>>113313>that's literally metaThat's just preparing for a game. I'll admit that my experience with offline d&d isn't that vast, but every time involved everyone in the group planning and chatting about what role they wanted to play in the story.
>>113314To be real, my character is
not as powerful as she could be. I could easily get to 60+ Wisdom without having to sacrifice 7 turn undead attempts if I had afforded my character the ability to use epic items (after all, my enhancement bonuses only progress by level). If I had made my PC neutral instead of good, she could cast both sanctified and corrupt spells. My PC is only about 1/4th as powerful as an optimized tier 1 caster could be (without exploiting infinite loops), but i didn't
just build her for power, I built her to accurately represent the role I wanted to play. I only took this stupidly under-powered Vow Of Poverty feat because playing an artificer left me with a subtle disdain of how unapologetically broken the 3.5e item system is.
Sure, my PC is made to fight gods, but isn't that what the campaign is about? There are a lot of epic monsters who are actual gods with actual deific powers that could wipe out the entire party on the surprise round if unprepared. I built a character with powers appropriate for what I expected to encounter in an epic level adventure. Sealing a reality-warping chaos deity that can thanos-snap you into a turnip with no save requires nothing but an optimized character. I've seen the ELH suggestions for epic level adventures and the Elder Evils adventure modules. Epic level is a high-crunch, powergamed, rocket-tag setting where a single unblocked attack can mean certain doom for an entire party.
A gibbering orb can shoot 24 ray attacks at once, followed by 12 bite attacks, each with a chance for Improved Grab and a chance to swallow whole, then devouring all of the swallowed caster's spells and using them against the rest of the party,
as a standard action. To counter that, I made a planar shepherd that had access to incorporeal forms to avoid being zapped, grabbed and eaten and have all of my spells sucked out on the surprise round.
A Protean, which is at exactly this party's CR, can duplicate
any extraordinary ability as a free action. That means that it can make iself immune to every kind of spell (wil-o-wisp), split into infinite copies of itself (black pudding), Become incorporeal, gain any kind of damage reduction, duplicate any Ironheart, Stone Dragon, Tiger Claw, or Diamond mind maneuver (those are extraordinary abilities too), give itself temporary access to any feat, make iself immune to any kind of energy damage, change size from fine to colossal, ... etc. Oh, and it regenerates like a Tarrasque, and it has Dimensional Door, Detect Thoughts, and Planeshift at-will. It basically combines all of the nastiest parts of a Phasm, a Chaos Beast, and a Tarrasque, in addition to every other kind of creature that could kill a party member in one round. I strongly expect to fight a bunch of those because they're the epic monsters most closely associated with chaos and randomness. Sure,
my character could try to escape from it, but not before it killed-off a party member and/or killed a bunch of innocent poners. To avoid absolute massacre, the only way to counter a monster like that is with immediate action, permanent, and persistent divination buffs, to warn the rest of the party that an nigh-invincible chaos spawn just manifested; then you would need to buff-up all of the party's martial characters so that they could deal enough nonlethal damage in the next several rounds to keep it from concentrating on teleportation so that they can knock it out and a spell-caster could use a wish or miracle to keep it dead. You need a spell-caster for that, and a spell-caster with greater spell-casting capabilities than a druid. Since it looked like there wasn't going to be any wizards or clerics in the party (at the time), I figured i'd try to get access to miracle and warp destiny through the Bonus domain feat. I made a character with Divine Metamagic so I could buff my allies and have those buffs last all day, so they wouldn't be easy-meat for epic monsters.
Then there's Infernal abominations who, thanks to their deific abomination traits, could slip through all of my divinations and defensive wards, grab me, bite me in throat and suck out my spells. How can I counter that? I really don't know. I'd just have to buff up the rest of the party and hope they can defend me from it while i try to pin it down with spells.
Then there's the possibility of a demilich, an optimized wizard, cleric or sorcerer impervious to all magic except for holy smite and kills you if it touches you. That's a monster that possesses all of the abilities my PC has, and much much more. I'd be afraid of fighting that, because the only way to deal with it would be to layer a fuckton of defensive wards and buff the party so they hopefully someone can damage it's astral projection hard enough and quickly enough for it to return to its private demiplane.
But really, there's a lot of stuff in those books that I don't think my PC could handle, let alone defend the rest of the party +2000 believers from. What if a Shape of Fire attacked and burned Topaz's believers and reanimated them all into an endless sea of lavawights? That would kill us unless you had a way to see into the future and stop the catastrophe from happening in the first place.
I built a god-fighter PC because CR 25 means fighting literal gods.