The Slow Death of Epic Tier

[Dausuul]

Dausuul: It's also important to realize that a 3.5E fighter was usually autohitting AC by the late point of the game and epic tier (as attack bonuses rapidly outscaled defenses by a long way). So you can throw in things like power attack on this first few attacks without any worry. Whereas in 4E, while a Slayer is pretty accurate when charging around literally everywhere he's not quite as "lolwut" accurate.

I decided not to wade into that thicket. Once you get into that, you have to consider the 4E fighter's various tactical options, and whether the 3E fighter's ability to fly three times a day outweighs the inability to use Cuisinart Strike and move on the same turn, and all sorts of stuff. It was simpler just to stack up the raw numbers and observe that they were approximately the same.

 

[Barastrondo]

Well, yes, but that's an expected part of a 3E character. 3E fighters are extremely item-dependent; you can't take away their Christmas trees and expect them to perform to standard.

Yeah, which was as big or bigger a departure from the same perspective of "existing world, new edition." Suddenly the world needs a lot more magic items in it, and easy ability to create more. It sparked a different breed of epicness. If you didn't have the Christmas tree, 3e actually was considerably closer to previous AD&Ds in some ways, but at the expense of the math working as well.

 

[Dausuul]

Yeah, which was as big or bigger a departure from the same perspective of "existing world, new edition." Suddenly the world needs a lot more magic items in it, and easy ability to create more. It sparked a different breed of epicness. If you didn't have the Christmas tree, 3e actually was considerably closer to previous AD&Ds in some ways, but at the expense of the math working as well.

No argument there. Unfortunately, while taking away the Christmas tree brings the fighter-types back to sanity, it also has the effect of increasing the already-huge power gap between fighters and casters at high levels. Wizards are the Scrooges of Third Edition.

Pre-3E, I agree with you that the power scale beyond Name level was much compressed... but the high-level world back then was so different it's hard even to make a comparison. I mean, how do you weigh 3E or 4E against a system where a pit fiend averages 58 hit points and Lolth herself has only 66, where AC caps out at the equivalent of 30 and direct damage is a high-level wizard's most fearsome weapon?

Every time I have occasion to step out of Wizards-era D&D and back into the landscape of TSR, it's like entering a totally different universe. The mechanical changes between 3E and 4E were huge, but the philosophical changes between 2E and 3E were far greater IMO.

 

[Aegeri]

I decided not to wade into that thicket. Once you get into that, you have to consider the 4E fighter's various tactical options, and whether the 3E fighter's ability to fly three times a day outweighs the inability to use Cuisinart Strike and move on the same turn, and all sorts of stuff. It was simpler just to stack up the raw numbers and observe that they were approximately the same.

Yeah, I know what you were trying to achieve but it is a bit of an important difference. The main reason the fighter becomes useless though in 3.5 is because most creatures have ridiculous spells, auras and outright physical damage canceling. This makes him really hard to play, while the Slayer is pretty happy to just run around stabbing people for 30 levels.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hey there ArcaneSpringboard!

I think that's actually what the MV: Threats of Nentir Vale book is going to be about. It's not an encyclopedia of monsters, but of groups of monsters (eg a Dragon and his minions).

Great minds think alike after all. I really like the sound of this and I do believe its the way forward for D&D.

However, they're probably still going to be focusing more on Heroic/Paragon tier stuff.

I guess some enterprising 3rd party publisher will have to do something like that for the epic tier then.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Howdy Ryujin amigo!

Upper Krust, two 'classic' themes can be used in order to make up for the dearth of Epic creatures, of a single theme. They are:

"Stuck in the Middle": The heroes have to save the world from being laid waste as the battleground for a war between "heaven" and "hell", neither of which really care about collateral damage.

"Evil Unites": Two normally warring factions of evil join forces, then caste their gaze toward the idea of subjugating the world. "Demons" and "Devils" put aside their past rivalries, in order to expand their empires. Of course they'll eventually fall to squabbling over the world's corpse, but until then....

I agree, but the point I was specifically making was that even with the three 4E monster manuals its virtually impossible to design an adventure (lets say of 8-10 encounters) based on any one theme.

Think about it, if you have a Demonic theme, you are virtually banjaxed beyond Marilith, Nalfeshnee Tyrant, Balor in the epic tier).

So even if you have two themes operating in tandem, you probably still don't have enough epic monsters to flesh out those themes for 8-10 encounters without massively repeating the same monsters.

Which is why my other point is that monster design would be better served in more tightly knit theme-based 'chunks'.

 

[Ryujin]

Howdy Ryujin amigo!



I agree, but the point I was specifically making was that even with the three 4E monster manuals its virtually impossible to design an adventure (lets say of 8-10 encounters) based on any one theme.

Think about it, if you have a Demonic theme, you are virtually banjaxed beyond Marilith, Nalfeshnee Tyrant, Balor in the epic tier).

So even if you have two themes operating in tandem, you probably still don't have enough epic monsters to flesh out those themes for 8-10 encounters without massively repeating the same monsters.

Which is why my other point is that monster design would be better served in more tightly knit theme-based 'chunks'.

Yup, you're right about the single theme being dead in the water. I figure that two though, carefully chosen for certain similarities in theme, might just do the trick. As you say though, it would be a near thing.

Perhaps this would be a good direction of expansion for Dungeon Magazine to go in? It's nice to have the odd adventure, for those times when you're stuck for ideas, but having material to flesh out your own adventures is useful too.

 

[pemerton]

I don't really see how 4e is designed any differently in terms of the relationship of the PCs to the rest of the world than any other edition. PCs start out a bit stronger, but that has little to do with how epic level play goes. Really any issue being discussed here WRT 4e is pretty much true of all earlier editions as well, with the exception of 4e having a level 30 cap.

I don't entirely agree with this - see below.

It's a question of scaling.

<snip>

With one of the design goals of 3e being to make each level a more distinct power-up, the differences between levels became more pronounced. A 20th-level fighter has a lot more hit points and attack power in 3e than he did in 2e. In 4e, it becomes even more pronounced because ten more levels are added, with the same intent of making each one a notable power-up, plus the additional tier-wide powerups.

I don't disagree with this, but I'd probably put it slightly differently.

To my mind, the way that 4e differs from earlier editions is by having a mechanically built-in endgame. This is manifested in the mechanical scaling, which requires distinctive high-level threats if the game is to play in a mechanically sensible fashion. This is a marked difference from AD&D, for example, where (as has often been noted) AC and damage don't tend to vary so dramatically across the range of levels, either for PCs or their opponents.

But the endgame is also manifested in the thematic aspects of the mechanics - epic destinies, the nature, origin and backstory of epic tier monsters, and so on. And this is a signficant difference not only from AD&D but from 3E as well.

1st ed AD&D has a mechanically built-in end game, namely, name level. But as Barastrondo has pointed out, this is an endgame which plays out in the world, without necessarily having the other-planar/mythic dimensions that are almost an essential feature of 4e Epic tier. In 3E, which has no endgame, it is possible to add build NPCs and/or add classes/templates onto monsters like giants in order to locate even a high level game more-or-less in the world. But the way 4e is built forces things in a different direction (unless a group does the work to come up with all non-mythic epic destinies, all non-mythic epci monsters, etc - but I think that would be a lot of work).

 

[Crazy Jerome]

But the way 4e is built forces things in a different direction (unless a group does the work to come up with all non-mythic epic destinies, all non-mythic epic monsters, etc - but I think that would be a lot of work).

Granted, but what kind of work is it? Let's say for sake of argument that you have a 4E changed like this:

There are 15 character levels. The existing levels are condensed, exactly 2 for 1 (i.e. current 1st and 2nd level become the new 1st level, etc.) Tiers are removed. The experience cost per level are doubled. Otherwise, the mechanics are kept identical. This work is done for you.

Now, just how much fluff do you now need to change to keep from forcing things in a different direction? (If it helps, pretend that you don't know anything about 4E design, tiers, etc., and just want to have 15 good "levels" available for D&D play.)

I bet you can change the wording on a few epic destinies, and then refluff a few monsters, and that is about it. Might be a few other things. Whatever effort this is, this is what is necessary to make it work. That work that was done for you squashing the levels? That's eliminating the effect of big numbers and other such factors that are clouding the issue.

 

[Barastrondo]

I bet you can change the wording on a few epic destinies, and then refluff a few monsters, and that is about it. Might be a few other things. Whatever effort this is, this is what is necessary to make it work. That work that was done for you squashing the levels? That's eliminating the effect of big numbers and other such factors that are clouding the issue.

It doesn't quite eliminate the effect of big numbers. Under this system, a 1st-level skirmisher will have a 16+Con HP, 15 AC and an attack at +6 vs. AC; a 5th-level skirmisher has 48+Con HP, a 25 AC and an attack at +15 vs. AC; and a 15th-level skirmisher will have 248+Con HP, a 44 AC and an attack at +35 vs. AC. The scaling is still very dramatic from one end of the scale to another, it's just that there are half as many jumps that are individually twice as steep.

1e Lolth had 66 hp and an AC that topped out at -10. Her 4e equivalent has 1268 hp total and an AC that tops out at the equivalent of -41. Making her 4e equivalent "17th level" but not changing any of the mechanics makes it semantically different, but still poses the same basic dynamics of scale.