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

[Filcher]

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]

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.

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]

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).

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.

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]

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]

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?!?