GenCon 2009: High Level D&D Seminar

While at GenCon this year there were many events and seminars which I wanted to attend, but one of the seminars that I really didn’t want to miss was the High Level D&D one hosted by Bruce Cordell and Stephen Schubert from Wizards of the Coast.  The blurb write up for the seminar mentioned something about a sneak peak at what might lie beyond level 30, which combined with epic level monsters fueled my post about adventuring after the epic tier.  It turns out that the blurb may have been misleading, or in my opinion downright incorrect, as Stephen addressed this and said they had no plans to discuss such a thing.  However, as the WotC designers have a habit of doing, they asked the audience in the room who would be interested in such a thing and if I remember correctly just about half of the room raised their hands, so we may be seeing something about this in the future of 4E.

The High Level D&D seminar began with Bruce recapping the general overview of the three tiers of play in 4th Edition.  Heroic focuses on local issues, small dungeons and a strong incentive in gaining loot as the party slowly makes a name for themselves.  The Paragon tier sees the party move on now that they’re recognized to bigger cities and bigger goals, and the story ties them to more regional consequences for their actions.  Epic tier sets the party up as “myth-makers within your game world” as they fight avatars, angels, and even gods.  They emphasized that one of the goals of the Epic Destinies is to really tell a strong story with your character in this tier of play.  Stephen and Bruce took some time to elaborate on epic level play, saying that as the party learns to do awesome things like fly and come back to life, they insisted that DMs should in most cases let the PC’s do these things and use their epic abilities instead of the gut reaction which is to stop them from flying over a mountain or completely avoiding a location.  Instead what they encourage is letting them fly over things, but make it a dangerous path for them to take.  The underlying idea is that if the characters have awesome abilities but they never get to use them, then the game stops being fun for the players!

From there the seminar jumped right into a big Question & Answer session, which I attempted to record most of the important things said during.  There were many questions about the game mechanics and math at higher levels, especially with regards to PC to-hit and AC versus Monster to-hit and AC, they said that the expertise feats and several others should help minimize any discrepancies.  They really want the game math to scale all the way up through the levels, and what they have found is that party cooperation that develops at later levels starts to offset any of the perceived differences in the math (for example:  Epic PC armor class lagging behind).  There was a follow up question about if resource management really scales all the way up, as higher level characters don’t need to use as many healing surges or aren’t in as much danger.  The answer was that there will be more factors draining a character’s healing surges at higher levels.  They mention that daily powers and magic items once the character has more of them become a resource that can be managed as well and lived with, but once a character runs out of surges it’s time for them to rest!

There was a long discussion about broken mechanics and how to deal with them as a DM, such as an epic level wizard using Orb of Imposition being able to stun-lock Orcus.  The effective answer was to throw more challenges and not just let the party cheese a demon prince, Stephen’s go-to example was throwing five Balors at the characters (be he also alluded that he is a deadly DM).  A question was asked about how to handle high level rewards, which they referred to as being answered and addressed in the DMG2 coming out next month (Stephen had a copy that we got to look through briefly).  Both Bruce and Stephen suggested giving out items that fit the flavor of your game world and giving them mechanical benefits on the side, the anecdote used was a character gaining a +5 to reflex because they were blessed by the Lady of the Lake.  This discussion also lead into giving out temporary boons to characters (such as the +5 to reflex) that make each encounter, adventure, or tier unique for the players.

Someone asked about why Wizard area of effect attack powers seem to target allies while monster’s attacks don’t.  The simplest answer was that Bruce felt players need to have interesting choices, and that the AoE targeting leads to more of these.  The question was asked about encounter length in paragon and how long they should take, the rule of thumb given was that truly epic fights should take 1-1/2 hours, while the typical fight should always last 45 minutes to an hour at most.  They did acknowledge that at the higher tiers the sheer number of options players get tends to spread things out and slow things down a bit.

Solo monsters were brought up, and questioned whether their damage output was too low or if there were ways around this.  They seemed to understand this, and recommended increasing the damage, they also said that solo monsters in the Monster Manual 3 will most likely have better resistances to stun and other effects to increase their ability to challenge parties.  This is the point where someone brought up the level 31+ issue, which caused Stephen to say that perhaps the GenCon write-up had over-promised the seminar in that respect.

Someone asked if they were going to continue the Icons line of minis, especially for Orcus as he is the final fight in the official adventure modules.  Both Stephen and Bruce expressed that everyone at WotC really wants to produce those minis, but that the Dragon Icons did not sell nearly well enough and so they have no plans at the moment to continue with more.  A great question was brought up about how to make players in the higher tiers feel like the consequences of the game are higher, the answer was that more involved storytelling is needed to get player investment in what is happening to the characters.  The question was also asked about how to effectively jump characters from one level to another, they agreed that you should jump characters to the beginning of a tier such as level 11 or level 21, and not to the middle of  a tier.  This allows the players to become familiar with their character’s abilities, giving them better knowledge of and investment in the character.  A reference was made to some of the more “ridiculous” rules for using skills in 3.5, such as stunts and skilled feats of epic proportion.  Utility powers effectively are meant to take the place of these, but they didn’t view this as a bad thing to allow players to do and really make their skill choices feel important especially at later levels.

Perhaps one of the matters that I was most curious about, the questions was asked how the monster creation rules changed from the first MM to the MM2, and how we can update earlier monsters to the new rules.  They elaborated that some of the changes came from solo fights dragging: the early solo monster’s defenses were too high and they had too many hit points so they lasted until characters were out of daily and encounter powers and had to resort to just using at-will powers over and over.  To fix this they reduced the hit points gained when making a solo monster and did not adjust their defenses nearly as much, but they did try to give them a more concentrated output of attacks in the shorter number of rounds they’d be fighting (such as through bloodied trigger effects).

Another question was asked about the official modules, and how they made the final fight with Orcus (in E3: Prince of Undeath) dramatic and truly epic.  They could not mention any specifics as the module is not out yet, but they said that Orcus knows the party is coming to fight him, and that the demon prince has an involved role in the story and goals that he wants to accomplish, so he will be prepared for the PCs and those are the elements that add to the encounter.  They also revealed that the E3 module will have a different stat block for Orcus than the one in the Monster Manual.

Straying a bit from the subject of high level D&D, but still a good question, it was asked how many future books they planned to produce and if it would just continue as it is going for the next few years.  Stephen essentially said that there is a critical mass for the core books that they will stop at, supposedly none of them intends on creating a PHB 11 or a DMG 10.  Exactly how many they will make cannot be said yet, but it sounds like the 5th or 6th generation will be the most we see, then they will go on to creating other books instead of the core ones.  In my opinion the quote of the seminar happened at this point:

“We want these books to have things in them that make your game better.” – Stephen Schubert

The end of the seminar included some general discussion on how to handle encounter design, which led to Stephen telling some good stories about how he feels the Wizard in the back of a party should never feel safe.  He said almost always in his games the party has monsters coming at them from multiple (if not all) directions and the safest place for the Wizard to be is usually close to or next to the Fighter.  Overall it was a very enjoyable seminar, and if for nothing else it’s really great to see first hand some of the designer’s reactions and instincts when it comes to solving problems in D&D.