Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vayden" data-source="post: 4659360" data-attributes="member: 57791">Hello again all! I'm back with what I've learned from 2 more sessions of paragon play, one as a player and one as a DM. I'm also excited because I got a chance to start DMing an Epic campaign - no real details from that yet, as we basically just did character creation. Hopefully I'll have some good experience at Epic soon that I can try to boil down to tips. Meanwhile, I have 3 quick notes of what I learned from Paragon play last week:1) Minions can be frightening if you tweak them up!Like I said earlier in the thread, I like to use a ton of minions and basically treat them as terrain hazards. However, in the paragon game I'm playing in, our DM unleashed an army of homebrewed minions on us that did 2d8 + 7 damage on their attacks. We learned very quickly to fear and respect those minions. When our wizard was trying to decide whether to unleash a daily power on the boss monster, or use scorching burst on the minions, we all screamed at him to kill the minions before they wiped us out. Very different and exciting change from the normal feel of minions.2) Monsters at paragon tier don't have enough powers for their hitpointsThe basis behind 4e monster design, as the designers have explained multiple times, is that they didn't want to give monsters too many powers because the monsters were usually dead in 4-5 turns. While this is true at the heroic tier, paragon monsters have enough hitpoints that they tend to live quite a bit longer unless the party is a well-honed damage dealing machine. There are exceptions to the rule, but for many monsters, they can start to get boring and predictable pretty quickly (and even more so at epic based on my very limited testing there). Solution? Cut their hitpoints aggressively, give them more powers, or use a wider variety of monsters. 3) Every tip in this thread for heroic tier applies more so at paragonThe big fight that I DMed this week in paragon worked much better than the fights I ran last week, mostly because I sharpened in the focus and worked hard to apply everything I'd learned. The players were on a ship being pursued by enemies in another ship - they partially succeeded on a skill challenge I set up to out-run the enemy ship - they lost the enemies in a series of islands, but the enemies managed to send some summoned monsters after them before they got away cleanly. I used a Roc (hp reduced) and 4 homebrewed snakes (constrictor snakes with the addition of the flame-spitter snake's ranged attack, with a different element for each snake). I used the ship as interesting terrain, with the Roc attempting to pick characters up and drop them over the side. I introduced the snakes on the 3rd round to change the setup of the combat, forcing them to adapt their tactics. And in the best move, I took the advice of one of the posters here and introduced an objective that wasn't "kill all the enemies" - I had the Roc crash into the mainsail of the ship and become trapped, and started damaging the mast as it attempted to free itself. The players were rejoicing at first because the Roc was temporarily out of the fight, then panicked as they realized they were about to lose the mast. The various attempts to save the mast became the highlight of the fight. I'll hopefully be back next week with more paragon and epic lessons, but until then, what about you? For those of you playing or DMing at Paragon or Epic, what have you learned?</blockquote>

Verification