Thematic use of Epic Destinies - how have you used them in play?

[LostSoul]

I run a 4E hack, and the PCs within are not anywhere near epic level, so I don't know if how we play things is going to be informative in any way.

[sblock]So: Heroic characters have a Goal. This is tied to a Paragon Path, and they get XP for doing things necessary to achieving that goal. They can switch goals, but then they can't take the same Paragon Path.

The same is true for Epic Destinies, though you only get one at 11th level. (So if you accomplish your goal early in Heroic, the other PCs have a chance to catch up.)

The Epic Destiny is always very specific to the character. (We've had a few characters meet their goal, so we've talked about it.) Basically, it's about becoming a god or other divine creature with an extreme reach over the world. One of the PCs who achieved his goal wants to become the god of the hunt, the wild, and protection of animals (specifically rabbits). Since he's taking on a portfolio that another god has, he's going to have to confront that god to reach his destiny.

The abilities that he gains are pretty standard 4E ones, except - and this is a big change - his skills will become "spiked" so that he can do supernatural things. One of his skills is "Hunter", basically; so when he hits level 21 that skill is going to be supernatural. I'd imagine that it would mean that he'd be able to sense all living creatures within a 25-square-mile area.

In order to reach level 21 the PC must do certain things associated with their destiny.

So anyway. The "story" gets filled in mechanically because the PC is awarded XP for pursuing their goal; they need to hit certain waypoints in order to level up; and we work out what exactly being a "Demigod" or whatever means in the context of the PC's destiny.[/sblock]

 

[Manbearcat]

Legendary Sovereign is a funny one in that it needs a fluff reskin just so it's more than "you're the crown prince", and doesn't feel like a mere Paragon Path - I want the PC to be a legendary sovereign *during* the game, not after the campaign ends! And it needs the original endline from its first publication as Mythic Sovereign added back in; something like "legends will say he only sleeps, to rise again at his nation's hour of greatest need" - so it feels sufficiently King Arthur/Friedrich Barbarossa/Holger Danske.

We opened up our Epic Tier play with something a little different which featured a Legendary Sovereign, outlined in this post.

 

[S'mon]

Thanks MBC! "Must spread XP..."
Also thanks LostSoul.

 

[sabrinathecat]

My Feypact warlock took Feytouched and Fey Liege. Over time, in between adventures or sometimes during (when we were wandering town or trying to find information), he would recruit for his pact holder. By Epic, he had almost bought his way out, and now (we just reached lvl30 last week), he is setting himself up to have his own kingdom within the Feywild. Branching away from Winter court to set up Autumnal--he loves harvest festivals, and with the Tuathan theme, changing into crows, cabbits, and other animals is good fun. Plus Dual-pact Gloom Pact made for fun. Add to that multiclass O-ssassin (from Dragon magazine, as opposed to E-ssassin from HoS), and darkness is just drawn to him. Oh, he died at lvl 19, and became a Revenant. Very twisted creature that he is, Bahamut loves his work. (Scales of War campaign).

On the other side, Dwarf shield fighter is just an unstoppable force that almost never gets dropped. There were 2 paragon paths, and 2 EDs that I liked. When in doubt, I looked at the lower level powers/benefits, because I'd be playing with those a lot longer.

For the most part, our group is people who work with mechanics, but use the spirit of the text over the rule-rampaging. Sure, there is some optimizing, but we have always made roughly where we were going part of what our characters were doing.

 

[pemerton]

I'm interested in stories of how DMs and players have used Epic Destinies in story terms (ie apart from the mechanical benefits) and how they have affected/determined your campaigns. Did they take your games in a different direction from what you originally envisaged? What sort of dramatic weight did they have?

My campaign is well into 22nd level. We've had trouble convening a session for the past few weeks, but the PCs should reach 23rd next session.

During the PCs first extended rest at Epic (which came after their first use of Epic powers - as discussed in this thread, the PCs had quite a few encounters at Epic tier before they got a chance to rest), I narrated a series of "Epic Dreams" (described in this post). I think I got the idea from module E1. I used this for a mixture of backstory dumping (eg about the Lattice of Heaven and Erathis's purposes in having the invoker/wizard/divine philosopher/sage of ages remake the Rod of 7 Parts, which also relates to the demonskin adpet who has runes of the Queen of Chaos burned into his demonskin robes and the inside of his eyelids), foreshadowing (eg establishing more context and information for Ometh, a dubious exarch of the Raven Queen whom the paladin/questing knight/marshall of Letherna has in his sites) and setting up some discussion among the players (eg the balance between law and chaos, death as transition vs death as stasis, etc).

I am expecting these story elements to play a fairly big role in shaping how things unfold - decisions are going to have to be made about the whole law vs chaos thing, for instance - and I am also anticipating a degree of intraparty conflict. One player hasn't yet made his epic destiny public, and I won't post it here, but needless to say it is fairly appropriate to a drow chaos sorcerer who is a demon-hating demonskin adept and a Chan-revering primordial adept who dreams of overthrowing Lolth and undoing the sundering of the elves, and who in the meantime makes do with an elementally admixtured resoundingly thunderous storm-marked Blazing Starfall as his at-will. (Also, once the PCs get to 26th there will be no more hiding this destiny - at least once per day it will have a notcieable transformative effect!) That same player, however, is trying hard at both the ingame and out-of-character level to put forward the idea of a compromise "middle way" between absolute law/stasis and unbridled chaos, so as to avoid a party split.

Oddly enough the dwarven fighter/cleric/warpriest/eternal defender - the only notionally good PC in the party - is more sympathetic to the drow than to any other PC, mostly because the others all revere the Raven Queen to some extent at least. So the clash between the eternal defender, committed to life, and the demigod and marshall of Letherna who revere death, may grow. Especially if choices have to be made about what to do with dead souls and their fate, which is likely given (i) the Lattice of Heaven issue, and (ii) the fact that the paladin/marshall is on a quest to free the Soul Abattoir from Torog.

I don't know how much this helps answer your question.

(Much more ground-level colour, rather than dramatic theme: when the PCs met Zirithian, the former knight of Lolth and now a vampire would-be exarch of Orcus, I made sure that Zirithian greeted the paladin/marshall as one knight of death to another. Even though that sort of colour doesn't really effect action resolution directly (though it can trigger stuff, such as in this case a debate between PC and NPC), it helps establish the feel of the game during play, and I certainly do my best to draw on PPs, EDs etc for this sort of colour as I'm running the game.)

Custom EDs seem like a good idea for tying their themes closely in to the campaign; especially perhaps where a PC has a lot going on but doesn't seem obviously headed for a published ED.

I tweaked one ED: the secret one conferred a linguistic benefit that the PC was already getting from his theme, so I substituted knowledge of a ritual in its place (to complement the rituals he already has from his Mark of Storms). Now I think of it, the same player also has a slight tweak on his Primordial Adpet theme, to make it fit Chan, the queen of good air elementals.

I also helped another player with a custom Theme - an undead hunter, modelled roughly on the Primordial Adept but buffing Perception and Endurance, and as his attack power giving him a radiant blast.

That last point brings up an issue I have with Destinies - they're a player-facing rule, but Destiny as such is not something fully in the hands of the character. So unlike Paragon Paths I'm keeping some control of what EDs are taken (much to the outrage of rpgnet when I mentioned that there)

I can see where the outrage is coming from, but also your point. I think it speaks to a deeper issue in D&D which 4e really brings to the fore: the player can send signals (via choice of class, race, theme, PP, ED etc), but ultimately the GM has control on the framing of situations in response to those signals. (It's not quite like Burning Wheel, for instance, where you can buy your nemesis at game's start with build points, and the GM is more-or-less obliged to send you up against said nemesis as part of the game's expectations. Even if Orcus is your PC's nemesis, you won't be facing him until 30th level or so, and in the meantime the GM has to send related but different challenges your way.)

This puts a degree of demand on the GM which inevitably means that some options may open up but other be closed off even if the PC would want the mechanical benefits.

My approach (based on a sample size of one campaign) is to treat it a bit like a wishlist - if the player wants to be a demonskin adept, and lets me know, I'll drop in demons for the PC to skin and make robes from. Or a slightly different example - the +6 to all knowledge skills for the deva sage of ages was narrated as him recovering many more of his memories of a thousand lifetimes. But I'd have doubts about a player who makes no effort to link his/her PC to a kingdom, or an Arthur-style legend, and then just wants to become a Legendary Sovereign at 21st. If the player wants to be a Legendary Sovereign, let me know so I can set it up! That's the "responsibility" aspect of the player-side option. For a player who doesn't want that sort of responsibility than I think one of the more story-light EDs is more appropriate, like Destined Scion or even Demigod. It's not as if these are mechanically weak, either!

 

[S'mon]

Thanks p! Sounds like we're on the same page - right down to me planning to kick off P2 in the next session or two...

 

[Manbearcat]

@S'mon One thing I've found help guides coherent, thematic play in 4e is PC authorship (or at least co-authorship of quests) directly related to their Theme/PP/ED. You may want to consider having your players write up 3-5 minor quests and 2 major quests (1 individual and 1 group) that they would like to pursue that has direct thematic tie-ins to their ED and how they visualize their features being relevant to and emerging within play.

What is a good bit of fun (and helps coherency) is having players tie-in their quests to each other's backgrounds/themes/etc. Co-author 1 minor quest (shared) with the person next to you, one with the person to the right of you and then cross-ways. Its easy to do at my table with such a small group but may be more difficult with larger groups. The whole group can sort out their major group quest together and then each player can compose their own individual major quest.

 

[S'mon]

@S'mon One thing I've found help guides coherent, thematic play in 4e is PC authorship (or at least co-authorship of quests) directly related to their Theme/PP/ED. You may want to consider having your players write up 3-5 minor quests and 2 major quests (1 individual and 1 group) that they would like to pursue that has direct thematic tie-ins to their ED and how they visualize their features being relevant to and emerging within play.

What is a good bit of fun (and helps coherency) is having players tie-in their quests to each other's backgrounds/themes/etc. Co-author 1 minor quest (shared) with the person next to you, one with the person to the right of you and then cross-ways. Its easy to do at my table with such a small group but may be more difficult with larger groups. The whole group can sort out their major group quest together and then each player can compose their own individual major quest.

Thanks MBC, this sounds a great idea - I was thinking of doing something like this for the Destiny Quests. But as far as I can see the DMG expects the whole group to have just 1 Destiny Quest, because it is the PCs' final adventure, all PCs must be 30th, and they get removed from play after completing it! I think as written it doesn't really work when looked at closely, and I need to do it your way; maybe at 21st level get each player to work with 1 other player on a Quest (would always be a Major Quest the way I do XP) tied to their ED but also connected to another PC? 6 such Quests could take up maybe half the Epic Tier on their own!

Luckily I have things fairly tightly plotted for most of Paragon Tier, but very open for Epic Tier, so I can easily accommodate this. One issue I can foresee is I may have a Wallflower/Watcher player who may not wish to do this, and a Slayer player who might enjoy it but might find it too much like work. Maybe if I ask them just to submit a brief paragraph though?

 

[S'mon]

One thing that's great is that over the past couple months I have lead my group off the rail tracks and into being really pro-active as they've embraced Dominion play. So they should be a lot more amenable to quest-setting than a year ago I think.

 

[Manbearcat]

Luckily I have things fairly tightly plotted for most of Paragon Tier, but very open for Epic Tier, so I can easily accommodate this. One issue I can foresee is I may have a Wallflower/Watcher player who may not wish to do this, and a Slayer player who might enjoy it but might find it too much like work. Maybe if I ask them just to submit a brief paragraph though?

If they are disinclined (for the reasons you mention or any other really) to compose something weighty, what you might want to ask them for is just a few phrases a la MHRP's Milestones that frame their PCs, via their EDs, the way they see them moving/evolving through the coming conflict.

For instance, take the:

Wild Hunter ED in HotF

Living the Destiny

As a Wild Hunter, you live for the chase. Your quests revolve around tracking down and dispatching oath breakers, either on behalf of those wronged by their failure, or simply to reestablish balance to the cosmos. As you bring down foe after foe, your prowess increases to the point that you turn your attention to the most infamous fey oath breaker—the evil goddess Lolth.
At first, you might have to settle for taking down her favored abyssal drow or her exarch. But the day nears when the clarions will call for the greatest of all Wild Hunts, and the Demon Queen of Spiders will feel that primal fear shared by all prey of the hunt.

Great for a Ranger, good for an Avenger. There are a lot of hooks there but you need something specific to this character's backstory and to your campaign's unfolding narrative. I know your game takes place in FR (not sure of period) and that the Zhentarim are involved in some way but I don't know much else. Do you have any relevant power-player underlings (but not the BBEG because that is a given) who are oathbreakers or that have gravely betrayed others in your campaign; perhaps someone like Lord Boulton in TSoF&I or Count Rugen? A phrase such as:

- BBEG's lieutenant's blood on my blade, his crumpled body at my feet, is all the bounty I seek.

The game could feature an epic duel between the two of them in a climactic encounter (a la Inigo and Count Rugen) while the other PCs are separated and left to fight off waves of minions.