End of an era…

Sigh.. our excellent 4e campaign has come to an epic close. The final conclusion was very well done and for a while it seemed that evil would prevail. But the party managed to barely survive and defeat the god-slaying BBEG (or in this case ‘Big Bad Evil Chick’ or ‘BBEC’). As a sort of unusual “reward” the remnant powers of the gods that had been slain became available for acquisition and my legendary damage-dealing ranger, ‘Kataar’, has now ascended partially into the pantheon of deities as the new Demigod of Hunters and Assassins.

I’d like to thank Rae Vhen the GM for his incredible work as the GM. I learned a lot from him and I am sure my own campaigns will be better for having played in his. I’d also like to thank my playing partners for three years of fun and camaraderie. By the end of the campaign I believe Kataar was the oldest “surviving” character in the party.

Kataar was my first and only serious 4e character I’ve played. I did enjoy playing him, not just because of his crazy damage potential, but also because of his street-savvy and his clever utilization of magical toys and trinkets. He always was able to pull something out of his bag of tricks, and even in the final cataclysmic battle his “wonderful toys” gave us a critical respite from a crushing aura which was seriously hampering our combat effectiveness.

I do think Kataar was a surprisingly multi-dimensional one-dimensional character. Although he had the charisma of a garden slug, he excelled in sneaking around, climbing on or over things, finding stuff, opening things (although at the end of his career we had a more talented thief in the party…) and breaking stuff. He was particularly good at breaking stuff.

Although I have mixed emotions about ending such an epic campaign, I am actually happy to retire Kataar and move on. In the end Kataar may well be the single character I have invested the most time and effort into in my entire career of gaming. I can’t honestly say he is my favorite character (I tend to prefer complex, troubled spell casters over straightforward martial characters) I can say he’s been a blast to play.

Thanks again Rae! Excellent work.

Heh, as I was setting tags for this post I realized I now have to move Kataar from “active” to “inactive” in my categories… sigh.

Totally epic dude!

Well, we did it. My 4e group finally hit epic level. Level 21 introduces us to the whole new realm of epic adventuring.

Our first quest appears to be to hunt down and subdue the Tarrasque.

My ranger, Kataar, is as close to a munchkin character as I’ve ever played. He is a melee monster. A damage dealing dervish of demonic destructiveness. It’s sorta embarrassing how much damage he can do.

Which brings me to epic-ness…

I was expecting to see some bump in effectiveness for reaching epic level. I figured it would be more than a simple level up situation.

But I was amazed after going through the online Character Builder tool and comparing my post-epic Kataar to my pre-epic Kataar.

Basically he has gotten significantly better in every area he was already pretty darn good. The epic path he picked allows him to add a +2 to any two ability scores. Of course he picked dex and str. Plus crossing the epic boundary provides a boost to several feats just for moving from the “paragon” tier to the “epic” tier. For example, his “power attack” damage bonus goes from +6/+4 (main hand/off hand) to +9/+6. His weapon focus feat goes from +2 to +3. Etc.

The end result is that his attack modifier went from +24 at level 20 to +27 at level 21. Usually you see about a one point boost in your attack modifier per level. So in that sense moving from level 20 to level 21 is like advancing three levels in one step.

The question is going to be whether epic level encounters factor this sort of jump in, or if the AC, Attack and Damage progression is pretty linear for them. I guess I will find out.

I’ve only played a couple of characters in my 30+ year D&D career that got higher than level 12. Usually the campaigns I am in start at level 1 and peter out somewhere around level 10 or so. Playing a demigod-type character is an unusual situation for me, and it has its own entertainment value.

I am looking forward to our next session so I can see what sort of impact all these combat boosts have in, well, combat. 🙂