Trying To Decide...
- Thread starter Tellerian Hawke
- Start date
Celebrim
Legend
Because at that point we will have been doing the same story for like 8-10 years, and we'll make that decision when and if I ever get there. In my experience with long campaigns though, there gets to be a point where most players feel they'd like a change and to try out new concepts or personalities or alignments or play styles for a while. So high level characters tended to be retired to efficiently run their Kingdoms (or whatever end state they'd reached where their main goals were accomplished), and then only occasionally revisited. Quite often I would see players reach points where they'd prefer to run their henchmen or children to their higher level 'mains'.
I have the same ideas, but they aren't tied to the notion of level. In my game world, the 7th level PC's are "high level characters" and "important". Inflating the numbers merely to inflate the numbers serves no real purpose IMO, but just slows down play. The way I think of tiers of play is less a range of levels, but a range of styles and focuses of play. In the past, when I've hit what is now called "paragon tier" and what used to be called "name level", the game would change style. If early play was characterized by dungeon crawling and solving murder mysteries, and later play by grand quests and saving the kingdom, then the paragon play was characterized by settling down, marrying the princess, and accepting the burdens of rulership. What I think of as epic play is less saving the world, though that happens, but settling fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of the setting.
Impressive. But also sounds very constraining? Didn't you ever think to yourself, "You know, I'd like to play a cleric for a while?", or something like that?
I'll put up the epicness of past campaigns and the current campaign against anything, as long as we agree to define epic in terms of the sort of play being explored rather than the size of numbers on the character sheet. The Battle of Starmantle. The Battle of Anaria Bay. These are things on the scale of the last battle in Return of the Jedi, played out at a resolution that boggles most peoples minds when they see it. I assure you that I'm not missing out on anything.
These words mean something like the opposite of what you think that they mean. If you really wish the sentiment to be true, then don't say them. Simply say what you mean without preamble.
Tellerian Hawke
Defender of Oerth
My apologies; I do truly intend the sentiment. My "pre-amble," unfortunately, is a habit resulting from years of internet discussions, where people tend to get offended easily, from the slightest criticism or disagreement. I'm glad to see that you are a person with which I can have such a discussion without such precautions. I shall avoid them in the future.
I don't know. What rules aren't you enforcing?
Are you skipping over movement on a grid?
Are you ignoring spell components?
Are you making sure players HAND you the spell lists they have ready and are you checking them off as they use them?
Are you enforcing resting times?
Are you enforcing WBL and hitting the players with XP penalties?
Are they multiclassing and violating the max level rules?
In low level play, you can gloss over things. In high level play you NEED to enforce ALL the rules or the players will walk all over you. For example:
Player got together the equipment to make a 200,000 gp magic item. That's 200 days to create in game time. We go about 3-4 sessions to cover one game day. He ain't finishing it any time soon.
It costs about 27,500 gp to get a +1 to a stat. Count that against WBL.
There are all sorts of speed bumps. Enforce the rules as INTENDED, not as written. Just make it clear and spell out the clarifications. If you need a list, check out my handbook guide the EVD.
http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=11953.msg204497#msg204497
I often have editor notes that say, "DM's DON'T ALLOW THIS!" and "Players! Try and get away with this!" Should be a good guideline. Honestly 99% of the true rules abuse isn't practical when you ask questions like, "And... HOW are you planning on become a twice betrayer of Shar?"
Remember the old Mulhorand saying: A Player's ears are in his back and he hears best when he is beaten.
Celebrim
Legend
At this point, it's completely clear you are an angry troll with no point to make.
You've accused me of not enforcing rules, yet you don't know what rules I'm not enforcing. More to the point though, the sort of things you now are bringing up have nothing to do with my assertion that being able to survive epic play requires absolute immunities, nor does it undermine the basis of that assertion.
No.
No.
No, but then I generally trust my players not to cheat. When they are cheating, I usually catch on fairly quickly.
Yes.
Wealth by level? No, but I assure you that in general my players are beneath the wealth by level guidelines most of the time. In any event, this has nothing to do with my point, nor do I want to get into another argument about what is a rule and what is a guideline. Suffice to say that, if I wasn't enforcing the WBL guidelines, it still wouldn't make it not true that survival as an epic level character is predicated on absolute immunities.
Err what? Have you skipped over to 1e or something. I don't know what you mean by this exactly, but in any event it doesn't really matter.
Ok, that's enough of that. Where anywhere is there any question or worry or concern of my concerning whether the players can "walk all over me". I assure you, I could keep the players from walking all over me whether they cheated, had twice the wealth by level, and any thing else - not that those are issues, but believe me, I'm well equipped to defend myself from munchkin power gamers. I never even raised an issue in this thread regarding whether the DM could hold his own. What you specifically challenged me over is my assertion that in order to hold their own, epic PC's had to have absolute immunities.
First, so what? How does this in any way counter my assertion that epic PC's require absolute immunities? What does this have to do with the thing you quoted that originally set you off. Secondly, why in the heck are you harping on and on about beating the players down and enforcing the rules and crap like that? Why the heck do you feel the need to tell me to abuse my players? My problems with epic level play have ZERO, NOTHING, NADA, to do with worries that I wouldn't be able to challenge the players tactically or in terms of system or scale of numbers or anything of that sort. I have no worries or concerns regarding whether I can compete with the players or whether I'm going to get bullied by the players or any things else to do with that adversarial crap. As I said, my problems with epic play are conceptual and for lack of a proper term simulationist in nature. It's pretty darn clear from you concerns (which to me strike me as so much petty trivial crap) that you and I are not playing the same game.
However, again, this is all a tangent. The original assertion is simply factually. Among other things you have to take into account, if you can't survive a very large number of attacks from low level spellcasters simultaneously, then your epic level character is simply toast. If for example, you are going up against Mephistopheles - which is RAW a fairly low level epic opponent - some consideration must be made for the fact that he can trivially arrange you to be attacked by 100's or 1000's of greater devils who loyally serve him, often have teleport capabilities, and have ranged magical attacks. So if you are supposed to be 25th level or something, and a few 100 CR 10 foes are still a problem, chances are you are a very dead 25th level character even before we get into discussions about how unpredictable the math gets when we are dealing with characters above CR 20 interacting with each other. This sort of stuff doesn't even require you to get up above 20th level to experience. Anyone familiar with say the D20 grapple rules knows that high level characters pretty much have to have Freedom of Action or similar absolute immunity or at some point they just get squished and die no save.
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Tellerian Hawke
Defender of Oerth
This point that you make is relative to an original point that I made earlier in this thread, and I would like to expand upon my response.
The characters have CLOSE to what you're talking about, but not consistently;
2 of the 5 have Death Ward items
2 of the 5 are immune to all Death attacks
1 of the 5 is vulnerable, but that's the guy with the best Fort save. [And that guy is immune to all forms of poison. So none of the poison spells work on him.]
All of them have AT LEAST 35/+4 DR and 32 SR.
Some of them have better SR.
Some of them have better DR.
2 of the 5 have items of Spell Turning.
1 of them is immune (via a ring) to all elemental damage.
4 of the 5 have Fire Resistance 50
1 of the 5 is immune to fire completely
All of them have Mind Blank, continually active.
2 of the 5 have 95% protection from critical hits (Heavy Fort armor) [* = in my game, Heavy Fort armor won't completely protect you from crits. It's only 95%.]
1 of the 5 is undead, and therefore immune to critical hits.
On top of all of this, they also have access to that epic spell I mentioned above (Heroic Ward.)
But basically, these guys have such high levels of resistances as to make them more than a match for any mortal army. To break an SR of 32, a 12th level mage would need a 20, and a twentieth level mage would need a 12. That means that a 20th level mage still fails to break SR 32 a full 55% of the time. And then, their resistances, immunities, and saving throws apply. So yeah, non-epic spell casters could hurl thousands of spells at them without having much effect.
But one of the things I pride myself on is that in my game, there is no such thing as "unlimited power," or as an "unkillable foe." No matter how epic you are, you can still die tomorrow from a lucky shot.
So I really hesitate to use such a premise to measure how epic they are; in a world where no one is epic enough to be "unstoppable," it's kind of hard to hold them to such a standard.
Even though they almost meet it. Ha ha.
P.S. As for the thing about an army of demons, all of whom have spell-like abilities, yes, that still gives these guys pause. They have been in situations before where they have had to face such an obstacle. They were fortunate enough to have a castle to fortify themselves in. The demon army caused them great distress; they ran out of their major attack spells, and all but 1 party member was below half hit points when the battle ended---with the party's escape through a portal.
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Endur
First Post
I like 3.5 as a refinement of 3.0. It works very well
However, I don't use the epic rules, so no idea regarding epic. But for levels 1-20 (and especially levels 1-10), 3.5 is great.
Celebrim
Legend
And as such, they are as I would expect of anything claiming to be CR 40+, more or less invulnerable to most common modes of attack, so that, if for example Mephistopheles prepares his legion of ice devils to ambush the players, 1000 overlapping ice storms would have an expected damage near zero or at the very least its a trivial application of power to prepare for such an attack. Just as a 20th level Barbarian is more less immune to an army of kobolds, so a 40th level character is more or less immune to 'mooks' that would be significant foes for non-epic characters. Simultaneously being targeted by 100 meteor swarms yields exactly zero damage to any of the characters you mention.
But here I think you misunderstand me. Despite having absolute immunity to all the expected sorts of attacks that you need absolute immunity to, they aren't absolutely invulnerable to everything. Presumably other epic foes can in fact challenge them. It would be pretty trivial to give examples, but the important point here is that not only do the above immunities prevent the party from being trivially overwhelmed by low level foes, but they also keep epic foes from overwhelming them with cheese strategies generally.
Tellerian, from your description, the big problem you are running into in your epic play is the bounded accuracy problem, which is exactly the problem they tried to fix with 5th edition. When you are designing a monster for epic level 50, how do you know what hit bonus the creature should have? Some epic characters at that level might have an AC of only 40, but some others might have an AC of 90. The range of possible values is so far beyond the range that you can roll on a d20 that all you can do is pull a number out of a hat and hope that sometime, somewhere, the number isn't always an auto-hit or an auto-miss. I only see two options:
1. Give the party more and more bonuses to-hit, until all attacks are basically auto-hit. At that point you can balance combat based on damage done vs. HP, instead of to-hit vs. AC.
2. Find some ways of introducing abilities that circumvent or modify the to-hit vs. AC mechanic. The aforementioned touch attacks are one such idea.
1. Give the party more and more bonuses to-hit, until all attacks are basically auto-hit. At that point you can balance combat based on damage done vs. HP, instead of to-hit vs. AC.
2. Find some ways of introducing abilities that circumvent or modify the to-hit vs. AC mechanic. The aforementioned touch attacks are one such idea.
Celebrim
Legend
This is exactly right, and it is a pervasive problem with high level play that both 4e and 5e tried to address. It's not unique to D&D. It starts showing up in most systems eventually in one form or another. Whenever the bonuses get so large that they overwhelm the random factor of the fortune roll, the system starts to break down. In some systems it shows up as, "Whatever character X finds trivial, character Y finds impossible. Thus, no challenge is ever a group challenge." In systems with opposed rolls it shows up as, "The whole system and all it's choices can be reduced to throwing 100 dice, and the side that rolls the most 20's wins." In some systems it's both.
The 'to hit' problem is one of the least egregious. Even worse is the saving throw problem. By the time you are up to CR40, the potential variances in your expected saving throw bonuses are so high that your best save might be in the 40's, while your worst save is in the 20's. Worse, the DC of saving throws will vary from in the 20's to into the 60's. Saving throws have a tendency to become very binary. Either your chance of success is close to 0, or else it is darn close to 1. Grappling is if anything even worse. The grapple bonus of a CR appropriate creature might vary from being in the low 20s to the 90's. If you aren't immune to grappling or impossible to hit, then you're probable a 95% chance of success touch attack away from being helplessly crushed - in some cases by a creature that can take -20 on its grapple check and still autowin the opposed check.
This is a contributing factor to the reason that absolute immunities or absolute circumventions become increasing more important than linear improvements to your defenses and offenses. Unless the number is 'nearly infinite' and far outside the range of numbers you encounter, it becomes unimportant what your to hit bonus is, or what your AC is, because their will always be foes that overwhelm whatever number you have. What becomes important is, "Can you evade an attack with a 100% success rate?", or "Are you 100% immune to damage of this type?", or "Can you ignore the opponent's AC entirely." This further contributes to increasing variation of the numbers.
At this level of play, the only abilities that are of any real value are those that absolutely defend against something or absolutely circumvent it. Getting the bonus to something up by another +X, where X is a number less than 30 or so, is fairly meaningless and probably more difficult than finding something that says, "Your opponent's defense doesn't matter", or "Your defense doesn't matter."
Which is why thing's like Anti-Magic field and Mage's Disjunction ends up playing such a huge role in the tactics of high level play. The spells are pretty crushing absolutes. AMF reads, "An anti-magic field suppresses any spell or magical effect used within, brought into, or cast into the area, but does not dispel it." Note that caster level isn't specified. It all just winks out, almost certainly resulting in immediate shifts in defenses and attacks by larger than the fortune roll. What was just impossible is now possible. What was just unlikely, is now almost certain. If you aren't absolutely immune to the AMF, now what? Likewise, disjunction doesn't specify caster level either. It just crushes everything. Anything dispellable is now dispelled, which means any spell of any duration even permanent is now gone. Moreover, the problem with the wide variation in expected DC's is now critical. It's possible that the targets are about to lose all their non-artifact magic items, and at this level of play many of their artifacts as well. Poof. Gear dependent PC's will likely have their effective CR get cut in half.
And so on and so forth.
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