An Idea For Epic Level

[ren1999]

How about this idea based on several comments on this forum.

1st to 20th level is the adventuring hero tier.
21st through 25th level is the king, lord and noble level. Think King Conan, King Kull, Elric. At this level, D&D could become a combination of role-playing and empire building and war gaming.
At 26th through 30th level we could bring back the immortals where characters struggle with heavens and hells to help some adventurers or try to hurt others.

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[FireLance]

I'm fine with the basic idea that D&D can (and should?) embrace other types of gameplay apart from dungeon crawling.

What I'm not too keen on is the idea that the players have to adopt a certain style of gameplay once the numbers on their character sheet get large enough.

5e should allow epic-level characters to just continue killing epic-level monsters and taking their epic-level stuff, if that is what the players want.

 

[delericho]

There are many different arrangements of the tiers that could be made. The one you suggest wouldn't be my preferred arrangement, but there's nothing particularly wrong with it.

However, I don't think the problem with Epic play in 3e and 4e was to do with them not having the right arrangement of the tiers. IMO there were two issues, one with game design, and one with support.

In both 3e and 4e, the complexity of the game increased with level, and never really stopped. (In 3e, this manifested as the game becoming extremely mathematically complex. In 4e, it was more an issue of juggling huge numbers of options. IMO, 4e had the edge here, though I wasn't a fan of either.) As far as I can tell, this was largely a matter of the designers making sure they got the game 'right' at the early levels for release (since that's what people would play), but deferring the later stuff... only to find there were insurmountable problems tucked away in the design. (Needless to say, I was more than a little disconcerted when WotC said they were doing the same again with 5e - that will almost certainly lead to the same problems.)

Because of the complexity of the systems at these levels, there was a greater need for support. However, there were also fewer people playing, meaning that WotC couldn't justify providing that support. This, in turn, turned people off playing at those levels, further reducing the incentive to support those levels...

That leads me to one of two conclusions:

1) WotC should design the game only to cover those initial 10-15 levels that people actually play in numbers, and that they themselves can reasonably support.

Or...

2) WotC should work really hard to make sure that the game does not become inherently more complex as it goes up in level (or, at least, no more than it absolutely has to). This will mitigate the need for support, that they cannot guarantee to provide. If this then leads to more people playing high levels, this will justify them providing support, and at that time they can consider introducing more complex Epic modules. But they should work from an initial assumption that they're not going to be able to support it, and so build the game to work without.

IMO, of course.

 

[Li Shenron]

I'd love to have modules for empire building and war, but D&D character levels mostly represent the strength of characters during adventures, not off-adventuring...

In fact one of the problems with 3ed was with skills, that if you wanted to become the best cook in the world it seemed you needed to kill a lot of goblins first, and you didn't even need to learn any recipe involving them.

Same for running a kingdom or a business. I actually like the idea in BECMI that you were enabled to something like that at some level, but IMHO adventures (thus levels) should be decoupled from the background stuff. After all, the King of X might be a seasoned 20th-level hero while the King of Y might be a young spoiled brat who cannot hold a dagger properly.

I really think that this sort of background stuff modules should work so that you can choose for your character to get the kingdom duties, or the army general, or the merchant business, or the cult/guild leader etc. but you get out from it what you put into it, meaning that one player who is interested in spending some effort roleplaying that duty will be granted some benefit (e.g. free equipment, extra money, contacts, henchmen...) while another player who isn't interested is neither penalized nor benefit by his decision of ignoring such opportunity. [Actually, I believe this has a lot to do with the meaning of treasure in D&D, but I do not want to derail the thread too much...]

Back to epic levels, their sole purpose should be to scale you up to more epic monsters: bigger, older, scarier and more dangerous on a larger scale. If that means ancient beings buried underground or gods in outer worlds, it could be more as a consequence of the abilities/spells that those levels enable, such as planar travel or flying.

 

[the Jester]

What if the pcs take over an area when they're 6th level? Are they somehow prohibited from ruling it for 15 more levels?

What if the 21st level party just wants to crawl dungeons?

Playstyle choice should not be defined by level. That said, I have no problem with the idea that it's easier to rule at higher levels.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Tiers-As-Treasure solves all of the problems for everyone in the thread and also gives you free pie.

Well, if the DM wants to give you pie.

But if your DM is withholding pie from you, you should probably get a new DM! He's having badwrongpietimes.

 

[kitsune9]

At 26th through 30th level we could bring back the immortals where characters struggle with heavens and hells to help some adventurers or try to hurt others.

To 36th level