Rule of Three finally addresses an important epic tier question!

[Tony Vargas]

I restrict minion artillery from firing through allied forces, so positioning becomes important.

Ah, that's a good idea, custs down on the minions-would-just-anihilate-eachother problem substantially. Though, if one side could set up a classic cross-fire, it'd be whithering.

 

[S'mon]

Ah, that's a good idea, custs down on the minions-would-just-anihilate-eachother problem substantially. Though, if one side could set up a classic cross-fire, it'd be whithering.

The PCs will have 10 dwarf crossbowmen, 5th level artillery, as well as 52 infantry, while the Chaos force has 15 orc bowmen, 4th level artillery, and 75 infantry. The PCs will have the chance to set up their defense of the bridge ready for the enemy counter-attack, while the Orcs, Gnolls & Ogres need to cross the battlemap, so with good positioning to have infantry protect the crossbow dwarves they could probably do a lot of damage. But if they bunch up to defend vs enemy infantry they'll be more vulnerable to enemy battlecasters - there are lots of interesting tactical questions that sticking with a 1:1 scale really brings out. The area is largely wooded BTW, typically granting cover + concealment, so ranged attacks are at -4, area attacks at -2.

Last session when the PCs were on the offensive, I had 31 soldier minion-8 Drakkarim Chaos Marauder to defend the bridge, but I was so worried about the PC battlecasters (a Wizard-6 and an Invoker-6) wiping my guys out that I kept them in cover away from the bridgehead and well spread out for too long; in the end the PC battlecasters' AoEs didn't much hurt me but they *did* keep Chaos' head down, enabling the PCs' side to cross the bridge in force and overrun my side before I could regroup. Basically a classic combined-arms maneuver from the PCs.

Next time the roles are reversed - now the PCs have the smaller force, they are on the defensive, they'll be facing powerful enemy battlecasters - basically the situation I was in last time. We'll see how they do.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Next time the roles are reversed - now the PCs have the smaller force, they are on the defensive, they'll be facing powerful enemy battlecasters - basically the situation I was in last time. We'll see how they do.

Hope it all goes well. One thing I am curious about, how would you replicate the idea of crossfire? Say in this case the PCs set up with their dwarf crossbowmen (or is that crossbowdwarf?) to the left and right of their side of the bridge in cover. With some sort of makeshift defense making the bridge difficult terrain. When the enemy come on to them en masse they'll basically be firing into a large group with overlapping fields of fire. Would you allow missed shots to reroll once to see if they hit a secondary target?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Given the way he's using minis and terrain and banning firing through you own allies, crossfires will naturally be a very effective tactic, even with no further mechanics, they'd be whithering.

 

[S'mon]

Hope it all goes well. One thing I am curious about, how would you replicate the idea of crossfire? Say in this case the PCs set up with their dwarf crossbowmen (or is that crossbowdwarf?) to the left and right of their side of the bridge in cover. With some sort of makeshift defense making the bridge difficult terrain. When the enemy come on to them en masse they'll basically be firing into a large group with overlapping fields of fire. Would you allow missed shots to reroll once to see if they hit a secondary target?

Usually a "miss" will actually be "bounced off armour"; the chance of just randomly killing some other guy with an arrow or bolt is pretty low because the velocity is low and you need to get the angle just right. So concepts from modern rifle or machinegun fire aren't really applicable.

However there are cases like what you describe where I will ad hoc grant the attacker combat advantage. Say you've trapped a mass of enemy in a confined space, maybe stuck on the bridge like in a game of Medieval: Total War, granting CA would certainly be reasonable.

Anyway the PCs need to defend *both* sides of the bridge, or Per Vartal's plan won't work.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think maybe in general I'd handle the really massive battles in a more abstract fashion, but that choice really depends on the preferences of the players. My current group for instance probably aren't all that interested in the minutia of things like fields of fire.

Monster scaling works pretty well though. Personally I tend to make some tweaks when I level scale from one type to another, but it is pretty simple to do.

 

[S'mon]

Given the way he's using minis and terrain and banning firing through you own allies, crossfires will naturally be a very effective tactic, even with no further mechanics, they'd be whithering.

Yeah, I find these things usually work best as emergent properties of the robust base (minis, 1:1 scale, use terrain, use minion rules) than imposed top-down.

 

[S'mon]

I think maybe in general I'd handle the really massive battles in a more abstract fashion, but that choice really depends on the preferences of the players. My current group for instance probably aren't all that interested in the minutia of things like fields of fire.

Well, this big two-session battle is very much a one-off, the campaign as a whole is Vault of Larin Karr sandbox dungeon/hex-crawling, though we had a 5-session intermission while I ran dungeon crawl 'Forge of Fury', which got the PCs levelled up enough to take on the big challenges.

 

[ArcaneSpringboard]

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

I looked into this in my blog post recently:

This is My Game Cooler Magic Items

 

[pemerton]

It seems (to me) to come from things like the "extra life" powers that most EDs have, as well as some of the design slant of 4e. It's also influenced by the way that 4e scales... Specifically, the reward mechanic in 4e is XP, which is generally seen as power gain.

<snip>

I don't personally like the kind of "powerup" that exists in 1-30 D&D. It doesn't match up with the "source material" that I prefer to call upon, and I'd like things a bit more gritty.

See, the notion expressed before the snippage is one that I think needs to be nipped in the bud! (Or rather, given that it's already pretty widespread, and hence has already budded - so maybe it's a notion that needs to be weeded out!)

The mechanical scaling in 4e makes more sense, in my view, as a device for pacing the players through the story elements of the game - start with kobolds/goblins, end with Orcus/Lolth. There's no need to see the mechanical scaling as modelling "quanitites" of increasing power in the actual gameworld.

Of course it's obvious that a demigod is more powerful, in the gameworld, than the same PC was as a 1st level hero. But we don't need to put any sort of ingame metric on that increase in power - and even if we want to do that, there's no need to envisage it as corresponding to the mechanical metric.

I don't think a game where PCs can end up as demigods is ever going to be gritty, but I don't think the powerup has to work in a way that is at odds with good, mainstream fantasy storytelling.

The issue is that, because of constant scaling (necessitated by the narrow band of "acceptable challenge") there's no actual power gain. The PCs don't really get to butt heads with things they can beat... yet..., nor do they get to mow through what was once a serious threat.

I don't agree with the latter sentence, for the same reason others have given - there are higher-level minion versions of many of the standard humanoids, and where they don't exist in the published rules they're just about the easiest monsters to houserule in.

And as for the first sentence - there is no power gain in the metagame. The game should, if anything, get more challenging over time as PCs become more complex to manage, and the ingame circumstances more complicated. But in the gameworld there is a very noticeable growth in power - the hero is now a demigod. A good GM should be bringing this out at the forefront of play - and good epic rulebooks (which don't really exist now, outside bits and pieces from Plane Below, Plane Above, Demonicon and Underdark) would help a GM become this sort of good GM.

I tend not to agree with Ari Marmell's recent blog that says this requires a new mechanical approach to play (such as domain rules or similar). Rather, I think it needs good advice on how to build skill challenges of an appropriately epic flavour (because, for the reasons others have given, at these levels you want to reduce the proportion of challenges that are combats) and how to make the combats that take place at these levels truly epic and otherworldly in scope. I think the notion of a "filler" combat encounter is pernicious at any level of play, but doubly so at epic.

So the result is that the players are looking for that "power". They want the game to get easier, not harder.

I haven't found this to be the case GMing Rolemaster into epic levels, and I'm not expecting it to be the case in 4e either.

And there's a lot of work in the 4e design aimed at removing the possibility that the DM might act like a jerk, which IMO leads to the assumption that if the DM is doing anything that "isn't in the book", then that's exactly what he's trying to do.

<snip>

4e seems in a way to be the culmination of the idea that players need the system to protect them from "bad touch DMing". And I think that has had the unfortunate side-effect of seriously eroding the idea that players should actually trust the DM.

<snip>

there are bad, abusive DMs out there, but I think we've gone a bit too far in trying to pull their fangs. Particularly since IMO you don't want to be playing with those people in any case.

Ron Edwards has a phrase I like, and that I'm going to quote only a little bit out of context (he was talking about The Pool) - a game like 4e, which tends to rely heavily on the GM framing the ingame situations with which the players engage via their PCs (be they combat encounters or skill challenges), depends on trust at the table, as a group, that the GM's situations are worth anyone's time.

So I don't think 4e erodes the idea that players should trust the GM. It depends upon that trust. But what it does do (in my view) is (i) give GMs tools (the mechanical scaling, encounter building guidelines, DCs etc) to create situations that they can be confident in running at full tilt without being worried that they've been unfair to their players, and (ii) give players tools for engaging and taking charge of the situation, because action resolution is less dependent on GM-fiat than in earlier (especially but not only AD&D) editions of the game (eg skill challenges create an alternative framework to mother-may-I or open-ended resolution for non-tactical encounters, and powers plus page 42 and the support for that in the new skill descriptions create a similar alternative within the tactical sphere).

And in my view (and experience - admittedly with RM rather than 4e) this is all conducive to good epic play, provided that the GM is able to create situations that are worth anyone's time. I think WotC needs to provide more support for this - both at the thematic/story level, and also at the mechanical level (as I said above, not new mechanics, but advice on how best to use the mechanics that the game already gives us).

On top of this, I would really prefer to slow down advancement. Way down. I think the published 4e adventures (H/P/E series) are about the right length that 3 or 4 of them would make good pacing for a single level

I think this is probably just a taste thing, but my taste goes the other way. If anything, I'm toying with the idea of speeding up advancement - my group plays every two to three weeks on a Sunday afternoon (probably a little fewer than 20 sessions a year, each of a little less than 4 hours), and we don't play all that speedily. At the moment we're probably 4 sessions per level, and I'd be happy for that ratio to drop to 3 sessions per level. (At the moment I'm just trying to achieve that via more quest XP, because I know that if I start applying multipliers to XPs gained I'll make an error somewhere and muck up my bookkeeping.)