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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saagael" data-source="post: 5913166" data-attributes="member: 84839">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.</blockquote>

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