Getting up to speed for GenCon

[Tarondor]

My friends and I are long-time D&D players and we've been playing in the GenCon D&D Open / D&D Championships on and off for over 30 years. For the first time in many years, we're going to have a chance to play all together on the same team this year, and we're very excited.

Problem is, we're relative newcomers to 4e. We tend to play other systems. All of us have played some 4e, but only in the Heroic Tier, and none of us are experts in the system (though we've had a lot of fun playing it in the past). This year, the Championship is using Epic Tier stuff we're just not familiar with. For 30 years, though several iterations of D&D (starting with OD&D), we've mostly stuck to low- and mid-level play.

So, we've decided to do what we can to bring ourselves up to speed on this style of play. We don't all live in the same cities anymore, and can't just sit down and play a few Epic games to get the hang of it. We'll have to rely on reading and whatever we can do online.

What can you recommend? What do players familiar with Heroic Tier 4e games need to know to be minimally competent (all we're really going for, to be honest) with the Epic Tier?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Bold or Stupid]

Less changes than you think, characters have more options and tricks but not that many more than high heroic mostly I'd say read your powers carefully.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Its all about synergy. Being able to shed conditions is something you really need to be able to do. Defenses per-se are somewhat less important, something will be able to hit you, somehow, but then again raw damage isn't usually a huge issue. If you want to really optimize look into focusing on a damage type or something like that. Radiant is the typical choice these days, but cold is equally effective.

Look carefully at consumables and various lower level items. If you have some idea what you're facing you can get a lot of mileage out some of them.

Another option would be to build a psionic party and leverage the poor scaling of low level augmentable at-wills. Its a trick that's likely to get fixed at some point, but its going to take WotC a few months to figure out how to rewrite psionics so they actually work right... In the mean time the right builds can be quite OP.

I'd take a look at the charops forums and guides, just to get an idea of what's possible and pick up some ideas on specific game elements that could be handy.

 

[Tarondor]

Thanks for the replies.

We're specifically getting ready for the D&D Championships, however, and those come with ready-made characters. I don't believe we'll have any say over their composition or equipment. So we need to be ready for anything.

 

[Aulirophile]

Practice doing math in your head. My group is terrible at this, but they roll where I can see and I have all their modifiers and powers memorized. They just announce what they're using and I do the math.

Has shaved off 1-3 minutes per round.