Do you Expect to hit Epic tier?

[S'mon]

So there's discussion of how the game breaks down at Epic, and how there are very little epic tier support.

This lead to me being curious: when you start a game, do you really anticipate that the campaign will actually make it to epic level? Do you actually expect to play at that tier?

I never make it to Paragon, let alone Epic, so I don't think I'll ever get to play it. But do you?

My first 4e campaign was only intended to go to about 9th, and seems to have ended at 8th. Of my current 2 4e campaigns, it now looks like I can DM them consistently for a good few years & I'm hoping at least one of them will reach Epic. It's a daunting prospect though: ca 3 fortnightly sessions to level, with ca 22 sessions/year, = nearly 3 years to reach Epic! The biggest risk IME is that too many of the original players move away and the campaign loses impetus & peters out.

As I'll be running both campaigns fortnightly on alternate weeks there is the possbility of eventually running just one of them, but every week. Not every player can do weekly games though, and while there is group overlap I'd probably have too many players if I combined groups. Most likely I'll run both for a good while and it may be one has more 'legs' than the other and might go weekly once I see it can go the distance.

 

[S'mon]

BTW I'm running 3-3.5 hour sessions, but advancement is still about 1 per 3 sessions due to halving monster hp, more monsters, lots of weak monsters, but still full monster XP. One campaign (Forgotten Realms) started at 1st and just hit 3rd in 6 sessions, averaging 3/level. The other (Wilderlands) started at 3rd for a more wahoo, bad-ass heroes feel, and just hit 6th after I think 7 sessions, averaging 2.5/level.

 

[Riastlin]

In the game I'm currently running, the PCs are at 14th level now and I fully anticipate reaching the epic tier (though its still at least a year away I would guess). I would like, at this point, for the game to reach all the way to 30th, but a lot of that will depend on the above mentioned fatigue and whether or not there's enough material out to make an interesting campaign throughout ten levels of epic play.

In the game in which I'm a player, we are currently 6th level and though we haven't said anything about actual campaign length, my guess would be that we won't reach epic tier. Between cancelled sessions and scheduling conflicts and just general fatigue, I just don't see it happening.

Both groups strive to meet every other week for about 4 - 4.5 hours. That being said, I would love it if the second group managed to reach all the way to the epic tier -- particularly since I rarely get the chance to be a player.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

With our slow rate of progress, no. On the other hand this campaign has, as well as the previous one with the same group of players, survived the 18-Months-Trap.

 

[erleni]

Got already once to epic (stopped at 28th level) and plan to go there with the new campaign. PCs are at 14th level but we level up pretty fast (the fact that there are only 3 players probably helps, as encounters are shorter and we can squeeze more out of each session).

 

[Ryujin]

I specifically started my current campaign, at 8th level, promising my players that they would get a taste of Epic play. We were cheated of it when our usual DM decided that Epic was boring, after having read all of the available material for it (killing my chances of running him through it, at the same time).

They're currently just entering the last section of Revenge of the Giants, so it'll be coming soon.

 

[Dykstrav]

Nope.

In my very first 4E campaign, it ran for a little over a year and we got to fifteenth level. By that time, encounters were agonizingly slow and the group had burned out on it. We figured out that we enjoyed the game in the level 1 to approximately 6 range, so whenever we played 4E, that's about as far as we got after that.

We once had the idea to run an epic encounter as a one-shot, partly because some people had never played epic, and partly because some people wanted an assessment of how complex/engaging an epic encounter was. So we made a stack of 30th-level characters and planned to have them engage Tiamat as described in Draconomicon. It never happened because most of our players didn't want to play it after seeing the resources available to level 30 characters and no one wanted to DM it after seeing Tiamat's stats.

 

[SpydersWebbing]

I would like to hit epic tier in my current game, but that's probably not going to happen. We're level 6 right now, and that's after almost 5 months of gaming. By the time this semester ends we'll be around 12th level, and since we're undergrads we get a month to three month breaks from the campaign. I think if we keep that level of involvement up we'll hit epic by some time next Fall.

Hm. 3 month breaks for long running campaigns. I like this idea...

 

[1darklord]

You should really add yes as an option!

We started at level 1 in our campaign and have worked our way up to level 24.

Daniel.

 

[Saagael]

I haven't played close to epic, but I'm more of a DM, and when I started my campaign I fully intended to run the characters through at least level 27. That was 4 years ago, and luckily the campaign is still going (several people have left and we've grabbed new guys, but we have a solid group now). It is an online game with Maptools, so we do have that going for us.

The players JUST hit level 21 at the end of their last session a few days ago, so they're really excited about that. I'm apprehensive as I've heard of how painful epic tier with regards to grind and whatnot. And with the rate this campaign is going, it'll be another 2 years before they hit level 30.

So to answer your question: Yes, I plan to hit epic tier, but that doesn't stop me from making the entire campaign as epic as possible.