pemerton said:
You seem to be treating flavour as mere colour. I don't see why it should be treated that way.
Because by definition, that's what it is.
Flavour is to taste as colour is to sight. I like the "changing the drapes" explanation and cant add much to that.
You two have very different conceptions of RPGing from me. (Or else, perhaps, are using words with very different meanings).
Here are two episodes of "flavour", not all that untypical in my experience.
(1) The PCs are walking along. They find their travel blocked by a deep gorge.
(2) The PCs are walking along. They find their travel blocked by a rushing stream.
The difference between the stream and the gorge is a difference of flavour/colour. But it is not
mere colour. In scenario (1), the players start scouring their equipment lists for pitons, ropes etc. In scenario (2), the players start scouring their spell lists for spells to freeze water.
There are whole modules built around the premise that these sorts of differences of flavour matter to action resolution because they make different player resources, and different modes of deploying them, relevant. (Eg such classics as Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain are built largely along such lines.)
The significance to action resolution of differences of flavour extends beyond physical geography, obviously. If the GM tells the players that they can see a shop, it makes sense for the players to start making plans to have their PCs purchase equipment. If the GM tells the players that they can see a group of orcs charging at them, it doesn't make the same sense to start speculating about how much the orcs might charge for a longsword!
Yet another example, this time with more emotional rather than purely instrumental significance: if a PC is fighting someone in the dark, and then a light spell is cast and the PC sees (and the player is told) that the combatant is (say) the PC's parent, then that point of flavour matters terribly, as it totally changes the stakes of what is going on. (The whole of the mystery genre in RPGing, for instance - but not only it - is based on the significance of these sorts of flavour reveals.)
pemerton said:
a 1st level Basic D&D PC cannot move through, or break down, a dungeon wall (at least, not deploying the standard resources of that system, including typical tools in typical ingame timeframes). Yet such a PC can clearly move through a forest, or for that matter burn it down.
Yes, but, so? The point is that however they choose to move, you hard scene frame them to the next room of the forest. The scenario is similar to an adventure game where however you go left from one screen, you still arrive at the same screen. However the move, you treat them as if they were 'in the corridor' between rooms. This is in practice a very common technique.
I don't really see that you're describing anything here other than bad (lazy? inexperienced?) GMing.
The GM frames the scene: "You're in a clearing in the woods. You see [whatever], and you can hear [whatever] coming from the next clearing. A screen of foliage blocks your sight, except for the dim forest trail between the two groves." The player declares an action for his/her PC: "OK, I'll use Burning Hands [or flaming oil, or whatever] to burn away the foliage so I can see what's making the noise [or get a clear shot with my bow, or whatever other benefit the player thinks his/her PC will obtain from having a better view of the other clearing]." I don't see how scene-framing techniques have any relevance here: if the GM, in response to the action declaration I've just set out, responds "OK, you find yourself in the next clearing" that's neither scene-framing (hard or otherwise) nor action resolution. It's simply the GM ignoring the player's play of his/her PC and playing it him-/herself, in the crassest form of railroading.
If it had never occurred to the GM that the players might treat the foliage differently from how they would treat a dungeon wall, then I have some sympathy for the GM who doesn't know how to respond to the action declaration I've described. Perhaps the GM wanted to frame the PCs into close combat with whatever is making the noise in the next grove, but read somewhere that foreshadowing is a good technique, and so decided to narrate the hearing of the noise from the neighbouring grove, and has now come unstuck!
In such a situation I think I'd prefer that the GM be frank than simply railroad. Even better, the GM is able to think on his/her feet, and narrates the scene through the burned bushes along the lines of "You can see that the noises from the next grove were coming from a [whatever]. As it sees the flare of flames and hears the crackling of the scorched leaves, it charges towards you!" (Perhaps taking some damage, or other sort of debuff, for passing through the burning foliage, thereby not rendering the player's choice of action completely ineffectual.)
Anyway, part of what I mean when I say that you're describing bad or lazy GMing is that Moldvay Basic is not written to play as a "hard sceneframing"/railroad game where the GM force is (barely) concealed behind the flavour of dungeon walls. Moldvay Basic is not intended as a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook with the GM there to roll the dice for the monsters - which is basically what you are describing, isn't it?
In another thread I talk about how I don't yet have good rules for burning down things of any size or scale. Yet recently this happened in my game anyway. How did I do it? Fundamentally I just changed the drapes. Since there was no need to interact with the fire, it didn't matter. A forest fire also need not have any meaning for the story. Maybe I'd have some NPC now go, "You ruined my drapes, you vandals!" (in so many words), but that's about it.
<snip>
I think that changing scope where scope only means the drapes is probably even less interesting and less important than changing the numbers.
There are two occasions I can think of in my current game when fire mattered. On one occasion, the wizard used an "enemies-only" fireburst spell to try and kill a necrotic spider swarm in a library/laboratory. Given that the spell was "enemies only" rather than "targets all creatures", I allowed an Arcana check (at the level-appropriate DC) to avoid damaging the books in the library. The check succeeded, and so the books weren't damaged.
On another occasion, a PC had fallen unconscious during a fight inside a burning building. Another PC, outside the building, wanted to rush in and rescue him. After some discussion at the table, we resolved the movement as normal but requiring a STR check (at the level-appropriate DC) to break through the flame-weakened timber. The damage-by-level table was used to adjudicate the damage suffered by the rescuing PC (both fire damage and also untyped damage from having bits of building fall on him as he broke through the wall - being a tiefling helped him endure the fire damage).
Both these episodes involve interacting with the fire. In the first episode, the player (by way of action declaration for his PC) introduced the fire into a situation in which I as GM adjudicated, on the basis of the fictional positioning, that it would be a complication. (Which the PC can overcome via a skill check.) In the second episode, the GM has introduced the fire into the situation as part of the framing, and when the players choose to have a PC interact with it the fictional positioning (it's a villager's timber house that is on fire) in combination with the basic action resolution rules (DCs, damage spreads, etc) is used to resolve that declared action. I wouldn't characterise either of these episodes as "just changing the drapes".
prior to the change to the paragon paradigm we related to the world primarily as heroes. We spent our time doing heroic things, like going on quests, facing monsters, defeating evil foes, and rescuing the innocent. When the campaign changed it caused us to change the way we were looking at things. At first we kept trying to do heroic things when they came up, but we soon realized that not only was it usually a waste of our time, but it was unnecessary and kept us from our ever mounting list of more important duties. We weren't heroes any more. We were rulers; we had heroes. So instead, our henchmen and retainers were sent to do heroic things, and the reported back to us. They were our scouts and agents, and we only needed to step in personally when they reported that things were over their heads. So the main campaign became mostly about ruling, directing, and so forth, and when we were dungeon crawling or questing as a break from the main action it was often us playing a party of our main PC's henchmen. We had become those important NPC's that earlier in our career had been sending us out on missions, and we knew then why they weren't doing it themselves. They were fighting larger wars, often several at once, arranging grand alliances, and seeing to the needs of the literally 1000's of NPCs whose life, health and prosperity depended on them. Battlesystem and mass naval combat rules (which we had to invent) were more important to our main NPCs than dungeons.
There seem to be multiple things running together here.
First is the equation of "being heroes" with "dungeon crawling". By "dungeon crawling" do you mean any RPG action that involves the players declaring actions for their PCs that are resolved via the relevant mechanical procedures (often but not always dice)? If so, that is a very expansive meaning of "dungeon crawling" - for instance it entails that most Traveller or CoC play is dungeon crawling. Or do you mean "dungeon crawling" in the more literal sense of exploring an interior/underground setting drawn up by the GM to find out what is inside it? In the latter case, I don't see any equivalence between "being heroes" and "dungeon crawling" at all. My games involve barely any dungeon-crawling, and have not done so for well over 20 years. And that has nothing to do with tiers of play - it is as true at 1st level as 20th. I don't enjoy the dungeon-crawl paradigm except in rather modest doses.
Second, much of what you say is framed from the in-game perspective of the PCs, rather than from the perspective of the players. For instance, you say "We had become those important NPC's that earlier in our career had been sending us out on missions". But who, at the table, chose those missions?
In my view, if a player is playing a low-level member of a religious or military order, and s/he builds into his/her PC description a desire to do ABC or engage in conflict XYZ or whatever it might be, it's a relatively insignificant matter that the ingame trigger for pursuing ABC or XYZ is a superior of the order - roleplayed by the GM - asking/telling the character to do so. The real decision was made by the player in building his/her PC.
The extent of player control vs reactivity in relation to the campaign is, at least in my view, to be worked out by looking at things from this metagame perspective, not from the ingame perspective. For instance, in your AD&D campaign, when you and your fellow players play the henchmen out on a mission, it's not as if you're being railroaded or have somehow forfeited your control over the direction of the campaign just because,
within the fiction, your characters were told what to do. Because it is you, as players, who authored and delivered (by playing your main PCs) those instructions!
Third, that 1000s of lives depend on the PCs' choices, rather than a few lives, strikes me as in-and-of itself having little significance for the tone or depth of the campaign. I have GMed episodes in which NPC allies, soldiers, dependents etc were added to lists upon recruitment, and crossed off them after dying, in much the same way as an equipment list might be managed. I have also GMed episodes in which one dependent NPC dying though a bad choice from a PC was one of the most emotionally significant moments in the campaign to date.
Fourth, the fact that you broke out BattleSystem strikes me as not particularly fundamental. It's an oddity of D&D (and of course other systems too) that its combat system and skill system don't scale up very well to handle mass combats. This is not true of all RPGs. Even in my 4e game, to give an example, when the PCs had to lead the defence of a duergar citadel against the incursion of a demonically possessed purple worm this was resolved as a skill challenge: the fictional stakes were high, but the resolution mechanics themselves don't need to change to reflect that - the different fictional positioning is just incorporated into the framing of checks and the narration of consequences. The negotiation of treaties and grand alliances certainly seems to be the sort of thing where social resolution mechanics would be relevant.
Finally, it seems to me that I could "change the drapes" of your paragon campaign and set it at a much more prosaic level. Instead of armies vying via BattleSystem, I have market stalls competing via whatever mechanic you want to use to resolve economic rivalry. Instead of soldiers and citizens, I have family members and employees. Instead of grand alliances, I have agreements with millers and farmers and the vendors of spices. And so instead of your game of kings, I am the head of my family which sells spicy fruit buns at market stalls throughout the city, in heated rivalry with the vendors of custard buns. (And the analogue to your retainers and agents is the junior family members who actually do the selling, dealing with recalcitrant customers and thieves but reporting the big things, like thugs demanding protection money, to me.)
I'm not really sure that that is a paragon game, although no doubt in the hands of the right GM and fellow players - who are prepared to downplay the economic and record-keeping aspects, and play up the "heated rivalry" and "protection money" aspects (ie those bits that foreground the protagonism of the head of the family) - it could be fun at least for a little while.
What I think this example shows is that the flavour - what is at stake? - does matter to tiers of play. Whereas the fact that the players are managers rather than immediate protagonists, at least in my view, doesn't.
Our characters started having marriages and children. Our character sheets included maps of the castles and other properties we owned - we didn't invade 'dungeons' nearly as often as we defended them!
The building up of alliances, family networks and the like is something that is a typical part of my campaigns, as the PCs cement their places in the world (often associated with the players developing a clearer conception of what their PCs' ultimate goals are). We tend not to worry too much about mapping out the PCs' houses and other territories. Typically we make do with descriptions and/or sketch maps.
The bit about "defending dungeons" sounds somewhat reactive, which puts it into contrast with some things you say later on. Anyway, in my experience the PCs defending themselves or their homes or others' homes (Seven Samurai style) is not that uncommon. I don't see it especially as a marker of paragon play, although I realise that you are trying to convey a gestalt and this is just one element.
It was a campaign unlike anything I'd played before or since.
It reminds me, in some different ways and to varying degrees, of multiple campaigns that I have GMed. Including my current one. None of the points about stakes (in terms of dependent NPCs, grand alliances and the like) is foreign.
There are two respects in which it does seem different. Between Battle System and some other things you say, it seems heavier on the accounting than even my most accounting-heavy Rolemaster games. I loathe accounting more and more (in my 4e game very little coin is dealt with, but when it is it irritates me; but the wizard has to keep track of his residuum total and that is a pain, as the numbers keep getting mucked up when character sheets are reprinted/updated).
The other difference is the agency aspect. The players in my games have certainly from time to time used henchmen and friendly NPCs to round out their numbers, do odd jobs for them and the like, but these tend to get resolved offscreen. The focus of play is the heavy lifting, and this is for the PCs to do.
For many campaigns, the way you relate to the game world doesn't change. As you get more powerful, you foes become more powerful, but the fundamental challenges you face and the methodology for facing them doesn't change.
<snip>
in general, when you are at lower than the epic tier, you are determining how the world will change only in the negative or in a reactive way.
In this we have something of a disconnect, very much related to a point I made above. You are framing this almost entirely from the ingame perspective. But for me, as a player, what matters is my experience, not the imagined experience of my PC. If the GM is framing me into scenes that I - indirectly via PC build, or directly via telling the GM what I wanted - choose for my PC, then I don't feel reactive at all. Nor negative.
This can be seen in the current campaign I'm running. My protagonists are currently heroic tier (6th-7th level, with a couple having political rank 3 on my scale of 1-10). Thier quest is to stop a 17th level necromancer from doing something (exactly what they don't yet understand because they are still locked in their survival oriented view of the world). But the 17th level necromancer is epic tier. His quest is to change the rules of the world and the game, which is epic.
I don't really understand how an NPC can quest to change the rules of the game - that seems very OotS to me.
But on the main point, your whole game set-up seems very different from mine (on the assumption that the players share their PCs' ignorance). The PCs in my game wouldn't be framed into a goal that is so opaque to the players. The players tend to choose their own goals and I frame around that.
If he suceeds, I'll have to write new house rules for the setting
<snip>
in practice those changes you talk about never really happen, because either the PCs 'win' or the game doesn't continue. Rarely do you see a campaign written with the PC's trying to bring about a new meaningful change in the world rather than stop it.
<snip>
A change to the game world like, "No pure blood elves.", or "No clerics.", constitutes a change to the setting. Exactly where that starts to become clearly a change to the system as well isn't clear, but I think at some point it clear is both. The point is that the change is large and tangible and meaningful.
What impact will the choice of outcomes have? Will a choice of Law mean a reduction or elimination in random results (all rolls are Take 10, for example)? Will Chaos result in much greater random chance?
<snip>
D&D encourages fights to be the exciting cusps of the campaign, certainly. That is one reason the tiers really don't feel all that dissimilar. We accomplish the same things, the same ways, on a grander scale of flavour text/colour.
Both these posts are somewhat puzzling to me.
First, I don't really get the significance of rules. Second, I don't really get the conflation of PC and player perspective.
In my previous (Rolemaster) campaign, the culmination of the campaign was the PCs taking steps to undo an ancient pact that had been made between the Lords of Karma and the Heavens in order to seal away various dangerous beings and dangerous artefacts. The PCs had two motivations for doing this. First, they had learned of the fate of a "dead god". (I use inverted commas because while the gods giant dead body existed in the world, in a body of water with his head poking just above the surface as an island on which a lighthouse was being built, his tortured spirit also roamed the ethereal plane - which was how the PCs first encountered him, when one of them was possessed by him - and his pre-death self also existed, out of time and space, locked in a never-ending, agonising battle with the forces of emptiness as one consequence of the aforementioned pact.) One PC in particular (the paladin) regarded the fate of this god as utterly unjust. And hence was determined to change it.
The other motivation was that a minor demon had found a way to steal souls from the karmic cycle and lock them away in artefacts that would then power him up when used by his followers. And the gods wouldn't interfere in this because to do so would violate their earlier pact, and they were prepared to allow this wrong to continue in order not to violate the more important compact. The PCs also regarded this as very unjust.
Hence the PCs tracked down a banished god who had been a friend of the dead god, befriended him, and got him to lend them his "Soul Totem", the artefact whose invention had resulted in his banishment because it enabled manipulation of the karmic cycle outside the dictates of the laws of karma. The PCs then came up with a plan to defeat all their enemies at once: they found a way into the void, where they fought, and defeated, the dead god's eternal foe; they then froze time so that they could extract the dead god before the eternal cycle commenced again; they then revealed to a demon overlord that the minor demon mentioned above was plotting against him, thereby getting that overlord to capture him and his soul-trapping artefacts (which were then shoved into the void so that they couldn't escape or be used again). The paladin PC was then ready to step into the void and take the dead god's place when time unfroze, until the PCs came up with another plan at the last minute - they tricked the demon overlord (who was a former Lord of Karma) into using the Soul Totem to create a karmic replica of the paladin to take the dead god's place in the void, which left the paladin free to (i) help the dead god beat up the demon overlord and push him into the void too, and then (ii) return to the mortal world where he turned the lighthouse into a monastery of paladins dedicated to the dead god. (The other PCs similarly lived happily ever after in our narration of the end game, including one of them - the PC who throughout the campaign had been the most modest and least self-serving, constantly overshadowed by his domineering cousin (also a PC) - founding a dynasty whose integrity would be the key to keeping the voidal gates shut.)
For me, at least, that was a satisfying campaign with a very satisfying resolution. The action and backstory gradually built up, with small things from early in the campaign being integrated into the unfolding story (somewhat no myth style - and so in that way different from Celebrim's campaign, in which he already knows who the ultimate villain is and what that person's goals are), until the players finally realised the full scope of what they wanted to achieve, and did so. The PCs made a meaningful change in the gameworld - they freed the dead god while maintaining the safety of the world, and in the course of doing so vindicated the banished god, restored the integrity of the karmic cycle which it had been lacking for so many cycles of history, and showed the Heavens that they had been wrong.
At the table level, the players chose to make the dead god a focus of play - he was one of dozens of story elements that I introduced at various points in the campaign (on that particular occasion after buying Monte Cook's Requiem for a God), and he caught on, especially for the player of the paladin - hence the gradual development of more and more backstory pertaining to him. Similarly for the minor demon lord - for reasons I can't really remember years later the players took a very strong disliking to him, and defeating him was always on their "to do" list. Hence my decision - as GM - to connect him to the dead god via the bigger karmic storyline (which was taken in part from Bruce Cordell's Bastion of Broken Souls).
The players already had an opposition to heaven and the Lords of Karma, because they were trying to capture and punish one of the PCs (who had written up his backstory as being an animal lord banished from heaven), and so it was also natural to build on that and frame them into situations raising the possibility of greater and greater dissent from heaven's edicts. One of the highlights of that was when one of the PCs persuaded an angel who was the "living gate" to the banished god to allow herself to be killed so they could pass through to the prison plane - persuading an angel that genuine performance of her duty requires departing from the edicts of heaven and allowing these rogue agents to kill her is in my view more epic, and more emotionally engaging, than persuading a shopkeeper to sell some rope for a cheaper price, even if in mechanical structures the resolutions are much the same. The latter does not leave everyone at the table emotionally drained; the former does, or at least did when it happened in my game.
It was also the players - one in particular, the player of the paladin - who had for the longest time wanted to defeat all the PCs' enemies by tricking them into fighting one another. He eventually achieve this,
and in the course of that came up with a way to let his PC live happily ever after rather than be eternally trapped in the void (which, up until the solution occurred to him, he was prepared to do). This was not emotionally draining, but it was very satisfying for that player.
None of this required special rules or changes to the rules. I did not need rules to describe how a minor demon uses ancient artefacts that he has recovered when they fell to earth from their stellar prison to divert souls from the karmic cycle. Nor did I need rules for how the Soul Totem infused an ordinary phantasmal duplicate of a person with genuine karmic status. Nor, had it happened, would I have needed rules to decide what happens to the paladin PC trapped in the void (that's the end of the game for that PC, not the framing of a scene for him). I did need rules to adjudicate the PCs' trickery of the demon overlord into using the Soul Totem, but the ordinary social resolution rules were adequate to that task. (If not ideal in absolute terms - problems with RM's skill system is one reason why I now prefer 4e.)
The rules changes that N'raac suggests strike me as pretty hopeless. How would you play a D&D game in which every time a d20 roll is called for the result is stipulated to be 10? The game would break down very quickly. All damage dice being averaged would be a different and tolerable change, but also basically pointless - it would change the tactile and cognitive experience of combat, and reduce suspense a little bit, while having basically no impact on overall outcomes. If you want such a change because you don't like rolling damage dice, just go ahead and introduce it (as many tables do, and as D&Dnext is doing for monsters/NPCs). I would add that either such change is quite different from Celebrim's ideas, which at least as expressed seem to involve excluding or introducing certain game elements, like fire spells, elves and/or clerics. But anyway, I don't see how "no elves" or "yeah, now we have gunslingers in the world" is a more meaningful or epic change then the ones I've described. I'm sure it could be emotionally powerful in the right context, but the fact that it can also be expressed in mechanical terms doesn't strike me as a very big contributor to that.
Ultimately, for me the rules - and especially the action resolution rules - are a medium for managing the contribution of content to, and elimination of content from, the shared fiction. They are not themselves something that play
addresses. They are something that play
uses. The meaningfulness of a change, for me, is measured in its contribution to the story - in terms of scope, emotional power, consequences for subsequent fictional positioning, etc (and of course those things are all related). Whether or not it has or requires rules expression is neither here nor there.
Do the players really choose, or are they simply expected to preserve the status quo?
How does it change the world? Does it just change the encounters the PC's have
pemerton said:
I personally don't understand why that is more epic than "You just killed Torog. Now the elemental chaos is not being held back from the underdark, and hence the world is threatened with dissolution."
a) What you just described is just flavor; what I described wasn't just flavor.
b) What I described meant the players had been the active agent. What you just described just means that the players are again in the reactive role - trying to stop something rather than do something.
c) What I just described involes a tangible change with immediate impact. What you just described means nothing. The world is always 'threatened with dissolution'... in the background, as a drapery, as a trope to move the action and give it the illusion of urgency. Nothing is actually happening.
(a) It is not mere flavour; it is hugely significant fictional positioning. It shapes what is possible, within the gameworld, and what is not. In fact it has already driven choices by the PCs: the invoker secretly bound Torog's dying spirit to Bane and Levistus so that it might operate as at least a temporary bulwark against chaos; and the drow is planning to leverage the new freedom enjoyed by the primordials (including his patron Chan, Queen of Good Air Elementals) in his quest to destroy Lolth and thereby undo the sundering of the elves.
(b) This conflates players and PCs, but is not true at either level. The PCs were active in seeking out Torog's Soul Abattoir, destroying it and then establishing a defensible position from which to fight Torog (knowing that he would come after them). It has been a focus of their endeavours for about 10 levels. And the players are the ones who made defeating Torog a focus of play. Their are plenty of other opportunities open to them within the scope of the campaign and the gameworld. It is one that they chose.
N'raac asks whether the players chose and will choose. Yes. Who else would? (Would the GM tell the players what actions they have to declare for their PCs? That's an odd way of RPGing.)
What is likely, although not inevitable, is some form of falling out between the PCs at the moment of choice, because of differences of conviction and commitment. (This is foreshadowed in the different responses to the death of Torog from those two PCs that I mentioned.) It is highly unlikely that the PCs will be acting purely reactively.
(c) What I described is a tangible change with tangible impact. I already explained how that impact is being experienced and leveraged by the PCs. I am confident that will continue until the campaign reaches its climax. Perhaps most of the fiction in your game is merely "drapery" that is not "actually happening". That is not so in my game. The primordials can't be freed until Torog is defeated. Now he has been, so they can be. And the drow will be taking steps to do that. That is not reactive, that is not drapery, that is not nothing.
N'raac also asks whether it will change the encounters the PCs have. Of course it will - if the world changes, then things met within it will change. If new forces are unleashed, then the demigods of the world are likely to encounter those forces. Contrary to the claims about flavour, these are not mere flavour - just as negotiating with a charging orc, a shopkeeper, a guardian angel or a demonic overlord are very different things (different fictional positioning, different emotional and dramatic significance) even if the mechanics are fundamentally the same, likewise encountering a freed primordial compared to (say) a devil or a god (and even more so when that primordial was freed as a result of the efforts of the PCs). The stakes are different. The possible outcomes are different. What the PCs want from them is different. What the PCs will offer them, or try to take from them, is different. This flavour which you two seem to be dismissing is, for me, the essence of an RPG. It's what makes an PRG fundamentally different from a board game - fictional positioning matters, both to framing and to adjudication.
does Chaos seep into the very environment, perhaps creating zones of Wild Magic and other locations where previously there was not enough Chaos to cause such change?
Now, if instead of 'threatened with dissolution', the setting acquired a new rule - "Any object which is left unattended by a sentient being must make a Fort save every 24 hours or disentigrate", and as a result you actually had the world disolving and the players had to arrange elementals to watch them sleep lest they wake up in an empty abyss, that might be epic.
To me this is primarily more rules fetishism. And also accountancy, in Celebrim's version.
I don't see how wild magic zones are particularly epic at all - I have used various sorts of magic zone 20-odd years ago in an RM game and in my experienece the main thing it does is add a distorting aspect to play, as players look for techniques to optimise the exploitation of possible resources while deftly managing whatever risks there might be. (Another strong feature of 4e, for me, is that it centres so many player resources on the PC rather than the external environment, except for that part of the external environment implicated in the current situation. Which removes the distorting influences on player priorities that I have seen from magic dilation zones, time dilation zones and similar sorts of things in other campaigns that I have run.)
Celebrim's "world dissolution" idea I think is suitably epic (although it strikes me as rather reactive in the way it is set up), but also quite hard to implement as his suggested solution indicates - if the focus of the game becomes securing elemental sentries, that might be a rather pedestrian play experience in service of that epicness. For me, this goes back to the issue of playability - changes to the rules or setting that render the game unplayable (or unplayable unless tedious action declaration and resolution is engaged in) don't make for epic play, they make for boring play.
The world dissolution idea could, I think, be more dramatically implemented by way not of a general rule of the sort Celebrim describes (and certainly not one that involves dice rolls and stats for every object in the world), but by way of choosing some particular place or object to be the focus of dissolution, to which the players have an actual (and the PCs an imagined) emotional connection. So far, I've been thinking of the prison of Miska the Wolf-Spider. But I don't need rules to do any of this: if things are going to dissolve, they are going to dissolve. (Or if the players express a desire to stop some threatened thing from dissolving, then doing so would in mechanical terms be a skill challenge - so the rolls would be made by the players in the usual way.)
Was the battle against the Advisor necessary? Would the campaign (or this arc, or tier) have felt complete without it? I believe, in a lot of games (YMMV), the answer is that the players would be quite disappointed if they did not get to defeat the Bad Guy in combat.
The freeing of the baron was not the climax of the campaign. Hence, whether or not the battle against the advisor was necessary (I'm not sure what counts as "necessary" in playing a table top RPG), it was likely. His influence over the baron was not his only source of power, and the PCs were likely to try to stop him in toto. In fantasy adventure RPGing that tends to mean fighting. It doesn't always mean fighting, though: in this post I've already posted an example of a resolution to a campaign which did not involve fighting but rather tricking various enemies into undoing one another until they could all be trapped in the void.
if I take a 5HD Ogre Magi, change his club to the wand of death, change him to appear to be Orcus, change his lair to a bone palace in the Abyss, and then have the players invade the bone palace to defeat Orcus and save the world, the scope and scale hasn't really increased any more than if I had made the Ogre Magi 30HD. It's changing the drapes on the room.
<snip>
Most of the adventure paths I've read by Pazio, while in many ways quite good, don't change scope (much).
Luckily for me, for my players and for our campaign I don't GM in this style, and I wouldn't touch an adventure path with a bargepole.
