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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Teemu" data-source="post: 9050042" data-attributes="member: 30788">One thing 4e can do really well in the epic levels is amazing power fantasy that works pretty smoothly, without getting too bogged down by complex or time consuming rules. I actually had a 4e group of level 21 PCs fight an actual army of people and dragons, and it all worked perfectly without hiccups or overly complex mechanics. It was pretty amazing to be honest, and so far 4e has been the only version of the game that has allowed something like that. It's been a while, but if I remember correctly, it was a wave encounter where regular soldiers were represented as one-hit kill swarm minions. If you're wondering why, 4e technically has an objective power level in its rules for creatures, but it's not level, it's the XP. You can translate the same creature from a standard to a minion by looking at how much XP a creature of a particular level is worth. Regular mortal people tend to be standard creatures of low to mid heroic tier (around levels 1-5), so a single soldier can be translated as a high-heroic or low-paragon minion creature (levels 9-13 or so) -- but minion is the least powerful version of creature allowed in the rules, and in the epic levels a single regular mortal like that is not a threat at all (maybe an environmental hazard!).But, with a bit of rules familiarity, you can combine regular mortal soldier minions into a swarm and make it a standard creature, but even that is not enough to threaten epic tier heroes because it's a paragon tier obstacle. Thus, I made minion creatures but with the swarm subtype: archer formations, spear formations, mage formations. Gargantuan creatures consisting of dozens of people, but because we're facing epic PCs, even a single successful attack lays waste to them, dissolving the formation! They had extra defenses against single target attacks to account for the custom minion swarm rules -- normally swarms take half damage from such attacks, but minions die in one hit.I also had wings of young dragons attacking from the skies. Only in 4e. They were minions, as heroic-tier solos translate into level 21-23 minions, give or take a level. Accompanied by adult dragons (paragon solos translated as epic elite creatures), and of course a solo ancient dragon leading the army (the last wave of the fight). Again, only 4e D&D can pull off a fight like this in high level play. Sure, you could do it in 3.5 at very, very high levels, but it would be nearly impossible to gauge the difficulty, and it would take forever to resolve it. It was honestly pretty smooth going as a 4e combat encounter.</blockquote>

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