Advice for a Hell of an Epic Adventure

[Sadras]

Hi, I'm have to run a 2-3 session adventure as part of a multi-DM approach for a major plotline whereby the party is going to face Asmodeus. I will be dming the first stage of hell. I have read the 4E material out there and the information looks promising, however I DM another regular group who is below 10th Level, and so this will be my first forray into epic play (of any edition).
I guess Im a little unsure of 4E as a whole and the whole epic play seems kind of daunting.

Essentially what Im asking is:

1) What advice could you guys offer me for DMing high level characters which could only be gleaned through experience (especially 4E); and

2) Do any of you have any quick/cool ideas/fluff for the 1st stage of Hell.
Essentially the players will traverse further deeper into the Hell stages, if they lucky bypassing some, before dealing with Asmodeus. The characters are level 21 (but essentially level 23 due to optimization and DM gifts).

My thanks to any who respond.

 

[Saagael]

Two things I learned from epic tier play:

1) No matter how challenging you think a combat/challenge might be, you're underestimating. The players are insanely powerful at this point, and you'll likely always underestimate how strong they are.

Double damage you deal, add in lots of weird terrain that makes combats tense and tough (not grindy with lots of stun/daze/immobilize).

2) Combats take forever to resolve, so go at it in small portions. Combat dynamic has to change at epic tier, just due to the amount of options PCs have. Instead of running isolated encounters for each room, you should instead be running 2-3 encounter chains with no short rest. At 1st level the characters will take on a fortress one room at a time. At 21st level they take on the entire freaking fortress (in waves, of course).

Bonus points: Give players opposing goals for combats. They may want to kill the enemies, but doing so will cause them to lose out on some other objective (rescuing someone, getting an item, etc). Give some risk/reward options.

For example, recently my players (level 25) delved into the heart of a volcano to find an imprisoned dragon. This dragon was imprisoned by a devil, and when killed, would empower that devil. The players needed to kill this dragon to take on Tiamat later. They had also previously created an alliance with this same dragon. To make things more difficult, releasing the dragon would cause the volcano they were in to erupt.

In this situation there were three conflicting goals. 1) Denying this devil power. 2) Killing the dragon to take on Tiamat. 3) Staying friends with this neutrally aligned dragon. They had to decide what to do to meet as many goals as possible, and which goals to ignore. In my experience, this kind of situations gives freedom and choice on a micro level, without completely changing the scenario.

 

[Evilhalfling]

You may already know some of this but.....

watch where monster come from, MM1 & MM2 epic monsters do way too little damage, and tend to have stun/dominate/daze powers, while lacking any defenses vs the same.