One of the areas of most roleplaying games that makes we wonder is the design of epic-level characters. These are typically high-level characters in the last 25% of the game's progression path. These are the earth-shaking superheroes of the world, iconic characters in their own right, and ideally, what players strive for their characters to become. Too often, game designers are content to just let high-level characters to be broken, the rules not tested or designed for high-level play, or they let the game's math drift off into this area where the number ranges are so high the original dice mean little. What's the point of rolling 1d20+30, when most tasks in the game are 'beat a 20-25'?
D&D4 was notoriously playtested less than it should have at the higher levels, the game fell victim to multiple cheats, stun locks, and other cheeseball tactics that spawned endless errata. Our group hit multiple issues with high-level balance, some classes falling off the power curve, and changes invalidating builds far too often, and it hurt our group's interest in the game. To be fair, the game was designed to have high-level play, the rules and monsters support it - it just wasn't playtested that well. The fact they needed to re-balance monsters constantly tells you something, they never found that sweet spot in play until the game's end.
Most of the 3.x D&D games, including Pathfinder, cease to be fun after level 7-8 or so, and a lot of players in our groups shared that view. The games devolve into abstract high-level math, and around this point, wizards and other spell casters take over the game, so the pure fighting class players lose interest first, followed by the caster players later on. The game just wasn't designed for high-level play, and extending the system just leads to an escalation of numbers to the point of absurdity. The old D&D 3.x Epic Level Handbook has skills and modifiers shooting all the way up to 1d20+100, and at that point, you are so far out of your original dice range things get silly.
Some of the old percentile games never scaled well either, games like Top Secret and Star Frontiers had percentile ability scores that were hard to figure out when they got into epic ranges. In Star Frontiers, if a robot has a strength of 500%, his melee skills would be something like 250% + 10% times skill level of 1 to 6. How does rolling a 205% chance to hit work? Similarly, characters could have scores of 110%, 130%, or more with some experience expenditure focused on one area.
MMOs hit this problem with no end in sight. In World of Warcraft, you could have a 60th level character doing hundreds of points of damage per hit, and then a 90th level character doing tens of thousands of points of damage in a single hit. Compare this to a first level character doing 1-10 points per hit and you'll get a good sense of scale. Some day, we will have DPS ratings being calculated in the millions of points of damage in a single hit. There comes a point where everything becomes relative, and the numbers matter little. In a way, this hasn't changed much from the old SNES RPG days where a character takes 9999 damage, the maximum they support, and dies - although the numbers have gotten much larger.
Okay, yeah, complaining is nice, but what do you do about it? A lot of these games do not understand that high level play should be different than low level play - and not just by the size of the numbers. There comes a point in every game where the game needs to change, and the game could change again at another point. World of Warcraft used to understand this, and in some games like Everquest, it still applies. In these games, certain classes have game-changing powers unlocked at certain levels, and the class' role changes. Where MMOs fail in this is that the gameplay does not change. typically, it is another dungeon with slightly more powerful monsters - maybe some new special powers are used on your group.
A game needs to know the breakpoints where the game changes, and support this. D&D4 tried to do this with tiers of play, where they tried to set expectations of what characters at different tiers of play should be doing and going. It led to a strange situation where 10th level characters were out plane-hopping, and this hurt the dedicated worlds, such as Eberron, Dark Sun, and Faerun. The game did set expectations well, but in reality, it didn't really do too much more than offer some special tier classes and more powerful monsters.
The math has to work too, and you have to set caps you can live with. If you have a game based on a 2d6 skill roll, what does it mean to have a +10 modifier? Epic doesn't have to mean broken math, especially when you take the time to design that high level experience. It is a different thing if you intend your game to break at high levels, that is a different thing, and also something we used for SBRPG1. An open-ended game where the math will break is a different beast than a close-ended game where the math breaks at the high levels. In the latter, the designers should have tweaked that high-level play experience to b fun without broken and strange math.
A lot to think about today, and also issues we are hitting in the design of 7dRPG.
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