A Reevaluation of Epic

[Vrock_Summoner]

No, it's not balanced. In fact, it's more unbalanced than general D&D, which is a bit scary to think about in all honesty.

No, it's not the place for most fantasy stories. Most normal fantasy takes place at level 10 tops, while even full D&D-acknowledged high-power fantasy stories tend to take place pre-9th-level-spells. In many ways, Epic D&D is only half D&D, and half its own thing, almost a different game.

But I think this may be intentional, or at least beneficial.

Hear me out here. Let's start with Epic Spellcasting. No doubt it was designed badly, if for no other reason than that the spell DCs are just really weird. Of course, in Epic the designers fully expect you to have items and such giving you +Awesome to skill checks, so a spell with a crafting DC of 80 or so isn't entirely unrealistic to expect for a level 30 or so character, though they aren't likely to write their own example NPCs that way.

Think about it for a second. Epic Spellcasting is broken... On purpose. Melee characters get access to a lot more magical things... For the better. Spellcasters can do things nobody thinks are possible... Because spellcaster=win, yes, but also more fundamentally as a design function.

Epic is ABOUT building characters that can do everything. They made some stupid design choices and no level 20 full caster has issues with being able to do everything already, but that's kinda irrelevant.

A lot of people walk into Epic thinking it's just "D&D, but bigger numbers" and this is fundamentally a mistake. Epic is about stripping off the restrictions. Not necessarily the weakness, but the restrictions. It isn't supposed to be the same as before, a story about clever leaders of men, about heroic underdogs, or even about the tenacity of outmatched people faced with adversity too great for themselves. Fundamentally, Epic captures something I think most other systems haven't captured; whether that's good or bad is your call, as it can be a letdown to people used to regular 3.5.

The thing Epic captures, the type of story you tell with Epic D&D? It is, fundamentally, you taking charge and responsibility. It is a story about you doing it yourself.

It seems so small, like something you can do in any game, but it's a bigger deal than you'd figure.

Pre-Epic is a story about Paladins who are gifted Holy Avengers by the gods themselves to use in the final battle against The Darkness. Pre-Epic is a story about taking the artifact of awesome power to the top of the mountain and using it to reopen the portal to the BBEG's demiplane for the final battle. Pre-Epic is a story about a Wizard who trades his soul to the dark god for unimaginable power so that he can defeat his former master and prove himself.

Notice something about those stories? There's always someone/something else. Something leeching credit, but also something letting you know you're not the only one who can do it, you're not the only one trying.

That might make Epic sound lonely, but it's more just about you becoming THE hero, the one all the little people look up to, the one who does the thing... On his own.

An Epic story is the Paladin crafting his own Sword of The Light Will Screw You, one-upping the Good deities before he heads out, and electing to ignore the Plot Artifact of Sealing the Darkness Again in favor of destroying the concept of darkness in its entirety. Epic is about the wizard who, when faced with a BBEG who is sitting in his Epic-levelly-defended demiplane, turns down the Tower of High Sorcery's offer to try to use an artifact as the center of a Circle Magic spell to break the party into the plane, and instead says "just give me a week, I'll make my own danged Epic spell to force my way in through his." Epic is the story about the character who tries to kill the dark god and take the power he wants and makes the Artifact of Kewl Powers out of his corpse for later generations to find.

I don't know if I really made my point... All of my thoughts are kinda jumbled. Basically, Epic is about taking responsibility for everything, not having to rely on others and cut corners and worry about satisfying them unless you happen to be emotionally invested in doing so. It's rising above reliance on others outside your own party, breaking off restrictions, removing your ability to absolve yourself of any responsibility for the success or failure of what you do.

Effectively, Epic is conquering dependance and excuses. It's evolving. And maybe it's true that this isn't the story D&D was telling before. But that is the story Epic tells.



Okay, absurdly long message done. What do you guys think? Agree? Disagree? Does it warrant a shift in perspective and a re-evaluation of Epic as a subsystem? Or has this been a bunch of pointless chattering in a thinly veiled effort to make myself seem like a philosopher? You guys decide! Though it's obviously the last one.

[HolyCouncilMagi]

Other than the scale of it, I fail to see how this is anything more than a matter of playstyle. I mean, I guess there's some inherent truths to what you say; like, a low level wizard isn't to blame if he screws up using the world-saving artifact the high archmage got for him. The low-level fighter isn't to blame if his armor breaks and he dies without being able to protect his allies since he probably didn't make his armor himself. But most of what you're talking about is playstyle; maybe a different playstyle than most D&D players are used to, yes, but workable at most levels.

[unseenmage]

Having played Epic as a 'D&D but bigger' game that evolved into a 'lets just do it ourselves' game I find myself agreeing.
In fact IIRC the Epic book says about as much in it's preface even.

I'd even go so far as to add that the problems folk have with Epic are less to do with the fact that its a subsystem that doesn't play well with basic D&D but more to do with the lack of proper transition from nonepic to Epic.

The epic book gives us the math and the subsystem but it doesn't near prepare the players or the DM for the idea that the characters will be driving large parts of the plot from now on, by necessity, because that's what Epic is all about.

I mean, I played an Epic Monk. No, he couldn't rewrite reality to suit his needs. But then again, he could still do some pretty unbelievable expletive-deleted.


I always wanted to pit true nonepic cheese against epic characters to see who'd win. I liked the idea of cheesey Circle Magic and 'Constructs as Magic Items' and Shapechange shenanigans as the challenges appropriate to Epic characters. That the Epic characters become the watchdogs of the universe because if they don't then the Omnificer and/or Pun-Pun could come into being and conquer everything everywhere in an instant if they aren't careful.
And then something goes horribly wrong and the Epic characters are forced to relocate to a new campaign setting because the overgod cheesemonster is eating realities and there's no where left to go but Dark Sun or someplace else that's less appetizing than Eberron or Faerun cheese-wise.

Eventually our intrepid Epics find themselves defending third party sources and traipsing through second rate Dungeon and Dragon magazine pseudo settings that're only half fleshed out and have minimal support because that's all that's left of the gamer-verse. Finally finding some cheesey gem or another of their own to use against the overgod cheesemonster that will restore all of every campaign setting everywhere but only at the sacrifice of themselves. Not only do they have to die, but they have to encapsulate themselves between reality and time pinning the overgod cheesemonster in a infinite grapple check so it can never darken another game ever again.

Well that's the gist idea anyway. :smallbiggrin: No matter what the scope an Epic character is about being in charge of their destiny and hounded by greater responsibility than a normal character can fathom.
It's the difference between Spider Man harping on about great power and Superman actually dealing with the consequences of not ruling Earth with and iron fist and "saving" everyone because of his greater responsibility to freedom than that of ending all suffering everywhere by the sheer might of his superpowers.

[Doorhandle]

To be honest you guys hit the nail on the head there, even if you had a ramble a bit first. I think it's Also visible in other games with a similar scope.

For example, Mythender: Do you need a ritual or divine backing to kill thor? No. You can just walk to his fancy-pants mead hall, carve on the walls where he can stuff it, Pick up the whole thing, throw it at him and work from there.

[ryu]

To be honest you guys hit the nail on the head there, even if you had a ramble a bit first. I think it's Also visible in other games with a similar scope.

For example, Mythender: Do you need a ritual or divine backing to kill thor? No. You can just walk to his fancy-pants mead hall, carve on the walls where he can stuff it, Pick up the whole thing, throw it at him and work from there.

I like the sound of this game's sensibilities. I'll google it later to see if I'm into the mechanics.

[NichG]

I think you've seen part of the beginning of it, but I don't think you've yet seen the end of it, and there is an end of it too. I'll be a bit abstract here, but in my experience actually playing this kind of game: at the furthest extremes, the story that epic D&D tends to bring out is one about the limits of one's willpower and imagination, and also the tendency of things to become irrelevant when that fact is realized.

What do I mean by that? Well, the seeds are already there in pre-epic D&D. Lets take optimization for example - its known that at Lv1 you can make Pun-Pun, but most people would call it against the spirit of the game to do that. However, there are finer gradiations - do you play a wizard who can do everything, or do you limit yourself to something Tier 3 or whatever to make a challenge? When you get to Epic, the game forces you to discard your own limits and realize at some point that you have the resources to succeed at anything if only you can bring yourself to accept the methods you need to employ. And I don't necessarily mean things that are morally questionable, but rather things that feel 'cheap' somehow. That realization that you don't need to follow the plot and get the MacGuffin to win, but can just throw together an epic spell and declare victory - that is a realization that in the lofty stratospheres of power in high-end D&D, nothing is stopping you anymore.

Except of course your character's identity, theme, etc; but really, how malleable are those things? Will your character insist on doing everything with melee combat because its his theme when, for a minor expenditure of wealth compared to their WBL, they could be magicking their way past every obstacle? Is their theme, their identity, more important than stopping the villain or solving the village's problems?

Furthermore, when you get to the very high end, what's to stop someone from resurrecting, say, every single person who has ever died? Do you choose to allow death to still remain meaningful, or do you declare it to be another irrelevancy and shove it aside?

At the end of the day, you're not just taking responsibility for being the prime movers and shakers, you're also deciding what aspects of the world are permitted to remain relevant, and what aspects you will brush away and render moot. The dark side of this is that there's a tyrrany of the minority here - if one of the epic PCs decides to resurrect everyone who ever died, death has been made irrelevant even if your PC wanted it to stay relevant. If you want to train up the next generation of heroes, but your fellow party member destroys cosmic evil once and for all and makes heroes un-necessary, there's not much you can do about it. Over extended play, this can result in a situation where very few things about the world remain meaningful in any way to the epic characters. That village you taught magic to at Lv10 will never make a whit of difference compared to the power you throw around on a whim at Lv40; that kingdom you spent so much effort protecting, no one there has an existence that can even comprehend the sorts of choices you can (and must) make - what does it matter if there's a serial killer wandering around when you can kill the god of Death and force all those souls to return? Or rewrite time so that no tradgedy ever occurred in the first place?

What I'm getting at is that its not just that the PCs are responsible for resolution or methodology or being the prime movers. They are also responsible for deciding 'What is the line? What must we not touch for our actions and the actions of others to remain meaningful?'. The only real questions and challenges for the highest ends of epic are challenges of philosophy, not challenges of actual corporeal difficulty.

Perhaps this is as good an explanation of any for why Ao doesn't mess with Faerun...

[unseenmage]

And again I agree.

Ao is to D&D what Superman refuses to be to the DC comics universe.
Supes knows death personally. Has met the guy on more than one occasion. And death has a soft spot for Supes too.
Superman could just walk up to death, Kryptonian magi-tech him, then punch him into nothing. But he doesn't.

Can you imagine having the ability to end death, end suffering, and then not do it? Saying Ao keeps the universe together is one thing. Playing Ao and letting the gods of death disease and war actually have their way because that's what's ultimately best even though you can hear the prayers of the sufferers all the time would be quite another.

[Phelix-Mu]

And again I agree.

Ao is to D&D what Superman refuses to be to the DC comics universe.
Supes knows death personally. Has met the guy on more than one occasion. And death has a soft spot for Supes too.
Superman could just walk up to death, Kryptonian magi-tech him, then punch him into nothing. But he doesn't.

Can you imagine having the ability to end death, end suffering, and then not do it? Saying Ao keeps the universe together is one thing. Playing Ao and letting the gods of death disease and war actually have their way because that's what's ultimately best even though you can hear the prayers of the sufferers all the time would be quite another.

I also tend to agree. The sheer scope of the matters at stake in epic (and as one approaches it) often force characters to clarify just what they stand for and just what methods they are willing to employ when the Big Bad at the End of the Rainbow comes to town. This can be excellent role play. And aside from excellent role play and fun problem-solving dilemmas, there isn't much to epic at the mid-to-high end of the optimization spectrum. Low op epic is functional at times, but runs into the opposite problem of putting the characters on the big stage and then not giving them the right tools to survive.

I ran a monk15/wiz1/abjchamp5 in an epic campaign that featured lots of setting-hopping as the party worked directly for Ao. Ao died at level 25, slain by Gundam Tharizdun, who had been sucking the marrow out of the D&D multiverse for some levels. Then we ran and ended up in Wheel of Time, then something about Cain, the Last Vampire, then Hellgate: London. Finally we ended up thrown in "jail" in the WH40K universe. Quite a bit of fun, but eventually we reached a pretty high level of dysfunction (and the kobold sorcerer got possessed by a chaos demon and stole the TARDIS...that pretty much put the kibosh on the campaign)...I had, with DM's permission, pretty much thrown all the optimization into my character that I could muster (still can't hold a candle to what goes on here, but it was quite impressive, especially the Epic Leadership psion shaper/constructor/metamind cohort and his endless stream of astral constructs...luckily I hadn't started the game as a caster, or the end would have been much faster). Most of the fun of the game was figuring out just how much my highly principled character (LG Int-based monk) was willing, or unwilling, to compromise, and managing the role play with the rest of the party (most of whom were neutral with a chaotic bias). That and building sentient spaceships comprised of thousands of awakened oaks melded together under a single construct mind, then outfitting the thing with multiple mythals. Yeah, that was fun too.

Epic can work, but can definitely be a bit of setting change in many games. On the other hand, it can implode spectacularly under the weight the characters can bring to bear on threats (or the world generally).