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Earthwalker
2010-12-30, 05:07 AM
I have seen a few posts on these boards of people asking for help with lvl 20 gesalt builds for new games. Or ideas for lvl 20 characters or lvl 30. It just boggles my poor tiny mind. I have never played past lvl 10. I am of course really interesting in how these games play out.

What are your characters like ?
What opponents do you face ?
How does a standard combat go ?
What are your characters drives ?
Why isnt he staying in his summoned mansion and enjoying the good life ?
How are the campaigns run ?

Lots of questions I know but I am just interested in how things work at this level and how you keep tied to the world your characters live in.

TaintedLight
2010-12-30, 05:29 AM
I have seen a few posts on these boards of people asking for help with lvl 20 gesalt builds for new games. Or ideas for lvl 20 characters or lvl 30. It just boggles my poor tiny mind. I have never played past lvl 10. I am of course really interesting in how these games play out.

What are your characters like ?
What opponents do you face ?
How does a standard combat go ?
What are your characters drives ?
Why isnt he staying in his summoned mansion and enjoying the good life ?
How are the campaigns run ?

Lots of questions I know but I am just interested in how things work at this level and how you keep tied to the world your characters live in.

These are really great questions. To give you an example of the sort of thing I see in my high level games, I'll recount one of them.

One of my favorite high level characters was my 23rd level chaotic good aasimar sorcerer, Phanan. He was caught picking at the leylines of the material plane, which could have potentially unraveled the planar fabric because he had no idea of the cosmic importance of the leylines. To make a long story short, he was apprehended by a powerful inevitable from Mechanus and brought before Primus, God of the Modrons, to answer for it.

Because of the reckless and chaotic nature of his crime, he was sentenced to organize the endless libraries of Mechanus meticulously for all eternity. Captivity proved to be an interesting time for Phanan. He spent eons pondering the nature of law and how oppressive and cold it was. He'd devise organizational schemes of his own chaotic design because the original sentence made no mention of a preferred system. He'd sort by number of creases in the book binding, color, size, first letter, number of punctuation marks, or any other inane but consistent detail.

Now, not every high level character ends up on trial for some cosmic crime, but the nature of high level play has proven to be conducive to a few specific things for me:

1. High level characters and humility rarely mesh. You frankly can't reach the heights of power (and 20th+ is the heights of power, no doubt) without some serious ambition. Mediocre or humble characters don't strive to become the best at what they do in all ways at all times, but a 20th level character is literally a paragon of his class.

2. Your greatest challenges sometimes come not in the form of monsters, but in the form of knowledge. At these levels, you have the tools to really delve into the truths of the multiverse. What you uncover may be more threatening to your way of life than Asmodeus's aspect ever was. The cool thing? You're epic and you can handle it because you're epic.

3. Combat is awkward. REALLY awkward. Everything in the ELH has a preposterous AC that is impossible for any non-powergamed melee'r to penetrate. Spellcasters immediately gain an unbelievably unbalanced advantage in the form of epic spellcasting, a system that rewards stupid and abusive cheese because it punishes you for using it as intended. More on that in the next point. Rocket tag is a common phenomenon as characters and enemies trade save-or-dies until one of them rolls a 1 because they can't fail otherwise due to their badly scaled save DCs versus the impossibly high save modifiers.

4. Epic spellcasting does not work. To replicate a basic fireball spell with the epic system, you end up spending a huge chunk of gold, experience, and time that is simply not worth it, but with enough solar cheese you can do absolutely anything you can imagine. Cool idea, but it's just unusable as written. The worst part is that these spells are actually necessary for some things because normal magic just doesn't pack enough punch a lot of the time at levels sufficiently high.

I hope that helps you get a better picture of at least what my games looked like.

Earthwalker
2010-12-30, 06:03 AM
Now, not every high level character ends up on trial for some cosmic crime, but the nature of high level play has proven to be conducive to a few specific things for me:


Thanks for the answers this is the kind of thing I am looking for.

Can I ask other then the book sorting what did your character do ?
What characters did the other players play ?
What problems did you have to over come

bokodasu
2010-12-30, 08:13 AM
Lots of questions I know but I am just interested in how things work at this level and how you keep tied to the world your characters live in.

I'm not sure you really can keep tied to the world your characters live in, unless it's super-mega-power-land. Our party is just hitting the epic levels, and pretty much everyone has some sort of themed stronghold that is getting to the runs-itself level, with a small town's worth of followers who do everything from brewing our beer to crafting our magic items. They haven't totally settled down because the main BBEG who's been pestering us since level 6 is STILL around; right now we're taking him to a locked plane of hell (and hopefully leaving him there, but some party members think that since he's "reformed" we should "help" him). I think there's going to be a Tarrasque involved. (Although if I know my DM, we're not going to be fighting the Tarrasque; we're going to be fighting the gaggle of demons who hunt the Tarrasque for sport.)

An example of a problem we had to solve - the BBEG true resurrected an entire village of people he'd wiped out a few years ago (see: "reformed", above), which annoyed some inevitables, who came to correct the problem with an army of clockwork dogs. A couple of devils are after the BBEG for cheating death some other way and are coming after us because they know he won't be too far away, and a great wyrm black dragon was annoyed with him for some other reason we never did find out. So somehow we wound up trying to a) save the village, b) stop the devils, and c) not get eaten by a dragon while doing a) and b). So there's a lot of that multipart stuff going on, which is pretty fun as far as that goes.

Combats are unfortunately getting to be not much fun. Either we have a bunch of buddies with us, which means it takes two hours to run two combat rounds (not even a little exaggeration - that was our whole game last week), or there's some sort of plot fiat why we can't have them, and then it's rocket-tag. (Or both; it takes the DM 20 minutes to resolve the turn of all the bad guys, after which you and two of your followers are dead, but that's ok, one of the others just resurrects you on your next turn.)

I think it's probably the point where you should be switching to mostly plotty stuff without so much combat, and/or retiring your characters. Don't get me wrong, I do love me a good game of rocket tag, but it's not what I want to do EVERY week.

I have no idea how epic spellcasting is supposed to work. Personally I'm choosing to ignore it.

Saph
2010-12-30, 08:40 AM
The highest I've gotten in a serious campaign was level 18ish or so, playing through the World's Largest Dungeon.

It worked mainly because of all the limits on the PCs' power - we had no access to shops or item crafting, so what we had was what we'd found. Summoning/teleporting was also barred by the dimensional locks on the dungeon. We also didn't have a huge amount of sources to pick between and the DM specifically limited non-core spells. Even with that, though, our characters rarely ran into a serious challenge.

Balance in 3.5 becomes a REALLY serious issue at the higher levels. Usually the complaints about 3.5's balance issues are exaggerated, but high levels are the one area where the exaggerations have a bit of truth. Our party was:

• Druid (me)
• Rogue/Sorcerer/Unseen Seer
• Fighter/Swordsage (TWF build)
• Cleric/Radiant Servant of Pelor (DMM build)
• Ranger (TWF build)

My Druid was about as tough as the rest of the party put together, due to stacking dragon-form Shapechange with Bite of the Werebear. The Unseen Seer and the Fighter/Swordsage weren't as tough as me, but could keep up, since both could do crazy amounts of damage and had a few extra tricks. The Cleric and the Ranger, though, just got flattened every battle. The Ranger had it particularly bad, since he needed to full attack to do any damage, and had an AC of about 25, meaning that pretty much everything could squish him like a bug.

That said, the game didn't completely break down, and we had a satisfying final battle before completing the campaign.

Earthwalker
2010-12-30, 09:30 AM
I'm not sure you really can keep tied to the world your characters live in, unless it's super-mega-power-land. Our party is just hitting the epic levels, and pretty much everyone has some sort of themed stronghold that is getting to the runs-itself level, with a small town's worth of followers who do everything from brewing our beer to crafting our magic items.

[snip]


Do you spend much time, or have you spent alot of time maintaining the strong hold. at one stage were you involved witht he peoples lives under your command. Or are they just a resource for you.

It does seem you have settled down you are just being called to action as you seem to take responcibility for the BBEG, which is good I like how you are still able to find motivation.

You say combat gets slow, does it desolve into the epic clerical battle pictured on the Order of the Stick. Spells going one way and back till someone rolls a 1 ?

Do you also get bad guys with the same abilities as you so its, so they keep going down then being resurrected the round after and so on ?


The highest I've gotten in a serious campaign was level 18ish or so, playing through the World's Largest Dungeon.

[snip]


I can see how it works if you are in a dungeon and the main focus is to get out. I am of course guessing what the worlds largest dungeon is like, I asume it does just what it says on the tin. Was it mainly combat ?

Saph
2010-12-30, 09:54 AM
I can see how it works if you are in a dungeon and the main focus is to get out. I am of course guessing what the worlds largest dungeon is like, I asume it does just what it says on the tin. Was it mainly combat ?

Combat, exploration, and traps. The Rogue/Sorcerer/Unseen Seer had a lot to do. There was a little more roleplaying later on, as we struck alliances and bargains with various dungeon factions.

Runestar
2010-12-30, 10:25 AM
Some possible explanations of why combat tends to drag on at higher lvs.

1) Party spends eons buffing one another to the gills, and meticulously working out their final stats. Then in the first round of combat, the foe casts greater dispel magic or some variant thereof. :smalleek:

Expect to spend at least 20-30 minutes working out what spells stay and which go, as well as their impact on your stats and reflecting this on your stat sheet.

2) Option paralysis. At higher lvs, players have more options at their disposal, meaning they tend to spend more time reviewing these options to decide which is most optimal. Higher level foes also tend to be more complex as they too have more abilities to keep track of.

3) More attacks and dice to roll. For instance, a rogue can have 5 attacks at lv16+ (3bab, +1haste, +1 from TWFing). For each attack, you need to make an attack roll. For damage, reroll for critical threats, roll 10 d6s for sneak attack, and reroll for 1s (deadly precision feat).

This means that on a full-attack, your rogue can easily be making as many 70+ dice rolls just for that 1 round! Granted, this is an extreme example, but you will find you spend more time generating dice rolls simply because you need to roll more of them and adding them all up.

That's just the icing on the cake. :smallamused:

Saph
2010-12-30, 10:35 AM
This means that on a full-attack, your rogue can easily be making as many 70+ dice rolls just for that 1 round! Granted, this is an extreme example, but you will find you spend more time generating dice rolls simply because you need to roll more of them and adding them all up.

It's not even that extreme. In the WLD campaign, the fighter/swordsage's attack routine would usually go something like this:

• Activate Pouncing Charge
• Activate Searing Blade
• Do primary hand attacks at something like +30/+25/+20/+15
• Do off-hand attacks at something like +29/+24/+19/+14
• Calculate 1d6+whatever damage for each hit, including conditional bonuses (note that the off-hand did a different amount of damage than the on-hand)
• Add Searing Blade damage, dealing an extra 2d6+11ish fire damage for every hit - this has to be calculated separately in case the thing has fire resistance.
• Add sneak attack damage from Assassin's Stance if applicable, checking to see whether the enemy was vulnerable to precision damage.

It wasn't that unusual to spend 15+ minutes rolling all the dice and adding up the numbers. And that was just one person's turn!

Earthwalker
2010-12-30, 10:40 AM
WOW that is alot of dice rolling.

I take it that would be happening for every turn the sword sage got. Or in the other example for what the rogue did.

At the same time what are casters / buffers doing.

Is it 15 mins of rolls fro the sword sage and a caster then casting one spell ?

What about being hit by the many save or dies, does this happen ?

Can you get killed in round 1 and then just spend 3 hours waiting for the combat to finish ?

Invelios
2010-12-30, 10:45 AM
you forgot to add in burst effects, regular weapon effects, banes, and a various assortment of other options to add to damage.

Typically, in one combat round for one PC is over a hundred dice, if you still rely on them at that level.

I typically only use the dice if the average total is less then the creatures HP, and only when the attack wasn't described really detailed.

a detailed description is worth a hundred dice to me, especially in epics as people tend to be overwhelmed by the options presented to them at that level.

bokodasu
2010-12-30, 12:26 PM
Do you spend much time, or have you spent alot of time maintaining the strong hold. at one stage were you involved witht he peoples lives under your command. Or are they just a resource for you.
...
Do you also get bad guys with the same abilities as you so its, so they keep going down then being resurrected the round after and so on ?


We spend offscreen time at our strongholds - the in-game time's been about 4 or 5 years, I think, and there's usually 2-6 months of downtime between levels, which we can either e-mail RP or just sort of summarize sometime before the next session. I'm not sure how involved everyone else is with their followers; all of mine are animals I've awakened, so I know their names and statblocks and generally what they're up to, but I don't RP interactions with them. Oh, and somehow I wound up with the lover and son of the BBEG, who seem to be in my protective custody, but they kind of do their own thing and the DM lets me know how that's going.

The monk has some weird homebrew power - his followers are formerly chaotic evil creatures that he's shown the light of lawful neutrality to, so they're all enemies we've run across at some point. The ranger and paladin have Leadership, so they each have their one cohort they RP, but I don't know what they do about their average followers. The wizard doesn't have followers; he spends his time researching new spells and crafting new magical items. I think the fighter is doing some PrC-related side-questing, and the cleric is a celestial ball of light thingy who comes and hangs out with the other PCs when they need his help.

Everyone else covered the rest of the combat parts pretty well. And in our campaign each of the 5-7 players who show up does each of those things for themselves and their 2-5 followers/cohorts/companions/summons; it adds up even when we're pretty efficient about it. And we do averages for most dice rolls, unless there's some specific reason to roll.

We've only had one unkillable bad guy; I think if we had to fight resurrecting enemies we'd never finish a combat, ever. They get pretty much all our other powers, though. And if our DM deems something broken, he takes it away from us and gives it to an enemy. (Which is a nice anti-cheese measure, I think. Note: AN enemy. It's not like they all use the broken cheddar forever.)

Curmudgeon
2010-12-30, 12:33 PM
It wasn't that unusual to spend 15+ minutes rolling all the dice and adding up the numbers. And that was just one person's turn!
Yeah, we do that the first time around the table. Then we just use the average damage values, and only roll to hit from then on. It lets people see just how much time we're saving so nobody complains after the switch.

Shenanigans
2010-12-30, 12:54 PM
Epic levels can be fun, but as the other posters have mentioned, sometimes the focus needs to shift. The DM for our epic level campaign had us all design and build strongholds, ruling that once we did, we were given the leadership feat as a bonus. We had a lot of fun doing that and then managing our followers in various wars and conflicts.

I think the one reason my buddies and enjoy our epic campaign is that most of us have played these characters all the way from 1st level. It's fun seeing that kind of range. For example, our barbarian has had the same suit of masterwork studded leather armor (a regional item I believe) the whole time, just enchanting it up to its now epic status.

At first it's kind of neat realizing that your characters can fight (and defeat) some truly incredible foes: demon princes, demigods, super-dragons, etc. Eventually though, combat with anything but the most ridiculous of enemies (usually with character classes) becomes a bit boring. That isn't to say it can't be funny to describe. One of the other players in our epic campaign once indicated that listening to the description of epic exalted monk fighting an orc army reminded him of this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08XsAR1TsbY

The other hitch with combat is that spellcasters take over even more, because one of the only ways to seriously threaten an epic party is with high-level casters. Our melee characters are generally relegated to cleanup duty while the casters do all the heavy-lifting.

bokodasu
2010-12-30, 01:03 PM
Yeah, we do that the first time around the table. Then we just use the average damage values, and only roll to hit from then on. It lets people see just how much time we're saving so nobody complains after the switch.

Another thing we do is roll damages when it's not our turn and make a list. Even then, it's roll for your twelve attacks, then have your cohort cast an AoE spell and figure out whose SR it beats and roll all of their saves, then have your hireling run over and heal your friend, and have your mount carefully trample twelve bad guys on his way over to you. It still takes some time.

It's still fun, though. I'm the only one who's been in the campaign since level 1, but most of the other players started around 5-7, so we've all got some investment in our characters. And it is pretty neat going from "I can finally afford +1 dragonhide armor!" to saying, "and I put the last greater energy resist on my +6 dragonhide armor..."

Runestar
2010-12-30, 08:07 PM
Alternatively, you could come up with an excel spreadsheet to quickly generate and add up the different damage values.

Also, multiple buffs means having to track them all individually (since their durations likely vary from days to hours to mere rounds). For speed's sake, you may simply want to assume that any spell with "rounds" or "minutes" just lasts till end of encounter, while "hours" equals all day.

Not to mention that with all the difference bonuses, players typically double check their figures to ensure there is no overlap. Even at mid lvs, I have had fighters with ~10 buffs active on them at one time! :smallcool:


At the same time what are casters / buffers doing.

Well, fighters too can take a lot of time (if they get to make a full attack). You are looking at 5-6 attacks at least, together with other dice like holy and bane. They may also take time agonizing over the "best amount" to power attack or expertise for each round (plus adjusting stats accordingly).

Casters may hog time with multiple actions. The druid has an animal companion, and can spontaneously summon monsters, so at any time, you are playing a mini-chess game with 3-5 extra cohorts. Not to mention looking up the spells if nobody knows what they do, and waiting for everyone to digest the info.

Wizards have familiars, as well as additional cohorts via leadership/gate/planar ally/binding. And don't forget mounts (paladin or draconic cohort). They can also access extra actions through spells like timestop, shapechange (and god help you if he insists on taking a new form every round), quickened spells, celerity line and contingencies.

You get the idea. Even if each player takes just 15 minutes to finish his round, that is already 1 hour+ (not forgetting the DM) to complete 1 turn! :smallannoyed:

Earthwalker
2010-12-31, 04:53 AM
Its odd I posted this question or series of questions as I didn't think lvl 20 game play was something I would like.

I still feel I am not suited to it, but it has been eye opening what is involed mechanically and what people do at this level. The odd thing is hearing how once you get to this level the change in game play can happen where its alot more about how you control other factors of the game world and your allies as opposed to just fighting.

I certainly have a diffferent view of things after reading these posts. It is refreshing after posts like how to challenge a lvl 20 wizard and similar posts.

I would still be interested in hearing more about peoples experiances of high level play, also hearing peoples stories and characters.

ffone
2010-12-31, 05:34 AM
Computer-assisted rolling is nice.

(I like it anyway b/c there's a 'paper trail' roll history with some programs or websites).

For example, if my haste rogue makes 5 main hand attacks which are each 1d4+11+9d6+17 when sneak attack applies, I can do all the damage in one go by rolling 5 copies of that (after rolling the attack mods).

Ex:
http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/
Do 5 d20s and add the mods mentally (since they differ by iterative and you need to check the original d20 for threats) or type in a sequence like 1d20+32;1d20+32,1d20+27;...
Then do 5 copies of 1d4+11+9d6+17 and only use the results for the attacks which hit.


Also, you can save time with little game impact by doing average damage (every pair of d6s is a 7, etc.) Typically, as your level and damage increase, more of the damage is either a ton of d6s (for rogues and many spells) or a big constant modifier. Either way, the percentage variation goes down (law of large numbers for Xd6). Every 10d6 sneak attack can just add 35 to the base damage (also mostly a constant a modifier, esp. with the obligatory Craven).

Runestar
2010-12-31, 05:35 AM
You can consider reading this thread.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-legacy-discussion/186400-bo9s-notes-swordsage-play.html

While its main purpose is to showcase a swordsage's capabilities, it also involves a lv16 party in the age of worms module.

ffone
2010-12-31, 05:44 AM
Also, if 'average' damage reduces the variability too much (like if you are fighting several identical monsters and PCs start to metagame / beancount HP to know in advance whether their attack will fell the 2nd monster) - the DM can roll monster HP rather than taking averages. This adds in some suspense to when the monster will drop, and can be quicker than rolling damage (esp. since the DM can do it on his own time).

Runestar
2010-12-31, 05:55 AM
There are actually freeware which can quickly generate multiple die rolls.

I have tried it and it works fine. Only thing is that it is not quite as satisfying as physically rolling the dice, though undeniably faster. :smalltongue:

http://www.max.twobrotherssoftware.com/

NichG
2010-12-31, 09:56 PM
I'm in a highly homebrewed, very high level campaign (highest ECL in the party is maybe 40 or 45?). The focus has more or less been about figuring out what is going on at each stage in the game, with the PCs, starting at level 5, being the center of a grand manipulation from day 1.

Basically, at low levels we were being given the opportunity and drives to grow by an antagonist who wanted to essentially create a certain kind of tool he could use by generating a new plane of existence with particular rules that were advantageous, and we were made into the native outsiders of that plane.

By getting us to grow, we could tap the power of that location more, and he tried to get us to use it in ways that would make him benefit. To motivate us he needed to present adversaries and situations that would make us want to be stronger and get involved (namely, the destruction of each of our worlds of origin). Essentially the seat of the lord of all creation had been vacated by his assassination, but the way had been locked, and we were cosmological skeleton keys so this guy could become the next regent.

Eventually we found out we were being used, and broke the collar and confronted the guy, only to find that he himself only had small plans, but that there were worse things going on that our growth of power had caused. As a new cosmological location, certain things were happening as a side effect of our existence that were destabilizing the rest of the universe. So then we were in the position of deciding who got the throne next, since we were the only ones who could open the way. We eventually randomly decided on someone we met, but in the preparation for helping her take the throne we, via our skeleton-key nature, accidentally released an imprisoned former regent who also wanted it (basically a perfection-gone-egotistical style angelic being).

So we had a race for the throne, and randomly someone else got it due to the details of the race, followed by the former regent getting pissed off and destroying the power source behind it. Meanwhile, we also managed to unlock the door to another imprisoned threat, this time intentionally (we thought it'd slow the angel down, but it turned out to be much worse) which started to consume the rest of the cosmology.

At that point we kind of felt responsible. After a few fights with the army though, we figured out that the head of the corruption army was acting as a repository for the (conserved) sins of several previous epochs of the cosmos, and so killing him would probably cause it to splash all around, just making things worse. So it looked like were also feeling like we were being manipulated again, and we went off on a tangent and tried to figure out what was really going on. We ended up releasing another ancient entity who spoke of the whole thing being set up by her old enemy, for unknown reasons. Then unfortunately we let on too obviously that we weren't falling for the manipulation, and moreover let on that we had gotten a bit too powerful, so the guy decided to act.

Turns out the whole thing was to test whether or not the universe contained beings capable of unlimited potential, where a 'yes' answer meant the universe was lined up for destruction as too big of a threat. So we're now flying across the void in a ship made of the assembled remains of four previous universes that had been marked for death with the 3000 only survivors of our multiverse, trying to figure out what we're going to do about a power that can fairly trivially crush everything.

As far as motivations, we've had PCs say 'I managed to save my home world, so I'm heading home and living the rest of my life there, farewell'. We've also had PCs who said 'The loss of my homeworld sucks, but now I'm basically a god and can make entire planes of existence trivially. Woot!'.

We've got a pirate captain who has acquired and lost the most valuable object in all creation twice now (in this case, the necklace Brisingamen). I'm playing a former deity who sees this as an opportunity to mentor the new pantheon that recreates everything and thus treats the other PCs as fledgeling gods. We've got a nihilist mathematical buddhist who is unsatisfied with the quality of the endings so far and wants to do it right. We've got an anti-hero type who keeps stealing the past histories of other iconic people and making them his own. We've got a drow who has utterly mastered the powers of hell, and who just seems to be having fun with it. We've also got a random girl from modern earth whose skepticism is effectively a force of nature (to some extent she can shut down things that she disbelieves in).

We spend a good amount of time messing around trying to figure out stuff. We've created organizations, planes of existence (alas, all gone now), new materials that had never previously existed (we have an energy inverter metal, a metal that transmits paradox, a metal that conducts soul energy e.g. experience, a metal that holds positive and negative energy charges like poles of a magnet, etc), etc.

We've had various hobbies: My character spent some time running various strange shops in Sigil (he would accept any cursed item and attempt to redeem it). The pirate built a realm for herself where she could sleep on piles of gold and make exotic booze. The nihilist buddhist was inflicted with immortality and decided to spend an exceedingly long time in meditation, since he could (and since our past-stealing party member could manipulate time so we didn't have to wait for him).

Combat does still occur every so often, but its usually pretty fast since we aggressively take average on large die pools and those of us who use spells generally have them listed out so we don't have to hunt down the information.
We tend to spend much more time on downtime stuff, and a lot of time figuring out how to interact with weird places and situations we get into.

All things said, this is not a typical epic game, since we as a whole have surprisingly few of the immunities that epic parties would normally need to have to avoid rocket tag. For instance, only one party member has immunity to mind-affecting spells. None of us (I think) have immunity to death effects. Furthermore, we don't even have a full progression arcane caster in the party, which is unusual. The DM homebrews our enemies and they all tend to have internally consistent themes, so we don't feel the pressure to be perfectly immune to everything as we might need to if we were facing epic wizards or other such things.

DragonOfUndeath
2011-01-01, 10:39 AM
*snip*

I want to play that game. it sounds AWESOME

Aracor
2011-01-01, 04:38 PM
You know, I find it really ironic that in many ways, the opposite ended up being true for my game that went fairly far into epic. This game progressed through the entire 3rd edition WotC line of canned adventures, ending with the Bastion of Broken Souls, interspersed and then continued with homebrew adventures after that. The final climactic battle ended with the The casters who focused on casting found it difficult to do what they wanted to. One of the oddities as you start progressing into epic is that save bonuses actually start going up higher than the save DCs of even your highest spells (barring epic magic, which has the possibility of all kinds of wonkiness), and immunities start being more rampant. Enervation is a great spell...until the vast majority of your enemies have high CL death wards on them. Solid fog is wonderful...until freedom of movement is common.

We had a couple fights that literally involved the two groups of enemies pounding away until they found a chink of the piles of immunities and resistances, beginning with our fighter Ian charging the enemy and getting an epic reflect spell bounced into his face.

But the most effective characters overall were Ian (just about straight fighter, with a couple levels of rogue and then five levels of thief-acrobat), and my halfling rogue Racso. Straight rogue. All the way up to level 27, when the campaign finally petered out. We also had an arcane archer, a wizard, and a sorcerer/archmage who took the cosmic descryer epic prestige class.

Admittedly we abused magic to help out. There were several rings of spell-storing and pearls of power that would get our powers up, and this was much closer to the beginning than the end of 3.5...we hit level 21 as the Complete Warrior was released, so a lot of things changed as books were released, classes/feats were adjusted, and characters had to be changed and rebuilt to meet with new rules and requirements. I still remember when persist spell was changed from +4 to +6 levels, and almost every single character had to be adjusted because suddenly righteous might could no longer be put as a persisted spell into a ring of greater spell-storing. And then divine favor and righteous might being suddenly hit with the errata-bat and their effectiveness being chopped in half. Didn't matter though. We had a great DM, and he had the uncanny ability to catch us by surprise as often as we caught him. None of our characters felt underpowered, although like I said, it was getting to the point where the casters felt their best option was to start hitting people with pure damage because they simply couldn't get most other effects through the myriad piles of defenses. It got to the point where disjunction simply didn't work because there were greater counterspelling rings with disjunction in them specifically to keep that spell under control. Because our DM could and did throw it at us at high levels, and we were expected to do whatever we could to protect ourselves.

The final battle ended up teaching ourselves and our DM a very valuable lesson: Never field balors in large groups. Our entire party had evasion, so we ended up setting up chain-exploding balors which leveled half of the field opposing us, since they aren't immune to their own explosions, and there were about ten of them set up as shock troops by Demogorgon (our BBEG in this particular arc), along with a myriad collection of other assorted nasties, with Demogorgon himself at the head. And they were stock out of the book balors with no templates or tricks added to them. So they had a bad day once we realized we were better equipped than they were to handle the explosions, and Ian and Racso between the two of them could kill 3-5 balors a round, depending on angles and crits.

But all in all, it was a very enjoyable campaign. I still miss it to this day and still have Racso's character sheet just in case. With all of the additional books, I'd rebuild him somewhat, but a surprising amount of his build would remain completely unchanged. I think at the end of the final arc, the gods themselves owed each of our characters a favor for assisting with that, and at least one of them intended to pick up divine rank 0 as his reward.