Death's Reach - entering Epic play

[MortalPlague]

From my experience running a couple of fights for 30th level PCs, I've had some thoughts as to how I'd approach real epic play. Let the PCs steamroll many of the encounters; they are epic, they need to feel that way. Then every third or fourth encounter... cheat.

Have a creature that hits for triple or quadruple its normal damage (it won't kill the party, but it will make them sit up and take notice). Have a monster that acts once between everyone's turn. Remove the "immediate action / turn" limit for a interrupty monster.

A few encounters like that, and you'll have your players guessing.

 

[Vael]

Hmm, there is a good point. PCs have so many ways to break the rules, gaining extra actions, attacking on a minor action .... monsters need a way to keep up.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Hmm, there is a good point. PCs have so many ways to break the rules, gaining extra actions, attacking on a minor action .... monsters need a way to keep up.

How about a Paragon Path for Monsters™? It could be just a few abilities that they get based on a specific theme.

Like some extra attacks, or energy-themed powers, and something cool that happens when they spend an Action Point.

 

[Netherstorm]

I ran E1-E3 last year and the encounters are simply not hard enough. The biggest let-down is the encounter you have coming up where

Spoiler

The party faces off against an aspect of Orcus

It is simply pathetic! I'd say up the damage and lower the hit points of all your monsters. Also beware, if your party has caught on then they've all got major necrotic resistance going, be ready for that too.

Death's Reach had a cool story, but it was pretty dull in execution. And the bad guy runs away, which everyone hates.

 

[jamesmanhattan]

I played Death's Reach, Kingdom of the Ghouls, and then DM'd Prince of Undeath.

I have bad news, Epic is broken.

As a paladin I stunned my way through elite after elite. The designers gave way too many "control" powers to non-controllers. Paladins stun, rogues stun, rangers immobilize etc...

The power level obtainable by players is too much for the monsters. Players can boost their defenses with feats and items to be near un-hittable. They use interrupts, and action points, and stuns to maintain an action advantage of 2 to 1 or higher. The players get to act 2 times more than the monsters. Then pile on top of that interrupts like Shield that cause misses. Causing a miss is just as good as a stun if you compare the effects the two have. Both cause the player to have a damage advantage.

You've got to do a lot of work converting the monsters to the new MM3 and Monster Vault guideline power level.

1. Easy fix: Double the static modifer of all damage so 2d6+6 becomes 2d6+12. Brutes need it tripled 2d6+18!

2. You've got to give Solos and Elites their actions back. Give every Solo an extra standard action! Yes the old solos were designed to do 2 monster damage per standard, and the new ones are supposed to be outputting 4 per round. Let them automatically end stun and daze after each standard action. Let Elites take immediates no matter what, or just let them spend their action point to remove an effect.

3. lower the HP of Solos by 1/5th
give all Brutes +2 to hit.
lower all Soldier's to hit by -2, and let them all mark even on a miss!

4. Have a serious discussion with your players and try to convince the non-controllers to dump their stun powers and their other "controller" powers.

Consider some houserules. After the first few weeks, all of us players were fed up and bored of Epic, so we agreed as a group to try some houserules. First being that Stun was downgraded to Dazed on Elites and Solos. You should have seen how fast everyone dropped their stun powers. All people wanted to do was stun elites and solos, it wasn't fun stunning anything else.

That should do it.

P.S. The worst boss fights I ever saw were Doresain and Orcus (separate encounters). Doresain was stunned (save ends) by a Paladin, his Balor dominated by a Barbarian! With Orcus, he never hit once with Touch of Death because every time it was interrupted by some random player interrupt.

 

[fumetti]

Couldn't this all be solved by simply using lower-level characters for those adventures?

All that adjusting is way too much work compared to simpy beginning E1 at level 15-17...

 

[Goonalan]

Couldn't this all be solved by simply using lower-level characters for those adventures?

All that adjusting is way too much work compared to simpy beginning E1 at level 15-17...

I should imagine not for most people as they've probably run H1-3 and P1-3 and so are 21st Level by the time they get to E1... IMHO.

Also the tone of E1-3 is Epic, therefore Epic it should be, face off with Orcus at the end, you don't want to be doing that at 25th level and the PCs asking... Now what?

And there are very few Epic Level scenarios available already, I'm therefore not going to downgrade one of the few that's not to bad- from a flavour perspective, although the series still needs plenty of work.

Cheers Goonalan

 

[mac1504]

Couldn't this all be solved by simply using lower-level characters for those adventures?

All that adjusting is way too much work compared to simpy beginning E1 at level 15-17...

The problem is that the modules were written before a lot of the revisions were made along with the majority of the splat books. The damage output and powers that the monsters have are woefully inadequate for an Epic level party; jamesmanhattan makes some very good observations and recommendations. If you do some searching there are a lot of good remedies for these issues. Sly Flourish is a great site that has a lot of input as to what can make a more challenging Epic battle. At the site, the author suggests re-purposing a lot of monsters from MM3 and the Dark Sun creature catalog (I love the suggestion of re-skinning Lali-Puy as Doresain).

I'm running E1 right now, and we just finished up with the Nerull's Gate battle and the

Spoiler

battle with the aspect of Orcus

. The party ran over the two encounters with barely breaking a sweat, but I made almost no modifications (except for beefing up the marilith) to the monsters in those two encounters. The battles did provide me with better insight into what to expect in this tier, and I will definitely be making adjustments.

I also think the battle with

Spoiler

the aspect of Orcus

is setting the party up for failure, as they seem to have an overconfidence in battling the big man himself at the end!