What I Think About Stuff-the Metabarons Retrospective, Part 4

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Part 4-Aghora the Confusing

DISCLAIMER: Due to Aghora’s peculiar gender issues, this Metabaron will be referred to with the personal pronoun hse (he/she) and the possessive pronoun hir (his/her). If this confuses you, it’s because you only have one set of genitals.

With the Steel Head Party Platter finished, you lean back and take a sip of club soda, in a desperate attempt to quell the waves of self-pity rising up from your gut and washing over you.

Ah, product placement. Sweet, shameless, degrading product placement.

Just as you’re about to pay and leave the restaurant, all the while rubbing your belly and holding back some very audible burps, Jodorowsky leans over you and tells you that since you’re one of the select few to have braved the previous dish, you are to be treated their specialty dessert.

Nodding in agreement despite your stomach’s angry protestations, you stare in horror as you are presented with a gigantic bacon-vanilla shake, complete with a huge novelty straw.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Drink that Should not Be!

Holding back your tears, earnestly wishing not to hurt his feelings, you lean in and take a sip. It tastes exactly like all bad ideas should taste. Too salty and too sweet both at the same time, with just a hint of ‘what the fuck where they thinking’ gently tickling your frontal lobe as it cackles menacingly.

This, in a nutshell is what Aghora’s tale feels like. To be fair, presenting a character with a nature as strange as hirs, let alone using him as a protagonist for your narrative is way harder than it seems. After all, hse is a male brain trapped in a woman’s body, raised by a barely human parent into becoming the toughest, roughest, strongest and deadliest warrior rolled into one. Hse is also the last Metabaron, the product of a half-mad caste of killers richer than the Hindu Pantheon with way too much time in their hands.

This smug little shit right there, lying amid the spoils of a lifetime of hoarding is a goddamn amateur compared to the Castakas. 

Face it: when your dad’s a bitter killer robot in the grip of depression, you aren’t exactly gonna come out normal, sugar. Especially not when he pushes you to your very limits so you can impress your mom into admitting she was wrong in the first place.

I’ll only trap you into a perpetual state of dying until you admit you were wrong, okay?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I continue shoveling creepy imagery into your poor exposed brains, some backstory:

With Gabriella dying from some combination of ‘unspecified disease’ and ‘bullshit complications’ (i.e. losing her will to live), Steel Head pleads with her to allow him to save her children. Gabriella informs him at the last minute that she willed her womb into producing twins, instead of a son (wombs being the understanding, logical organs that they are). She also forces Steel Head to promise her that she will raise the daughter, thus trying to put a stop to the Metabarons once and for all.

Steel Head of course disagrees, but as the children are delivered, Tonto makes a stunning medical diagnosis:

Original sound effect of Tonto tapping the girl’s skull so he could verify his findings were removed from the printed edition.

So yeah. Apparently Gabriella’s womb is capable of performing stunning feats of infant development, besides of course manipulating the development of a zygote. There’s also the matter of the ease with which she performed these feats. From the top of my head, the following questions arise 

a)Has she done this before? If so, with whom? 

b) Was she trained to do this or 

c) did she develop these abilities after exposure to cosmic rays? 

d) Is this some sort of super power? If it is a superpower, then can it be used to fight crime?

Answers: a) Not that we know of b) No c) NO d) Yes

With Gabriella’s life teetering on the edge, Steel Head performs a brain switch surgery, thus saving the girl in the hopes of saving his super-powered bitch of a wife, who dies anyway. Steel Head pulls a fast one however and suspends her in stasis (see above).

Lacking a mother to feed and nurse the child, steel head does the next best thing and captures a Tarantuwolf (part tarantula, part wolf, part acid trip), which he tames and trains into both breastfeeding the child and caring for it. Aghora, already fucked up beyond belief, just shrugs, and rides it around the metabunker so they can frolic in the vacuum of space.

Sure as hell beats shitting on hirs ass all day playing xbox.

But the time comes when daddy Steel Head calls the twisted little product of his loins and puts hir to the test to prove whether hse is worthy of the Castaka name. He does this in the most sensible, least serial killery, Yog-Sothothiest way possible.

By asking the kid to stick hirs hand inside a goddamn ham slicing machine.

I and your mummified mom talked about this and we decided that we should not impale you on a rusty pole before you turn 16.

Of course, hse pulls through like a boss, voluntarily slicing hirs own arm all the way up to the elbow, thus proving hirself a true Metabaron. After that, Steel Head pimps Aghora out, by decking hirs body with half a war fleet’s worth of guns, because they both watched every season of Pimp My Ride and decided that the East Coast guys had a great idea going on.

Yo dawg, we heard you like mass murder, so we put WMDs in your body so you can kill everybody while you’re killin everybody!

With hirs Dakka officially on, Aghora scours the galaxy slaying its most powerful villains in the service of the Emperoress. But all is not well back home. Because while Aghora is away, daddy Steel Head goes officially bonkers and decides that he’s had enough of this humanity bullshit. Replacing every living thing on his body with a polymer counterpart, he officially turns into a cold, unfeeling automaton.

“Also, can we do something about the downstairs equipment? Perhaps replace it with a minigun or something?”

Joking aside, this is a fitting scene and a logical progression to Steel Head’s tale. Having lived his whole life as a cyborg, briefly tasting the joys of human emotion then losing everything in a tragic turn of events, Steel Head finally decided he has had enough of this whole humanity bullshit.

Switching his body to that of a robotic facsimile and choosing to become a machine is, essentially, the end of Steel Head’s tale. After all, there is not one little bit of him left that can claim to be the Castaka warrior that he was born; there are just wires, processors and a shitload of guns fuelled by sheer hate, wrapped up in a polymer casing. 

Note my use of the words ESSENTIALLY and how NOT ONE TINY BIT OF HIM can claim to be a Castaka warrior. Let’s face facts, boys and girls. You can’t turn yourself into a gleisner robot and still have the audacity to claim you’re the same person. But, apparently Steel Head’s dickishness survived the transmogrification process unscathed and hung on so he could torment Aghora just a while longer. Inside his new body, he challenges Aghora to a battle to the death, according to Metabaronic tradition.

Which essentially means dooming his only offspring to certain death, since invincible deathbots tend to scoff at puny sword blows:

Aw, I'm sorry, is my indestructible polymer casing too much for your widdle sword?

Pinned against the wall, Aghora chooses to stab hirs undead mom and uses the advantage to trap Steel Head inside the stasis gel and then shoot him into the vacuum of space for good measure.

With Steel head out of the way, Aghora enjoys hirs wealth and waits in vain for the Imperial Court to summon hir to their aid. But no one comes. Aghora, having had enough of their shit, decides to present himself (and his badass surrogate mother-mount) to the Emperoress, so he can request an audience.

Those of you who have read the comic books are by now fully aware of the third recurring theme in the Metabarons saga, the periodic slaying of the current Imperial Court by the hand of the current Metabaron. This shit only happens because every thrity years or so, the people there apparently forget that everyone in the room was violently killed exactly thirty years ago, on the eve of a Metabaron’s visit. This mostly happens because they provoke him.

Guess what they do when Aghora shows up to present hirs case. Then try to guess what follows.

\ At this point, I was convinced that every nobleman in the Capital hired hobos specifically for the task of replacing him for exactly this scenario.

With Aghora having made hirs case, hse is immediately hired to face the first great threat to the cosmos. Quick question: remember how Steel Head fixed that hole in the space time continuum that allowed invincible space vampires to creep in, killing a million people?

Well, he didn’t. What actually happened was that he did so shitty a job at it, that it actually drew the attention of an entire UNIVERSE full of the things, which immediately rushed in to kill everybody and replace the current universe.

Murphy’s law of Cosmic Crisis Escalation: If something from a parallel universe broke once into your continuum, then another far worse thing from the same universe will follow.

Aghora of course fights the invading universe and kills it, making hir the Metabaron with the biggest kill count in the series, which raises a very important question: was this necessary?

I understand that Jodorowsky was aiming at creating a character that would be the exact opposite of Steel Head, something akin to Aghnar only bred for battle and far more ruthless and that he aimed to present a challenge befitting it, but this seems terribly inappropriate. We already know that the Metabarons are killers, so how is the slaughter of an entire universe worth of lives supposed to phase us? How does this exactly contribute to Aghora’s story.

It doesn’t. A lot of stuff that takes place in Aghora’s story don’t. They’re just used as segways, as short impressive stories that pave the way for the Nameless Metabaron (who was obviously the focus of the creative team’s project). All in all, Aghora’s tale is just a transition montage.

With the universe save, the Emperoress presents him with the Super-Awesome Medal of High-Fives

Like this, only with a tiny little laser show and more tits.

And then this happens:

                               Look who’s wishing they’d sent their spare hobos instead…WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?


Which proves that the horrible spider monstrocity has brain cancer and attacked everybody, so they have to put it down. Aghora, facing hir own mortality, decides it’s time he put that vagina of hir to the test and have himself a baby. But let’s face facts, nobody wants to do a dude in an ugly girl’s body.

So hse opts for the next best thing, borrowing some stem cells from bro. But bro’s gone bad. Which leaves only one option: IMPREGNATING HIRSELF WITH HIR OWN BRAIN CELLS.

Because apparently nobody was even willing to jerk off into a cup for hir sake…

After some medical-genetic bullshit hand waving, Aghora somehow impregnates hirself, achieving the ultimate form of masturbation. With future savior of the universe and product of unholy incestuous self-sex in the oven, Aghora’s life seems to be going swimmingly.

When suddenly, SPACE WITCHES!

BwooOOO-oooo-WEEOO-ooo jum-jujuju-jum

The last remaining Shabda-Oud, after their defeat at the hands of Aghnar, retreated to the fathest corners of the galaxy where they set their plan in motion. It’s one of those great, fool proof plans, which is based on two premises: a) Killing the current Metabaron (which seems to be ill-advised. After all, they failed killing the last one when they attacked him en masse and the only weapon he had was his beloved) b) Making everybody worship a two-headed monkey psychic on the premise of following some obscure prophecy (and a direct reference to the Incal).

Pictured: a really good idea, without any flaws whatsoever.

Two-headed monkey and its space witches decide to attack the Imperial space prison and free their secret weapon against Aghora, Zombra. Presenting her with her secret weapon, Zombra regains her multiplication power, hoping against hope that the numeric advantage she’ll have over Aghora will be more than enough.

               

Nothing sexual about this scene whatsoever.

To their credit, they do attack Aghora when hse is at hirs weakest (i.e. when she’s giving birth) on some remote planet. Zombra cuts it close, sending wave after wave of her clone-selves-duplicates, pushing the Metabaron against the wall. I have to admit that the scene is both perfectly paced and does indeed consist the awesomest one hermaphrodite vs a gazillion attackers scene I have so far seen in a comic book

All this scene is missing is some Italian power metal lyrics and a solo from the guitarist of Dragonforce while in the throes of a seizure.

But Aghora cannot deal with such a large force. Outnumbered, but not outgunned, hse decides to fall back in the most metal way possible:

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PIECE OF EQUIPMENT MIGHT CAUSE YOU TO VIOLENTLY EJACULATE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Sword. Turning into a jetpack. Oh God, yes! Yes! Yes!

You know what? Even if you HATED Aghora’s tale, you’re gonna love its fight scenes. Sure the character suffers from a severe lack of character development and hardly qualifies as a viable Metabaron, but goddamn does hse put up a fight. 

Mr, Jodorowsky, I forgive you. Mr. Gimenez, you have my deepest sympathies and my undying adoration. A team of people that has the balls to both write and present a jetpack-sword has the kind of balls other comic book creative teams WISH they possessed.

Nerdgasm aside, Aghora orbit-bombs the planet full of Zombras, turning it into a cinder and then rushes to the Imperial Capital, where the Shabda-Oud’s two-headed monkey god has killed its royal guard and is threatening the Emperoress. Aghora rushes at the scene, newborn in tow and unleashes the DISCO.

                                                                                  

I keep imagining the OST to these scenes as a series of cleverly disguised disco covers, remixed Immediate-Music style.

But the space monkey god proves to be too powerful even for the mighty Metabaron. Falling on hirs knees, Aghora is soon to be destroyed, when her child (like Oda to Aghnar) comes to hirs aid. With their mind power combined, they kill the monkey-god and order is restored.

Thus, Aghora’s tale comes to an end. Was it any good, you’ll ask? 

The answer’s HELL YEAH. It’s always HELL YEAH.

While it does lack character development and Aghora simply comes off as the transgender weirdo of the family, it contains a lot of excellently presented scenes of battle, stunning visuals and, most importantly, it moves fast but with a proper sense of pacing. Aghora’s tale, action-packed segway that it was, served as an excellent punchline to the Metabarons saga.

This is the end of this retrospective, since the series was cancelled by Marvel Comics after the ending of Aghora’s tale. The following issues that covered Nameless’ tale did circulate in Greece, but unfortunately I do not possess any of them and therefore, I am unable to go into detail about Nameless.

I will, however, present you the part of Nameless’ tale that I have read, as well as make a couple short references to two of the series’ unsung heroes, Tonto and Lothar.

This sumbitch might not get a special reference here, but he does end up saving the universe by the end of the Incal.

See you again next week, when we wrap up the Metabarons saga!

Human Slaves Of An Insect Nation-part 5

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Great on paper, shit in practice!

 

Human Slaves of An Insect Nation, Part five-Threat Scaling Or from Kobolds to the Planes  

I’d just like to take a moment so I can state that the Epic Level Handbook was the single dumbest idea in the history of tabletop roleplaying.

Outshining Savage Species’ stupidity the way an exploding sun outshines a firefly’s glow.

With that in mind, allow me to move on to my argument:

As I stated in Part 4 of this article series (where I explained that players come to the game with the promise or riches, bitches and the venting of their sociopathic tendencies), tabletop roleplaying is based on the premise that overcoming a challenge begets reward.

Why the hell else would you bother dressing up as a dwarf?

Dungeons and Dragons became so stupidly famous because it was the game that sort of made this formula famous, by adding not only experience points, gold and bitchin’ magic powers in the equation, but also because the idea of constant, scaling challenge is an inextricable part of the system.

No matter how good of a Storyteller you are, there is a deeper, more insiduous reason why players come to the table and toss dice at each other in pretend battles to pretend death: and that’s so they can get stronger so they can fight more pretend battles to even more pretend death, while facing gradually more ridiculously dangerous circumstances.

They come to your table and listen to you talk and do funny voices, while making up an overarching plot line that leads to the near-collapse of the multiverse because they want you to make them akin to the heroes of yore.

tl;dr they start off like this

and end up doing this.

This effect, this scaling of power and threat is in more ways than one, the core of every game you will ever run, ever. Of course, power doesn’t need to be provided to the players in the form of magic armor or spells that can set fire to the sky, but you know what?

Most players won’t really care for much else. In fact, most players (at least the ones I’ve played with, no matter how good they were) will miss on the idea of subtler power like, say, political power and influence over the religious and diplomatic standing of an entire continent. No sir, your players are in this for the explosions, the gore and the dragon slaying and you best fucking buck up and provide said goods!

Shut up and kiss me, you fool!

But how do you manage the myriad intricacies of scaling threats? How do you deal with the grating, breackneck pacing of managing three to six manchildren, hungry for power? And, more importantly, where do you stop?

I cannot answer these questions, as they are a matter of personal experience and subjective approach to tabletop gaming. What I can do instead is give you this:

THE SHAPESCAPES GUIDE TO NOT LOSING YOUR SHIT WHILE MANAGING AN ENTIRE CAMPAIGN

That’s you, before reading this article.

Step One: Acknowledge that you are going to fuck up.

This is a fact that should be plain as day already. I’ve had friends of mine claim that they don’t like the pessimistic approach to gaming in these articles and that I should not constantly remind Storytellers that they are going to fuck up but you know what?

They’re fucking wrong.

Tabletop roleplaying is an exercise in basic social manipulation and narrative pacing, wrapped in memory exercises, with a touch of risk management. It’s the kind of hobby that makes you remember all kinds of trivial bullshit, while trying to pull off a tale and run a halfway convincing setting.

If I make it sound too hard, it’s because it is. Running a game with any sort of skill or success is a feat in and of itself and if you can pull it off, then you’re a fucking champ.

“Thanks, lake reptile! I feel so much better now!”

Most gaming articles, advice manuals and other horseshit material keep giving you feel-good advice about ‘story management’ and ‘challenge ratings’ or ‘experience tables’, automatically assuming that you’re going to pull these off with success, simply by virtue of following the word of the rules, but that’s the worst goddamn assumption they could ever make.

Not one of those goddamn tomes acknowledge the fact that you might mess up or might not get it right or even provide you with contingencies, because they don’t want to hurt your widdle feelings.

Well you know what dude? I ain’t scared to hurt your feelings. In fact, I am going to hurt you so goddamn bad that you will develop considerable scar tissue and you’ll have to grow around it. I’m gonna make you tear your Storyteller Muscles so you can be stronger every time until you’re an invincible story-machine, steamrolling over every challenge!

But to do that, I need you to accept that, along the way, you are going to mess up. You are going to make mistakes and your players will exploit them and you are going to learn from these mistakes and come up with increasingly better solutions until you’re the shadowy puppetmaster, pulling at your players’ heartstrings, making them dance to your every command!

Their lives and sanity dangling at the edge of your malicious fingers.

 So get this through your cute little noggin first: threat scaling is tough to pull off. But you are going to do it, because you are going to turn boss battles into walks in the park and random strolls through the park into Total Party Kills until you get it right!

With that in mind, let’s move to…

Step Two: Set up the Pace

How fast do you want your players to move up the great food chain that is your setting’s power level? Do you want them to be mud-farmers for a good chunk of their adventuring career, or would you like to speed things up so you can get to the demigod phase by lunchtime?

Fighting against extinction-level threats before dinner.

This is a direct correlation to having a clear outline of your story in mind. If you want the focus of your story to be the gradual and painful rise of a group of cobbler’s apprentices to royalty, then you need to play this out carefully and above all, slowly. The characters must move in a pace that fits your story so they can pave their way to glory in the corpses of their enemies

Every inch marinated in their own sweat-blood.

If, on the other hand, you’re feeling slightly more Michael-Bayey, you can always just blast past through the starting phases of the game, so your players can get to the giant-killing without wasting your time.

Sometimes, some rulebooks or articles will urge you to start the players off at an advanced starting point, so you can save time and effort. This approach, while popular, is only partially correct. 

Advancing players ahead of time by, say, 3 or 4 levels results in a manageable party with some considerable (but relatively ordinary) experience. However, starting the players in a much more advanced level of power means that their development and understanding of the limitations of their power occurred off-screen and that, above all, your players don’t actually know what to do with them and will in fact, drag your game down, as you also don’t know what to do with the mad gods you plagued yourself with.

That’s why you must move to…

Step Three: Make them fucking earn it.

“Experience is civilization, Julie. Without it, we're back in the LARP.”

Tabletop roleplaying differs from vidyagames in the sense that you can experience and play out the intricacies, trappings and understanding of your character and setting. In order to do this, however, you need to play him out and in order to play him out you need to be there, every step of the way.

There’s a reason why I consider starting the players off on an advanced stage is a bad idea. And that’s because the players cannot (and will not) understand or know how the magical sociopath they’ve just rolled into being works. Power, in tabletop roleplaying, isn’t just about tossing tupperwarefuls of dice at each other, or screaming obscenities at mindless results tables.

“You horrible fucking bastard! You ruined my life! Yououou ruiiined myyy liiife!” *KRA-KA-THOOM!*

Giving players power means putting yourself in the front seat of the rickety roller coaster you just made, knowing full well that this thing is about to collapse right under your feet the minute you begin your descent and still act all surprised about it.

If you still want to give them power, then do it sparingly and according to tour own narrative needs. Are your players war veterans? Level 3 sounds pretty good. Were they special force commandos in the same war, fighting behind enemy lines? Level 5 covers that. Were they the slayers of Nur’Combah, the Green Tyrant of the Gamboge forest? 

No, they weren’t. And if they claim they were, then they’re fucking lying and they better pray to their gods that Nur’Combah doesn’t catch wind of the stupid fucks that go around saying they killed him like a bitch, unless they’re looking for a faceful of highly corrosive acids.

With that in mind, why don’t we talk about…

Step Four: Set a cap.

“The realms of gods are not for man. Not yet.”

 

How lofty are the heights your players can aspire to? Can global champions exist in your story? Has anyone ever built himself an empire by virtue of his magical prowess and the might of his steel? Can you punch a god in the balls?

These are the questions that you need to answer before you set your cap. Your characters, even if they are destined to be the champions of the U niverse, need to have a clearly defined limit to their abilities. Perhaps they were never meant to be more than champions of the realm. That means that by D&D standards, level 12 is the highest any man may aspire to. Do you want them to be multiversal badasses? 18 is your cap.

Do you feel like you need to make your gaming life a living hell at some point in the future? Then try level 20.

But above all and most importantly, you need to understand that these are the highest possible levels of power your players can aspire to. These are the rewards they will receive at the very end of a life of adventuring and struggle. Which means that there are going to be very few people in the entire world to even near their awesome power. 

It is important to note, at this point, that when your players do reach their cap, or on their way toward it, you need to support the illusion that they are a team of badasses. Power, in roleplaying games is only as awesome as you can make it out to be. Yes, the players will always want more power, more numbers and cool shit. But if you can make them feel that this is the absolute fucking best it could get for everyone ever, then you’re covered.

Remember, kids: the illusion of power is much more effective than power itself!

Step Five: Manage the challange (I’m honestly sorry, I just couldn’t get it to rhyme any other way)

Du-du-duhm! Ah’m gonna be da vurry best! But first I’ll fuck up a looot! Ja-ja-junjun!

Step five lasts the entire campaign and can only be perfected by gradual and careful experimentation with your players’ capabilities, limitations and exploitation of the rules.

And in certain rare instances, teamwork.

Managing the challenge is a highly subjective matter that works topically, according to the rules and arbitration of each campaign on your part, so here are some basic guidelines.

-Fixed Challenge measuring systems (like, say, CRs) are garbage:

Once upon a time, Wizards of The Coast hired their finest machine game designers and tasked them with the quantification of each monster’s threat level, as a means to measure how dangerous it is. Thus, we got the Challenge Rating system

Turning the undying personification of ultimate evil with eyes that suck out your soul into an 8.

The CR system hurt roleplaying in two ways: 

a) it turned the flair and character of monsters into numbers and the entire series of battles in the campaign into essentially a Street Fighter style tournament and 

b) it was so goddamn stupid everyone thought it was smart.

I could go on and on about CRs and all that relevant shit, but that would defeat the purpose of the article, so here’s the gist of it:

Each monster should be placed and arbitrated according to the needs of your story and is there to challenge your players. Yes, this method is way harder to pull off and requires much more thought on your part, but it makes for a much better model of play. In fact, by doing this you realize that…

-You should not be afraid to experiment:

Ach, ja! By zplizing ze abilities of the undying monstrocity vith ze regenerative capabiliez ov a monitor lizard, I am become as a God in mein own right!

Monsters and threats are usually made by professionals who know what the hell they’re doing and know how to work with you. But sometimes, your monster, villain or threat needs that extra flair. So why not add shit to him or change some shit up?

Give your astral pupa that’s been plaguing your characters the ability to instantly track them across the Universe! Make your otherwise invincible shadow demon vulnerable in moonlight! Turn your boring ass elf nazi bad guy into a sniper! 

Caught in a pinch? Go cyborg on their ass!

The possibilities are endless and no-one can stop you! No one but yourself, that is. Remember: you are the only one who knows what your party can handle. You know whether the brain-blasting eye attack you gave your orc scout will kill them or if it will just give them a hard time.

But if you’re boring and not into spicing up your monsters (or if you’re into tactical combat), then you can…

-Spruce up the battlefield:

Wait, so Iron Fist is interesting now? How come nobody told me?

Fight in zero-g. Get a shitload of lesser enemies to charge the team as they are orbital dropped from space. Shamelessly copy and remix an MK arena. Make the sky, the sea, even absolute darkness your field of battle!

Always make sure that your current threat faces your characters in a setting that is advantageous to it, thus giving it better ground to fight in. Also give the players hazards that they can master, forcing them to use their abilities in new and exciting way, but always know this:

The players will miss the subtler clues. Always add an environmental or morphological hazard that can be exploited both ways. If their enemy can use Dream Kung Fu, then make sure they get that they can use that against him as well.

Remember: your players like a challenge, when it is evenly balanced and thought out. Nobody wants a party pooper that flings Godzilla at them and goes:

“It’s a twenty-storey lizard with fission breath and impenetrable skin” “I cast Magic Missile!” "Uhhh...kay"

But, according to Step One, you could just always turn this into a TPK. Cue…

Step Six: Arrange for escape contingencies

Fuck this, I’m out of here.

Your threat might end up becoming too much. Maybe you miscalculated and now the dragon’s about to tear your party to shreds. Or perhaps the amorphous blob of matter with the hypnotizing song that can swallow and assimilate the party in five rounds made it to the sixth.

Either way, this is a fuck-up. There’s two ways you can deal with it.

-Deus Ex Machina:

The Deus Ex Machina is a classic ‘I messed up so I’m pussying out’ move that is aimed toward covering up your mistake while at the same time keeping everybody happy. A straightforward, in-your-face application of deus ex machina makes you look inept and above all, like a coward.

“Nobody’s gonna say my son was yellow.”

This method of bailing requires careful planning and, above all, subtlety. You cannot present an unkillable meat grinder of a monster and then have the torch-bearer come out with a gatling gun and kill the fucker. But what you can do is give the monster very particular dietary needs. Say, for example, that after incapacitating the party, the creature leaves their seemingly dead bodies to marinate in a cesspool for a couple hours so it can eat them. The torch-bearer finds them then and helps them escape and presto! You’re scot-free!

Only problem is, there’s only so many ways you can pull it off. They ain’t that many, but they’re enough for you to understand where you went wrong.

-Taking it like a goddamn man:

You clench your teeth and explain how you fucked up. You accept the consequences and above all, make it up to them. If everybody’s dead, you can at least try harder to not make this threat the meat-grinder it originally was. If everyone got away with the skin of their teeth, then control the damage.

It’s tough as shit and you’re going to get a lot of verbal abuse over it, but they’re going to appreciate you for it. As you all learn and grow together, so does their power, which brings us to…

Step Seven: Power Sucks

Explosive disintegration does sound like a much more viable alternative, after all.

As your players grow in power, they discover that they get more options that they can use in their favor and abilities that they can apply in combat or otherwise. This means that, as you progress in game, threats can be overcome in more than one ways.

That means that you need to up your game but to up your game, you need to have set up your cap and know your player’s modus operandi. In games like D&D, the system begins to break down past the 12^th level, since at that point the character’s magical prowess gives them such range of possibility that it’s absolutely ridiculous to plan for every contingency.

This is also probably the point where everyone starts getting bored.

“Oh wow, I blew up the Zataran homeworld…again…yay?”

The rise to power and the illusion of power in a game is only worth as much as the challenge and the threat it represents. As long as that well of adversity runs out and your players have become unstoppable machines of change in their universe that is the point where the game needs to end.

It’s not so much a flaw in the game. Games are, after all, designed to cover the wide range of players who would like to play it, so it needs to cover as much ground as possible and provide as many options as possible. The point where power becomes a burden is the point where you, as a Storyteller and they, as your players start getting tired of it.

I’ve found, through my gaming experience, that I cannot handle high-powered games. I can manage the illusion of a high-powered game, by giving the players considerable abilities and influence, but the mechanics just elude me. Maybe you can do it and run a game up into the impossibly powerful levels and be able to juggle the numbers and the endless within factors that need to be taken into consideration.

But that means that you’re awesome.

Addendum:

I consider the Epic Level Handbook and the entire idea of Epic Levels to be utterly ridiculous, mostly because people have come to equate power with numbers and cool special effects, when in fact the nature of power in a story relates to pretty much how much of an impact you have in the world your characters inhabit.

You don’t need artifact swords that can split planets. There’s no necessity for you to beat the living shit out of the Eight Gods of Chaos and you don’t have to be at level 25 so you can explore the Eye Of Nothing at the very center of the Universe.

You need, however, to be able to cover all narrative threads and present situations in which those things could be possible. There’s a reason why people prefer Batman over Superman these days and that’s because Batman is a downright ludicrous character who constantly spawns contingencies that allow him to be in the same team with the people who can juggle suns.

Remember: you don’t need muscle to move the world. You just need a big enough lever and some ideal positioning.