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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SHARK" data-source="post: 648849" data-attributes="member: 1131">Greetings!Well, JBrowning and others are certainly entitled to their opinions--for myself, however, looking at every aspect of competitive human endeavor, especially warfare, there is almost always a dynamic of attack/defense, measure/countermeasure going on, rather successfully, throughout 6000 years of recorded human history. From that, in my opinion, it isn't unreasonable to assume that for whatever spell/magic item/tactical combination created, there is or soon will be, an effective countermeasure. In the meantime, armies still march. In my world, especially, where there are often armies of hundreds of thousands or millions of troops fighting on the battlefield, expending such efforts for effective countermeasures would seem to me quite natural, and even essential. Thus, wizards, spells, and magic items will tend to balance and cancel each other out to a rough degree.For example, think about the scope for what epic level spells and magic items can do. Vast armies might concievably have protective clouds that hover over them, absorbing the majority of such energy attacks, and so on. There can be a vast array of defensive measures created, the scope is just as limitless as for attacking strategies. In addition, as my friend Wizarddru pointed out, countermeasures being what they are, wizards are not necessarily likely to be prone to expose themselves too often, or too long, especially high-level wizards. From a state point of view, very high level wizards become almost critical national resources, and exposing them to ruthless elimination could simply be out of the question, considering how long it takes to reach such powerful epic levels. From this point of view, I can see where high level wizards would be used for intelligence, defense, and support, and actually far lower level wizards would be sent into the front ranks for the direct offensive action and force multiplication. There are always more lower level wizards, but when the high level ones are ripped apart, that side has lost assets--whether it is one, ten, twenty, or fifty of them, that quite literally may take decades or more to replace. Mmadsen! Indeed, as for the reason four characters would be dungeon-crawling, well, for lower level characters as well as high or epic level characters, that is why I think that the campaign environment needs to be fully and thoroughly detailed, so that such characters *know* exactly why they are going into the ancient ruins of Khar-Naggoth, or whatever. Not just, "Hey, there's monsters in here! Let's go get some treasure!" or whatever.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I think that Game Masters need to consider the personal motivations, the campaign environment, the npc's histories and personalities, and so on when designing adventures for epic level characters for example. There has to be good reasons why the characters are where they are, and why they are even involved to begin with. Epic level campaigns don't have to just come to a halt when the characters reach 20th or 25th or 30th level. The Game Master has to prepare ahead of time for when the party reaches such levels by involving the players in what is going on in the world around them. In many ways, the characters goals shift to become as much or more *personal* as opposed to some generic desire for "experience" or "treasure." By epic levels, characters should have enormous amounts of wealth and wealth-generation ability, such that money for any number of personal projects shouldn't really be in question. Thus, there needs to be deeper, more complex motivations.As the Game Master considers arranging and integrating deeper, more complex motivations, whether it is a complex military objective, a delicate diplomatic matter, the need resolve conflicting goals with various family members or allies, and so on, these things can all be interwoven and integrated with various kinds of opposition, natural obstacles, political/religious/ideological obstacles, as well as traditional physical opponents. However, the physical opponents need to be ruthlessly built with care and ability--the same skills and power suites available to player characters, but also diversified, and deployed with different tactics, as well as using mass numbers and creating multiple threats, and unclear objectives as far as priority. These kinds of considerations, when blended and deployed aggressively by the Game Master can not only serve as a challenge on an ongoing basis to the player characters, but also allow for different scopes of objectives, and even create competing goals and objectives within the party of player characters. Tactically speaking, it is important to keep the pressure on the party, making the environment chaotic and urgent, denying them full intelligence, or the time to fully integrate such intelligence and make perfect decisions. This kind of multi-pronged pressure can make even the most powerful epic-level characters forget to use certain powers, over look things, or make hasty judgments that either fail, or only partially succeed. In my own group, despite having ferocious abilities, they don't always make the perfect decisions, or at the right time, and I don't think most people do. Certainly if the Game Master is throwing them into a really hot environment, the player characters are going to make mistakes. They always do. The enemy makes mistakes as well, spells aren't always cast where they need to be, forces and creatures react differently to different situations, and they don't always fall into neat little categories. In all of this chaos, as war usually sooner rather than later becomes, a very desperate and confusing environment. It is in such that a good Game Master can make challenging scenarios for the player characters, and epic level campaigning can be even more challenging and fun than campaigning at lower levels.Semper Fidelis,SHARK</blockquote>

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