The Slow Death of Epic Tier

[pemerton]

Playing that level of game is one thing, but creating the environment where players are ready to take on that responsibility and have something they believe in so strongly that they want and need to be 'god' of it is more difficult.

I don't like the way PCs hit level 21 and suddenly its 'WHAM! You are now godlike!' Especially if at earlier levels you could essentially bumble through by killing everything and picking up the treasure.

To make it work you need to be sowing the seeds of plot and drama and character way before then. Like a PCs first love has been turned undead (when he was, say, level 8). He's tried all kinds of quests and rituals and whatnot to get her back, and failed and failed and failed. And finally (at level 21) he goes 'Screw you Orcus, things just got personal.'

And the party quests and battles and plots and eventually kills Orcus, and undeath no longer exists for a while (until some author with a vivid imagination goes and writes Frankenstein and he seeps slowly back into the world). But what really happened is the hero got the girl - killing Orcus wasn't IT. It's just how the story to get the girl played out.

This is the way I see Epic level. PCs can get stuff done by rearranging the concepts that create the world. But the responsibility lies with the GM to provide meaning to that world such that they have personal stuff they need to get done.

These ideas don't come from running or playing D&D, btw. These are Herowars ideas, but I think they fit the discussion.

I agree that HeroWars gives a good handle on how to approach Epic play. I think there is also some good stuff in The Plane Above - I posted on this when that book came out.

The only part of your post I'd quibble with is where you say "the responsibility lies with the GM to provide meaning". I think the GM bears the responsibility to make this sort of meaning possible - by doing things like killing off the girlfriend at level 8 - but the players also have to be prepared to invest in the game and in their PCs. Luckily 4e has (in my view) a lot of easy ins for the players - the Raven Queen, the split between the branches of elvenkind, a good variety of demons and devils, an interesting god of civilization combined with a post-civilization/points of light gameworld, etc. These are also features that integrate the planar bias of Epic (which I agree is very obvious) with a concern for the PC's own world (which I agree is an important part of emotionally engaging the players).

In a game that focuses on gods and themes that (at least to my eye) don't provide the same easy ins - eg Pelor as a prominent god (where's the drama?), exploring dungeons on the Outer Isles of the Astral Plane, hanging out in Sigil, mapping the Elemental Chaos - then I can see that Epic Destinies and the Epic Tier might be harder to motivate and extract engaging play from.

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

Primordials, Gods, Archfiends and Daemon Princes (some of whom were Gods/Primordials)

Adding to the list (now with Archfey):

Yeenoghu, Demon Prince of Gnolls (Level 28 solo, Dragon #364)
Mual-Tar, the Thunder Serpent (Level 35 solo, Dragon #370)
Alloces, the Butcher of Nessus (Level 28 elite, Dragon #373)
The Prince of Frost (Level 31 solo, Dragon #374)
Koliada, the Winter Witch (Level 26 solo, Dungeon #162)
Codricuhn, the Blood Storm (Level 27 solo, Dungeon #172)
Balcoth, the Groaning King (Level 33 solo, Dungeon #178)
Baphomet (Level 28 solo, Manual of the Planes)
Dispater (Level 28 solo, Manual of the Planes)
Zuggtmoy, the Lady of Decay (Level 22 solo, Demonomicon)
Belashyrra, the Lord of Eyes (Level 28 solo, Eberron Campaign Guide)

Ogrémoch is Level 34, btw.

 

[chaochou]

The only part of your post I'd quibble with is where you say "the responsibility lies with the GM to provide meaning". I think the GM bears the responsibility to make this sort of meaning possible - by doing things like killing off the girlfriend at level 8 - but the players also have to be prepared to invest in the game and in their PCs.

Agree, totally. The players have to take the opportunities to connect with the in-game world. In my experience most players will, but they tend to follow the GM's lead in terms of style. If I run 20 levels of dungeon crawl variants it'll be hard to suddenly get them to switch to developing narrative hooks and emotional ties for their characters.

Also agree that there are lots of interesting themes for Epic tier to pursue - I'm slowly prepping a campaign and thinking about how to get some of those into play to see what grabs the PCs attention.

 

[KidSnide]

Agree, totally. The players have to take the opportunities to connect with the in-game world. In my experience most players will, but they tend to follow the GM's lead in terms of style. If I run 20 levels of dungeon crawl variants it'll be hard to suddenly get them to switch to developing narrative hooks and emotional ties for their characters.

Also agree that there are lots of interesting themes for Epic tier to pursue - I'm slowly prepping a campaign and thinking about how to get some of those into play to see what grabs the PCs attention.

This is actually one of the other problems with epic-level play. The vast majority of epic foes are extra-planar is nature. Although the outer planes can always be a threat to the PCs' homeland, epic-level play tends to involve the PCs leaving the locations and NPCs to which they have developed attachments. That's a major barrier for the games I tend to play/run.

Related, I find the 21-30 nature of the epic tier to also be a little problematic. To my mind, a standard use of the epic tier should be as the last adventure to a campaign, not the last third. In a campaign arc that isn't supposed to end with fighting a demon prince / god, there's only so much epic gameplay to be had. However, it seems to me that epic destinies and the character generation rules would make a level 1-23 game a bit of a bummer for the players. Thoughts?

-KS

 

[Barastrondo]

Epic tier is a somewhat contested subject among my group. At least one player would like to keep playing until he runs out of levels (and accordingly isn't a fan of the mandated retirement at 31st); another is very uninterested in epic tier, and would rather see closure at the top of paragon.

I also see the ghettoization of epic content as kind of a problem. KidSnide, your observation's spot on. I run a pretty social game, so many of my players are interested in relationships with NPCs they've been hanging around since the early levels. Not just romantic relationships, mind: mentorships, rivalries, friendships, even things like playing matchmaker between NPCs. Stuff that goes on in between adventures. As designed, epic tier is meant either to take place somewhere outside that world or to draw the players' attention to the world-shaking threats it represents, discouraging them from spending casual time in a peaceful setting.

Personally, I'd like to see epic tier addressed more from the perspective of people who are running multiple games simultaneously at different levels in the same world. I come from a long tradition of jumping around: having one group at 11th level, another at 5th, and a brand-new group starting at 1st, in different regions. It would be interesting to see some more attention placed on ways for one group to have epic adventures actually in the world, without necessarily changing the world such that now the other two groups' games are about the world-changing stuff that the epic-tier party brought with them. It's a difficult approach to take, and if the answer is "you shouldn't do it: either break off epic tier into other planes, or make the whole world about what the epic tier is doing," then that's not a good sell.

 

[Prestidigitalis]

Call me old fashioned, but I don't consider arch demons and the like to be gods unless WotC spells out "god" in their description, and not merely as "is worshipped as a god". So "Zbggglmnnn is a demon god" -- check. "Zbggglmnnn is an arch demon, worshipped as a god by cockroaches and sentient navel lint" -- nope.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Call me old fashioned, but I don't consider arch demons and the like to be gods unless WotC spells out "god" in their description, and not merely as "is worshipped as a god". So "Zbggglmnnn is a demon god" -- check. "Zbggglmnnn is an arch demon, worshipped as a god by cockroaches and sentient navel lint" -- nope.

Meh. God, Primordial, Demon Prince, Arch Fey. The lines are pretty blurry if you ask me. They are all "super powerful mystical entities" of whatever sort. At least in my campaign the inhabitants of the world are pretty unclear on these kinds of distinctions. Knowledge of other planes of existence etc is a pretty rare commodity. Different types of entities go by all sorts of names and there is plenty of confusing misinformation and partial knowledge. One source might call Rorn an "Elder God" and another might call him a "Demon". Neither may be precisely correct but they aren't exactly WRONG from the perspective of mere mortals either. A high level wizard or religious expert might well understand the different to whatever degree it matters but to the vast majority of inhabitants of the world they are all just powerful beings, bad, good, or indifferent.

I don't see where it makes any real difference in play in other words if Demogorgon is a demon or an evil god. He's a bad guy. He does bad things. You want to stop him and maybe lop his head off if you can. It might come into the plot that you need some specific potency against demons to defeat him and that same magic isn't going to affect an Arch Fey but the characters can learn and research that stuff. It is all just labels and shouldn't be the focus of things in general except as much as it adds interest to the background.

 

[KidSnide]

I also see the ghettoization of epic content as kind of a problem. KidSnide, your observation's spot on. I run a pretty social game, so many of my players are interested in relationships with NPCs they've been hanging around since the early levels. Not just romantic relationships, mind: mentorships, rivalries, friendships, even things like playing matchmaker between NPCs. Stuff that goes on in between adventures. As designed, epic tier is meant either to take place somewhere outside that world or to draw the players' attention to the world-shaking threats it represents, discouraging them from spending casual time in a peaceful setting.

Personally, I'd like to see epic tier addressed more from the perspective of people who are running multiple games simultaneously at different levels in the same world. I come from a long tradition of jumping around: having one group at 11th level, another at 5th, and a brand-new group starting at 1st, in different regions. It would be interesting to see some more attention placed on ways for one group to have epic adventures actually in the world, without necessarily changing the world such that now the other two groups' games are about the world-changing stuff that the epic-tier party brought with them. It's a difficult approach to take, and if the answer is "you shouldn't do it: either break off epic tier into other planes, or make the whole world about what the epic tier is doing," then that's not a good sell.

I think there are three choices:

1) You can run a game in an epic world, not unlike the Illiad (at least under certain interpretations), where gods and demi-gods are sometimes physically presents and impossible epic tasks are expected. That isn't to say that every kingdom has an epic ruler - an epic level king would be the exception. It's just that there is a meaningful population of unique epic heroes and monsters that common folk avoid tangling with. (Forgotten Realms games are probably best run with this perspective, although the tone of that world can be very inconsistent with it's power level.)

2) You can run a game in which epic threats are the rare exception. In this world, epic heroes are vanishingly rare and an epic threat is a major concern for everyone. A story line in this could end with a epic threat, but that would be the exception, not the rule and a failure in confronting the epic threat could have massive reverberations in the world. That isn't to say that non-epic stories can't take place at the same time, but a well-known epic threat could dominate the world's attention in the same way that, say, World War II dominated the world's attention in the early 1940s.

3) You can run a game in which there are many epic threats, but they are ghettoized to the outer planes (or some other arena). This is the D&D default, and it has the advantage of allowing writers to work on epic story for the default D&D world without having that story interfere with the generic heroic/paragon world. So, from WotC's perspective, this makes a lot of sense, but -- if you actually want to run a game with epic content -- this non-integrated structure seems worse to me than either of the other alternatives.

-KS

 

[Sunseeker]

I think one of the problems here is that to be a 'god' means to be more than HP and AC and a bunch of powers and actions.

It means to be the physical representation of something which mortals experience - summer or winter or death or agriculture. You kill the god of music, music no longer exists, either physically or conceptually.

I disagree, but that's mostly because I'm more of an objectivist in this case. Music will continue to exist, as will the seasons, storms, ect... The gods are representations of those things, if those things cease to exist, so do their gods, but I do not believe the reverse it true.

Playing that level of game is one thing, but creating the environment where players are ready to take on that responsibility and have something they believe in so strongly that they want and need to be 'god' of it is more difficult.

I don't like the way PCs hit level 21 and suddenly its 'WHAM! You are now godlike!' Especially if at earlier levels you could essentially bumble through by killing everything and picking up the treasure.

To make it work you need to be sowing the seeds of plot and drama and character way before then. Like a PCs first love has been turned undead (when he was, say, level 8). He's tried all kinds of quests and rituals and whatnot to get her back, and failed and failed and failed. And finally (at level 21) he goes 'Screw you Orcus, things just got personal.'

And the party quests and battles and plots and eventually kills Orcus, and undeath no longer exists for a while (until some author with a vivid imagination goes and writes Frankenstein and he seeps slowly back into the world). But what really happened is the hero got the girl - killing Orcus wasn't IT. It's just how the story to get the girl played out.

This is the way I see Epic level. PCs can get stuff done by rearranging the concepts that create the world. But the responsibility lies with the GM to provide meaning to that world such that they have personal stuff they need to get done.

These ideas don't come from running or playing D&D, btw. These are Herowars ideas, but I think they fit the discussion.

This however, is a wonderful way to forfill those "epic destinies".

 

[chaochou]

Related, I find the 21-30 nature of the epic tier to also be a little problematic. To my mind, a standard use of the epic tier should be as the last adventure to a campaign, not the last third. In a campaign arc that isn't supposed to end with fighting a demon prince / god, there's only so much epic gameplay to be had. However, it seems to me that epic destinies and the character generation rules would make a level 1-23 game a bit of a bummer for the players. Thoughts?

-KS

Yes, I'd personally want to use Epic tier as the culmination of a story-line. I couldn't just keep throwing new 'epic' stuff at PCs (in any game) without it being founded in some sort of pre-epic story or intrigue.

With limited credible opposition, taking out the story's central villain would be the end. I think there are plotlines to make it more than upping stat blocks for a few fights - splitting the party and forcing them to fight in pairs to mount crystals in temples thousands of miles apart simultaneously to take down a magical ward, cutting deals with my enemy's enemy and subsequent betrayal, etc.

I don't know whether I could sustain that for 10 levels. I guess I'd keep going until we were all ready for the story outcome to be decided.