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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 2861044" data-attributes="member: 1757">QFT.However, I do think that by higher levels, you're getting into a pace of play that doesn't really resemble the high-fantasy genre that D&D cleaves to at low- to mid-levels. High-level D&D PCs don't resemble Conan or Aragorn so much as they do superheroes, demigods, or swirling balls of exploding anime character. It's not so much the raw damage output as the sheer array and power of movement, information-gathering, and "rebooting" capacity that changes the game. This is the major problem I have with high/epic-level D&D; the fact that designing adventures starts looking like some unholy combination of an exercise in Philip K. Dick pastiche and a four-dimensional geometry exercise. Another issue with epic is, to a certain extent, tedium; putting one challenge after another in the path of your PCs starts to get a bit boring, especially when your great wyrm red dragons become paragon Colossal+ advanced age category 20 great wyrms, and your beholders become pseudonatural elder orb Sor25s, etc. From a narrative point of view, it seems a bit anticlimactic for either (a) your big bad world-eating monster to go from a threat to a speedbump or (b) all the monsters to simply move up in power with the PCs while serving the same purpose.I'd also have to say that huge, "epic" story arcs, world-shaking threats, and powerful foes are quite possible at sub-epic levels. What seems to get really complicated at epic levels are the pacing and the mechanics. I shudder at the thought of actually *running* a combat featuring a deity or one of those insane cosmic entities on Dicefreaks. Epic entities can take days of game and real time to strategize properly.That said, I quite liked running my last campaign, which ran to 21st-22nd level, and I could have found things to occupy my PCs further. Um, yeah.</blockquote>

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