Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7346689" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well...If you look into this what you find is that early on the PHB1 provided for some really HUGE AoEs at epic, but later books toned that down drastically and many of the early ones were errata targets. The most significant being epic Turn Undead, which got a HUGE nerf. The general thinking on this is that WotC saw how people were actually playing epic and concluded that giant battle grids just don't exist! It is simply so inconvenient and downright impractical to do that the game can't feasibly accommodate it.I mean, consider, to make a 200'x200' square area requires a map 40'x40'. NOBODY makes a battlemat that size and even if you could get one very few tables are more than 32" wide (36 at most). Even a 4'x8' sheet of plywood (the size of the tables at our gaming club back in the 70's) barely allows enough room for it with 6" on each side retained for all the rest of the contents of the table! Anything beyond 200x200 is simply never going to happen. 200' is well within the effective range of mundane archery, let alone really impressive epic magic. It would be possible, IF you had a system where scale could be changed, but of course 4e is so sensitive to exact positioning to the square that this is a hard thing to do (I guess you could play at 1" = 10' as long as the battle was fairly widely spread out). Classic D&D of course used 1" = 30' outdoors, which at least gets you into a scale range where archers have to move before they can engage. Personally I think most action in Epic should be SCs. Here you're unconstrained and if the SCs are grand in scale then rituals and other less constrained magic becomes pretty key. You can always drop down to 'tactical' level for mixing it up, and at that point I don't feel too bad about the limited AoEs. Its not really like you'd expect characters to unleash world-shaking magic at the drop of a hat in a sword fight. If a capstone encounter includes pulling off something that affects the entire board, so be it.</blockquote>

Verification