Creating Stat Blocks for High Level Campaign

[Marcarius5555]

This is not an advertisement for a game -- I'm not offering to run anything.

I've been participating in a thread about high level campaigns. A major difficulty seems to be the lack of suitable stat blocks for such a project. One suggestion that was made was to start a thread to see if anyone wants to contribute to a stat block repository for high level opponents.

So I'm going to propose a theme and general power level for stat blocks and see if anyone wants to contribute something. If there are enough complete submissions, and they're suitably inspiring, maybe someone will come along and want to run a game with it.

Here's the challenge -- make high-op CR30-50 opponents for a Pathfinder gestalt game.

Source: you can use anything from https://www.d20pfsrd.com, https://libraryofmetzofitz.fandom.com/wiki/Library_of_Metzofitz, or http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com. Go absolutely bonkers with optimization and give tactics notes after the build.

If you're doing npcs with classes -- gestalt whatever level you give them, 1 feat per level, Elephant in the Room Feat Taxes, and 1 feat per level.

Let's say the setting is some kind of enchanted forest with a group of green dragons that control it -- maybe they have a lot of kobold servants of some sort.

[AvatarVecna]

NYPA, dude.

[Aleph Null]

NYPA, dude.

Forgive my noobishness but what does that stand for
Just wondering lol

[AvatarVecna]

Forgive my noobishness but what does that stand for
Just wondering lol

Not Your Personal Army

[Warlawk]

This is not an advertisement for a game -- I'm not offering to run anything.


This is actually a really good idea and I think could be a great resource for people considering running an epic game.

That said, the recruiting forum is not the right place for such a thread.

[Marcarius5555]

This is actually a really good idea and I think could be a great resource for people considering running an epic game.

That said, the recruiting forum is not the right place for such a thread.

I beg to differ -- there was literally a similar thread a little while ago: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?649498-Monsters-Villains-Demigods-and-Dragons!-3-5-epic-NO-GAME. You're free not to participate of course. I would appreciate if everyone who didn't want to participate in the project would simply not post instead of contesting it's validity.

Considering an identical thread didn't get accosted in the same way a very short time ago, this really does just feel like picking on and bullying me for no real reason, and I'd really appreciate if those who are for some reason annoyed to just leave me alone instead of hassling me. I'm going to be reporting every subsequent argumentative comment as harassment to the moderators.

[Aleph Null]

I beg to differ -- there was literally a similar thread a little while ago: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?649498-Monsters-Villains-Demigods-and-Dragons!-3-5-epic-NO-GAME. You're free not to participate of course. I would appreciate if everyone who didn't want to participate in the project would simply not post instead of contesting it's validity.

Considering an identical thread didn't get accosted in the same way a very short time ago, this really does just feel like picking on and bullying me for no real reason, and I'd really appreciate if those who are for some reason annoyed to just leave me alone instead of hassling me. I'm going to be reporting every subsequent argumentative comment as harassment to the moderators.

Could I make a not-villain-but-plot-device NPC who would in such a situation be a plot-point-of-contention where you can either get their support if you play right or make them mad and have to fight them if you screw up? Because I have an interesting idea for that sorta thing. As a side note, this would likely be from scratch rather than using PC mechanics, although I would certainly take inspiration from existing things.

[Marcarius5555]

Could I make a not-villain-but-plot-device NPC who would in such a situation be a plot-point-of-contention where you can either get their support if you play right or make them mad and have to fight them if you screw up? Because I have an interesting idea for that sorta thing. As a side note, this would likely be from scratch rather than using PC mechanics, although I would certainly take inspiration from existing things.

yup -- that'd be great too -- anything that could be used. Thank you!

[Peelee]

The Mod on the Silver Mountain: Thread moved and re-opened. Do not make threats to report posts. If you think a post should be reported, report it.

[Nightraiderx]

Another thought on the project, rather than just creating monster/npc's at random you could instead adapt one of the epic campaigns and then adjust the npc/mobs to gestalt forms.

[Marcarius5555]

That's a good idea too -- probably even better than mine, since then you can use all the maps and plot stuff too.

What would be a good module? How crazy do we want to go with this?

One crazy idea I might have is to convert the old Black Spine campaign from Dark Sun along with the Dungeon githyanki modules like the Litch Queen's Beloved using the 3.5 rules on Athas.org, but make it all epic level. You'd still need to bump everything up a good deal -- the Litch Queen is only a paltry level 25.

[icefractal]

I like this concept, but I think you'll need a lot more definition around power level. Because:


Go absolutely bonkers with optimization and give tactics notes after the build. Even specifically avoiding infinite loops, you can get to a "kill anything published trivially while being invulnerable to it" level by 20th, much less 50th! It's not something you'd get accidentally, but "go absolutely bonkers" and yeah.

So the question is - what kind of 30th-50th level PCs are these opponents facing? Paizo-style? Optimized but still "normal" (real body, one set of actions, a couple dozen buffs)? Full-on "I am an entire multiplanar organization by myself" style?

Also, I've got to say that 50th level characters are a lot of work. I sometimes make characters for fun, and at high levels it's not an "all in one sitting" process, and I don't always bother picking all the choices (feats, spells, items, etc) once I have "enough". And that's just to write things up for my own use, not to publish-able standards. So it's going to be a hard sell getting many people to participate. I'm currently interested to participate, and yet I estimate that at most I'll produce one foe over the next week or two.

[Marcarius5555]

I like this concept, but I think you'll need a lot more definition around power level. Because:

Even specifically avoiding infinite loops, you can get to a "kill anything published trivially while being invulnerable to it" level by 20th, much less 50th! It's not something you'd get accidentally, but "go absolutely bonkers" and yeah.

So the question is - what kind of 30th-50th level PCs are these opponents facing? Paizo-style? Optimized but still "normal" (real body, one set of actions, a couple dozen buffs)? Full-on "I am an entire multiplanar organization by myself" style?

Also, I've got to say that 50th level characters are a lot of work. I sometimes make characters for fun, and at high levels it's not an "all in one sitting" process, and I don't always bother picking all the choices (feats, spells, items, etc) once I have "enough". And that's just to write things up for my own use, not to publish-able standards. So it's going to be a hard sell getting many people to participate. I'm currently interested to participate, and yet I estimate that at most I'll produce one foe over the next week or two.

Oh, I'm totally on board with you that it's an insane amount of work -- that's the main reason I assume there's so little published material at this level. Clearly, if you're going to actually put the effort in to try to make it interesting -- doing all this custom crafting work you're talking about with feats and stuff, it is a process that takes as long as making a character -- which can take weeks for stuff this high. I was working on a level 2 character for another game last night -- and even that was taking a long time looking through all the options for different things, looking through different guides for different options for different things, and that was a really simple build compared to most of what would go on in an epic level experiment. Once you multiply that out to a campaign worth of stuff... yeah, clearly that's like a solid few months of just making stat blocks, if not more.

I also agree on the power level -- I'm not even sure why there's stuff like the CR 90 great wyrm time dragon. It has 74 intelligence and a 90AC. It can manipulate time with several different effects, and so the only possible interactions between it and the pcs would consist of some kind of complicated time travel recursive loop silliness, where either one or the other insta-wins basically. It's more lore background than anything that would make a meaningful encounter. You could spend several months designing characters to face it, and still basically ends up with a meaningless recursion of time dilation effects that isn't even an interesting game scenario.

Honestly, I'm just genuinely curious if there's even enough interest to try to create this idealized epic campaign that seems to take up head space in a lot of people's imaginations, or if it really is just an impossible amount of work, and really is totally theoretical, and practically unworkable outside of some highly unlikely scenario like some kind of hyper focused amateur game designer who has time, energy, and inclination to spend years working on this by themselves. You'd think some 3pp. company would have published a 21-30 campaign of several hundred pages, or more than one, if there was a decent market for that sort of thing, and it was feasible to get freelancers to produce it. I'm not really aware of much, if anything in that category. There's clearly a lot of 3.5/PF material -- especially extremely niche archetypes and such in 3pp. supplements that have literally never been played, and never will be. I wonder what percent of the stuff from the 3.5 Epic material and PF1e Mythic material falls into that category too. Legendary Games put out a really impressive body of material to try to make the Mythic system work -- I wonder what percent of that has ever actually gotten into a game, or if it's sort of an art object of reading and imagining an epic game that might be played -- there's some really interesting lit. theory commentary on role playing game literature that talks about this quality of enjoying the books as a metatext about a theoretical game that might or could be played, and imagining that vicariously, but not actually doing it. And this act of imagining this theoretical game is a separate and significant way to experience these texts alongside actually sitting around a table or opening up a discord. This also applies to amazingly crunchy niche systems that just strain any sense that it would work at a table -- there's numerous reports that Kevin Sembedia, for instance, doesn't even use the vast majority of the Rifts rules when he runs games, and he made the system!