Epic Level Encounter Design

[Will Doyle]

Anybody got any thoughts on Epic level encounter design in 4th edition? I've got my own ideas about what works and what doesn't, but I'm well aware that every group is different!

So:

How do you keep things challenging when the party has access to so many healing powers?
Which epic-tier monsters/hazards/traps have given you the best results?
How does terrain differ for your encounters at epic level?

Also - any recommendations for good published epic level adventures?

Cheers!

 

[pemerton]

I haven't run epic yet, but here is a link to some upper-paragon encounters that I ran (20th+ level encounters for 17th and 18th level PCs). I'm expecting to do more of the same at epic - over-the-top terrain especially, but also unrelenting application of superior force!

 

[n00bdragon]

My group made it to level 19 before we called it quits (just started a new one at level 1 a couple weeks ago). It's not quite epic level but I had enough encounter design experience up this advice is probably still relevant:

The biggest thing with high level fights is that everything has to be bigger. The players have become almost godlike (and in epic they will in many cases be demigods quite literally) and that's reflected in what they are able to do. Each party member probably has several encounter abilities to get themselves out of serious trouble and probably one way to come back from the brink. The party healer(s) are extraordinarily powerful and if left to their own devices the players may find most fights a bore as they cannot be credibly threatened.

Terrain is always important in 4e but at higher levels it should go from being a distraction or an obstacle to an outright weapon. The very ground the PCs fight on should often conspire to kill them and shield the enemies. Include gratuitous pools of lava, acid baths, and 100 ft deep chasms anywhere they could conceivably be found. Just always remember the golden rule of terrain: Someone in the fight should not be happy where they are at the beginning. This is so that both sides don't just lock into a static slugfest. At high levels you will frequently want to make this the players. A good way to do this is start encounters when PCs trigger a trap of some sort. That way the fight starts with them literally in the trap.

Second, don't pull any punches. One of the biggest difficulties for 4e DMs is realizing just how tough the PCs are, especially at high levels. I would almost encourage you to aim for fights that are unfairly difficult (but not grindy) and then let the PCs surprise you with their resilience. This is difficult to do with the Monster Manual 1 and 2 monsters so you will probably have to really get into making your own baddies, good thing this is easy. Aim to do heavy damage that can quickly drop characters if they aren't careful and give them powers and abilities that interact with their specific terrain.

Lastly, the primary strength of the players is that they can heal and that monsters largely can't. This is huge and very difficult to understate. At high levels, just to compete, monsters need that ability too. Include a healer or maybe two in most fights. It can be as simple as another generic monster who has a healing power. Make sure the monster stands out from the crowd so the party can target him. It also gives good direction to the fight and forces the players to move about and get at the well defended healer instead of just bashing through the closest monsters first.

Example: If I were designing a fight around pools of lava that involved deathknights as basic enemies I might add that the deathknights are on fire (with a requisite damage aura and immunity to fire damage) and give them abilities to push players into the lava. The encounter begins when the players trigger a trap in which the floor turns into a slide that guides them straight into a pool of lava around which the deathknights are waiting to pounce. Among the Deathknights is a deathknight king with a recharge power that can revive a fallen deathknight with 1/4 hp. Much of the rock around the pool is unstable and if certain squares are stepped in by PCs they have to make checks or have it crumble away beneath them possibly falling into the pool.

 

[pemerton]

The biggest thing with high level fights is that everything has to be bigger.

<snip>

Each party member probably has several encounter abilities to get themselves out of serious trouble and probably one way to come back from the brink.

<snip>

Terrain is always important in 4e but at higher levels it should go from being a distraction or an obstacle to an outright weapon. The very ground the PCs fight on should often conspire to kill them and shield the enemies. Include gratuitous pools of lava, acid baths, and 100 ft deep chasms anywhere they could conceivably be found.

<snip>

don't pull any punches.

I would agree with all of this. I would add - be ready for the players to have their PCs use the terrain to their advantage - for example, in the hydra fight that I linked to upthread, the PCs used their Fire Horn to strip the fire resistance from the elementals, then pushed them into the lava; in the beholder encounter, the invoker PC used forced movement to impale the beholder on a stalactite.

Some GMs might be worried that letting the players improvise in this sort of way will unbalance things. My advice is - build your encounters on the assumption that the players will improvise in some fashion or other (you don't need to know exactly how). Then when they do, they get to save the day, rather than turn things into a cakewalk.

the primary strength of the players is that they can heal and that monsters largely can't. This is huge and very difficult to understate. At high levels, just to compete, monsters need that ability too.

This is one point where I'm inclined to disagree. The occasional healing monster can be interesting, but I wouldn't recommend it in general. Regeneration is a book-keeping pain (though it gives rise to the tactical question of how to shut it off), and active healing powers can just tend to induce grind. Rather than healing, I would suggest piling in an extra monster/NPC or two.

 

[MortalPlague]

I would agree with all of this. I would add - be ready for the players to have their PCs use the terrain to their advantage - for example, in the hydra fight that I linked to upthread, the PCs used their Fire Horn to strip the fire resistance from the elementals, then pushed them into the lava; in the beholder encounter, the invoker PC used forced movement to impale the beholder on a stalactite.

Some GMs might be worried that letting the players improvise in this sort of way will unbalance things. My advice is - build your encounters on the assumption that the players will improvise in some fashion or other (you don't need to know exactly how). Then when they do, they get to save the day, rather than turn things into a cakewalk.

This is one point where I'm inclined to disagree. The occasional healing monster can be interesting, but I wouldn't recommend it in general. Regeneration is a book-keeping pain (though it gives rise to the tactical question of how to shut it off), and active healing powers can just tend to induce grind. Rather than healing, I would suggest piling in an extra monster/NPC or two.

On top of that, the improvisation you mentioned would make for a great gaming story. You don't want to quash good stories for the sake of a balanced combat.

I've had some experience with Epic tier, so I feel I can talk about a few things. I ran the one-shots against the gods at L30, I ran a campaign from level 19-20 (not epic, but close enough to count), and I ran a L24 game. You will always have to tailor everything to your PCs; if your party is striker heavy, they may have an easy time dishing out damage, but not so easy taking damage. If your leader doesn't have many saving throw granting abilities, conditions can sink your PCs (or at least make things very grindy). If they're mainly melee, a fight at range with tough terrain can be killer. Be aware of what their strengths and weaknesses are, both so you can exploit them, and so you can play to them.

There's an excellent resource by Sly Flourish you should have a look at. They publish an excellent PDF titled Running Epic Tier D&D Games, which has a ton of useful information. Plenty of great tips, like to ignore the rules, and how to run an epic plot. It's been one of the most useful DM books I've read.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The best thing about designing Epic encounters is that the encounter guidelines still work. Put together a bunch of same-level monsters, and get a modest challenge.

The worst thing about designing Epic encounters is that the encounter guidelines still work. You have to get more creative at Epic to convey the epic-ness of it. A modest challenge isn't going to feel epic, it's going to feel modest, and throwing hard encounters constantly, while an option, is just going to feel hard. The DM really has to shade towards 'storytelling' to get the epic scope and feel out. It becomes what you're fighting for as well as what you're fighting that can convey that.

For instance, I'm in an Epic game at 25th level and current story arc ended with the Abyss and Elemental Chaos separated from eachother. When your actions influence a change in cosmology, you might be Epic...

 

[Will Doyle]

Thanks for the replies, folks. Some great stuff to ponder there - looks like epic scope and consequence are key, with battles giving the PCs options to improvise. Epic also seems more suited to forced movement and damaging hazards within the environment. Bigger environments are more important I guess, if only due to the increase in larger sized creatures. Also, MortalPlague - many thanks for the link to that SlyFlourish pdf, that looks perfect.

n00bdragon - I'd not thought about healing, but it's a very interesting idea, even if it does lead to more book-keeping. One thing I try to do with encounter design in general is provide "sub-objectives" within battles - e.g. you're not just slogging it out, you're slogging it out while trying to disable minion-spawning gates, or whatever. I could easily see myself designing environmental features that revive dead enemies, or provide temporary HP, etc.

 

[Joshua Randall]

You can glean some good advice from the Living Forgotten Realms (LFR) Epic-tier adventures:

http://www.livingforgottenrealms.com/
(search for EPIC#-# where #-# is 3-1, 3-2, 3-3, 4-1, 4-2)
[sblock=direct links to .zip files of the adventures]
EPIC4-2 (level 25)
EPIC4-1 (level 24)
EPIC3-3 (level 23)
EPIC3-2 (level 22)
EPIC3-1 (level 21)[/sblock]

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hey Will!

Anybody got any thoughts on Epic level encounter design in 4th edition? I've got my own ideas about what works and what doesn't, but I'm well aware that every group is different!

So:

How do you keep things challenging when the party has access to so many healing powers?

What they don't tell you is that the PCs scale approx. 18% (of a level) faster than the monsters. In a nutshell, every 6 PC Levels = 7 Monster Levels.

Therefore, at 24th-level, PCs are equal to 28th-level (Elite*) Monsters.

1 PC is roughly equivalent to an Elite of the same level (adjusted as I mention above).

Therefore the ways to balance epic encounters is to swop Elite's for Standards, Swop Solo's for Elites and swop Super-solo's for Solo's.

Super-solo's as in KRONOS.

Also - any recommendations for good published epic level adventures?

There are none as far as I know (no official good ones that is). I reviewed E1, E2 and E3 on my website - I think I gave them all 5 out of 10.

I should have published some by now (curse my procrastination).

 

[keterys]

A lot of it really depends on the optimization level of the group. There's a pretty big difference, for example, between these characters -

Striker:
Warlock: Eldritch Blasts most rounds for ~40 damage (2d10 + 3d8 + 8 stat + 5 enh + 3 feat)
Genasi Ranger: Twin Strikes plus an extra attack (minor, immediate) almost every round for about 170 (2d10 + 5 enh + 5 firewind + 5 shard + 4 item + 4 fire + 4 lightning + 5 prime punished called shot + 3d8 promise of storm, with crits spawning a free attack)

Leader:
Pacifist Cleric: Nullifies the damage of one monster every round.
Tactical Warlord: Gives +9 Initiative and uses Hail of Steel or Death from Two Sides to make a monster die every round.

Defender:
Cavalier: Subpar damage to adjacent enemies that attack my allies, as long as those enemies don't teleport, forced move, or stop OAs (daze, stun, etc)
Sigil Carver Swordmage: Nullifies two monsters worth of damage every round.

Controller:
Hunter: Okay damage while applying fairly negligible soft control to one guy.
Invoker: Dazing and Stunning the entire encounter.

Anyhow, my experience is that most people are in between those two ranges, so level + 1 to level + 2 actually still work just fine for moderate encounters, and level + 3 or level + 4 can still threaten a TPK. As long as you update monsters for new design standards and are fairly aggressive about using your options, setting up synergies, etc.

In particular, I'd advise against adding high defense and hit point enemies willy nilly, cause you're just inviting grind _unless you have optimized strikers_. For example, if the group has a swordmage, cleric, warlock, wizard don't expect much damage out of any of those; even as they're probably able to mitigate and heal a ton. Another group might be an artificer, barbarian, ranger, fighter and obliterate enemies, but have very little ability to heal.

Do make the PCs attack each other and themselves. It tends to auto-scale for the level of optimization, and it's often hilarious.

For what it's worth, I run and play epic all the time, and I've been involved in all of the epic adventures for LFR except for 3-1. So I'd be happy to answer more specific questions, if you have them.