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View Full Version : Possible fix for Epic Spellcasting?



Tohron
2009-10-24, 10:24 AM
A lot of you know that Epic Spellcasting is broken, since as is stands right now you can just use followers from leadership and/or summons to act as ritual casters and mitigate enormous DCs. So here's my proposal: all mitigating factors on epic spells only affect the DC to cast - they do not affect the time, gold, or XP it takes to craft the spell. This should easily resolve the chain-gating-solars-to-animate-planet problem, since such a spell would take millions of years to craft.

Since an adventurer likely doesn't have time to sit around in one place researching a spell, they could be allowed to just invest a certain amount of time, along with the appropriate amount of gold and XP every day to get credit for researching it (the rules are vague here anyway).

Although I'm not sure this will fix everything wrong with epic spellcasting, this does delay the rate at which newly epic casters gain power, and also makes ancient wizards and cosmic entities much more relatively formidable, since they will have used that time to craft extremely powerful spells.

The Glyphstone
2009-10-24, 10:30 AM
It's a start, but Epic Spellcasting just has so much wrong with it that you'd be best scrapping it entirely and starting over, like many people have.

tyckspoon
2009-10-24, 10:38 AM
^what he said. Notably, if you run all the costs off the 'real' DC, you hit Epic Spellcasting's other big problem- if you *don't* mitigate, it's almost impossible to make a spell that is worth what you pay for it (especially for combat spells- making '1 action' the default cast time for some of the seeds should be done as part of a fix. That extra 20 DC to cast a spell in the same time every other spell level you have gets for free is just one huge kick in the junk to the concept of epic blasting.)

Indon
2009-10-24, 11:10 AM
Limit individual spellcasting mitigation factors based on caster level. Say, a max mitigation of 1/2 CL per factor.

Individual mitigating factors are:

-Backlash damage
-XP Burn
-Cast Time Increases
-Additional Participants

Which would limit the max mitigation to twice caster level, which should help limit the more egregious potential abuses to the system.

Now we have to make the system more viable as baseline.

Reduce the resource cost to (1,000 gold X Spellcraft DC).

Specific values may need tweaking, but that should address the two biggest problems with epic spellcasting: Potential Spellcraft DC mitigation abuse, and excessive development costs for reasonable spells.

Edit: There are other mitigating factors, but they don't stack indefinitely, and casters shouldn't be dropping their blasting spells to D2's for an extra -5 anyway, it'd be silly.

Milskidasith
2009-10-24, 11:14 AM
The gold itself is the problem... increasing the cost doesn't help. Restarting it entirely is what is necessary, because... well, it's either completely terrible (non mitigated, or mitigated with costs) or broken (fully mitigated) with nothing in between.

Indon
2009-10-24, 11:16 AM
Considering that epic WBL is very high, I don't consider that gold cost excessive by any means, and development time and XP costs are based on gold cost.

Edit: Actually, looking at Hellball, make that 500 gold times the spellcraft cost. Now it costs a rather minor 45,000 gold and 1800 XP to make.

Oslecamo
2009-10-24, 11:31 AM
^what he said. Notably, if you run all the costs off the 'real' DC, you hit Epic Spellcasting's other big problem- if you *don't* mitigate, it's almost impossible to make a spell that is worth what you pay for it (especially for combat spells- making '1 action' the default cast time for some of the seeds should be done as part of a fix. That extra 20 DC to cast a spell in the same time every other spell level you have gets for free is just one huge kick in the junk to the concept of epic blasting.)

But this bring another problem. There's plenty of nonepic magic spells that are already damn strong. Making epic spells castable as a standard cation that are stronger than nonepic spells would only have a shred of balanced if we went out there and we made some epic feats or epic combat options for martial characters.

Personaly, I don't see that much of a problem with epic spells taking time. Wizards telling the fighters to hold the line while they prepare their ultimate fireball of death is a big staple of fantasy, and could kinda work in D&D.

For example, spending two hours to make a super buff that will last one hour, then teleport and go to town.

Or a spell that takes five rounds to cast, started while the caster is hidden, in order to open the combat, like piercing some uber defenses of their enemies.

tyckspoon
2009-10-24, 11:50 AM
But this bring another problem. There's plenty of nonepic magic spells that are already damn strong. Making epic spells castable as a standard cation that are stronger than nonepic spells would only have a shred of balanced if we went out there and we made some epic feats or epic combat options for martial characters.


I wouldn't do it to all the seeds, just the ones that are apparently actually intended to be used in the same way their non-epic counterparts are (Destroy/Energy/Dispel, for starters.) That extra 20 DC makes it more difficult to replicate a Lightning Bolt than to automatically protect yourself from next five attacks you take in a week (and as a bonus, you can get your attacker to kill himself!) That's ridiculous, especially when the designers supposedly *wanted* people to blast stuff.

Temet Nosce
2009-10-24, 12:25 PM
But this bring another problem. There's plenty of nonepic magic spells that are already damn strong. Making epic spells castable as a standard cation that are stronger than nonepic spells would only have a shred of balanced if we went out there and we made some epic feats or epic combat options for martial characters.

Personaly, I don't see that much of a problem with epic spells taking time. Wizards telling the fighters to hold the line while they prepare their ultimate fireball of death is a big staple of fantasy, and could kinda work in D&D.

For example, spending two hours to make a super buff that will last one hour, then teleport and go to town.

Or a spell that takes five rounds to cast, started while the caster is hidden, in order to open the combat, like piercing some uber defenses of their enemies.

I don't see a problem with this either (in fact, I like the image), but lets work out how epic spellcasting would make such a spell (the ultimate fireball of death one) ignoring the usual methods of circumventing things (please inform me if I'm calculating this incorrectly).

We'll use the Energy seed and turn it into a 20 ft radius then increase it till it's oh... 640 ft. That brings the DC up to 41. However, the damage is only 10d6 so far so we'll need to do something about that. An optimized blaster Sorc can easily deal thousands of damage a round with Wings of Flurry at this point, we obviously can't match that (well, there goes the ultimate part) but lets shoot for high enough to actually kill most things with low 20s CR. Call it 500 damage assuming average rolls. It'd cost another 160 to bring it up to 500 damage (using the dice size increases and guidelines in the seed for each additional die rolled) leaving us with a DC of 201 even without modifying the save (which defaults to 20+casting stat I believe, reflex half).

So, 201 now we apply the casting time mitigation... for a total of -20, and requiring a casting time of 66 rounds. Assuming we meet the new 181 spellcraft DC it'll still take 1,629,000 gold (do you even have this much gold total by early epic?), 32 days, and 65,160 EXP just to develop the spell... which still wouldn't be nearly as good of an option as just using Wings of Flurry to kill them off in the first place.

Epic spellcasting is non functional in so many and varied ways that trying to "fix" it is pointless. Scrap it, start with something new.

Indon
2009-10-24, 09:33 PM
Call it 500 damage assuming average rolls. It'd cost another 160 to bring it up to 500 damage (using the dice size increases and guidelines in the seed for each additional die rolled) leaving us with a DC of 201 even without modifying the save (which defaults to 20+casting stat I believe, reflex half).

How do you get that?

+40 would cover 4 die size increases: 6>8>10>12>20.
To get +160 out of that for the Energy seed, you'd need to add 60 additional damage dice.
70D20 deals well over 500 damage.

And then, the final and most significant point in your entire argument is the most easily houseruled aspect of Epic Spellcasting. Seriously. Just drop the development cost per DC point.

Also, there's not much point in comparing extremely optimized nonepic damage-dealing with what would be reasonable, hopefully unexploitable, damage dealing with epic spellcasting. In fact, all you're doing is pointing out that epic spellcasting with some basic fixes to prevent mitigation exploitation and to reduce development costs is potentially more balanced than high-level nonepic spellcasting.

Not that that's hard, but still.

Milskidasith
2009-10-24, 09:36 PM
Balance is relative to other things... so if a hard to develop epic spell is still weaker than spells of 9th level, epic spellcasting is unbalanced in that respect. Whether it can make the fighter (who can ubercharge for nigh infinite damage anyway) feel better doesn't make it balanced compared to, you know, other spells.

Indon
2009-10-24, 09:45 PM
Balance is relative to other things... so if a hard to develop epic spell is still weaker than spells of 9th level, epic spellcasting is unbalanced in that respect. Whether it can make the fighter (who can ubercharge for nigh infinite damage anyway) feel better doesn't make it balanced compared to, you know, other spells.

Yes, but the fix being requested in this thread is clearly one for an epic magic system that can't be gamed to that level (as it presently can, with the trick the OP describes).

The OP clearly wants an epic spellcasting system that's usable but not abusable. It's rather easy to shut down the abuse - just make infinite mitigation unfeasible or impossible. From there, making it feasible consists primarily of making it affordable.

And in this case, the epic spellcasting system can indeed outdo high-level blaster spells rather handily, barring extreme optimization combos which presumably would be just as banned in the OP's (or any reasonable) game just as quickly as infinitely mitigated epic spells.

Kylarra
2009-10-24, 09:50 PM
I've found that just taking the higher leveled spell slots and stacking metamagicked spells into those is equivalent of any reasonable epic spell.

Masaioh
2009-10-24, 09:55 PM
Limit individual spellcasting mitigation factors based on caster level. Say, a max mitigation of 1/2 CL per factor.

Individual mitigating factors are:

-Backlash damage
-XP Burn
-Cast Time Increases
-Additional Participants

Which would limit the max mitigation to twice caster level, which should help limit the more egregious potential abuses to the system.

Now we have to make the system more viable as baseline.

Reduce the resource cost to (1,000 gold X Spellcraft DC).

Specific values may need tweaking, but that should address the two biggest problems with epic spellcasting: Potential Spellcraft DC mitigation abuse, and excessive development costs for reasonable spells.

Edit: There are other mitigating factors, but they don't stack indefinitely, and casters shouldn't be dropping their blasting spells to D2's for an extra -5 anyway, it'd be silly.

I was thinking of something similar to this, except the limit to mitigation would be a certain percentage of the non-mitigated DC.

Temet Nosce
2009-10-25, 04:44 AM
How do you get that?

+40 would cover 4 die size increases: 6>8>10>12>20.
To get +160 out of that for the Energy seed, you'd need to add 60 additional damage dice.
70D20 deals well over 500 damage.

You're right here, for some reason I thought die increases were 20 per. So it actually works out to 40 less, thanks for pointing that out. Still completely unreasonable of course.


And then, the final and most significant point in your entire argument is the most easily houseruled aspect of Epic Spellcasting. Seriously. Just drop the development cost per DC point.

Also, there's not much point in comparing extremely optimized nonepic damage-dealing with what would be reasonable, hopefully unexploitable, damage dealing with epic spellcasting. In fact, all you're doing is pointing out that epic spellcasting with some basic fixes to prevent mitigation exploitation and to reduce development costs is potentially more balanced than high-level nonepic spellcasting.

Not that that's hard, but still.

Actually, that rather IS the point of my argument. That you'd need to make yet another houserule, for one of the most basic varieties of spell to function at all at epic and it would still not stand up to non epic spellcasting.

And yes, there is. Otherwise anyone with half a brain is going to use optimized non epic spellcasting, and even if they're forced not to the results from epic spellcasting will be... underwhelming because bluntly epic spellcasting is supposed to be well, epic.

Instead of going through the trouble of working through the entirety of Epic spellcasting, and houseruling the issues one by one you would be better off simply writing up your own system.

Indon
2009-10-25, 08:01 AM
Actually, that rather IS the point of my argument. That you'd need to make yet another houserule, for one of the most basic varieties of spell to function at all at epic and it would still not stand up to non epic spellcasting.
You use one houserule to make all epic spellcasting function, and it stands up against any spellcasting that a DM is likely to let into their game.

Seriously. Thousands of damage per round? You might as well try to make an epic spell that compares with the Locate City bomb for your argument.

Anyone 'with half a brain'. Seriously, do you think people actually play games like this, where they would ask for advice on toning down epic spellcasting abuses and yet permit 100% of optimization non-epic?

Cyanic
2009-10-25, 10:17 AM
TBH it really doesnt seem too broken even with epic leadership mitigations as long as you assign a minimum final DC (I set minimum at 50 OR 10/per aspect/effect for last epic I ran), player made the following:

Light of Soul

+14 (seed ward, physical)
+190 (up physical protection to first 100 pts/rnd)
+4 (protect from all 3 physical damage types)
+14 (seed ward, energy, acid)
+95 (up acid protection to first 100pts/rnd)
+14 (seed ward, energy, cold)
+95 (up cold protection to first 100pts/rnd)
+14 (seed ward, energy, elect.)
+95 (up elect. protection to first 100pts/rnd)
+14 (seed ward, energy, fire)
+95 (up fire protection to first 100pts/rnd)
+14 (seed ward, energy, sonic)
+95 (up sonic protection to first 100pts/rnd)
+200 (+100 on caster level checks vs dispel)

Subtotal : 953
x5 (change duration to permanent)

Effect DC: 4765

Mitigation:
Ritual:
-550 (550 casters (group 1) contributing a lvl 1 spell slot)
-75 (25 casters (group 2) contributing a lvl 2 spell slot)
-2 (change range to personal)
-3300 (each group 1 caster burns 600xp)
-750 (each group 2 caster burns 1000xp)
Total Mitigation: -4677

Final DC: 88, Casting Time: 1 minute, Cost to Develop: 792,000 gp and 31,680 xp over 16 days

Mighty Guard

+17 (seed Fortify, DR)
+15 (up DR to /epic)
+198 (up DR to 100/epic)
Subtotal: 230
x5 (change duration to permanent)

Effect DC: 1150

Mitigation:
Ritual:
-550 (550 casters contributing a lvl 1 spell slot)
-550 (550 casters burn 100xp each)

Final DC: 50, Casting Time 1 minute, Cost to develop: 450,000 gp and 18,000 xp over 9 days




It actually didn't unbalance things too much, as we were playing lvl 45 and EVERYONE took at least 21 levels of a full caster. Still was able to provide effective combat/non-combat challenges to them without much effort.


Remember though, its only broken if the DM doesnt take steps to be able to mitigate/handle it. Pfff, 1000d20 damage, opps enemy's blink rolled true.


Edited to avoid wall of inconsiderate text

Dixieboy
2009-10-25, 10:25 AM
Am i the only one who finds those two spells quite... horrible.

Sure you get a nice benefit for casting them but you need a huge group of people to even begin casting.

Tyndmyr
2009-10-25, 10:53 AM
I've found that just taking the higher leveled spell slots and stacking metamagicked spells into those is equivalent of any reasonable epic spell.

This is my preferred solution as well. It neatly sidesteps the whole problem, and while I'd like a good custom spell-making formula, the epic system is not it.

Starbuck_II
2009-10-25, 10:58 AM
Am i the only one who finds those two spells quite... horrible.

Sure you get a nice benefit for casting them but you need a huge group of people to even begin casting.

Dude, Chain Gating makes these spells simple. Although, you can't use XP burn in Chain Gating just the spells.

Douglas
2009-10-25, 11:06 AM
I have some considerable experience with Epic Spellcasting, having played in a level 50 gestalt arena with very few house rules, and I can tell you that neither of those spells would be worth, well, anything at all in that arena. Outright immunity to all five energy types was standard on everyone and was always accomplished without the use of epic magic, and if your opponent cared about physical damage he'd be doing enough of it that the amount of protection those two spells provide is irrelevant - and the second one is almost certainly literally irrelevant because he'd have epic weapons that ignore it.

These three, on the other hand (house rules included capping post-mitigation DC at level+10 and mitigation at half the total DC):
Cheese Negation I
Abjuration
Spellcraft DC: 61 (my character had leveled up once)
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 11 minutes
Range: Personal
Effect: 100' radius spherical emanation centered on caster
Duration: 24 hours
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: Yes
To Develop: 549,000 gp; 11 days; 21600 XP (paid by Rod of Excellent Magic) +360
Seed: Ward (DC 14). Factors: Change Target to Area (+10 DC), 20' radius (+2 DC), Increase Area 400% (+16 DC), Anticipatory Strike (+8 DC), block Greater Celerity (+14 DC), block Sadism (+2 DC), block Masochism (+2 DC), block Disjoin (+10 DC), block Disjunction (+16 DC), block Timestop (+16 DC), block Greater Consumptive Field (+12 DC), block Improvisation (+0 DC), block Precognition, Offensive Precognition, Defensive Precognition, Offensive Prescience, and Adrenaline Boost (+0 DC)
Mitigating Factors: +10 minutes casting time (-20 DC), 3900 XP cost (-39 DC), personal (-2 DC)

The following spells do not function within 100' of the target creature:
Anticipatory Strike, Greater Celerity, Sadism, Masochism, Disjoin, Disjunction, Timestop, Greater Consumptive Field, Improvisation, Precognition, Offensive Precognition, Defensive Precognition, Offensive Prescience, and Adrenaline Boost. These spells fail to affect any target or area within the ward's area. If cast within the ward's boundaries, these spells automatically fail. If cast outside and then brought inside the ward, they are suppressed until they are no longer within the area. Time suppressed counts against their durations. Spell-like abilities and magic items that duplicate these spell effects are also affected.

The ward moves with the target (note I chose the single-target version for the base).
I will be using Extraordinary Spell Aim to exclude myself from this spell's effect, along with the other two. Yes, I am aware of the irony in doing so.

Cheese Negation II
Abjuration
Spellcraft DC: 61
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 11 minutes
Range: Personal
Effect: 100' radius spherical emanation centered on caster
Duration: 24 hours
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: Yes
To Develop: 549,000 gp; 11 days; 21600 XP (paid by Rod of Excellent Magic) +360
Seed: Ward (DC 14). Factors: Change Target to Area (+10 DC), 20' radius (+2 DC), Increase Area 400% (+16 DC), block Consumptive Field (+6 DC), block Celerity (+6 DC), block Fission (+12 DC), block Body Outside Body (+12 DC), block Anticipate Teleportation (+4 DC), block Greater Anticipate Teleportation (+10 DC), block Delay Death (+6 DC), block Superior Invisibility (+14 DC), block Empyreal Ecstasy (+10 DC), block Precognition, Offensive Precognition, Defensive Precognition, Offensive Prescience, and Adrenaline Boost (+0 DC)
Mitigating Factors: +10 minutes casting time (-20 DC), 3900 XP cost (-40 DC), personal (-2 DC)

As Cheese Negation I, except the spells negated are Consumptive Field, Celerity, Fission, Body Outside Body, Anticipate Teleportation, Greater Anticipate Teleportation, Delay Death, Superior Invisibility, Empyreal Ecstasy, Precognition, Offensive Precognition, Defensive Precognition, Offensive Prescience, and Adrenaline Boost.

Cheese Negation III
Abjuration
Spellcraft DC: 61
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 11 minutes
Range: Personal
Effect: 100' radius spherical emanation centered on caster
Duration: 24 hours
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: Yes
To Develop: 549,000 gp; 11 days; 21240 XP (paid by Rod of Excellent Magic) +720
Seed: Ward (DC 14). Factors: Change Target to Area (+10 DC), 20' radius (+2 DC),
Increase Area 400% (+16 DC), block Temporal Acceleration (+10 DC), block Timeless Body (+16 DC), block Synchronicity (+0 DC), block Sublime Revelry (+16 DC), block Starmantle (+10 DC), block Forcecage (+12 DC), block Schism (+6 DC), block Otiluke's Suppressing Field(+6 DC), block Nondetection (+4 DC), block Precognition, Offensive Precognition, Defensive Precognition, Offensive Prescience, and Adrenaline Boost (+0 DC)
Mitigating Factors: +10 minutes casting time (-20 DC), 3900 XP cost (-39 DC), personal (-2 DC)

As Cheese Negation I, except the spells negated are Temporal Acceleration, Timeless Body, Synchronicity, Sublime Revelry, Starmantle, Forcecage, Schism, Otiluke's Suppressing Field, Nondetection, Precognition, Offensive Precognition, Defensive Precognition, Offensive Prescience, and Adrenaline Boost.

You'd be amazed how much trouble these three spells consistently caused my opponents simply by removing a very specific small subset of the spells in the game from play. And I really do mean a small subset of the spells available, this arena allowed just about every WotC splatbook in existence.

Dixieboy
2009-10-25, 11:10 AM
Dude, Chain Gating makes these spells simple. Although, you can't use XP burn in Chain Gating just the spells.

Chaingating only works if your DM is drunk though.