Zen and the Art of the Impossible: Epic Theories, Part 2

In the previous article I mentioned that characters should be asked to do unreasonable things at epic tier.  I’d like to amplify that statement.

Epic Characters should routinely be forced to do the impossible.  But let’s break down what it is I mean when I say impossible.  Obviously when I say impossible, I mean impossible for normal inhabitants of the world.  If it was truly impossible, then no one could do it. Impossible tasks only seem that way at first.  They threaten to overwhelm the characters initially, but then the characters start to use their powers creatively and break down the seemingly impossible task bit by bit.

When I think of  designing impossibility in games, I’m thinking about a few things: Bigness, Complication, and Walls.

A Foe No Sword Could Kill.

Dragons are really cool. They do classify as ‘big’ enemies, huge even, but when I speak of  ’Bigness’ I’m thinking even bigger than that. When I want to amplify the scope of an epic-level task or encounter,  what I’m looking for is to make something so large that the thought of putting a sword to it seems ridiculous and absurd.  Maybe that dragon is the size of a small planet (hello Unicron).  Maybe the solitary dragon is an armada of dragons.  You can amplify size, but an even better way to make something big at epic is to conceptualize it.

What if our epic-level dragon was the spirit of dragonkind, the very essence of draconic might?  That is so “big” you can barely even touch it.

What does Bigness get us as DMs?  Why ‘super-size’ creatures in this way?  My two reasons are:

– separates epic tier as a unique play style.  At heroic, you hit things.  At paragon, you hit things with more finesse.  But just hitting things at epic with all that power just seems…wrong somehow.  When we can’t just hit something and make it go away, then we…

– encourage lateral thinking and creative power/skill usage. Last time I said that we need to embrace the characters’ power.  We short-circuit combat effectiveness in the short-term by making enemies to large to go down in regular fights but let the players make it up by doing even crazier things with their powers.

Bigness is great, but sometimes, things just get complicated.

I Need you to do 100 things, ten seconds ago.

I think truly memorable encounters are made memorable for clever use of complication.  When I say complication, I don’t mean having multiple status effects for your players, or even stacking up multiple hazards for the players.  When you need to complicate things, the first place to start is with goals.  Once you have a goal (or multiple goals) in mind, you then start chaining additional parameters and sub-goals to it.  An example:

First we start simple — just our goal: Defend the Heart of Light from the undead army. Simple, but boring.

Now, we complicate: Defend the  Heart of Light from the undead army while protecting the citizens of the town in pitch blackness as they fend off the corrupting effects of shadow. Now we’ve got something to work with.

I’d suggest out of the three methods I describe for building impossible tasks  that complication make its way into your game most commonly.  You can complicate in so many ways that it never gets predictable. You can only fight world-sized creatures and conceptual creatures so long before you strain credulity with your players.

You definitely don’t want to set up a bunch of Walls for them, though Walls might be the most interesting of the concepts I’ll discuss.

The Whole Entire Universe is Behind this Wall.

I think you know that I don’t mean a literal wall.  Here’s what I’m thinking.  A Wall is something that is on one or more dimensions, impenetrable.  It is the foe you can’t kill or reason with, the item you can’t destroy.  It doesn’t matter how big it is.  You just can’t touch it. There’s no way in. There’s pretty much nothing you can do but try to find the door.

The doors are actually what makes the wall interesting.  A crucial factor for me is that finding the door into and through a Wall should be part of the fight/encounter itself.  If it’s merely a case of  ”I am invulnerable unless you retrieve this item” then what you’ve got is a quest. Nothing wrong with that, but different from what I’m thinking about (though I’ll talk about quests later if you like). The Wall’s weakness is there in front of you to be discovered.  Interesting doors include:

–Sacrifice . The Wall opens up and becomes vulnerable when something is sacrificed to it.

–Chain of Events.  Players must discover a sequence of effects that makes the Wall vulnerable.

–Weak Point.  The PCs must access some difficult to reach spot to open this wall’s door. Combine with Bigness for Shadow of the Colossus style fun.

I also suggest that you use these as spice and not your main encounter design. Players could lose that sense of surprise and wonder if they see too much of it.

That’s all for this week.  What other epic matters should At-Will theorize about?  Let me know.

Similar Posts:

•      Complicated Goals: Making Memorable Encounters
•      Diabolical devices: the frictionless room
•      Powers are Everywhere.