Rule of Three finally addresses an important epic tier question!

[Aegeri]

90% of the time you have to do it with powers. Compare the new MV Dragons in combat to the old ones. The difference in excitement and sheer brutality - in short "Which of these is the better dragon" is inherently obvious. Especially when one runs the Elder Black Dragon MM1 vs. the MV Elder Black Dragon.

There is no way I will ever use one of those solos again due to the existence of the other.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The MM Black Dragon was possibly my favorite Solo. I run 'introductory' games a lot, so low levels, inexperienced/casual players. The MM Young Black Dragon's much-maligned low damage is forgiving enough for such a party to survive beating it down. It's darkness power adds a bit of Lurker drama without being overwhelming. For a solo, it's hps and defenses aren't excessive, so not too 'grindy.' And, it was easily re-skinned into a Water Elemental for a '4 elements' theme adventure I use for intros (4 encounters: one solo, one Elite + STandards, one Standards, one Standards + Minions - showcases the range of encounters for new-to-4e players).

I've also fought the MM Young Black Dragon - played with a little more malice by DMs dealing with an experienced party - and they were fun, dynamic - survivable - fights.


I saw the MV Black Dragon preview, and went 'damn, I never want to fight one of these things.' I mean, here, have vulnerability to my attacks, no attack roll, no save. Breath. Action Point. Oh, you're dead? Roll up a new character. Next! (That's just what it /looked/ like at a glance, I figured, in play, maybe not that bad.) Of course, there was one in Encounters. In a lurker-favoring environment, with minions (who did acid damage). Where Encounters is usually a cakewalk for my table, the Black Dragon killed one character outright, and effectively locked down another by litterally dropping her /each round/. *Blat* the slayer's down. Slayer's action: made death save. Warpriest Action: heal the Slayer, slayer's up. Dragon: *BLAT* Slayer's down. Definitely the most frustrating form of action denial I've ever seen.


Back on topic: Judging from the differences in our impressions and experiences - and given that I run almost exclusively low-Heroic, and only ever played consistently into mid Paragon, while you've run extensively at Epic - I'm becoming convinced that Epic plays much more differently from Heroic/Pargon than I'd previously thought from just looking at it (and playing low Epic on rare occassion). So, hey, an internet discussion has changed my mind on something...

 

[Aegeri]

*Blat* the slayer's down. Slayer's action: made death save. Warpriest Action: heal the Slayer, slayer's up. Dragon: *BLAT* Slayer's down. Definitely the most frustrating form of action denial I've ever seen.

Admittedly, that's a bit like feeding a kitten to a blender and a common mistake - sometimes it's better to not heal immediately if the dragon will just get a turn to whack them down again. This is also where tactics become 100% essential (Ha! It so never gets old). The party has to move in a way that will get the dragon to charge/bite them - unless the DM is being spiteful and coup de graces the fallen character (not something I would do personally). Alternatively, ensuring that the slayer cannot be put in the blast of its breath weapon is also critical - because there is no reason in that situation for the DM to care if he's in it or not (and likely leads to him dying).

I actually had this exact conversation with someone when encounters was going and the black dragon turned up, but in a post-MM3 world - especially at paragon/epic you really can't just heal PCs and expect to get away with it. If something has the wood on your wizard, healing the wizard won't help if its turn is coming before him. He's just going to get splattered again. So leaders need to be a lot smarter with how they heal. The Warpriest in your example is entirely at fault, but then again if the Dragon is focused on beating down the slayer constantly I can't see him doing much to the rest of the party. So maybe that is a win... of a sort.

Edit: The classic epic example that actually killed THREE players was 2 went down due to beheading blade. On the leaders turn - right before the Balor - he healed the fighter and avenger. Then the leader went and bloodied the balor. On the Balors next turn it whacked down the fighter into negative HP, action pointed and beheading blade killing the fighter, critting the avenger and just killing him and then crit the other character instantly killing him as well (bearing in mind this power does nearly 100 points of damage on a crit if you roll well - combined with an aura that deals automatic fire damage). Three dead immediately and no way out of that encounter - ended in a TPK. The point was that the leader didn't heal smart. In this case, he should have healed again instead of attacking to ensure they had enough HP to survive the creatures attacks until their next turn. Leaders actually have a very hard job in 4E now due to the damage, especially when you have things like Balors running around. Admittedly the PCs got unlucky - they could have killed it should a couple of their powers have hit - but that is sometimes the cruel way of DnD.

The MM Black Dragon was possibly my favorite Solo.

Low level heroic tier solos don't suffer so much. Now that same dragon at paragon tier - well the Elder Black Dragon in this case. You'd be lucky to get a turn. Hell, you'd be lucky to get a single action.

 

[kaomera]

I think one of the problems, with 4e, of starting at higher than 1st level is that it opens up the field for narrowly focussed, extreme builds more. We are in Paragon now, and I don't recognise this issue - I suspect it is because the players all had to live with their character at levels 1-10, so taking something that only really motors at level 11 would have sucked for ages!

Yeah, seeing that problem was one of the reasons I ended up starting at Paragon. Players often weren't getting to see their "cool stuff" in action because the game wouldn't last long enough to get it fully assembled. It's easy to say that "oh, you can just take immediately-useful stuff and then re-train later", but that feels awkward as a player. It just seems more natural to take the feats etc. that you're going to need to end up with; ideally you'd then have re-training available if something didn't work out the way you expected, but since you won't know how it's going to actually work until all the pieces are assembled it doesn't actually come up as such.

 

[S'mon]

When I saw the black dragon in the MM I immediately knew it would never work for me; I deleted the darkness power & upped damage right away.

In the end by the time my PCs fought a young black dragon, WoTC had released the MV preview version. As a 4th level MV Solo it made a pretty good threat for a fully prepped, nova-ing party of 6 5th-6th level PCs!

Some of the MV monsters do have excessive damage output IMO. The owlbear is a case in point; as designed it can spend an AP and do x4 standard level 8 brute damage to 1 target in a single round (x2 base from claws, then AP to use bite for another x2). By contrast elites & solos who have to spread their damage around multiple foes work much better. When I design elites I normally look to having their single-target damage output x1.5 a standard; not x2. Likewise a solo that can single-target should be x3 standard, not x5.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Admittedly, that's a bit like feeding a kitten to a blender and a common mistake - sometimes it's better to not heal immediately if the dragon will just get a turn to whack them down again.

Yeah, I was biting my tongue about it. There are limits to how much 'advice' another player can stand, and I have to watch myself. Point is, at low level, in casual play, it was a crazy encounter to throw, and the build of the monster, itself, but it beyond the pale for the kind of group you get in that context. Low level play isn't always like that - but it is often enough that erring on the side of making monsters survivable isn't a bad idea. An experienced DM with an experienced party can always beef them up.

Low level heroic tier solos don't suffer so much. Now that same dragon at paragon tier - well the Elder Black Dragon in this case. You'd be lucky to get a turn. Hell, you'd be lucky to get a single action.

Nod. So long as there's something between 'The party locks down the solo all combat long' and 'everything the defender and controller do to degrade the solo's action economy fails automatically.'

 

[Aegeri]

Some heroic monsters are actually very screwy now. Jackalweres and Broken Builder's (They are from an Eye on Dark Sun article) will scale into epic tier without any modification except to their statistics. That's just because their powers are that damn good. Solos have similar effects, good powers will scale up very well but they don't always scale backwards the same way. With some exceptions, MV dragons are just incredibly dangerous at low levels and remain incredibly threatening all the way into epic. You can take the elder X dragons and make them ancient (basically just changing stats) and they are still effective. Most of this is because they ignore the effects that cripple solos most badly. When solos (of most sorts) account for these with powers or abilities, most of them can usually fulfill their function pretty well.

Mostly what I've seen is that AoE stuns are more useful on regular standard monsters and single target stuns on elites. All they tend to do on higher level creatures is momentarily slow them down (which is all they really should do). The sad truth is that solos without them, like most of the pre-MV solos, just aren't worth using unless you just give them it in the first place.

 

[Balesir]

Yeah, seeing that problem was one of the reasons I ended up starting at Paragon. Players often weren't getting to see their "cool stuff" in action because the game wouldn't last long enough to get it fully assembled. It's easy to say that "oh, you can just take immediately-useful stuff and then re-train later", but that feels awkward as a player. It just seems more natural to take the feats etc. that you're going to need to end up with; ideally you'd then have re-training available if something didn't work out the way you expected, but since you won't know how it's going to actually work until all the pieces are assembled it doesn't actually come up as such.

Well, I don't actually think you "need" to have the narrow focus uber-move characters at all, and taking a character element to be awesome at level 14 when it might mean you don't survive level 8 just seems dumb. However, I will say that we allow "splatbook retrains" - in other words, if a splatbook has added some character elements since you last levelled, you get an extra retrain to allow freer use of the new stuff. Over the last year or so this has been an important alleviation of some of the pressure on retraining.

Bottom line for me is, you should be doing some "cool stuff" at Heroic, and you should still be doing "cool stuff" at Paragon and Epic. If you don't get to pull off the theoretical "uber-stuff" that you read about on the CharOp forum, well, (a) tough noogies and (b) what made you think the theoretical was ever practical, anyway? CharOp gives some good pointers - but don't expect to achieve the "perfect storm" anytime soon.

 

[kaomera]

Well, I don't actually think you "need" to have the narrow focus uber-move characters at all, and taking a character element to be awesome at level 14 when it might mean you don't survive level 8 just seems dumb. However, I will say that we allow "splatbook retrains" - in other words, if a splatbook has added some character elements since you last levelled, you get an extra retrain to allow freer use of the new stuff. Over the last year or so this has been an important alleviation of some of the pressure on retraining.

Bottom line for me is, you should be doing some "cool stuff" at Heroic, and you should still be doing "cool stuff" at Paragon and Epic. If you don't get to pull off the theoretical "uber-stuff" that you read about on the CharOp forum, well, (a) tough noogies and (b) what made you think the theoretical was ever practical, anyway? CharOp gives some good pointers - but don't expect to achieve the "perfect storm" anytime soon.

I re-considered my choice of the word "need" a bit before I hit submit on that post; I don't think you need any particular set of stuff, or whatever, either. However, it's what the system is more or less telling the players to do. I think that should tend to be helped along with the new design ethos - part of the problem is that individual components previously have tended to range from poor (trap choices) to good+ individually, but the really great stuff was only great because you managed to fit a few things together. And there are still too many "feat tax" options.

The issue with feats (in particular) is less one of a "perfect storm" than it is that 4e is yet another game with such a reliance on "leveling" that it's hard to actually fill out your concept at level 1... Or at any level far too often. After I've dug through the "tax" options and the choices that the other players are going to complain if I don't take (and as I prefer to play Leaders, but would prefer not to have to heal I may see that more than some) I don't feel like I have have the "slots" left to get all of what I want. And that gets worse if I have the character planned out in advance, as now my concept includes a paragon path that I can't take until I hit level 11, etc. And if you don't have your character planned out in advance, it's far too easy to fall into the "traps". (And I'm not a big fan of "splatbook retrains" - the last time I tried that I ended up with two players deciding to jettison their current PCs and re-roll completely, because folding in the new "cool stuff" basically wrecked their character concepts.)

I also don't think "survival at level 8" is really the issue (I'm not sure how much of an issue it is at all, 4e characters are very survivable, even at lower levels). Games peter out within 4 or 5 levels simply because managing everyone's schedules is difficult, and then someone loses interest and stops showing up and everything ends up unraveling. Players want "advancement", they want more power for their characters, and they want the survivability and convenience that comes along with it. But they also want challenge, and (to get back on-topic a bit) they want an "epic feel" at epic levels (and before that too, a bit). To me it seems like you don't get that epic feel without stripping away some of the invincibility, both to danger and to having to take responsibility / make tough choices, that is part of why players want higher-level PCs in the first place.

To me the issue of epic matching up with any particular source material (novels or whatever) is that RPGs are just too different of a medium. "Appropriately leveled encounters" or even a completely epic character (and not a character that has very heroic-tier frailties but is epic in one or more specific areas) just don't really show up in the books I've read. And the quasi-epic characters have big responsibilities, often just unleashing their power is fraught with consequence. In contrast epic 4e PCs saunter out and punch Demogorgon in the faces - or at least that's what I've found that players want. They want to just keep running dungeons, but they want that "epic feel", and I think the two are just pretty much mutually exclusive.

Maybe I just haven't been reading the right adventures; I think someone mentioned E1 as being good, maybe I'll track that down and give it a look. I think that if WotC was going to publish epic material that would be useful to me it would need to include both a "tutorial adventure", with copious sidebars of "why we did this thing that we did and why we did it that way", and also at least as important would be some advice on epic play (and maybe epic character design) for players.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Howdy kaomera!

And the quasi-epic characters have big responsibilities, often just unleashing their power is fraught with consequence. In contrast epic 4e PCs saunter out and punch Demogorgon in the faces - or at least that's what I've found that players want.

Make sure that the actions of the PCs have an equal and opposite reaction somewhere else.

- They may have killed Demogorgon, but then Graz'zt will conquer the territory of Demogorgon and become even more powerful, destabilizing the Abyss, the resulting war spills into the other planes.

- Or Demogorgon escapes, although the PCs managed to sever one of his heads. While the wounded Demon Prince plots his revenge (which involve's toadying to various evil deities) against the PCs, Orcus turns Demogorgon's severed head into a Demilich.

- With one of their number slain, the collective remaining Demon Prince's conspire to teach the assassins a lesson, by invading their homeworld.

They want to just keep running dungeons, but they want that "epic feel", and I think the two are just pretty much mutually exclusive.

My advice here would be to keep it short, with maybe 3-4 Scripted Encounters and some potential Random Encounters.

Most of the really high level adventuring we did invloved maybe 3 combat encounters followed by dealing with the (often political) repercussions of what we had just done.

Thats not to say the capacity for longer Dungeon crawling didn't exist, but when the PCs are almost as powerful as the Demon Prince they are facing, then most of the guards on the way to the throne room are going to be like dropping sausages into a meatgrinder.

As we have seen from WotC Epic Material, theres a gravitation towards Elite and Solo opponents at the higher levels. One of the annoying aspects of the E series adventures is that there is no verisimilitude given to the forces of Orcus in terms of composition. I remember vividly in one encounter there is this Vampire Lord who is more powerful than a Balor, but he's really just treated like any other mook even though he's basically a Demigod (in terms of power). In doing things this way, theres no real sense of progression, because no matter how powerful the PCs are, rather than having them cut down dozens of Glabrezu guards, instead the Glabrezu guards are just given extra levels to compensate (so you end up facing them in small numbers). So in a way, 4E has its own built in Level Scaling that you need to be wary of (a feature which ruins the Dragon Age videogame in my opinion).

Maybe I just haven't been reading the right adventures; I think someone mentioned E1 as being good, maybe I'll track that down and give it a look. I think that if WotC was going to publish epic material that would be useful to me it would need to include both a "tutorial adventure", with copious sidebars of "why we did this thing that we did and why we did it that way", and also at least as important would be some advice on epic play (and maybe epic character design) for players.

I actually did a Review of E1 Death's Reach a few months ago. The E2 and E3 reviews are in the pipeline. E3 is probably my favourite of the bunch.