How Do You Fight Once Death Becomes Trivial?

[HolyCouncilMagi]

This is in high-level play in general, but it becomes especially prevalent in Epic play. As anybody who has so much as played in an Epic game will tell you (not to mention basic optimization tricks to make this even more true) death is really, really cheap at those levels. Unless you're a god, which seems counter-intuitive, but eh, details. Basically, killing a character who is either himself Epic or has Epic-level connections removes him from the picture for like a few weeks at the very maximum and probably closer to a day in low-op games, and about six to twelve seconds in high-op games.

So, while I've spent forever and a day debating this with a few friends and have many opinions and ideas about how these sort of things go, how does one go about applying force to remove a problematic sapient individual? Sword through the gut stopped working a while ago for politically affluent enemies, and by now someone you would consider an average schmuck can usually find a way to deal with being tossed into a Sphere of Annihilation with some difficulty. You'll need way better options against more worthy opponents.

I want to hear opinions from you guys so I can compare and contrast them with my own, and maybe we can all learn something. How does one go about fighting Epic-level opponents, and making it matter? I suppose the best answer is probably "politically" but I mean fight in the more traditional sense.

[NoACWarrior]

I haven't played in an epic level campaign - but I always assumed that epic level play was like high level play, the ones who goes into combat first wins.

If you are talking about stopping other epic level monsters / NPCs then yes there is an issue with that.
I'd see storing epic level corpses in a bag of holding would be helpful to prevent them from being revived.

Or if possible get your diplomancer to make them your friend and you won't need to fight them again - but some people say that this is negated by near epic level magic so its kinda a raw deal.

Theres thinaun weapons - this allows you to entrap the soul so that no mortal magic can resurrect the person. Godly magic MIGHT restore the soul, but short of the entity stealing your weapon the soul is in I think you are pretty safe.

[Lightlawbliss]

for starters: don't kill them. I forget where, but tippy made a very good statement somewhere about how you deal with a high level wizard.
second: don't let them commit suicide. Commuting suicide and being brought back will get someone out of a whole slew of messes

[sleepyphoenixx]

Get a dagger made of thinaun(CW). It sucks in the soul of a creature it touches at the moment of death. If you want to prevent anyone getting their hands on it there are a few ways to consume or destroy a soul (mostly in BoVD). There's a few spells to trap/destroy souls too.

You could also turn them to stone/salt/ice and hide the statue. No death, no ressurection. Animating their corpse works too iirc, as long as you prevent the resulting undead from destruction.

Another alternative is total annihilation. Kill everyone who has an interest in ressurecting your enemy. Then kill anyone who might conceivably have an interest to ressurect them at some point in the future. Repeat until no one even thinks about ressurecting your enemies for fear of you coming after them, too.

[NichG]

Well, devil's advocate here, but doesn't that logically mean that one's methods should simply change to suit the realities of that level of power? What I mean to say is, at epic level you aren't trying to kill your enemies to take them out of the picture - you're trying to kill your enemies to delay them from acting in a particular situation. It becomes a much more limited tool than at lower levels where 'guy is causing problems? sword to gut'

If you were to play this sort of game to the hilt, Tippyverse-style, the question to ask is 'What is there that you can effectively preserve? What is there that you can effectively protect? What are the ways in which a character acts to influence the world, and which of those ways can be attacked on a permanent basis?'. Lets assume everyone is using astral projection gimmicks and things like that and basically there's nothing you're going to be able to do to permanently take them out of the picture; between divinations and contingencies and so on, they simply will never be caught in a situation that permanently ends them, period. What's left?

Well, you have to take a step back and ask 'why am I trying to kill this guy?'. Lets say for sake of argument again that your goal is to prevent this person from, say, conquering your home plane. If the person is using (lower level) armies to do this, then those can be taken out of commission on a semi-permanent basis by violence, because the amount of time and money the epic guy would have to spend to resurrect and re-equip his troops simply would make it not worthwhile compared to, say, finding a completely new army.

Can the epic guy conquer your home plane without the army? Well... any one city, yes. But he can't hold them all without spending all of his time running back and forth re-taking cities. So he'd have to crush the will of the populace so they don't just reclaim the city in his absence, or kill and raise the populace as undead or something. So now the goal is 'stop him from killing the entire population of the world'. This you could do by just staying ahead of him and defending any place he attacks in person, trying to maximize damage to his items/etc so that its expensive for him to pursue his conquest. You could also attack things he cares about as a reprisal and do a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction scenario (except in this case its Mutually Assured Poverty?).

Since attacking individual cities is likely to be tedious, he's going to want to do some huge epic casting to just kill everyone at once. This will probably require some artifact as fuel, or some magical location, or something. So the obvious answer there is, don't kill the mage, kill the lynchpin of the ritual.

Anyhow, one can imagine that this is basically the situation the gods are in - directly fighting is pointless since its all just avatars who get destroyed, and its hard to keep another god down (or keep their seat empty), so instead they use actually extinguishable pieces (mortals) as pawns to play out their fights.

[Jack_Simth]

This is in high-level play in general, but it becomes especially prevalent in Epic play. As anybody who has so much as played in an Epic game will tell you (not to mention basic optimization tricks to make this even more true) death is really, really cheap at those levels. Unless you're a god, which seems counter-intuitive, but eh, details. Basically, killing a character who is either himself Epic or has Epic-level connections removes him from the picture for like a few weeks at the very maximum and probably closer to a day in low-op games, and about six to twelve seconds in high-op games.

So, while I've spent forever and a day debating this with a few friends and have many opinions and ideas about how these sort of things go, how does one go about applying force to remove a problematic sapient individual? Sword through the gut stopped working a while ago for politically affluent enemies, and by now someone you would consider an average schmuck can usually find a way to deal with being tossed into a Sphere of Annihilation with some difficulty. You'll need way better options against more worthy opponents.

I want to hear opinions from you guys so I can compare and contrast them with my own, and maybe we can all learn something. How does one go about fighting Epic-level opponents, and making it matter? I suppose the best answer is probably "politically" but I mean fight in the more traditional sense.Bascally? You find a way to dispel, nullify, exhaust, and/or circumvent their assorted protections and contingencies (if they have Spell Turning or spell absorption, you exhaust it with a barrage of Magic Missiles from your cannon fodder, for instance), then you trap them in a way that prevents them from acting. No death = no resurrection. No actions = can't pull back on their Astral Projection. Shades (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/shades.htm)(Trap the Soul (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/trapTheSoul.htm)) is a personal favourite, as that makes them nice & portable and is rather tricky to defend against (other than just making the save or having high SR) without crippling yourself, and only costs the spell slot. Alternates include the Flesh to [X] line (Stone, salt, ice, et cetera), animating their corpse and protecting the resulting undead (note: Doesn't work if they're Astral Projecting), Imprisonment (although this means you have a location to defend permanently), mind control, and a few others.

[The Oni]

Instead of killing him, you could try to destroy his reputation/friends/network of allies/empire/mundane wealth. Restrict his power. Cripple him with epic-level curses. Wipe his memory and perma-polymorph him, then drop him on the far side of the world somewhere.

[BrokenChord]

Instead of killing him, you could try to destroy his reputation/friends/network of allies/empire/mundane wealth. Restrict his power. Cripple him with epic-level curses. Wipe his memory and perma-polymorph him, then drop him on the far side of the world somewhere.

Gotta love Epic-level political maneuvering.

[Sylthia]

Losing your items is much worse than death at high levels. If you want to be mean, you can steal or destroy the PCs gear if they die or are otherwise defeated.