Is D&D Really Mythic Roleplaying? Is this what Epic Tier (20th-30th lvl) represents?

[Umbran]

Can D&D, by the book, based on the assumptions of the game and not individual campaigns, support a game that makes epic levels more meaningful than just cosmic dungeoncrawls? If we look at the myths of our cultures these mythic heroes like Beowulf, Achilles, and Hercules are exceedingly powerful but their stories become foundational tales representing the values of their cultures. Should D&D RAW give help to DMs providing them with tools to make the PCs epic characters more than silly fantasy superheroes and instead icons upon whom faiths, knightly orders, empires and whatnot are built upon?

I note first that you seem to conflate "mythic" with "epic", and you might want to examine that a bit. I am not convinced they are the same.

I think this comes down to the fact that the details of the ruleset does not strictly dictate the subject matter or style of play. While D&D (and d20) do not do everythign well, it can do many things well. And, there's only so much one book can do in the way of giving you advice about any particular style of play, if only because there are so many styles.

You can write a whole separate book about mythic play. You can also write a whole separate book about dungeoncrawling. The authors have to pick and choose subjects, based on their best guess and information about the core audience. They should give DMs more tools in the core rules if and only if they've got reason to believe a large section of the market wants to play that way. Otherwise, it is the subject for a supplement, possibly by a third party.

 

[Piratecat]

Repeating an Opinion doesn't turn it into a fact. Your opinion is that 4e will be a Tactical Map Game. You've said that - three times? - on this thread.

It's an opinion, and as such it only needed to be shared once.

Simon, you may not realize it, but you're coming off as rude. Complaining about how someone says something is a lot less effective than rebutting the point. Please try to talk about the ideas, instead of the people behind them.

I think Shilsen has nailed it, incidentally. D&D 3x is also designed as a dungeon crawling game centered around graph paper. That hasn't stopped us in the least from doing really fun, freewheeling political and social adventures. I have no worries that 4e is going to be any different.

 

[RangerWickett]

In myths, the characters are constant. Most mythic characters do a handful of things throughout the scope of a society's mythos, but during their tales they very rarely gain power. They might metamorphose into something new, but Zeus is pretty much always Zeus. He didn't ever "gain" his lightning bolts. Coyote is always Coyote. He never took a prestige class.

So if you want a mythic game, start the characters at a high level, and don't let them gain experience.

Also, very seldom in myths do multiple characters collaborate. That shows up more in epics, like the Odyssey, . . . I'm sure there are other examples, but I was up 'til 4am last night killing Tiamat, so I'm a little out of it. Most myths are about one protagonist and how he interacts with the world and with other characters. You don't get Hercules, Thor, and Son-Goku teaming up to deal with a threat.

Again, myths are often about explaining how the world is. They can be simply demonstrative -- the sun? that's Apollo's chariot -- or they can tell about how things came to be -- and God confused their tongues, and soon the Tower of Babel fell. Myths are very seldom about 'beating' someone. Much more often, they're about being defeated, which causes some persistent suffering in the world. Shouldn't've listened to the snake, Eve.

What works for myths and what works for games are different, though there's some overlap. Hercules and his trials goes pretty well. The Ramayana is all about love and war and battles. (Or is that the Bhagavad-Gita?)

D&D is not set up for myths in the broad sense, though if you nip and tuck a bit, you can make it work. Just like you can play chess without a chess-board while pretending that it's not just a boardgame, but is actually a tale of a Victorian heiress using her illicit paramour's gang of thugs to try to drive out the established members of her family so that she can claim control of the family from the house's current matriarch. (Beware the opening Butler gambit!)

I'm planning on running a mythic game for my first 4e campaign. 'Points of light'? I intend for the PCs to be the first sentient beings in the world, whose presence evokes the power of gods that will guide them toward establishing an entire world's mythos.

 

[delericho]

Is D&D really supposed to simulate mythic roleplaying? I mean, has D&D gone from approximating the Sword and Sorcery daring do of REH's Conan and Tolkien's LoTR saga to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Achilles, Hercules, Perseus, etc?

It would be nice. I also think the Epic tier is probably supposed to do this to a certain extent. I suspect, however, that it probably won't reflect this style of play as well as might be hoped.

Personally I don't think that D&D is really geared for mythic role-playing. When D&D does epic (ie. mythic) what I see, unless one has a very good DM and excellent players willing to go deeper into things, is an extension of the same.

I think that's the crux of it. If the DM and the players want to do Mythic role-play, then they will be able to do so. However, whether the game does as much as it could to assist in this style of play is another matter entirely.

In many ways, I think the old BECMI D&D probably did a better job of handling different tiers of play certainly than 3e did. With 4e it of course remains to be seen how things work in actual play.

I would be very curious to know how much playtesting of the higher levels has been done, and especially extended playtests where groups move through the various tiers. I would also like to know if they have been concerned with how the game plays, or worried solely with ensuring that the maths all works out. (My suspicion is that the vast majority of the playtest has been at lower levels, on the grounds that the vast majority of games will occur at those levels, that few playtests have covered large spans of the level range, and that the focus has been on getting the maths right, rather than emphasising a particular play style. I could well be wrong about any or all of these, of course.)

 

[xechnao]

I think Shilsen has nailed it, incidentally. D&D 3x is also designed as a dungeon crawling game centered around graph paper. That hasn't stopped us in the least from doing really fun, freewheeling political and social adventures. I have no worries that 4e is going to be any different.

To stop you, no, it won't stop you. But to be guiding you by how it is made, well, I don't think it will be providing a significant focus of this kind.

 

[delericho]

Actually, on thinking about this some more, I suspect 4e will handle mythic play rather better than 3e, simply by virtue of having the tiers spelled out up front.

In 3e, there is a certain linearity to advancement. A 9th level Fighter doesn't look much different from a 10th level Fighter, which doesn't look much different from an 11th level Fighter, which doesn't look much different from a 12th level Fighter... and a 9th level Fighter also doesn't look much different from a 12th level Fighter.

By contrast, if they up the rate of power acquisition with the tier breaks in 4e, then while the 9th level Fighter won't look much different from a 10th level Fighter (and the rest of that progression), the 9th level Fighter will look quite different from the 12th level Fighter, as the latter has picked up several powers that are just beyond the scope of the Heroic tier. And so, the Paragon character faces entirely different types of challenges than the Heroic one, not just the same challenges with bigger numbers.

If they implement it properly, of course.

I do wonder, though, if they wouldn't have been better served switching to a 36-level advancement scheme (because I'm old school), and using the same Basic, Expert, Companion and Master tiers as the old BECMI D&D. As things are, Expert sort of equates to Heroic, Paragon to Companion, and Epic to Master, and the 'Basic' tier is just missed entirely.

I also wonder (contradictory as this is) if they wouldn't be better served by having fewer levels that characters take longer to go through, but with a bigger power jump from each. 30 levels in an eight month campaign means that players are going to spend an awful lot of time levelling up, for a relatively small gain each time through the process. Given how many campaigns die simply due to the fatigue of playing the same character for so long, I wonder if reducing each tier to just 5 levels wouldn't be better.

 

[Belorin]

In myths, the characters are constant. Most mythic characters do a handful of things throughout the scope of a society's mythos, but during their tales they very rarely gain power. They might metamorphose into something new, but Zeus is pretty much always Zeus. He didn't ever "gain" his lightning bolts. Coyote is always Coyote. He never took a prestige class.

So if you want a mythic game, start the characters at a high level, and don't let them gain experience.

Also, very seldom in myths do multiple characters collaborate. That shows up more in epics, like the Odyssey, . . . I'm sure there are other examples, but I was up 'til 4am last night killing Tiamat, so I'm a little out of it. Most myths are about one protagonist and how he interacts with the world and with other characters. You don't get Hercules, Thor, and Son-Goku teaming up to deal with a threat.

Again, myths are often about explaining how the world is. They can be simply demonstrative -- the sun? that's Apollo's chariot -- or they can tell about how things came to be -- and God confused their tongues, and soon the Tower of Babel fell. Myths are very seldom about 'beating' someone. Much more often, they're about being defeated, which causes some persistent suffering in the world. Shouldn't've listened to the snake, Eve.

What works for myths and what works for games are different, though there's some overlap. Hercules and his trials goes pretty well. The Ramayana is all about love and war and battles. (Or is that the Bhagavad-Gita?)

D&D is not set up for myths in the broad sense, though if you nip and tuck a bit, you can make it work. Just like you can play chess without a chess-board while pretending that it's not just a boardgame, but is actually a tale of a Victorian heiress using her illicit paramour's gang of thugs to try to drive out the established members of her family so that she can claim control of the family from the house's current matriarch. (Beware the opening Butler gambit!)

I'm planning on running a mythic game for my first 4e campaign. 'Points of light'? I intend for the PCs to be the first sentient beings in the world, whose presence evokes the power of gods that will guide them toward establishing an entire world's mythos.

Emphasis mine. I think RangerWickett hit on a major point here, a large portion of mythology revolves around a single hero undertaking an overwhelming task, often with help from a diety or two whether in the form of guidance, equipment or heritage and persevering despite the opposition of governments or gods.
D&D is more about a cooperative effort of a group trying to perform the same task with only the tools at hand, whatever knowledge they can gather and with only the abilities they can learn.


Bel

 

[the Jester]

My point really boils down to:

Can D&D, by the book, based on the assumptions of the game and not individual campaigns, support a game that makes epic levels more meaningful than just cosmic dungeoncrawls? If we look at the myths of our cultures these mythic heroes like Beowulf, Achilles, and Hercules are exceedingly powerful but their stories become foundational tales representing the values of their cultures. Should D&D RAW give help to DMs providing them with tools to make the PCs epic characters more than silly fantasy superheroes and instead icons upon whom faiths, knightly orders, empires and whatnot are built upon?

Yes. I've been having these kinds of storylines imc since about 1988. Pcs have founded empires; overthrown kingdoms; taken an entire island-continent's population to a new plane and founded a Utopia; become gods; started religions; and more.

One quick example from my present campaign setting:

Dexter Nadly was a punk kid psionicist (2e) who eventually got converted to the dominant religion, dual classed to cleric, got his eyes torn out, and became the prime religion's Jesus figure. Now, about 270 years later, Dexter is revered like Jesus was in the 1400's in Europe. Yeah, there are schisms, there is corruption, whatever, but people use his name as a blessing or a curse; they have icons of him in their homes; they study the Book of Dexter, which is an add-on to their primary holy text, the Galadron; etc. (You can read about him here if you want.) Nowadays, one of the epic pcs is an epic-level cleric of Dexter.

DnD can do mythic adventures. It just requires a good dm and good players who want that kind of things in their games.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Unlike D&D, mythic heroes rarely have more than one fight per day. So 4e, being balanced per encounter rather than per day, supports mythic play better than previous editions.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hey all!

I think the key to a really epic game is to take away or marginalise the way characters gain power (EXP) and replace it with something more mythical.

In the Immortals Handbook: Ascension I created whats refered to as the "Event System", but it could easily have been called the Legend System. Basically its a series of guidelines (covering about 2 pages in the book) which allows you to measure how much worship a character receives from certain heroic deeds. With initial hero worship leading to true worship as the character ascends.

What this does is try to make players think about the consequences of their actions so that how you win is just as, if not more important than winning itself.

So you killed the lich in the dungeon, so what, who does that benefit, who witnessed it, wheres the poignancy. Whereas if you slay the Dragon by battling him in the skies above the city and this Dragon had held the city under seige for weeks. Or alternately it may not be about defeating an opponent, it could be about the act of creation (a magical aquaduct that brings fresh water to the city), or healing (you found a cure for a mysterious illness that thwarted all healing attempts and so forth).