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.
Well, I definitely agree that what XP
is in 4e would simply be pacing. But what players I've encountered seem to
want it to be is the powerup that it used to be.
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.
To me, it's much less obvious than in previous editions. Players are very aware of the mechanics, and they seem to view level X monster of type Y as a level X monster more readily than as a monster of type Y. I am, however, going to give the whole scaling-by-type (ie: solo/elite/standard/minion) thing more of a try; I don't think that it's not good advice. But anything that will help me convince the PCs that these are actually the same gnolls that they fought earlier, and not just a mechanically different monster that I'm calling those gnolls I think would end up being helpful.
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.
I agree, I was simply trying to make clear my preference / bias. I'd like to run a good epic game, but my general preference is for lower-level stuff.
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.
As above, I'm going to be giving this a try, but so far I've had a hard time getting the players to really equate two monsters that differ in both level and role. Rather than cancel each other out, having both differences seems to make the issue worse, IMO.
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.
Yes, I'd definitely like to see more about this. I don't think I have a huge issue mapping the change in the place of the PCs into the game world, although I may be guilty of making things early on seem too important. However, what I'd really like to see is ideas for moving this into the mechanics and "tactical play", which I find is a major draw for the players, takes up most of the time at the table, and can easily overshadow the story in 4e.
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.
I think either would help, actually. =] But, yeah I don't think you "require" new mechanics (unless that's specifically what WotC is looking to publish), and the advice would seem like a more logical first step before new mechanics.
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.
I certainly don't expect my experiences to be universal, but what I've seen in my games (and from talking to players) leads me to believe that they're looking for the same kind of experience from leveling in previous editions, that they don't really feel fully satisfied that they're getting it, and that they tend to want to speed up advancement to compensate (which I don't think it does, really).
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).
Well, we had a situation a month or two ago in my Dark Sun game where I had to make a call during a combat (which was already kind of going on too long), because I didn't think we could find an answer in the rules in a timely manner. At the time there was a bit of argument and bad feelings about it, despite the fact that it
really wasn't a major thing. When I went back to try and smooth things over and find out what went wrong, the responses I got ranged from "Well you should have just said that's how the rules read" (which I was not 100% sure of at the time) to basically "Oh, sorry man, I really don't know what came over me". All of my players resisted the idea that I should make a call and we should move on because, in the heat of the moment, "that's not how 4e is played" was what popped into their minds. RAW in 4e is more important, IME, than in previous editions - and I think that's a side-effect (for me at least) of the fact that 4e RAW is pretty damn good.
The situations are a different thing, but that can be an issue as well. If I throw down the battlemat and lay out minis, I have got a huge advantage in convincing the players that the situation is worth their time. (And this is very much despite the fact that there are concerns that we spend too much time running combats.) 4e has made combat the focus of the game in a more significant way than previous editions (for me - I suspect from some of what I've read / heard that this goes back further, and perhaps in some cases has just always been the case, for some players). And actually I was going to contrast that with non-combat situations, but trying to come up with specific examples I think that if the PCs are there then the players are pretty much ready to go. So maybe not an issue (I may be misreading the meaning of "situations"?).
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.)
I definitely believe it's a taste thing. Personally I feel like if I had more time to develop stuff then I could run a much better game at higher levels. I think that it should work to make maintaining a longer-term fictional continuity (ie: these are those gnolls you fought before, this is the guy who sent those assassins against you back then, etc.) easier for me to maintain. On the gnolls example, for instance, it seems to me that the longer between the first and second meetings the easier it ought to be for the players to look past the mechanical differences.
But my players generally want faster advancement, not slower. And I feel that this tends to result in not only a serious fixation on getting new "stuff", but also draws a lot of focus away from "what does my character do" towards "what does that new power do, again?" And I'll add that I'm much more ready to deal with rapid advancement as a DM than as a player. The need to just constantly be updating my character and adding new (and fairly meaningless, IMO) items is a big turn-off and definitely makes me pause before sitting down at the table as a player in a 4e game again...
