How much is TOO much?

[Xar Zarath]

As we all know, once a game goes into epic, without the players and the DM trying to work together, games can either shatter into anarchy or either just plain break...

However for me what is tough is the level gained. After 20 most classes like spellcasters don't get spells per day anymore and stuff like that, but you can of course gain levels in prestige classes if you haven't before...
my question is how many levels is too much levels? where do you draw the line, say 30, 35, 40? (Total character levels)

a copper for your thoughts...:smallredface:

[hymer]

The highest I've ver DMed for was about ECL 17-18. I should probably have drawn the line at 15. That's probably about where I'll draw the line in the future.

Edit: Since you seem to be asking about epic levels, I'll waive the cp. :smallwink:

[Red Fel]

In my experience, level 20 is the tipping point. I have been in one Epic Level game, and that was enough.

One of our players took LAs that put him behind the rest of the party. As a result, we were able to see very clearly the distinction between Epic and non-Epic, even for only a few levels' difference. It was staggering. We were fighting a literal god, with angels falling from the skies around us and cosmic forces being flung around like toys. Everyone was able to contribute, even the melees, except for the one non-Epic character. At the same time, the sheer scale of the forces at play was so staggering that it trivialized itself. It felt more like the players would trigger a Rube Goldberg machine that unleashed itself on the Big Bad than like the players were fighting the Big Bad directly.

I know Epic Levels are a thing, but for me, they are a Thing Too Far.

[Brookshw]

Highest I've ever gone was level 35 with the players being lesser/intermediate dieties. After that I couldn't build meaningful encounters so we wrapped it up. I guess when the powerlevels exceed the ability to have a meaningful game would be my answer and that is particular to the group.

[BWR]

Highest I've every played was ECL 19. That was the highest op game I've played (probably about average for most groups, going by what I see here, perhaps a bit less). The DM quit because he got tired of spending hours and hours prepping encounters that would be over in less than 30 minutes of combat.

My current Mystara campaign has seen the PCs hit 14th level recently and following the traditional BECM pattern they have started to settle down and think about building strongholds and fiefdoms. In short, companion and master level adventures are the order of the day. I'm also setting them on the paths to Immortality, so most of the quests and aventures from now on will focus on that. If they hit 20th level before Immortality, that's the cap. I don't see any need to bring in epic rules in addition to Immortality. Whether or not I'll run any Immortal level games remains to be seen. I've probably got at least another year or two of games to run before that becomes an issue.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I've got a hard cap on my games at level 17 and the implicit intention (explicit when I get a new player) of ending the campaign very shortly after reaching it. In the unintended event that the campaign lasts long enough that they -should- level to 18 I incorporate E6's mechanic of a feat for every given quantity of XP, though I set it at 15000xp instead of 5000xp.

8th level spells and effects have the game teetering on the knife's edge of "crazy powerful but manageable" and "shattered beyond recognition." 9th's are just too much, IMO. Seriously; time stop, shapechange, gate (this one requires a discussion before it can be selected), disjunction, astral projection; how can anyone but Tippy handle these types of effects on a regular basis? A couple times just before the campaign ends, sure, but with frequency they'd get old quick.

[Volos]

I've only DMed a single group to 20th level and beyond. Instead of giving them additional levels, I took away their character sheets and threw them into a world where their sheets no longer mattered. The BBEG became the DM and he ripped, tore, burnt, and shredded their character sheets. It was glorious. They had trouble convincing him to come down to their level, but they were able to defeat him and restore balance to the universe. I consider that game my "Star Ocean: Till The End of Time" tribute.

[Invader]

Much like most games it depends on the players. I think you coul go into the low epics without to much ridiculousness unless your players are trying to break the world in which case it's not to hard.

Personally I always looked at epic as something theoretical and nothing I ever really wanted to play.

[Eldariel]

I mean, there isn't a big difference between 21 and 40. It's just a matter of numbers unless you go out of your way to homebrew a ton of new spells and epic PRCs. Last relevant Epic feats come around level 30 so I'd say game on level 30 and level 1000000000 is about the same.

[Fates]

I DM'd a game which went to 32nd level- it actually went pretty okay, but then it was a very low-op group. Even then, it was extremely difficult to provide meaningful challenges for them- in the end, I sort of overshot and there was a TPK, which the players weren't prepared paranoid enough to prevent.

I'd suggest not going above, say, 25th level- though if your party is hi-op, you probably won't want to go into epics at all.

Oh, and never, ever, ever even think about allowing epic spellcasting (no, not even then).

[Sir Chuckles]

I've been in a "high-op" campaign. It wasn't really, it's just that the DM did a stupid and allowed the party Druid to have a Wisdom score of 3,287. Every encounter was pointless unless we left him behind.
Said DM got mad at me for ignoring the group and killing Asmodeus on my own (He really want me to use my Epic Leadership to launch some form of assault on him, rather than stealthing it and killing him in single combat), but it was the only way to make the fight engaging.

At the same time, I've DM'd a party of 8 ~Lv18s face off against a Great Red Wyrm as the BBEG. The party was, for lack of a better word, utter crap. Well, 50%.
There was only one survivor. That was...honestly my goal a bit. (In reality, three people were left. But the guy who got Held round 1 and then ran demanded 2/3rds of the hoard. So another player killed him in a single hit. Then the third ran away, and the "last man standing" took all the loot and threw it in an active volcano.)

It comes down to how strong of a player group the party is. If they're horrendously mismatched or very high-op, or even a poor DM (First example), Epic is probably gonna be a little too much. But in a low-op party where the Cleric 9/Fighter 9 thinks he's stronger than the Druid 19, you can probably push into Epic levels, but epic challenges might be too much.

[AuraTwilight]

Though I've never reached it, my theoretical cap is level 40. That's enough for two full base classes; if you can't make a satisfying build with that, go home.

[Morithias]

Never too high for me.

In the invasion of Rosewood campaign, they can grind levels and kill ufos until they feel like taking on the Elder Evil at the end.

If they want to grind until they're level 40+ and curb stomp the thing, I have every intention to let them.

[Invader]

I've been in a "high-op" campaign. It wasn't really, it's just that the DM did a stupid and allowed the party Druid to have a Wisdom score of 3,287.


I have to ask how one achieves an ability score of 3,287

[Tevesh]

I think it staggers at when the DM is too fed up spending multiple hours on a single encounter the PCs might bypass and/or annihilate within 30-90 minutes.

To me, that's anything above level 15. To make meaningful fights requires way more time each level and the tipping point is about level 15. I plan on concluding my current game above my comfort level, but still...

If you're willing to fudge the numbers or have limitless prep time, I can see a game go on indefinitely.

[Sir Chuckles]

I have to ask how one achieves an ability score of 3,287

He gave the party 7 Wishes with absolutely no limitations, except that we couldn't wish the defeat of the BBEG.
The Druid wished for Wisdom greater than all the gods. So the DM added up all the wisdom scores of all the deities he could find, doing various other dubious things to math, and ended up with that.
It took half an hour.

[HaikenEdge]

I once DMed a campaign up to 51; I run a very reactive world and figure out encounters on the fly, so it was up to my players what they wanted to do, and what they decided they wanted to do was completely rebuild the world to their liking, which they did. After that, they decided they wanted to colonize the moons and some other planets, so they did.

I think, at that point, my players reached the general consensus that they wanted to play in this new world as new characters, with the goal of becoming epic level and reshaping the world with these new characters, and that's what they were doing until we had to split up to go to different universities.

[MonochromeTiger]

"too much" is when your players begin destroying worlds and creating life in their image to pass the time....then you end the campaign, steal their character sheets, and make them gods in your next campaign.

[HaikenEdge]

"too much" is when your players begin destroying worlds and creating life in their image to pass the time....then you end the campaign, steal their character sheets, and make them gods in your next campaign.

I think that only works in a campaign setting where Pun-Pun isn't the over-deity.

[JoshuaZ]

I mean, there isn't a big difference between 21 and 40. It's just a matter of numbers unless you go out of your way to homebrew a ton of new spells and epic PRCs. Last relevant Epic feats come around level 30 so I'd say game on level 30 and level 1000000000 is about the same.

I don't think this is true. Between level 21 and level 40 you'd get a lot more PrC levels which even if you are only using standard PrCs can do a lot (e.g. IoSV). And the feats you get allow for interesting uses of metamagic spells, as well as multiple quickened spells in a single round. In a lot of epic situations, there's an issue of hitting with all sorts of things and hoping one runs into something they aren't immune to, or can do something to strip immunity away. Being able to cast more spells in a round does a lot more than just numbers.

I'd agree that after 40, not much will change.

[Tevesh]

"too much" is when your players begin destroying worlds and creating life in their image to pass the time....then you end the campaign, steal their character sheets, and make them gods in your next campaign.

I do that with all my NPCs but they don't need to go epic. Every time a player rolls up a PC at my table, they're going to be an NPC in the next game I run. Saves me a lot of time thinking of interesting people with quirky, memorable habits because the players have fleshed out their PCs during the time I've spent with them.

[The Corinthian]

Highest I've ever played to (well, GMed for actually) was ECL 26-ish. With Epic Spellcasting even, albeit homebrewed. Worked well, although if I were going to do it again I'd do a lot of things differently. I think you need to have some kind of theoretical cap, and in the system as it stands I think level 30 makes a fine cap. Higher than that is pointless because the numbers lose all grounding -a 36th level character doesn't get exp from killing things that don't get exp from level 20 characters. That's just absurd.

But in a more holistically designed system, with more structured power scaling, I don't think you need epic levels at all. I'm tinkering with a D&D hack which I hope to playtest in my next campaign, and it only goes to 20 -that's quite sufficient even for gods when most NPCs won't be higher than 5th level.

[Phelix-Mu]

I ran a campaign with several other DMs that went from 1st to 22-24 (there was an ending spread in levels). It might have gone for another level or two, but that would have been it. They'd done the awesome, the awesome was done, so more would have been...anticlimactic, I guess.

Campaigns at epic level aren't impossible, they just don't have the same feel as lower levels, and the demands on the DM/plot increase rapidly as the power levels grow in a distinctly non-linear fashion.

[Zombulian]

I've always wondered, in epic, how do melee characters keep up? Casters get their access to epic spellcasting and all that, but BAB stops at 20 does it not?

[Eldariel]

I don't think this is true. Between level 21 and level 40 you'd get a lot more PrC levels which even if you are only using standard PrCs can do a lot (e.g. IoSV). And the feats you get allow for interesting uses of metamagic spells, as well as multiple quickened spells in a single round. In a lot of epic situations, there's an issue of hitting with all sorts of things and hoping one runs into something they aren't immune to, or can do something to strip immunity away. Being able to cast more spells in a round does a lot more than just numbers.

I'd agree that after 40, not much will change.

Well, sure, but IoSV doesn't give that much to somebody who already can do whatever he wants as an immediate action; Warding is still an Immediate Action after all. Once you have Incantatrix/Spelldancer, Dweomerkeeper, Circle Magic and some sources like Hathran/Halruaan Elder/etc. it doesn't really matter what additional options you get (unless Beholder Mage/Illithid Savant/etc. are on the table in which case you can get the aforementioned abilities much more easily) You can fit all the big PRC abilities to 30 levels and yeah, you can get even more Multispells, Improved Spell Capacities and such afterwards but the real differencemaker is Epic Spellcasting, which can be taken on 21.

Basically, you can create builds that would get different abilities as you progress for probably 100 levels or so but if building on the top level, for relevant abilities, 30 levels should be all that really matters. Numberstacking lasts forever, of course, unless you use loops.


I've always wondered, in epic, how do melee characters keep up? Casters get their access to epic spellcasting and all that, but BAB stops at 20 does it not?

You get Epic BAB (½ the level). But well, melee characters stopped keeping up long before level 20. Either everybody or nobody should have level 9 spells/powers in epic; otherwise some characters are just useless.

[Zombulian]

In my experience, level 20 is the tipping point. I have been in one Epic Level game, and that was enough.

One of our players took LAs that put him behind the rest of the party. As a result, we were able to see very clearly the distinction between Epic and non-Epic, even for only a few levels' difference. It was staggering. We were fighting a literal god, with angels falling from the skies around us and cosmic forces being flung around like toys. Everyone was able to contribute, even the melees, except for the one non-Epic character. At the same time, the sheer scale of the forces at play was so staggering that it trivialized itself. It felt more like the players would trigger a Rube Goldberg machine that unleashed itself on the Big Bad than like the players were fighting the Big Bad directly.

I know Epic Levels are a thing, but for me, they are a Thing Too Far.



You get Epic BAB (½ the level). But well, melee characters stopped keeping up long before level 20. Either everybody or nobody should have level 9 spells/powers in epic; otherwise some characters are just useless.

Yeah, I figured. The above post just confused me.

[Phelix-Mu]

In lower-op games, it's easier to endure the tier spread, even at epic levels, but any strain that it has on the table dynamic just continues to mount. This is especially true if the campaign has lasted from low levels to epic, because by then, everyone has pretty much mastered how to most effectively use their character (within the limits of their op-level of course).

[AmberVael]

I've always wondered, in epic, how do melee characters keep up?

By being clerics and druids and sometimes other spellcasting classes. :smalltongue:

In my experience you can actually get away with playing something like a Psychic Warrior or a Tome of Battle character if the game isn't too optimized- they get enough options and interesting things to at least have some impact. You can forget playing a Fighter though, that just isn't going to work.