I built myself a level 21 Swiftblade Gish with 9th level spells(actually 10th with my epic feat). After spending a week with this, we played our first game. There was only one combat, against a Great Wyrm Red Dragon. After going first with my +26 initiative, I used Swiftblade Time Stop to buff myself into oblivion and then killed the dragon in one turn with Wraithstrike/Power Attack. Between that and the ridiculousness of the rest of the game, the DM realized that running an epic game was something he couldn't handle.

[Piratecat]

Originally Posted by Drowbane

I really don't understand this arguement, PC. IME, character sheets for high level PCs already have this kind of stuff laid out in advance. If you're a charging paladin, you know precisely what affects your charge dmg and have it already written out on its own line.

It changes all the time, unfortunately. In my game, whether or not you were using certain magic items would impact the roll. Power attack provides a variance, of course, and what buff spells are active makes a huge difference... and these suckers change constantly from combat to combat. Even worse, epic enemies often cause certain drains or debuffs that affect the math. When you have magic items that may or may not conflict with a buff spell's morale bonus (or luck bonus, or holy bonus, or what-have-you), it takes a bit of time to figure these out.

I definitely agree that taking the time to organize things ahead of time helps. But it's still slow.

I'll give you an example from Sagiro's 18th level game. My character can potentially get five attacks a round, and his combat numbers vary with haste and invisibility and three or four other buff spells that may or may not be active. When I roll my damage, I have to roll 1d3 + 1d6 + 9 + 6d6 sneak attack on each attack, but I have to roll the sneak attack separately because I get to reroll 1s. That means that if I hit on all five attacks, I'm rolling and totaling a minimum of 45 dice on my turn. It's just plain slow, even when I've got my combat matrices lined up, no matter how efficient I try to be.

[Noumenon]

Using the +42 bonus as an example:

Under the current system your average result on a roll would be 52.5

Under the proposed system, the average result would be 3d20+2, or 33.5

You'd think this would be the first thing they thought of when they proposed their system. The first obvious thing to do would be to give them the d20 when they hit +10, not +20, so that their average result would be the same.

After that, you have the issue that a 5th-level character getting their first +10 can now conceivably whiff on a DC 3 or knock a DC 40 out of the park. (Before, their success range was from DC 11 to DC 30.) You could give them 3d6 or 1d10 + 5, which averages the same but hits between DC 8 and DC 34 80% of the time. That compares to 80% between DC 13 and DC 28 for 1d20 + 10. The point is, when they take 10 they don't have an auto-20 now. They have just about the same 50-50 shot that they did when they were one level lower and had to roll 1d20 + 9.

The next phase in testing (obviously the people who developed the hyper-roll never got this far) would be to find out which skill checks this actually matters for and see how it changes them. Use Magic Device might be one because of the fixed DCs, but then I've heard people don't really use it that much. Is the problem really that the rogue auto-succeeds, or is it that the rest of the party auto-fails?

[freyar]

Originally Posted by Drowbane

edit: back when the ELH was fairly new, one of our part-time DMs contacted the group with a request for 60th!!! lvl PCs. We should up with our superheroes in hand... it was goodtimes. My PC (Lo Pan, God-Emperor of Tianguo) dual-wielded Iron Golems to take out a Greatwyrm Force Dragon in the first round. (and wiped out 5 more the 2nd round. heh)

This just begs a question: what race was Lo Pan if he could wield an iron golem?!?

[ashockney]

Here's a few thoughts on high level play I've posted before from this thread:
High level 3.5 - tricks for keeping the numbers game quick and easy?

How bad does it get? There are 49 conditions that affect combat and 144 modifiers to those conditions. You can't remember all of that in your head? Come on!
That's not even factoring in types of attacks, # of attacks, attack bonuses, armor classes and armor class modifiers, damage, and damage modifiers. I think you get the exponentially worse picture. There are some big opportunities to improve it. (For my fellow analysts and managers out there, yes, I actually process mapped D&D combat.)

Suggestions: well, first and foremost, make sure your group is committed to making this work. It will truely need to be a team effort. Everyone will have to do a little more work to make things go more smoothly. Second, I've found an excel spreadsheet to be a DM's good friend. Finally, I recommend talking to your group about combining and limiting the hundreds of effects that can become a real pain to keep track of at this level. For example, what if all morale, luck, sacred, divine, competence, and size bonuses were combined into a more generic "buff" bonus, and these bonuses generally lasted for 1 combat. It makes life a lot simpler for everyone. It's not like the party or the DM will be lacking for ways, but it prevents everyone from being forced to cast 12 different spells and do hours of research to find that one optimal combination, and keep track of each modifier separately. Same thing goes for the myriad of defensive capabilities - armor class, resistances, immunities, cover, concealment, displacement, blinking, and damage reduction. It will become very complex, very quickly if it hasn't already. Streamline this as much as possible, using the same "simplicity" approach as with buffing. Near the end of the campaign, and as you enter epic, there should be pretty standard "defense arrays" available to your players, when in various states of preparedness.

[Runestar]

Saves are an interesting point - at high lv/epic gameplay, the PCs can expect to be virtually immune to just about every effect in the game.

Freedom of movement counters grapple
Heroes' feast counters fear/poison
Mindblank counters any mind-affecting effect
Soulfire counters death effects
Fortification grants immunity to crits
Ring of evasion if you can manage a good reflex save (eg: via moment of prescience, or mind before thought)
Greater spell immunity for anything which slips through the cracks, such as blasphemy.
Disease generally isn't an issue since you should be able to come up with a solution within the incubation time.

Saves generally don't work against monsters because their sheer amount of racial HD usually means obscene saves (even for their poor save), unless you are a shadowcraft wizard (in which case your spells have a greater effect when they make their saves). Direct damage won't scale fast enough to keep up with their hp, leaving battlefield control...

If you are interested, here is a brief summary of what you ideally want when becoming epic, so you don't end up over-nerfing your PCs when you do your revision. I can post the longer version if anyone is interested.

Guidelines for a 21st level PC

Short version:

• Attacks - to hit AC 40, touch AC 15, flat footed AC 37.
• Attacks vs paragons - to hit AC 50, touch 42, flat-footed 41.
• Armor Class - 47
• Hit points - 183 (tanks or melee-ers should exceed this as much as they can manage! Double would be good)
• Special Ability save DCs - 35.
• Skills - +50 for effective skill use (where opposed checks are involved).
• Damage - 96hp/round minimum.
• Saves - +26 for your worst save.

[ashockney]

Also, you can see many ideas fleshed out in this thread:
"I hate math"
(sorry, it's long...)

Here was the culminating point:
So, I tried out some new stuff for high level play at Origins this weekend. Here it is in a nutshell:

Use average rolls (for attack and damage). (fixes the iterative attack/mods)
Use a simplified "buff" system.

Ta dum!

There's a bunch of sub-rules to these rules (and I mean a BUNCH!), but the long and short of it, is what you see above. All you really need to play high level D&D (I ran at 14th level) is a 20 sided die! Make a small number of calculations in advance, and you're off to the races. Get your game on, focus on the tactics on the board, and focus on your characters and their roleplaying.

Feedback I received was generally positive. I had a rules-lawyer and dedicated character optimizer at my table (twice) who indicated that they felt it was a little oversimplified, but got what I was trying to do. In the category of "smashing success" I had two 14 year olds (one male and one female) sit at our table. Neither had ever seen the character before Sunday, and both ACTIVELY participated in the combats, role-played their characters, and enjoyed the adventure. I asked if they felt they could continue playing at this level, to which they both responded, "oh, yeah." That is it!

We also completed the entire adventure in 3:45 min. That's a 14th level adventure, with four encounters, completed with characters most had never seen before, in less than four hours. There were two character deaths (huzzah!), and there was one combat that pitted the six player characters against 5 Fire Giants, 6 Elite Fire Giants, 3 Hell Hounds, and King Snurre himself (with his 3 pet "uber" hell hounds). How long do you think this combat would normally take? 24 combatants, 14th level. We did it in an hour or less.

[Runestar]

This is partly why I like the maneuver system of tome of battle. Instead of having to roll for 5+ attacks for my fighter (and expecting the last 2 to miss), I can just concentrate on rolling one good attack for my warblade (typically either diamond nightmare blade or strike of precise clarity). And if you went with weapon supremacy, you can take 10 on that attack roll, meaning that with a high enough attack modifier, you will always hit, so you don't even have to bother rolling.

Steady concentration lets me take 10 on my concentration checks (namely the diamond mind save boosters). So I can just declare that save as auto-succeed. And that aura of law lets me take 11 once/round.

While taking chance out of the equation seems like it might expedite things, does it seem like it would make combat less fun?

[Ydars]

As DM, the only way I could run high level D&D 3.5E was by having the PCs and all the monsters in excel spreadsheets. That way, I could instantly calculate buffs/debuffs. I also used the rule that 1d6 = 3 damage etc. I also used the rule that rnd/lvl spells= 1 encounter duration.

Set-up was therefore a little more time consuming, but having everyone's stats in excel really makes things work well.

[Noumenon]

So, I tried out some new stuff for high level play at Origins this weekend. Here it is in a nutshell:

Use average rolls (for attack and damage). (fixes the iterative attack/mods)
Use a simplified "buff" system.

Ta dum!

There's a bunch of sub-rules to these rules (and I mean a BUNCH!), but the long and short of it, is what you see above.

ashockney, I wanted to see the sub-rules. I read several pages of that thread, and found some cool spreadsheets and stuff, but it's really long. Did you ever collect all the sub-rules into one post anywhere?

Edited to add: I know there must be a post like that, because I made it as far as this one that lists every pitfall of high level/epic play.

[Kerrick]

Originally Posted by Noumenon

You'd think this would be the first thing they thought of when they proposed their system. The first obvious thing to do would be to give them the d20 when they hit +10, not +20, so that their average result would be the same.

Yeah, that was the version I saw here - 1d20 for every +10, not +20.

Originally Posted by ashockney

Here's a few thoughts on high level play I've posted before from this thread:
High level 3.5 - tricks for keeping the numbers game quick and easy?

I'll check that out later when I have a chance. Do you have a copy of that spreadsheet somewhere?

Originally Posted by Runestar

If you are interested, here is a brief summary of what you ideally want when becoming epic, so you don't end up over-nerfing your PCs when you do your revision. I can post the longer version if anyone is interested.

.... Wow. +26 for a low save?? I have a L45 PC I rolled up for a high-level playtest, and her low saves aren't even that high!

Please recall, the title of the thread is a direct quote from one of my players, at Origins, one year ago. They were even in the same adventure. This year, I had two young teenagers at the table, actively participating. We also completed the entire adventure in 3:45 min. That's a 14th level adventure, with four encounters, completed with characters most had never seen before, in less than four hours. There were two character deaths (huzzah!), and there was one combat that pitted the six player characters agains 5 Fire Giants, 6 Elite Fire Giants, 3 Hell Hounds, and King Snurre himself (with his 3 pet "uber" hell hounds). How long do you thing this combat would normally take? 24 combatants, 14th level. We did it in an hour or less.

That's truly impressive. I remember one epic combat we had where there were 6-7 PCs vs. a single creature (a really nasty homebrew creation with several thousand hp); the fight took the better part of an hour, even though it lasted onlt 5-6 rounds game time. I was playing a dual-wielding rogue type with 4 attacks with each hand... god, that got out of hand quickly. I was rolling attacks and damage beforehand (the DM told us the AC so we could do so), so I didn't slow things down personally, but that was a LOT of dice rolling, and not something I want to do ever again.

[ashockney]

Originally Posted by Noumenon

ashockney, I wanted to see the sub-rules. I read several pages of that thread, and found some cool spreadsheets and stuff, but it's really long. Did you ever collect all the sub-rules into one post anywhere?

Edited to add: I know there must be a post like that, because I made it as far as this one that lists every pitfall of high level/epic play.

I didn't collect them into one POST anywhere, but this effort was a fluid one. So, the rules continued to change as new materials were introduced to the game. Tome of Battle changed my thinking SIGNIFICANTLY, and then ultimately ended up pointing me in the direction of 4e, which largely has solutions to ALL of the pitfalls outlined.

I have several versions of the "rules" that I used, captured in different formats. What exactly are you looking for?

[ashockney]

Originally Posted by Kerrick

I'll check that out later when I have a chance. Do you have a copy of that spreadsheet somewhere?


.... Wow. +26 for a low save?? I have a L45 PC I rolled up for a high-level playtest, and her low saves aren't even that high!


That's truly impressive. I remember one epic combat we had where there were 6-7 PCs vs. a single creature (a really nasty homebrew creation with several thousand hp); the fight took the better part of an hour, even though it lasted onlt 5-6 rounds game time. I was playing a dual-wielding rogue type with 4 attacks with each hand... god, that got out of hand quickly. I was rolling attacks and damage beforehand (the DM told us the AC so we could do so), so I didn't slow things down personally, but that was a LOT of dice rolling, and not something I want to do ever again.

Thanks for the positive feedback. Which spreadsheet are you looking for, the one that added up all the attack rolls and damage for me? It's not much other than excel with formulas to do the math. I'd be happy to share, I have several good examples, including most of my "revisit" to the most popular 1e modules. Is there one you prefer? Or if you plan to be at Origins or Gen Con, I'd be happy to run a game with you.

(PS - if your players don't have saves in the 20's and 30's in epic, they're just not trying...)

[Kerrick]

Originally Posted by ashockney

Thanks for the positive feedback. Which spreadsheet are you looking for, the one that added up all the attack rolls and damage for me?

I was referring to the one you did laying out all the combat stuff.

(PS - if your players don't have saves in the 20's and 30's in epic, they're just not trying...)

That was MY PC, actually. And yeah, I probably wasn't - I'm not a min-maxer. :P

Thanks for posting that link to the other thread; it was quite enlightening. I burned through all 15 pages (though the last 5 were a bit off-topic). The main point I got was:

Combat is where most high-level play bogs down. The sheer number of bonuses (the application and removal thereof and whether or not they stack), situtational modifiers, and feats adds a whole level of complexity.

To a lesser degree, it becomes harder to plan for a party, but a DM who's been playing with a group since low levels (preferably L1) should know them well enough to provide a reasonable challenge and plan for contingencies.

Along with this, players should be conversant enough with their characters (if not the rules as a whole) that they can avoid slowing down play. It's ridiculous to assume that everyone will know what Rule X will do if you don't use it some or all the time, but if it applies to your PC, you should.