Epic Gaming

This thread is about "Epic" games. For the purposes of this thread, "epic" is broadly defined as the highest levels of play, or even post-level play. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons has typically defined Epic level to be 21st level and higher. Other game systems may have their own rules for when the rules start "breaking down-INTO AWESOME!" points.

I've recently started my own epic 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign (still looking for players! The mage dropped :(), but hey Troperville, let's hear about your experiences. After all, not everyone can be content to be Mere Mortals, amirite?

I thought we already had an Exalted thread.

Exalted would not actually qualify as "epic" for the purposes of this thread, because Solar Exalted are actually a default power level for the system :P

It was a joke. Y'know. "Oh, Exalted is an epic story. I get it. Haha."

Yeah.

Anyway; my favourite story from an Epic 3.5 campaign is when my entire party got teleported to the Underdark, basically directly to Valsharess' throne room by some dick Wizard. After a few turns of combat that go pretty badly, she gets bold, as most of our party is in shambles (my Wizard/Archmage is the only one that is not prone), steps forward, and taunts us. "You shall never see the sun again, worms!", or something to that degree.

At which point my Wizard prompty grins, adjusts his glasses with the opaque reflection trope, and smacks her with Nailed to the Sky. "Well, actually..." he says, as there is an echo of a scream, wet crunch, and a lot of displacing rock.

Next turn, shower of debree. Five turns later, sunlight.

Thank you, arrogance.

edited 30th Sep '11 10:45:41 PM by Korochun

Heh. My Psion/Wizard does the opaque glasses thing in a Dn D game I'm in. It's only paragon, not epic, and is 4E.

On the other hand, I deal like, 200 damage on the first or second round of combat, so who's to say I'm not epic? :P

So, I randomly decided to maybe start up an epic 3.5 game on a very short term basis. BROKENTASTIC!

I've played in a couple of epic-level (~1400 points) GURPS games. To give you an idea of what that means, one character had the ability to cause any any person not specifically immune to become fanatically loyal to him just by looking at them, AND the ability to instantly teleport anywhere on Earth, AND virtual omniscience for all events present and future, AND the ability to reincarnate in mere days if killed, AND the ability to virtually guarantee his choice of success or failure on any skill roll for himself or anyone else he can see.

Obviously, games like that can only go so far before the universe is destroyed.

Heh.

Points based games.

Point based - WITH MODIFIERS!

Doomsday Weapon (Accessibility: Only on second Fridays, -50%)

Time Manipulation (Accessibility: Only for changing the time to a second Friday, -80%)

edited 13th Oct '11 10:01:10 AM by EdwardsGrizzly

XD

So, last session, my party had three P Cs die. With Potions of Life, they all survived though, so, there's that. The enemy was this guy who had Catastrophic Dragon aura type mechanics, so he was constantly busting up the arena, and then once every 3 rounds, the broken up areas shattered, sending people over the edge into the elemental chaos below.

Was fucking nuts.

I would not mind an epic 3.5 game.

This was 4E. Admittedly, Death Is Cheap

Oh, you may have been talking about the 3.5 game I was thinking of starting. Yeah-no interest for that showed up so the idea was abandoned.

edited 22nd Feb '12 1:21:40 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

We've had some fairly Epic Shadowrun game (Which is a nebulous thing at best, since depending on build, karma may not matter as much to you, only money, and vice versa)

It was pretty fun, but we never got to finish it, sadly. But my character completed his character arc and life-long dream: Owning an Ares City Master (ie: An anti-riot APC) with a beer slush machine in the back.

I'm currently running a game that isn't technically epic, players are 16 level, but has an epic feel, i.e. players are Pathfinder Gestalt characters trying to save the multiverse from a being only called The Abomination. So far they've run through the Tomb of Horrors, and are going to Ravenloft next. I'm also planning on sessions in The World of Darkness, Sigil, The Far Realm, and another friends homebrew world called Vania where commoners are 10th level. Our Gunslinger/Alchemist asked me how I came up with this campaign idea and I said I couldn't decide on a campaign setting, so I chose all of them.

Ran an Inspiration-10 Genius: The Transgression game once, because I wanted to play a silly, mad-science pulp game based on the wonder system.

The party consisted of a massive, 600-year-old Grimm Techno-Knight, a Hoffnung character whose weapon of choice was a contained black hole and an army of flying robo-spheres, an Artificer who had built three Rank-5 Wonders into smartphone apps, and a guy who worshipped a squid-god, had turned himself into a man-cephalopod hybrid, and maintained the gang's spaceship - an enormous, flying, entirely biological nautilus.

Final fight consisted of fighting an egyptian-themed illuminated psychic who believed he was Apep, who was piloting his his pet metal centipede-thing (which measured an astronomical unit in length, for reference) on top of a massive holographic platform suspended over the seemingly surface of the Sea of Nothing, a bardo representing writhing, primordial chaos. The Knight and the Smartphone guy ended up rapelling from a robosphere into a crack in the centipede's eye lens, where the knight fought the Illuminated (who turned into a snake with a black hole for a mouth) and Smartphone guy tried to hack and shut down the holograph-producing machine. He succeeded, and when the disc suddenly didn't exist any more, the snake-scientist and his metal centipede fell into the oblivion of the Sea of Nothing and was no more, as the Smartphone guy teleported back onto the squid, and the mortally wounded Knight gave a final salute.

Amazing game, but rolling up everyone's wonders when they've got 100 Mania points to throw around gets a little tiring, even if the wonders that get produced are awesome.

We did one in my group with Pathfinder/D&D. It was kind of the culmination of the last several years of playing, with the first arc involving characters that had been built up from level 1 (before my time in the group), moving on to a campaign set a few thousand years into the future involving level 14-15 orcs deciding the fate of their tribe and thereby the world, and then a timeskip to the broken world they left behind using epic-level characters to try to stop the apocalypse. Several of us had the Leadership feat, and I played an Epic-level Noble, so there was a lot of city-building and defense in between heading out as high-level adventurers to slay the Four Horsemen. Sadly, the group kind of fell apart due to internal politics and conflicting schedules three horsemen in.

Man, I'd forgotten this thread existed. Guess not a lot of people play "epic" games, since they tend to be broken. Currently running a (different) 4E game where the party is 28th level. It's a lot closer to being balanced than any other campaign I've ever run, but the boss fights tend to be way too easy even with significant modifications.

Legend does a good job of remaining balanced at higher levels. I've yet to play above 12th level with the system, but even the optimized level 20 builds are fairly tame from what I've seen.

It depends on how you do it though. "Broken" characters I found are not the ones who are the most powerful: they are the ones who hog the narrative (not that the two are not usually correlated).

Ira: I agree. I was in a D&D game once where my character was the only one with any degree of optimization, which I only realized after chargen. But since I was playing a wallflower support character, nobody felt like they were overshadowed.

edited 21st Aug '13 10:49:24 AM by Muramasan13

Depends on the focus of the campaign. I tend to run very combat heavy campaigns myself, for instance.