Looking for extremely powerful epic monsters

[GandalfMithrandir]

that sounds awesome, I will be using that idea next time my PCs get around that level, if its ok!

 

[Jacob]

I actually should have done more research, and DMed that badly, it went way too long anyway and I killed it in a very anti-climactic way, where the power of all the stuff that they had killed imploded in upon itself and killed everything in damage that went past any damage reduction and resistances they had, even all the immunities they put up, so now they are level 1 again, working their way back up

Sounds appropriate enough, if it was a necessary sacrifice to seal away an evil they could never slay. Every action requires a reaction in order to balance such a power shift, right? In any other circumstance...ouch.

In other news, I assume they went about rebuilding and saving the almost destroyed multiverse, correct? Gods running out of the woodwork to delay a god from erasing existence tends to reshape more than continents.

Isn't 3 rounds fairly standard for high-level 3E fights?

As for the broader issues, I ran a campaign - in Rolemaster, not 3E - that culminated in the PC's fighting Tharizdun twice - once in the form in which he had been freed from imprisonment, and once in the form he takes in the Void (=Far Realm). They also reimprisoned him.

These 25+ level PCs used a lot of Time Stop to help them, which they got from entering into the dreams of a banished god who (before his banishment) had been the one of the most powerful magician and sages in the heavens. The fights against Tharizdun were, in turn, the culmination of a story arc that began something like 10 levels earlier, with a version of the Freeport Trilogy (which itself culminated with one of the PCs merging with a Dead God on which the lighthouse was being built to deflect Tharizdun - falling to earth from his heavenly prison - into the deep oceans). I also integrated all but the last part of Bastion of Broken Souls into the adventure. Plus some other stuff of my own.

Anyway, I don't see what's objectionable about this sort of thing. For me it made a pretty dramatic way to end a campaign whose themes were the natures of heaven, law, sacrifice, freedom and enlightenment.

It's not the power of the PCs that I confuzzled over, because again, a PC has the option to consider being a god at some point (among other grandiose goals). It dealt more with the amount of time that should have passed in order to let them get so powerful in conjunction with how long the fight lasted. And no, I don't think fights (climatic fights) should last 3 rounds. If it's happening, something wrong has happened.

...Well, sure, the party went back in time to steal treasures from Prismatic Dragons so that they could gain strength, but messing with the time continuum in such a way (depending on how one views such a thing) just makes for a bad outcome.

 

[GandalfMithrandir]

I said that most everything got fixed up off camera and now the current campaign is revolving around them helping to clean up the mess that they made, and now I have decided to make the temporal travel very heavily restricted.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think fights (climatic fights) should last 3 rounds. If it's happening, something wrong has happened.

OK, I get your point.

I think this is a function of mechanics, though, to some extent. I haven't played high level 3E, but I gather that 3 rounds is pretty typical for fights in that game. I know from a lot of experience that 3 rounds is pretty typical for a Rolemaster combat, especially against a single powerful foe, because that is about how long it takes until either a death crit is achieved or the enemy drops on hits due to concentrated fire.

While it might be more epic to have the fight take longer, in some systems the mechanics just don't really permit this.