I have another couple of concepts I'm more likely to do before I get to this, but I'd still like to tool around at Epic level before I'm done with the hobby for good.

From what I hear, Epic level is mainly just complicated. Both PCs and monsters have tons of powers, and PCs in particular become massively synergistic, if allowed, and are hard to challenge. Some see that as right and proper: the characters struggled through low levels and should now be the ones on top, moving forward instead of running on a treadmill of difficulty. Me, I sort of like the treadmill, as long as the threats and challenges keep changing (I played a little Borderlands and did not like that the tougher enemies were identical to the weaker enemies. Pointless.)

My hope for such a game would be for things to be more challenging than at lower levels. I don't know if the mechanics really support this, frankly: I have a feeling that even the updated enemies are generally not going to be able to challenge a well-built party, and most skill DCs would probably be laughable.

Still, I'd do what I could to make it challenging on my own. I think it might mostly be a matter of goal design. A character who can one-shot Orcus isn't going to be challenged by a fight the GM expected to go for 10 rounds. No, that character is challenged by a situation in which they need to one-shot Orcus. A character that can hit a DC 50 without sweating might sweat a bit when Epic-level circumstances pile -19 worth of penalties on him.

Or something. I'd want players who are more of the "Epic level should be challenging" school of thought, and who would be willing to work with me to make it such, not by making incapable characters, but by advising me on what would challenge their highly-capable characters.

4th Edition Epic characters are, at least once a day, immune to death. That says to me that they can suffer death about once a day and brush it off.

Interest? Thoughts?

I'm curious about this since I've never actually played a 4th edition game that lasted very long. Epic games in general also seem to be rare, so a chance to learn this facet of the hobby might be valuable.

I do think that Epic levels should be challenging though. But not more challenging or less challenging than any other level. Every tier of power should be appropriately challenging. At high levels, there is more at stake and all of that can be a challenge for players. That character you mentioned might be able to one-shot Orcus, but how good is he at influencing a Queen to make the right political decision for her kingdom? How useful is all that hitting power when your enemy's leaving the scene with the lives of dozens of hostages in peril?

As for a massively synergistic party, my inclination is that would be less common here on RPOL. Yeah, if characters had been working together for a long while they will have learned to adapt their strengths and weaknesses to complement each other. But when you get a dozen or more character RTJs from players who have no idea what the other players are submitting, I doubt they will necessarily work as perfectly together as you think.

I'm glad to see there's some interest!

Well, I can see it a few different ways. Mainly I just wouldn't want people to join thinking that they're intended to slice through everything easily because they have access to such tremendous abilities.

We're sort of on the same page. I like alternate goals, though I don't like people to have to be complete fish out of water. Also the "Queen" at Epic levels would be some divine or primordial entity and her "kingdom" an entire plane of existence. But the hostage idea is a good example. One-shotting Orcus shouldn't necessarily be considered sufficient to achieve victory (and he can probably come back from that anyway)

That's a good point, though the game makes it pretty easy to synergize on at least a basic level. A leader who gives out a lot of attack bonuses (which I hear is easy at Epic) makes everyone better. A defender who can tie up most of the enemies on the field improves things for everyone.

Good thoughts. I welcome others.

I'd love to play.

I've also had the problem, as a player, almost WANTING to die, because nothing can kill our 23rd and 24 level group. Heck, we're lucky to have someone drop to use healing surges.

I have some suggestions I could offer, but for now all I can say is that simple solutions make for better results than complex ones. For instance, just doubling damage on PCs can have dramatic effect. Using GM fiat to penalize PCs is usually a roundabout way of challenging them at best, and game-fatal time sink at worst.

I like the idea of having players tell you what would challenge them. I would certainly not mind doing so if I played.
This message was last edited by the user at 07:12, Tue 03 May 2016.

Haven't done much with 4e but what I find is true in any system to make things more difficult is to have enemies use smart tactics and to severely outnumber the PCs (especially if they are smart enough to spread out so aoes don't wipe them).

Interested btw though my 4e experience is rather limited amd I'll have to double what I have as far as rules.

I may have overstated it: I'm not out to kill characters; there are other ways to challenge, other things at stake.

What do you think it would take for players to pull back and make the characters less good? Or are the characters that good (and the monsters that weak) just due to the mechanics?

Probably, but I won't be doing that, unless there's some in-game mechanism causing it, such as an ongoing ritual that the characters can stop.

I'm interested to know what you mean. Penalties due to the circumstances of a situation, such as a rain of crystals in the Elemental Chaos giving a -5, which the pitching deck of the djinni yacht gives another -5 don't see "roundabout" to me, nor do they seem like a "time sing." They also don't seem complex. Can you explain further what you mean?

That's good to hear. As you point out, what might seem reasonable and interesting to the GM might just seem contrived and boring to the players. I value player input especially in regards to what they're up against.

Yes, though I'd want input from the players actually using those AOEs, because some players really don't have fun when their flashy powers are utterly neutralized.

Outnumbering the PCs is good advice but can get unwieldy. I would certainly want to try using waves of enemies, though I suspect that there are lots of encounter-long damaging areas that could block of the entry of new minions, unless they had a creative entry point, which again I'd be hesitant to use unless the players were bought in.

Well, no need to buy anything yet.

Thanks for the interest!

I forgot about the silly minion rules. That puts a serious crimp on gm tactics. :)

Also, It was supposed to be "double check" my 4e rules to see what I got. I think it is just an early pdf with only a few basic bits.

This message was deleted by the user at 06:40, Wed 04 May 2016.

Well, I freely admitted that the rules might not automatically make for a fun experience at Epic. I really don't think the game, in any edition, gets much playtesting at Epic. But there's nothing wrong with the minion rules - personally, I think they're brilliant - but we'd just have to get creative if we wanted to use them. (I notice that there aren't many minions higher than 23rd level.)

I tend to see "GM fiat" used when players don't like what the GM decided. This leads some GMs not to do anything that they can't back up with the books, yet just because something is printed in a book doesn't mean it works or will be fun. But concern over player response the whole point of wanting player input: if what the GM is implementing is something the players themselves helped create, there's much less of a reason for them to dislike it.

I get that, traditionally, a lot of skill checks in D&D are or seem like wastes of time. I try to adhere to the advice in Fate and other modern games: Don't roll the dice unless both success and failure would be interesting. If the players don't think a roll or even an entire situation would be interesting, then it just doesn't happen and we move on to something else.

That said, I would be looking for ways to make situations more challenging and avoid having massive skill bonuses simply steamroll over everything. Then again, even automatically successful skill checks can be interesting if there's some sort of choice or cost associated with taking the action. I'm still open to ideas.

"a lot of skill checks in D&D are or seem like wastes of time."

I think this stems from a shift in playstyle from how the game was designed to how the game is commonly played.

Nowadays, if the rogue searches for traps, the gm just tosses out a standardized trap name and dc, the player then basically auto rolls a disable device check, and obstacle defeated. This concept of treating everything as a mere dice check obstacle then leads to making lots of checks.

Another way though that was more common years ago than today, was where an obstacle was a story obstacle, and no standardized about it. A gm didn't tell you that you found trap X with dc Y. Instead you were given details about the trap according to your perception or search, I.E. if you barely found the trap, you might only know that it is a pressure plate, with no idea of what it connects to. You might try to just point it out to the party and step over it (no roll required), or you might try to put some shims in it that you bought in town to prevent it depressing (no roll required), or if you lack shim or equivalent, you might try jamming it with pebbles or debris, which being a less than optimal solution that might fail to work, actually would require a roll. Thus obstacles could be bypassed via creativity rather than rolling, but the rolling was an option when attempting something that might not work.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 10):

I disagree. Both of the situations you describe sound like a waste of time to me. The former actually sounds like less, because it's over quickly.

Most skill checks are a waste of time, because there's no reason for them, or the reason is poor, such as failure mitigation (in the case of incessant Perception or Insight checks) or psychological games by the GM or no one feeling confident stating something as fact. Even when there is a reason, the stakes are often abhorrent: succeed and things continue, fail and things come to a shrieking halt. This makes players averse to having to roll, causing immediate and unnecessary stress on the game.

If a skill check will be interesting if it succeeds or interesting if it fails, then it won't be a waste of time. Using skill checks only when something can fail, regardless of whether or not the players are interested in the stakes of that failure, causes problems.

As long as there are "nothing-happens-on-a-miss" attack rolls in D&D, I doubt it will get away from this issue all by itself. Dungeon World and some other games have finally dealt with this issue, and I take the advice I can from those games. Primarily though, I try to listen to what the players think interesting success and failure would look like, then we roll to see which one happens, because we're not trapsmiths, we're just imaginative people.

Wait, let me get this straight, you think that presenting the player with a puzzle and asking them to actually solve it, is uninteresting and a waste of time?

Because that is what option 2 is.

Option 1 is a character test. The only involvement of the player is rolling the dice, hence it becoming uninteresting and a waste of time.

Option 2 uses the same mechanics (albeit less often), but is a test of the player. The player must be involved because they must actually find a solution themselves.

Granted, option 2 is even better with a gm that makes failure something that still allows progress to move forward. For example, failing the disable device check in option 2 is a "You jam pebbles into crack of the pressure plate but as the party walks over it, the pebble cracks and the trap triggers anyway. One of the party [rolls for which one] gets assaulted by a hail of darts. [roll the attacks, etc]"

I honestly don't see how option 2 is a waste of time or uninteresting. It drags the player into the game, involves them on multiple levels.


And if you find that so uninteresting, what exactly do you even see in this game? Why not just stick with storytelling games like fiasco or collaborative writing? (serious questions, not rhetorical)

Is it just the inclusion of combat? Cause all I really see in any rpg is combat and either option 1 or option 2 (which option taken isn't a mechanics issue). I don't really see what else a rpg has.

Please remember that this thread is an interest check for a proposed game, not a discussion of the "correct way" to run a game.

Thank you.

I'd be happy to pick that topic up in another thread or (probably better) over private message or (probably best) drop it completely, unless anyone is actually looking for advice on making skill situations fun.
This message was last edited by the user at 21:21, Sat 07 May 2016.

Well, let me know if you ever get the concept for the game and board started. As a note for personal preference, I like skill challenges when they serve to fissure the story. Like a spy of the red mage being seen, and so the party gains intell on the red mage, or the spy watches the party and reports back to the red mage.

I could list other examples. Mostly, I like skill challenges if they can help root where a game will go. I HATE static stories where the players are filling cast roles. That's why I I like skill challenges.

If you choose not to use them, then so be it. I'm fine with that. I just prefer more than rolling combat dice and having to use all my RL intuitions to put the pieces of plots together. V (me) is not always the keenest on subtleties, so a roll can help me figure out what should be obvious. If I can just ask "Hey, what does so and so mean by that?" then that works too.

Back to the challenge level though, are you planning on doing alot of penalties to combat rolls?  So far you've only mention a -19 to Ocrus (one round cut time limit to boot!) and the -10 from the storm. Is this going to be a standard practice to challenge us in combat? Because I'm not so sure I want most fights to have flat "roll 18+ to hit unless you have an accurate attack".
This message was last edited by the user at 05:38, Mon 09 May 2016.

That was always my understanding of their intent. On a success one thing happens, on a failure something much different happens, or the same thing but in a drastically different way. If it's about travel, you still make it to the destination, but too late to make the intended difference.

I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I wouldn't use skill challenges. I love skill challenges. I dislike traditional skill-based scenes.

I don't like players having to roll to keep from being in the dark. I've never seen that benefit anyone.

I'm not planning anything and there is no "standard practice" except, as I said, involving the players in helping me figure out what would challenge their characters. Part and parcel of that is players thinking of ways they want to be challenged. I hope players would be willing to listen to my ideas too, without assuming that they would result in some sort of grind or torture session. Of course I don't want that, but I also don't want the game to be a cinch simply because the characters are Epic. A lot of stuff will be cinchy for them, but what the game actually focuses on should not be those things.

You just got me back into full swing interest again. I did, in fact, misunderstand some of what you were saying. We are in agreement on pretty much everything.

I'm more than willing, based on what you've already said, to take cue from you, the GM, as well as the other players on what you and they would like to do. It's a group activity after all, and that means give and take on things we might not individually find most fun.

I think I will stop there, as you've abated my concerns and voiced a desire to have some degree of input both ways.

Please Rmail me if the game starts. I'll follow this in the coming week or two but after that I might lose track of it, and I'd rather not miss the chance to play.

Best of luck finding more interested players! *crosses fingers*

Edit: I'm not actually sure, since this is the "game input" forum as well, if here (or the game when made) would be appropriate to discuss how to challenge me as a player. So until it's bit more clear, I'll err on side of waiting for a game to be made to discuss personal challenges.
This message was last edited by the user at 04:04, Tue 10 May 2016.

"I love skill challenges. I dislike traditional skill-based scenes."

I'm not really sure what the difference is, but I feel a bit better now that maybe the game will be worth playing. When are we going to start?

Count me in for this as well engine. Sounds like there is enough interest to make this happen.

I'm just dipping my toes back into the hobby after getting out of it a year ago. I have another game I'm working on getting off the ground at the moment, though I'm not planning on it being a huge campaign (unless it somehow proves wildly successful). So, I'm probably a few months away from kicking off an Epic level game.

Meanwhile, if anyone has questions about what I mean about anything here, please feel free to rmail me.

Thanks again for the interest.