Rule of Three finally addresses an important epic tier question!

[MerricB]

Malazan books of the fallen seems epic to me. It even has epic rank and file monsters. And plenty of characters there have hit the epic tier.

I sort of agree. It's pretty hard to tell what the power level of some of the characters are (especially as there are a fair number of "normal" human characters in there as well), but there's a good feeling of epicness about it.

Now I just have to read the final book... it's beside my bed at present.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

None? I mean there's epic stuff in a lot of novels, but not "epic-tier" or "epic level" for the most part. I'm sure someone else will be able to come up with some examples, but I don't think you need to be epic level to save the universe, mostly you just need to be at the right place at the right time and make the right (or wrong, sometimes) decisions. Epic tier just means that the wandering monsters end up threatening all of creation...

With Feist's work, a lot of the things hitting the lower-level characters are suitably non-Epic, but the work that Pug and his friends are doing in the demon realms? That's pretty close to Epic Level awesomeness.

Spoiler

I mean, Kelewan actually gets destroyed. That's not your general paragon-level threat... that's Epic!

Cheers!

 

[JoeGKushner]

After reading some of the back and forth here, I popped the $3.99 for Sly's Running Epic Games.

I'll agree with one on one thing right off the bat. Super Heroes.

It's very easy to see how a lot of super hero limited series, like Blackest Night, Sinistro War, Crisis of Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, Secret War, etc... can much more easily be mined for ideas that any Kull, Conan, Solomon Kane, etc... Well, at least Conan as written by Howard. There was a Marvel Arc where Conan is empowerec by the Old Gods to Fight the Devourer of Souls and they clash as giants across time and space! Every blow taking them to a new landscape and palce!

But yeah, comics appear to be the much better way to go about trying to model some of that stuff.

Interestingly enough, it also makes me think that next time I GM, I'm going to be a punk and go with Essentials Only option. I've got a few players who are min-maxers to the extreme. They don't do it to be spiteful, they're just damn good at making characters but those types of things using so many combinations and obscure bits make ME have to keep track of it all and reducing that to a much smaller pool? Makes things much easier...

 

[The Monster]

My take, in planning apotential 4e campaign:

In Heroic, the PCs change history;
In Paragon, the PCs make history;
In Epic, the PCs break history.

Which is to say, in my thinking, in Heroic, the heroes are just that, heroes and recognized great woman and men (or whatever), the ones who everyone recognizes that if they hadn't been there, things would be very different (i.e., much worse); battles would have been lost that were won, nations that would have fallen instead were saved, and so forth (real-world examples might include Winston Churchill, or Robert E. Lee, or Lech Walesa). Paragon heroes leave a lasting, important mark on the world: a major disaster or crisis was staved off; a nation that becomes a great empire would never have bene strong, or have existed at all without these folks; the big evil empire would have crushed the resistance, stuff like that. History would be hard to imagine without them (Picture such people as Charlemagne, or Julius Caesar, or Tokugawa). Epic tier is almost beyond analogy, people who simply introduce a complete change of historical currents, the end of an era - Napoleon, or Genghis Khan, maybe - but really, in a fantasy world, this is nothing less than altering the fabric of reality.

The reason I'm pondering this kind of stuff at all is that I'm simmering a potential 4e campaign, and I want to have an idea where it's all going from start to finish. While obviously I can't plan too much detail before I even know who the heroes are, I want to have broad schemes in place, partly for my own planning, and partly so I can have common threads weaving throughout, as well as useful prophecies and similar material.

Anyway, back on topic: I'd be interested in seeing something like a GM3 for epic tier and such. I just read Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier Games, and it's a very good start. I also can't help but notice just how high the new online 'monster builder' goes, so you can scale everything up and down at will.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

This thread has got me wondering if epic tier material might be a good niche for 3pp. I've decided to conduct some non-scientific market research over on this thread.

 

[JoeGKushner]

And to me, another HUGE problem with 4e support in terms of Epic, is magic items suck.

I'm not saying we don't have some cool and useful magic items, but outside of the unique items and artifacts, there just isn't a lot of 'heart' in the 4e magic item system.

3e could be bad at times, but there were plenty of 3rd party OGL sourcebooks that brought spice to the WoTC game and even WoTC tried out different things like Weapons of Legacy but 4e?

Well, the magic item book to support Essentials was canned and well... apparently they don't make Dragon mag like they used to. Shame as it used to have a lot of different articles that would provide new spells, magic items, and monsters on a monthly basis as opposed to a whenever the someone gets around to it basis.

 

[Aegeri]

I have to agree there. It feels like something rare items were supposed to fill, but the problem with Rare items is:

1) There aren't enough of them

and

2) They often suck terribly (The god awful Gauntlets of Ogre Power are a testament to this).

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I have to agree there. It feels like something rare items were supposed to fill, but the problem with Rare items is:

1) There aren't enough of them

and

2) They often suck terribly (The god awful Gauntlets of Ogre Power are a testament to this).

I'm reminded of the Holy Avenger being rare.

The "rare" version not being appreciably different from the regular version, which was apparently already balanced at its level. That...irritated me. At least jack up the crit dice or something...

Brad

 

[Incenjucar]

Magic items certainly could use more variety. People seem to have focused far too much on combat items so far. Most of the high level non-combat wondrous items are... furniture, decor, and living space...

 

[JoeGKushner]

And in terms of monsters, the real problem is that epic is well, epic.

By not treating it as its own tier with actual support, it leaves a lot of ideas floating around about what epic is or should be.

And I'm not saying that Epic can't be one man holding the bridge against the host of Hela (Skurge!) but that's not what 4e epic is about.

Indeed, the 4e Monster Manual, should have put a wide group of stat blocks for a few key levels of epic with appropriate abilities, damage, utilities, hit points, etc... with all of the key roles filled, and then provided the GM a sample of how those could all be tied intogether.

Looking at the comics, let's look at Blackest Night again.

Super Heroes and Villains who have died and come back with Green Lantern Rings? Unique entities each and every one with an overarching theme and arch.

Necron: A god king of the dead who wants to wipe out all life? Doesn't matter if its positive or anti? Unique entity.

Black Hand: His herald. Another unique entity.

This could be done by something similiar to the old Hoardling entry where each entity could have different abilities but they all pulled from the same core roots.

Because each entity is its own thing, each one may have different surprises or abilities that react to other epic powers in their own way. It prevents players from memorizing them and provides GMs some rolling dice juice that can inflame the imagination.

This is a lot of work, but when you've taken the game itself ABOVE the levels of dragons and even demigods, not having full stats for some customizable entities for the GM is, looking back, not a wise move.