30 réponses à ce sujet

[WhiZard]

WebShaman wrote...

First of all, there are NO Mods available that do Epic levels real justice.

None.

The reason being, it is just too dang hard to really do all the work! First of all, you need that Epic story.

There might be another way to view epic levels (though I haven't seen modules that do this).  Consider level 21 characters as if they were level one and have them progress to level 40 as one would progress to level 20.  Spawns like spiders and rats would be made a lot tougher, and the differences between different playable characters would be more pronounced, but the focus of the module would be geared more to roleplay than to actual fights.

[ffbj]

There are a number of pw's available for dl on the vault. If you want to have something to play with your friends, You could dl some of those and find one you like and Dm them for your buddies.
There really is no clear cut answer to what a pw is, best to just play a few and see. Personally for fun factor sp modules are about a 6 while pw's are around an 8. That's on average of course. Though the gunslinger days of NwN are long gone, (i.e the wild west) you can still have fun playing in pw's.
I changed my portrait even though I have had that one for 10 years. Tthere are so many people with it,  I thought it would be a good idea to change. On the old boards I was the only one who used it.  So to avoid confusion, mine mostly I changed it.

Modifié par ffbj, 21 août 2011 - 08:55 .

[WebShaman]

Let us examine the "step outside of the box" sort of monster scaling that is being suggested here for Epic levels (psemarie got it right).

IF we are talking about Faerun here (re: Forgotten Realms), then scaling up "normal" creatures to Epic levels and remaining in Faerun (not going to some sort of other Plane, etc) then one stretches believability to the point of breaking!

Why haven't these super-powered versions taken over Faerun yet? What is to stop them? Epic levels are RARE! Such beings have access to powers that defy belief!

Perhaps ONE gnoll or kobold somehow reached Epic levels. It would, of course, be a unique, special being. But hordes of such? Come on! Not on Faerun.

That would be like having an Army of Tarrasque's bearing down on your City...who is going to stop them? Who could stop them? Even Elminster would quail at such an event! (thankfully, the Tarrasque is a unique creature, for obvious reasons!).

Take a Dragon Flight, for instance. ONE Epic party could destroy the entire flight! Literally thousands of Dragons, and totally helpless against our mega-powered, level 40 party! DR up the yazoo, protections against every imaginable elemental damage (real and imagined!), and Dev Crit hits being threatened at every swing, combined with ACs that make one unhittable on anything other than a natural 20...and even then, DR absorbs all the inflicted damage!

Or take the invasion of The Horde...one Epic level party would swat it aside!!!!! You would have chains of Great Cleave the likes of which one has never seen!

No, the idea of "scaling up" does not work with the Forgotten Realms setting (see NWN2 MotB for details). One might be able to get away with such with a custom made setting, of course. One is still going to have the headache of "balancing" all that Epic levels brings with the D20 system, however.

Ask any builder, Mod maker, etc, about creating for Epic levels. You will notice that they mostly do not have any hair, anymore...

Pulled out, roots and all!

[Elhanan]

C: KR, Aielund, and Sands of Fate are all Epic adventures set outside of Faerun, I believe. So no setting manipulation has occured there, to my knowledge.

But even if it had, not all of Faerun might be charted and recorded; hence new official mods can emplace lost cities and such if desired. That is hardly new.

Not all the Epic feats are as imbalanced as Dev Crit; Harm, Heal, and Haste are pre-Epic spells in need of a refit, IMO. But these do not invalidate the remaining spells and Feats surrounding them.

And the usual dragons seen in D&D have always been weaker; hence the numerous articles and revisions offering True Dragons seen over the years. My very first PnP encounter was with a Black dragon, and a loss of hp and CHA were permanent; not the stuff of normalcy. But it was quite memorable which is what Epic attempts to be.

Scaling up works well for me, as it is also seen in the PC. It may require care to be utilized well, but that is always the case.

Modifié par Elhanan, 22 août 2011 - 02:03 .

[FunkySwerve]

Thanks for the name drop, WebShaman. Yes, balancing for truly epic/legendary levels is a nightmare, requiring extensive calculations, spreadsheets, and immense amounts of playtest. And we're dropping paragon levels (61-80) this month, too, along with 32 new paragon spells. That'll be the last iteration, and the foes will be the campaign closers, the Elder Evils (development of which is likely to take a couple more years).

Interestingly, paragon levels are like epic levels in a number of respects, from a balancing perspective. In terms of game balance, the real purpose of epic levels was to draw classes closer together in their statistics. WIth only 20 die pips of granularity, abs, acs, saves, and so on begin to divirge too widely to be sustainable under the pre-epic progressions. We had a similar issue with legendary vs paragon levels - if we continued legendary ab progressions, ability point handouts, skills, and so on, dexers would wind up with untenable acs, mages with absurd skill point totals (eliminating any 'choice' of skill), and melee builds would have untenable abs versus support builds - to name just a few issues. We also decided to have paragon levels not add casterlevels, as it would've blown the spell resistance numbers of some of the multiverse's nastiest beasties all to kingdom come.

So, from a game design perspective, the purpose of epic levels isn't at all mysterious. It was to keep the various and sundry classes close enough together in the core statistics so as to prevent game breakage.

Of course, if we read the original post's question more broadly, as in 'why have them at all', instead of 'why do them as they were done', the answer is basically - to expand gameplay. Game design theory tells us that players like regular indicators of progress in the game, and that's one of the purposes that levels serve. They are a progress marker, and an indication/reward for time invested playing. If you want players to spend more time playing, you need more progress markers. The real trick, of course, is implementing additional levels without completely negating all the content of the previous levels (see, e.g., WoW) - one reason we've been working on paragon levels for over two years, now.

If you're at all curious about how paragon levels panned out, or the feats that are being implemented with them (you can't hand out 6 new feats without giving players something to spend them on), or the paragon spells, you can peep this spreadsheet:

Paragon Levels

Funky

[WebShaman]

Thanks for the expert opinion, Funky!

You explained things much better than my paltry attempts!