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<blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 5107913" data-attributes="member: 29746"><p>Carefully.</p><p> </p><p></p><p>People who don't have the attention to/flair for details that I do often get bogged down in situations that I merely find enjoyably challenging/engaging; I'm a very unusual specimen that way. I only have one or two friends who honestly would want to bother statting up something that big "properly" (meaning, taking note of all the little details). The real key with it IMO is to make extensive use of shortcuts, such as having feat packages picked out, or knowing the "endlessly stackable" feats like Epic Toughness by heart so you can just easily add large numbers of them to whatever critter you need to fill thousands of feat slots for with simple multiplication. For a 40K HD critter, I'd likely spend most of the feats on Armor Skin, Improved Toughness/Epic Toughness, and stuff like that, and it'd really be a matter of deciding on the ratio I want for defense vs. offense. The feats granting individual abilities like Power Attack or Extend Spell are small enough in number that a creature with so many feat slots can be reaonably assumed to have them all, if you want to. That cuts decision time down considerably. Of course, this means that creatures that get big enough tend to all have the same abilities, but that's really how things <strong>should</strong> be when you're talking about things that are billions of years (or more) old and hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than gods. The differences then are not in the feats, but in the abilities that are appropriate to the being's tier: in this case, Eternal/Transcendental.</p><p> </p><p></p><p>Good luck! It'll be interesting to read the results.</p><p> </p><p></p><p><strong>All</strong> the math? Certainly not. A certain amount of math is necessary to avoid the game becoming a case of rock-paper-scissors, or coin flips. It's a question of how <strong>much</strong> math is appropriate to deal with whatever situation is at hand. The primary reason I dislike 4th Edition, recall, is that it's too simplistic. I agree that 3.X needed simplifying at high levels, but 4E went way too far for me. It made everything homogenized such that the game doesn't "feel" different enough to be interesting at high levels vs. low levels. Oversimplification became the problem that broke the camel's back, for me (and for others in my play group who have since adopted Pathfinder for their new games). I <strong>like</strong> complexity. If the game isn't complex at all, then it doesn't feel "real," and suspension of disbelief (which the game really depends on to work) fails to occur.</p><p> </p><p></p><p>Not actually true- the overplanning was really just the way my players preferred to do things. We had two or three serious powergamers, depending on how you define that term, and one of those guys was a type who was honestly in the game to "win," hands down. He hated to lose anything, and therefore would be unhappy if he didn't spend as much time as it was even remotely possible to spend making sure he had every possible advantage in a given combat. At ultra-high levels, this degenerated into spending several sessions using divination after divination after database access after clairsentient power-use after... (you get the idea) until he was satisfied that he had all the information about a potential enemy that he could possibly get in advance, and that all of that enemy's weaknesses were analyzed from as many perspectives as it was possible to analyze them from, and thus no matter what the enemy did he'd be ready with a counter for it (or better still, to prevent it from even being able to act in the first place).</p><p> </p><p>In other words, this had nothing to do with the system I was using and everything to do with the players I had in the group. I'm quite certain that even if we'd been using a game where divinations didn't exist, this player would have been forming careful tactical plans with all the other party members and analyzing them to death for any situation he could conceive of, and altering said plans after every actual battle to refine them for the next one. He's just as detail-oriented as I am, in his way, so it's in his nature to plan things that precisely.</p><p> </p><p>In the case of the now-finished game, the fact that the party did have access to powerful divination stuff meant that they analyzed all potential enemies in advance of actually deciding whether to antagonize them enough to attack/start a combat in the first place: the most egregious case of this was when they actually used time travel to go into the future by a few centuries, and once there, travel across the fifth dimension to <em>get a statistical picture over 14,000 separate timelines</em> of how various possible attack plans for one enemy worked out for their group. They ended up going back to their starting point and then using a different plan entirely to take the enemy out without giving it any chance at all to even notice their attack until it was too late (this was against the Hungry Void galaxy, if you were wondering).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="paradox42, post: 5107913, member: 29746"] Carefully. People who don't have the attention to/flair for details that I do often get bogged down in situations that I merely find enjoyably challenging/engaging; I'm a very unusual specimen that way. I only have one or two friends who honestly would want to bother statting up something that big "properly" (meaning, taking note of all the little details). The real key with it IMO is to make extensive use of shortcuts, such as having feat packages picked out, or knowing the "endlessly stackable" feats like Epic Toughness by heart so you can just easily add large numbers of them to whatever critter you need to fill thousands of feat slots for with simple multiplication. For a 40K HD critter, I'd likely spend most of the feats on Armor Skin, Improved Toughness/Epic Toughness, and stuff like that, and it'd really be a matter of deciding on the ratio I want for defense vs. offense. The feats granting individual abilities like Power Attack or Extend Spell are small enough in number that a creature with so many feat slots can be reaonably assumed to have them all, if you want to. That cuts decision time down considerably. Of course, this means that creatures that get big enough tend to all have the same abilities, but that's really how things [B]should[/B] be when you're talking about things that are billions of years (or more) old and hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than gods. The differences then are not in the feats, but in the abilities that are appropriate to the being's tier: in this case, Eternal/Transcendental. Good luck! It'll be interesting to read the results. [B]All[/B] the math? Certainly not. A certain amount of math is necessary to avoid the game becoming a case of rock-paper-scissors, or coin flips. It's a question of how [B]much[/B] math is appropriate to deal with whatever situation is at hand. The primary reason I dislike 4th Edition, recall, is that it's too simplistic. I agree that 3.X needed simplifying at high levels, but 4E went way too far for me. It made everything homogenized such that the game doesn't "feel" different enough to be interesting at high levels vs. low levels. Oversimplification became the problem that broke the camel's back, for me (and for others in my play group who have since adopted Pathfinder for their new games). I [B]like[/B] complexity. If the game isn't complex at all, then it doesn't feel "real," and suspension of disbelief (which the game really depends on to work) fails to occur. Not actually true- the overplanning was really just the way my players preferred to do things. We had two or three serious powergamers, depending on how you define that term, and one of those guys was a type who was honestly in the game to "win," hands down. He hated to lose anything, and therefore would be unhappy if he didn't spend as much time as it was even remotely possible to spend making sure he had every possible advantage in a given combat. At ultra-high levels, this degenerated into spending several sessions using divination after divination after database access after clairsentient power-use after... (you get the idea) until he was satisfied that he had all the information about a potential enemy that he could possibly get in advance, and that all of that enemy's weaknesses were analyzed from as many perspectives as it was possible to analyze them from, and thus no matter what the enemy did he'd be ready with a counter for it (or better still, to prevent it from even being able to act in the first place). In other words, this had nothing to do with the system I was using and everything to do with the players I had in the group. I'm quite certain that even if we'd been using a game where divinations didn't exist, this player would have been forming careful tactical plans with all the other party members and analyzing them to death for any situation he could conceive of, and altering said plans after every actual battle to refine them for the next one. He's just as detail-oriented as I am, in his way, so it's in his nature to plan things that precisely. In the case of the now-finished game, the fact that the party did have access to powerful divination stuff meant that they analyzed all potential enemies in advance of actually deciding whether to antagonize them enough to attack/start a combat in the first place: the most egregious case of this was when they actually used time travel to go into the future by a few centuries, and once there, travel across the fifth dimension to [I]get a statistical picture over 14,000 separate timelines[/I] of how various possible attack plans for one enemy worked out for their group. They ended up going back to their starting point and then using a different plan entirely to take the enemy out without giving it any chance at all to even notice their attack until it was too late (this was against the Hungry Void galaxy, if you were wondering). [/QUOTE]
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