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Crow
2009-05-05, 02:43 AM
I am not too good with developing Epic spells, but now I have found that I need to do so. I have a level 21 Battle Sorcerer whose group has just made a big boo-boo and unleashed a bunch of fiends onto the material plane. We're talking dozens of portals, all over the world, and lord knows how many demons have made it through so far.

One of the ideas the group is bouncing around is the use of Epic magic.

The first idea was some sort of mass dismissal spell that would effect the entire material plane. I have no idea what the DC on something like that would be, but I'm fairly sure it would be out of our reach.

The second idea was to figure out some way to travel back in time and prevent our group from doing the action which caused all the trouble. Again, I have no idea what the DC for this would be.

The Battle Sorcerer is the group's only full-caster. She has maxed-out spellcraft for her level, but only a +1 to intelligence, and aquiring a headband of intellect or just about anything else she would need to buy has become difficult at least due to the hordes of marauding demons everywhere. For either spell option, she is ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, and for the time travel option, it is fine if it ends up being a one-way trip.

monty
2009-05-05, 02:53 AM
I have no idea what the DC on something like that would be, but I'm fairly sure it would be out of our reach.

Rule #1 of abusing Epic Spellcasting: no DC is out of reach. See: animating the planet and similar.

Other than that, I'm terrible with epic, so I can't help you.

Tempest Fennac
2009-05-05, 02:57 AM
Is this the character who got raised at level 1 after being killed? If she is, how was she brought back to life?

I'm not too sure how to calculate the DC for a spell which would be that powerful. Could developing Epic Summoning magic to open gates to allow Good-aligned Outsiders fight the demons off work while being easier to do?

BobVosh
2009-05-05, 03:54 AM
Is this the character who got raised at level 1 after being killed? If she is, how was she brought back to life?

I'm not too sure how to calculate the DC for a spell which would be that powerful. Could developing Epic Summoning magic to open gates to allow Good-aligned Outsiders fight the demons off work while being easier to do?

Be easier to gate loop in celestrials, as that would also be the best method for epic magics.

If you don't abuse epic magic reduction of DC, than epic magic isn't a solution.

Also time travel is difficult as help with epics, the only real example is that you steal a time duplicate of yourself from 1 round ahead. It would be easier to dismiss all outsiders. Which, depending on setting, is an incredibly large number of nondemons too.

Locating portals via scry + teleport + close portal(whatever spell it is, cant find it) + repeat would be the easiest way to do this. Only a dozen or so? Easy enough. Hire level 10-20 adventurers to hunt down the rest of the demons.

Espically if you have a way to cast a persistant time stop. 24 hours to do what needs to be done. You can rest 3 times and reprepare spells, missing only a few rounds in combat. Rods of persistant, scroll with this written, somehow having gained access to 15 level spell slots.

Olo Demonsbane
2009-05-05, 08:44 AM
Persistant Timestop does not work :smallfrown:

However, you can travel to a really fast time plane...

Now how to abuse epic spell making...

First, find the spell with the longest range; I think its Reveal. Now, set the duration ~1 day. Attach both the Destroy and Dispel seeds to it. To destroy a portal/demon, simply view it on your screen. You get 10 turns per actual turn, thanks to being on a faster time plane. Because the base seed is Reveal, you have the long range for your destruction.

As a final note, by the sidebar on ELH, you can use your Charisma on Spellcraft for Epic Spells.

Shinizak
2009-05-05, 11:44 PM
Rule #1 of abusing Epic Spellcasting: no DC is out of reach. See: animating the planet and similar.

Other than that, I'm terrible with epic, so I can't help you.

I'd love to see how to animate the planet, please do explain.

monty
2009-05-05, 11:51 PM
I'd love to see how to animate the planet, please do explain.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10240.

Specifically, post #9.

Sstoopidtallkid
2009-05-05, 11:55 PM
I'd love to see how to animate the planet, please do explain.Gate in a bunch of Solars. Use them to burn slots to mitigate the cost of a spell to gate in a fairly large number of Solars. Repeat. When you get an arbitrarily large number of Solars, use them to burn slots to mitigate the cost of Animate (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/seeds/animate.htm). There's more efficient ways, utelizing Mindrape and having the Solars cast Gate, but that's the general idea.

Zaq
2009-05-06, 12:11 AM
From my understanding, epic magic has two speeds: broken and unusable. The spellcraft DCs, not to mention the research costs, are basically impossible to reach without abusing the mitigation factors, but there's more or less no such thing as "just a little mitigation abuse." There's not a whole lot of difference, if you ask me, between chain-gating a dozen solars, or thirty, or seven hundred. (Chain-gating to get willing participants to sacrifice spell slots to your ritual is simply the easiest and/or most commonly use mitigation cheese, not the only one.) Once you opened the chain-gate, it doesn't matter what you do thereafter. However, if you don't try to tweak the mitigation factors to get the spellcraft down to a reasonable level, it won't be at a reasonable level by the time you get the specifics of the spell up to something more powerful than a pre-epic 9th level spell, and you won't be able to cast it.

I have been told that if you try really hard you can approximate a middle ground, but I have yet to see an example of this. That said, how cheesy are you willing to get?

Crow
2009-05-06, 12:16 AM
Well I basically just need a rough idea of the DC's for what our group needs to do. The cheese will be limited by the battle sorcerer not being able to gate creatures in because she doesn't have the spell or access to scrolls right now.

tyckspoon
2009-05-06, 12:49 AM
Well I basically just need a rough idea of the DC's for what our group needs to do. The cheese will be limited by the battle sorcerer not being able to gate creatures in because she doesn't have the spell or access to scrolls right now.

The kind of spells you're going to need are going to be mostly designed by ad-hoc factors, which means there's no way to really estimate the end DC (although if you want a starting point, using Reveal for "scry a specific known place/object/being and cast spells on it regardless of line of effect" has a DC of 250. That's before you start adding the adjustments for scrying through blocking materials, penetrating protective spells, and targeting all the demons on the world at one time. All that stuff, by the rules, would probably knock the DC up into the thousands- and you haven't even started on the Epic Banishment effect you'll need to add to this to actually get rid of all the demons.)

So I think you're approaching this from the wrong end. Let your DM know that you want to make an epic spell to fix your mistake, and then figure out how many ritual participants you can reasonably convince to help you and keep secure while you cast. The starting point for your spell is whatever effect your DM will agree to let you pull off with that number of casters, regardless of its technical DC. If it's still not big enough, start adding other mitigation- make it take a week to cast, so you have to fend off multiple waves of demons while you try to save the world. Burn enough XP to make yourself un-epic (mind, if you pull it off, you might make enough XP back to cover that.). If you're really dedicated to fixing your mistake, use backlash and enough XP burn to completely unmake yourself, so that the cost of your Epic Spell is putting yourself beyond being recovered by anything except maybe the campaign world's overdeity, if there is one. But whatever you do, don't think about Spellcraft DCs. The Epic seed system really doesn't work for what you're talking about.

Crow
2009-05-06, 10:16 PM
Thank you for that reply. The sorcerer will probably have to do it all herself, so i will get together with the group and see what we can come up with.