Why so much hate on Epic levels?

[Ionsniper]

So Ive been reading through the forums and there seems to be common consensus that the game breaks down at the epic level. So most games never make it past the 21st or 23rd level. It seems to me that the real game for D&D starts at the epic level.

At the epic levels, sure it might not be play tested much, but that just means that you are more open to imagination, creating your own enemies and just building up your world. The DM Im gaming with right now has us going into the upper 40's for a final fight. The last BBEG on table would take up enough space on a mat to fill a 4' x 4' space. Anything his shadow passes over instantly dies, no saves of any kind.

He also has multiple high level prestige and epic classes we can take, as well as truly unique enemies and such to fight. Right now Im a race with a +12 LA at lvl 22 and the encounters are just as hard now as they are back when I joined the group at lvl 12.

I really believe that great DM's can take epic levels beyond just what the rulebook says and mold them to fit into any type of story they want them too. Some DM's might find the lack of epic support to be abysmal and never want to take a real story there, I find that epic is where the stories really become your own as you tailor everything to what you want and need for the story. The 1-20 game is just for teaching people the basics and how to properly use their characters.

Im just curious to hear your guys thoughts on epic levels and how your group would handle em.

[TroubleBrewing]

Well, first off, there's no wrong way to play D&D. If you and your group are having fun, nobody here can take that away from you.

That said, epic level play is marred by the Epic spell creation rules. Once a full caster hits 21st level, if they aren't a god, as far as the Playground is concerned, they're doing it wrong. It's too easy to optimize an epic spell into something truly gamebreaking to make playing at 20+ worthwhile.

[Harrow]

Epic Spellcasting is just 'win'. People already say that about normal spellcasting that's limited to spell effects professional game designers have made. If you allow players to create their own spells... *shudder*

Do you have any idea how easy it is for a 21st level Wizard to make a spell that automatically kills everything everywhere forever, but only do backlash damage to themselves so they can set something up to bring them back after they end reality? Really easy, that's how easy it is.

If you just scrapped Epic Spells and only used epic spell slots for non-epic spells with metamagic, then it would actually not be so bad. Controllable at least. But as it is, full spellcasters just ascend to DM-hood at level 21 while everyone else gets mildy more stabby.

[AWiz_Abroad]

Completely agree with both posters. I'm in an ECL 33 campaign that the guy has been running in his own campaign world since the early 1980s.

All the spellcasters avoid epic spells. It's a lot of fun.

[darkelf]

in my experience, epic is where everything in the system fails at once in a colossal tide of fail. the only way to play epic 3.x/whatever is to, basically, switch to playing amber. because anything which relies on the actual game mechanics is a pointless exercise in math homework which just ends in the PC involved saying "i win, double duh" anyway.

[Cirrylius]

It's a little better if you close the ridiculous infinite-loop DC-reducing measures of epic spellcasting. If you don't change anything else, change that.

[cakellene]

Description of BBEG would be one example of why. No save instant death sucks.

[TroubleBrewing]

All the spellcasters avoid epic spells. It's a lot of fun.

Yeah, see, if your table can agree to that, sure.

I personally don't enjoy epic level play for the same reason I don't like Superman: If I'm effectively invincible, there's next to no drama. I like my games gritty, bloody, and dangerous.

In other news, I've switched to Burning Wheel.

[Brookshw]

Personally I'm fine with running epic. It does take a lot of prep generally and works best if the group's making an effort to avoid rocket tag. The epic prestiges are kinda underwhelming unfortunately. There can be a bit of a "where did all these epic things suddenly spring from" question so a campaign that starts low level needs some careful prep.

[SinsI]

Epic Handbook was printed for 3.0, so all references in it are to 3.0 core books, and had a handful of errata "fixes" applied to it to "bring it to 3.5" - far too few to actually help.

This gets extremely problematic as you try to actually locate the references it has to, say, limits on non-epic items described in DMG (since 3.5 DMG doesn't list those).

Due to this, I don't think that Epic should be considered part of 3.5 at all.

[Karnith]

That said, epic level play is marred by the Epic spell creation rules. Once a full caster hits 21st level, if they aren't a god, as far as the Playground is concerned, they're doing it wrong. It's too easy to optimize an epic spell into something truly gamebreaking to make playing at 20+ worthwhile.
It's not just Epic Spellcasting/Epic Manifesting that is the problem with epic level play (though, certainly, it is one of the most broken things in the game). It's also that the imbalances of high-level play in D&D are exacerbated further; mundane characters get very little that is worthwhile in terms of build resources (unless you count more magic items), while casters get access to an ever-expanding number of powerful options. Class progressions are based on their pre-Epic progressions, so the classes that aren't very good pre-Epic stay bad once you get into Epic. Most Epic feats, and particularly those offered to noncasters, just offer slightly bigger numbers. The Deflect Arrows improvements (Exceptional Deflection, Infinite Deflection, and Reflect Arrows) are legitimately good, and TWF and archery get some fairly good support feats, but very few Epic feats offer noncasters significant abilities that they lacked before. Casters, on the other hand, get insanely strong options in Epic; Epic Spellcasting is the obvious one that gets picked on a lot, but remember that Epic also offers Ignore Material Components, Improved Metamagic/Improved Metapsionics, Improved Spell Capacity, Multispell, Permanent Emanation, and a whole bunch of Wild Shape enhancing feats for Druids (expanding both the sizes and types of forms available).

But, really, the reason that epic levels are unbalanced is that high levels are unbalanced. If your group can run a high-level game and have fun, well, epic rules probably aren't going to make too big of a difference. If your group finds a lot of problems with high-level games, epic rules similarly won't fix them.

[Shinken]

I don't think the epic 3.0 rules actually feel epic. They just have bigger numbers, more monsters are immune to X and Y. You play a longer game of 20 questions before instakilling whatever it is you're up against with Broken Epic Spell X. Christmas tree effects is turned up to eleven for noncasters. Also, there is very little it might emulate - meeting gods, fighting them and the like can already be achieved by high level play, so it ends up being that but with bigger numbers.
It just looks like something needlessly complicated to add another layer of math into an already math intensive game. I'm not a fan of high levels anyway (I prefer playing 5-12, which to me is the sweet post of both 3.5 and Pathfinder), so I guess that counts.

Anyway, if you're having fun playing epic, keep doing it and let other people that don't like it keep not playing it. :smallcool:

[prufock]

I personally don't enjoy epic level play for the same reason I don't like Superman: If I'm effectively invincible, there's next to no drama.
That's a good comparison, but I think you might be looking at it the wrong way. The tension in a Superman comic doesn't come from "will Superman die?" It comes from "will Superman save X" or "will Superman stop X before he can complete his nasty plan" and so on. We know that Superman is going to win, just like any hero.

Similarly, the stakes in an Epic game have to be different. We can set them against higher-level epic threats, sure, but it also becomes necessary to change the stakes.

That said, I completely agree that epic spellcasting is troublesome, and when my game hits epic I'm considering not having epic spells. You can still get higher level slots to metamagic up 9th level spells and so on, and maybe we'd even homebrew some 10th level spells, but epic spellcasting just seems... tiresome.

[Jeff the Green]

That's a good comparison, but I think you might be looking at it the wrong way. The tension in a Superman comic doesn't come from "will Superman die?" It comes from "will Superman save X" or "will Superman stop X before he can complete his nasty plan" and so on. We know that Superman is going to win, just like any hero.

Similarly, the stakes in an Epic game have to be different. We can set them against higher-level epic threats, sure, but it also becomes necessary to change the stakes.

Right. Just because you can't die doesn't mean you can't lose.

My personal problem with epic levels is that it precludes the kind of character motivations I like. If I can stack a bajillion contingent revivifys on my daughter, I can let the world burn and roast marshmallows with the kid. If you can cast a spell and just know everything, my librarian might as well go hug a Sphere of Annihilation because her entire life has been about the pursuit of knowledge, and its acquisition ends the hunt. And when you can literally steal Tiamat's hoard with a few moments of planning, my ADHD thief is going to go insane with boredom. There do exist epic motivations; they just don't appeal to me.

[WebTiefling]

If I can stack a bajillion contingent revivifys on my daughter, I can let the world burn and roast marshmallows with the kid.

I suspect someone has been reading the Dresden series! :smallcool:


If you can cast a spell and just know everything, my librarian might as well go hug a Sphere of Annihilation because her entire life has been about the pursuit of knowledge, and its acquisition ends the hunt. And when you can literally steal Tiamat's hoard with a few moments of planning, my ADHD thief is going to go insane with boredom. There do exist epic motivations; they just don't appeal to me.

No offense to your DM, but if he or she doesn't pump up Tiamat to at least challenge you stealing Tiamat's hoard, then he's a sucky DM. If you put a bajillion contingent revivify on your daughter, a level-appropriate foe can strip them off just as easily. In these cases, it's not the Epic that is breaking, but the DM.

That said - Epic play does have a very different style of challenges than lower level play. It's a new level of challenges. It's is no longer about stopping the Ancient Red Dragon or Necromancer army -- it is about stopping the Mad God Thaktalkizibytraek from pulling the Prime Material Plane into the Far Realms after it already managed to lock all the other deities away from interfering.

Secrets? Oh yeah, Vecna knows the weaknesses of Thaktalkizibytraek and isn't going to share. And no, Vecna does not have the piddly little stats of typical deities - he is also an Epic level caster.

The challenges change dramatically from sub-20 play, so it can be a rough jump from upper-teens level play to Epic play, but Epic challenges can work.

However, the mechanics of Epic Spellcasting are broken far more than the generic D&D rules. DMs have to use the BanHammer freely (but hopefully wisely, too). For example: Leadership (or variants thereof) AND Epic Casting? :smalleek:

Immunity to all nasty EVERYTHING? For free? No problem.
Arbitrarily high EVERYTHING? For free? No problem.
EVERYTHING. Yes, even that. And that too. For free? No problem.

[Forrestfire]

Right. Just because you can't die doesn't mean you can't lose.

My personal problem with epic levels is that it precludes the kind of character motivations I like. If I can stack a bajillion contingent revivifys on my daughter, I can let the world burn and roast marshmallows with the kid. If you can cast a spell and just know everything, my librarian might as well go hug a Sphere of Annihilation because her entire life has been about the pursuit of knowledge, and its acquisition ends the hunt. And when you can literally steal Tiamat's hoard with a few moments of planning, my ADHD thief is going to go insane with boredom. There do exist epic motivations; they just don't appeal to me.

In all honestly, that sounds like an amazing campaign concept to me. A group of epic-level adventurers that have become so good at their jobs that it just isn't fun anymore, so they go on one last quest to do [insert plot hook here] in a last-ditch effort to find something new. Onepunch Man: the D&D party, basically.

[Big Fau]

I think the simplest way to put this is: Everyone with 21st level casting capabilities is Pun-Pun without needing to jump through hoops. It's right there in the ELH, and actually intended to do just what Pun-Pun is supposed to do.

[Talya]

If you don't allow epic spellcasting, the stabby types actually can slowly catch up to the spellcaster -- at least to a degree. Spell DCs stagnate, but saving throw bonuses do not - oh, you can heighten the occasional spell into an 11th level spell slot, but you don't get very many of them, and eventually even the fighter with 8 wisdom will only fail a will save against your 9th level spells on a natural 1. Meanwhile the wealth by level rules will be giving that same fighter access to most spell effects he could ever desire on demand.

[Zanos]

Epic Spellcasting is fine as long as you follow the rules. Epic Spellcasting isn't a blank check to create whatever spell you want, all spells have to be specifically approved by the DM. Epic Spellcasting uses a whitelist system, not a blacklist.

But yeah if you let players make whatever Epic Spells they want they can create "Eat All Deities" and win the game.

[Seerow]

Epic Spellcasting is fine as long as you follow the rules. Epic Spellcasting isn't a blank check to create whatever spell you want, all spells have to be specifically approved by the DM. Epic Spellcasting uses a whitelist system, not a blacklist.

But yeah if you let players make whatever Epic Spells they want they can create "Eat All Deities" and win the game.

GM arbitration is unfortunately very inconsistent and nearly impossible to quantify in any meaningful way. So the only thing people can go by when discussing rules on the internet is what those rules actually allow.

[Elana]

Epic Handbook was printed for 3.0, so all references in it are to 3.0 core books, and had a handful of errata "fixes" applied to it to "bring it to 3.5" - far too few to actually help.

This gets extremely problematic as you try to actually locate the references it has to, say, limits on non-epic items described in DMG (since 3.5 DMG doesn't list those).

Due to this, I don't think that Epic should be considered part of 3.5 at all.

Oh Epic is obviously a part of 3.5.

But the Epic Level Handbook got replaced by the updated rules in the dmg page 206-210 :)

[Oscredwin]

That said - Epic play does have a very different style of challenges than lower level play. It's a new level of challenges. It's is no longer about stopping the Ancient Red Dragon or Necromancer army -- it is about stopping the Mad God Thaktalkizibytraek from pulling the Prime Material Plane into the Far Realms after it already managed to lock all the other deities away from interfering.

Secrets? Oh yeah, Vecna knows the weaknesses of Thaktalkizibytraek and isn't going to share. And no, Vecna does not have the piddly little stats of typical deities - he is also an Epic level caster.

Trick I learned from Tippy: Wish for a book (nonmagical) that has Thaktalkizibytraek's personal history and weaknesses spelled out in detail. Do this on a private demiplane warded in all the necessary ways. Then scholar's touch the book. BAM done in two rounds (3 if you cast shapechange to get a free wish as a Zodar). Comes online level 17 with no cheese.

[WebTiefling]

Trick I learned from Tippy: Wish for a book (nonmagical) that has Thaktalkizibytraek's personal history and weaknesses spelled out in detail. Do this on a private demiplane warded in all the necessary ways. Then scholar's touch the book. BAM done in two rounds (3 if you cast shapechange to get a free wish as a Zodar). Comes online level 17 with no cheese.

Well, you see, Thakatwhatever was Vecna-blooded, so you get a book with everything of his history that is known.

Vecna feels the attempt to gain the knowledge and prepares to consume you as soon as you step off the Prime. Oh, wait, you're in your own demiplane, not on the Prime from which he's blocked. Never mind. Vecna comes to kill you because you're trying to take one of his dearest secrets, or at least he starts preparing to kill you.

Nothing truly insurmountable, but Epic doesn't mean instant-effortless-win against Epic challenges. (unless unregulated Epic Spellcasting is allowed, of course :smalltongue:)

[Zanos]

Well, you see, Thakatwhatever was Vecna-blooded, so you get a book with everything of his history that is known.

Vecna feels the attempt to gain the knowledge and prepares to consume you as soon as you step off the Prime. Oh, wait, you're in your own demiplane, not on the Prime from which he's blocked. Never mind. Vecna comes to kill you because you're trying to take one of his dearest secrets, or at least he starts preparing to kill you.

Nothing truly insurmountable, but Epic doesn't mean instant-effortless-win against Epic challenges. (unless unregulated Epic Spellcasting is allowed, of course :smalltongue:)
Nothing about god-blooded template states that the deity offers you any aid beyond the abilities the template grants. Reminds me of the Wiz vs. Cleric thread where people were trying to argue that the clerics god would just pop in and smite the wizard.

[HolyCouncilMagi]

I think it's sort of misnamed. By level 10, you're a more epic and powerful hero/villain than most in fiction.

Nonetheless, I dislike it simply because it's impossible to play realistically and nobody ever tries.Having your usual magic-item enhanced Epic ability scores and wielding the power that becomes available to you, but it's really just impossible to even truly comprehend getting in your character's head at that point. Those characters' sensations, idealogies, thoughts, and even personal preferences should have all evolved far beyond what any person who has ever existed could even conceptualize.

And most people treat it like "just some bigger numbers and slightly more complex challenges" without even trying to play to the true growth, the explosive acclimation, the heightened sense of cosmic priority inherent in being an Epic character. Forget trying to emulate 40 intelligence, but a lot of people miss that fundamental aspect of character development.

... Well, fundamental to me at least. If you have fun without focusing on this, power to you and please keep having fun. But I just can't enjoy Epic games without players who appreciate the internal changes that come with reaching that level.

[Frozen_Feet]

Epic skills and most of Epic Feats (read: those that don't benefit spellcasting) are actually pretty nifty. Too bad they would've been mostly appropriate ten levels ago. Personally, I allow Epic uses for skills pre-epic and have reworked most epic feats so that their effects are available much earlier.

Epic spellcasting and the Divininty rules are just unplayable, like I've said before. It is not possible to run them according to either RAW or RAI. Any game attempting to use them degenerates to either pure GM fiat, or pure player fiat. In other words: either the GM arbitrarily decides what's possible or not, or they let the players arbitrarily decide what's possible or not.

[Oscredwin]

Well, you see, Thakatwhatever was Vecna-blooded, so you get a book with everything of his history that is known.

Vecna feels the attempt to gain the knowledge and prepares to consume you as soon as you step off the Prime. Oh, wait, you're in your own demiplane, not on the Prime from which he's blocked. Never mind. Vecna comes to kill you because you're trying to take one of his dearest secrets, or at least he starts preparing to kill you.

Nothing truly insurmountable, but Epic doesn't mean instant-effortless-win against Epic challenges. (unless unregulated Epic Spellcasting is allowed, of course :smalltongue:)

The mad god is a servant of Vecna :smalltongue: Anyway, I thought all the other gods, including Vecna, were opposed to this guy?

Anyway, baseline assumption for all of my plans is that there isn't some super being out there who will kill me for just being me (at least none that a knowledge arcana/planes check would notice). That way lies madness for the universe is infinite, thus all such beings may exist, therefore I must avoid fatally infringing on any of them. I know people in real life who have this philosophy, it doesn't work well.

Let's say that Thaktalkizibytraek just has the same ability with different fluff. Are you claiming I can't make the book as I describe, or that I can't read the book with Scholar's Touch. I can buy the argument that Scholar's Touch won't work, that's a divination "cast to learn information about Thaktalkizibytraek". I guess I'll just have to read the book. Good thing my demiplane has a fast time trait so I can read it in less than 1 round on the Prime.

[Magikeeper]

Let's say that Thaktalkizibytraek just has the same ability with different fluff. Are you claiming I can't make the book as I describe, or that I can't read the book with Scholar's Touch.

Wish can only create a non-magical item worth 25,000gp or less. How, by RAW, are you determining the price of the book? Specifically, an exhaustive tome describing the history of a person? A masterwork tool only gives a +2 bonus to checks; that doesn't sound like an exhaustive tome. I could be wrong here - is there a RAW price for a book on <any> subject that doesn't specify exactly what sort of bonus you get?

Or is the price of this book completely up to DM fiat? I don't think it is reasonable to assume a DM will ignore the cost of the knowledge in the book if the price is left up to them. Could you really get that knowledge for less than 25k*?

*Assuming you knew where to look, etc. I realize the answer is surely "yes" for most individuals, but we're talking about the extreme cases here.

[Urpriest]

The problems with Epic:

1. It's unnecessary. Powerful characters already exist at the higher levels.

2. Epic Spellcasting, as others have pointed out.

3. Just because they fixed some aspects of the scaling (Epic BAB, Epic Saves) doesn't mean they fixed all of it (save DCs, RHD), and some of it was meaningless well before epic (skills).

4. Thematically, you run out of options. The biggest demons, the top dog aberrations, the chromatic and metallic great wyrms...they're all below CR 30. Sure, you can add Infernals, or Gibbering Orbs, or Prismatic Dragons...but they're all monsters that are just defined as "the other thing, but more". They don't fit into the setting, because the setting was already completed by the existing creatures. Instead, they're tacked-on, and they feel like it.

[Captnq]

I find the only real issue is that epic spellcasting is broken. If you ignore that, it seems to work just fine.

I find that most people who state that the game breaks down at X level just aren't that familiar with the rules. I've had an unlimited rulebook campaign for quite sometime. Yes the scale has gotten grander, but I don't really have any problem challenging my players.

[Optimator]

My group plays epic a lot and eschews the epic spell rules and instead uses the Improved Spell Capacity feat and custom-makes 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th etc. level spells. This has worked great for us and we essentially use the epic rules as written otherwise. A few tweaks here and there and an experienced DM and we have a great time playing epic heroes.

One thing we do is retroactive BAB so if a Wizard 20 takes a level in Fighter the BAB is 11 along with the Epic attack bonus and save bonus. Little stuff like that.

I think the rules are fine as long as people have a grasp of the D&D rules and how the RNG works. Easy-peazy.

[Incanur]

in my experience, epic is where everything in the system fails at once in a colossal tide of fail. the only way to play epic 3.x/whatever is to, basically, switch to playing amber. because anything which relies on the actual game mechanics is a pointless exercise in math homework which just ends in the PC involved saying "i win, double duh" anyway.

This matches my experience, except for the part about the PCs winning. I'll never run a campaign using 3.x epic rules again. A couple years I did do an adventure that took 3.x epic rules as its baseline but with a free-form approach and aesthetics inspired by cosmic Marvel comics. 3.x combat is often a pain in the ass to resolve even in the middle levels but at epic it's just absurd with all the contingencies, time stops, wishes, miracles, and so on. It desperately needs simplification. Keeping track of the dozens of buff spells and items on each and every character by itself is too much.

[Vrock_Summoner]

This matches my experience, except for the part about the PCs winning. I'll never run a campaign using 3.x epic rules again. A couple years I did do an adventure that took 3.x epic rules as its baseline but with a free-form approach and aesthetics inspired by cosmic Marvel comics. 3.x combat is often a pain in the ass to resolve even in the middle levels but at epic it's just absurd with all the contingencies, time stops, wishes, miracles, and so on. It desperately needs simplification. Keeping track of the dozens of buff spells and items on each and every character by itself is too much.

Eh... Most of what I did in my one Epic level game was cast Hell Ball or whatever it's called. Too much complication bores me. But I think your problems are either player-oriented or just things that existed pre-Epic as well.

[Incanur]

The folks I played with - and still play with once a year - are hardly optimizers by board standards, though most of them got into it at times. High-level pre-epic does indeed have similar issues - I don't plan on DMing anything past level 12 or so again - but epic only compounds them.

[SinsI]

Oh Epic is obviously a part of 3.5.

But the Epic Level Handbook got replaced by the updated rules in the dmg page 206-210 :)

So, no epic spells, no epic magic items, only 13 epic feats; all casters get is simple increase in numerical parameters...
OK, one can live with that.

[Karnith]

So, no epic spells, no epic magic items, only 13 epic feats; all casters get is simple increase in numerical parameters...
OK, one can live with that.
3.5 with no 3.0 content actually has a fairly large number of epic resources. By my count there are about 80 epic feats in non-setting-specific books. Faerun books offer a number of additional Epic feats, at the very least in PGtF and probably some other stuff too, but I don't own most of them so I can't put an accurate count to it. WotC also had more than a few epic feats in some web articles (https://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/ei). There are also a few other epic resources spread among some other books, including some epic PrCs and a fair number of epic spells.

[Cirrylius]

Epic Spellcasting is fine as long as you follow the rules. Epic Spellcasting isn't a blank check to create whatever spell you want, all spells have to be specifically approved by the DM. Epic Spellcasting uses a whitelist system, not a blacklist.


Even if you DON'T abuse epic spells, get ready for some weird DC results.

Without any rules twinkery, it's easy-peasy to handcraft a DC 30, 10-minute-casting, moderate backlash spell that Resurrects all creatures in a hundred foot radius; meanwhile, a pregen 10d6 coldball that raises up to 20 victims as ordinary skeletons has a DC of 50, and a pregen spell raising a 100-foot radius island out of the ocean has a DC of 38, but takes two months of casting, an xp expenditure, and nineteen other epic casters. For a lousy, lifeless island. Ninth level spells create demiplanes for less work.

There's often not a lot of correlation between effort and effect.

[Vrock_Summoner]

... 10d6? But... That's not even damage...

... Wha!!????!! I just looked at Hell Ball again... DC 90!? Did I get that through DM fiat or something? I mean, I know 60d6 is nothing to scoff at, but... What?!

... Gah. Freaking Epic Spellcasting. Why you no sense make.

No wonder people say it can only ever be utterly underpowered or totally overpowered...

[Cirrylius]

... Wha!!????!! I just looked at Hell Ball again... DC 90!? Did I get that through DM fiat or something? I mean, I know 60d6 is nothing to scoff at, but... What?!

Yeah.

...yeah. It's 'cause it uses four whole types of energy, so the Seed DC of 19 gets added four times. Idiocy.

...wait, you said 60d6? Looks like you got some free candy there; in the description it's 10d6 per energy type, so 40d6 total:smallamused:

[Vrock_Summoner]

Yeah.

...yeah. It's 'cause it uses four whole types of energy, so the Seed DC of 19 gets added four times. Idiocy.

...wait, you said 60d6? Looks like you got some free candy there; in the description it's 10d6 per energy type, so 40d6 total:smallamused:

That much is at least easy to explain. I got force and cold damage as well on mine.

... But gods, these spell-making rules are still extremely silly. I get that even that lesser 40d6 STILL packs too strong a punch for, say, CR 21 monsters, but... There's no way that is worth DC 90. Nor are most of these effects worth their respective values.

Ridiculousness...

[Andion Isurand]

Here are some points of custom errata I've added to the epic spell rules so far:

Epic Level Handbook, pages 71 to 102
Any portion of text that mentions "final Spellcraft DC" is amended as follows:
"The final Spellcraft DC of any given epic spell, must match or exceed the single highest Base Spellcraft DC found among the seeds it incorporates."

Lost Empires of Faerûn, page 44
The Seed: Mythal is amended as follows:
"Mythals are unique. Any epic spell that is developed to incorporate the mythal seed, may only have one instance of itself in effect at any one time. Only the most recent casting applies."

[Theomniadept]

With the Ignore Material Components feat True Resurrections and Animate Deads become completely free, meaning death has no consequence and all enemies end up joining the party as undead. Forcecage in combat for free? Every battle requires enemies with Disintegrate, Rods of Cancellation, or teleportation to get out.

Magic, being as overpowered as it is, does nothing to lose power while martial characters with 100 levels in martial classes would still lose to a pre-epic Wizard.

[Andion Isurand]

Well, to help 'a little bit'... I would permit any class level that doesn't advance spellcasting (or the equivalent thereof) to gestalt with another such level from another class, provided all qualifications are met.

This would involve using fractional BAB and fractional saves, where only the first level allows its good saves to start at +2.5 and all subsequent levels add 0.5 or 0.33 to each save depending on whether it provides a good or poor save of that type.

This method favors the prestige bard, ranger and paladin classes, over their core counterparts, given that they don't advance spell casting at every level.

[Big Fau]

That much is at least easy to explain. I got force and cold damage as well on mine.

... But gods, these spell-making rules are still extremely silly. I get that even that lesser 40d6 STILL packs too strong a punch for, say, CR 21 monsters, but... There's no way that is worth DC 90. Nor are most of these effects worth their respective values.

Ridiculousness...

There's a 6th level spell for 40d6... Save DC be damned, as most everything in Epic is going to have Evasion to make Hellball cry.

[Philistine]

So Ive been reading through the forums and there seems to be common consensus that the game breaks down at the epic level. So most games never make it past the 21st or 23rd level. It seems to me that the real game for D&D starts at the epic level.

At the epic levels, sure it might not be play tested much, but that just means that you are more open to imagination, creating your own enemies and just building up your world. The DM Im gaming with right now has us going into the upper 40's for a final fight. The last BBEG on table would take up enough space on a mat to fill a 4' x 4' space. Anything his shadow passes over instantly dies, no saves of any kind.

He also has multiple high level prestige and epic classes we can take, as well as truly unique enemies and such to fight. Right now Im a race with a +12 LA at lvl 22 and the encounters are just as hard now as they are back when I joined the group at lvl 12.

I really believe that great DM's can take epic levels beyond just what the rulebook says and mold them to fit into any type of story they want them too. Some DM's might find the lack of epic support to be abysmal and never want to take a real story there, I find that epic is where the stories really become your own as you tailor everything to what you want and need for the story. The 1-20 game is just for teaching people the basics and how to properly use their characters.

Im just curious to hear your guys thoughts on epic levels and how your group would handle em.
I'm not sure the original question is really being addressed by the many variations on the theme of "because the epic level rules aren't very good," no matter how accurate that is - indeed, the OP seems to regard this as a feature.

So here's the thing, OP. D&D is known as a rules-heavy system, and the expectation in such a game system is that the interactions between player characters and game world will be adjudicated within the rules to the maximum extent possible (which ideally will be 100%). It's a specific type of game which appeals to specific types of players; and D&D 3.X, for all its other flaws, manages this part pretty well from 1-20. Once you hit Epic, though, especially with Epic Casting in the mix, you've fundamentally changed the nature of the game - and done so in such a way that many of the people who enjoyed the ride from 1-20 will no longer enjoy the gameplay from 21 on.

Basically, the point of playing a rules-heavy system such as D&D is that the DM does not have to make up the rules on the fly, and players can plan their actions with at least a rough idea of their odds of success. If the wide-open rules of Epic D&D3 appeal to you more than the 1-20 game, you might be better off ditching D&D entirely. There are other systems which will probably be better suited to your play preferences.

[Yawgmoth]

Epic games can be fun, but remember that every level you add takes roughly twice as much effort to plan for as the last. Yes, that does mean that a 21st level game takes 1,048,576 times as much effort to plan for as a 1st level game. I'm not being hyperbolic here. Everyone involved has to do a massive amount of planning because (a) each PC's wealth is equivalent to several large countries, (b) each PC is going to have a list of feats, class features, and spells about two dozen pages long, and (c) will need challenges that incorporate all of those in meaningful ways.

So good luck designing a problem that the party wizard/cleric/druid/psion can't just solve with the casting of a couple 9th level spells/powers. It's possible, but the plots are few and far between that actually function. DM fiat comes up a lot in epic games and usually involves saying "you can't use your insta-win buttons because reasons" and then making the game essentially a 17th level game but with bigger numbers.

Personally, I'd love to have another swing at an epic game, but I run into the other huge problem of epic games: 99% of the people who want to run them are really, really terrible DMs who have zero-at-best clue what they are doing. And when every time you attempt to play a certain style of game and the guy running it thinks Dominic Deegan is an example of good plot development and world building, or whose inspirational media is early 90s comic books, or thinks that epic can be run as "low-level game but everything has bigger numbers"... well it's easy to see how that game style can get a fairly universally poor reputation.

[Flickerdart]

One of the biggest problems with Epic isn't that the rules are terrible (which they are) but that the conceptual space was ham-fistedly defined. Epic's description is the reason that people think non-caster heroes like Hercules are Epic level just because they happened to be older than dirt.

The writers for the rule set should have realized that what makes things Epic isn't numbers, but the type of challenges heroes face. Pre-Epic is about going to places and acting upon things. Epic challenges - a point where heroes are literally world-changing powers - should happen on an appropriately large scale.

[atemu1234]

I use epic stuff. It's not hated in my groups. The problems with it are easy enough to deal with. I flat out told my spellcasters that while they can use epic spellcasting, I will severely limit their epic spellcasting abilities so that they won't break the game. People say they become more and more broken- I actually find that after level fourty they stagnate quickly. The only way to prevent this is multiclassing. Also there's controlling the game: as DM, you should try to make sure they don't do the stupid things like kill everything or just destroy the plot. If they can rob someone blind fine, but at the level they can do this anything with stuff worth stealing would have an equally powerful countermeasure, and it's the DMs job to keep the players occupied. They should fight on-level opponents.

[Ionsniper]

So Ive been playing into the epic levels a bit with my current campaign. Im level 22 with a LA of +12 due to custom race, fighting mid tier epic level stuff. We all have custom classes and races, my stats are 47 str, 42 dex, 45 con, 26 int, 36 wis, and 46 cha. Immunities to fire, cold, acid, and lightning, BAB = to Char level, HP's per level are 12, and Im near full caster progression for sorcerer, just 4 levels shy of where I should be cause of one bard and three paladin levels. I have a crown that gives all spells 1st-9th free metamagics of quicken, empowered and maximized unlimited times. My Swords on natural 20's instantly kills anything... ANYTHING even gods, great wyrms, demons who are known to return. Doesnt matter who or what they are, or how many HP they have. I even have a an ability through my class to be able to create a triangle of power around me, and when I channel a spell through it, I hit EVERYTHING on the battlefield with it outside of that triangle. Any aoe type spell anyway with maximized meta magics. Ive done it once. I used a cone of cold with Twin Spell, Maximize, empowered, energy admixture, heighten spell, and one other metamagic that was custom that added even more damage to it. I can also cast 5 spells a round with adding in a full attack. Its a truly epic campaign. I also have a lvl 28 Prismatic Dragon for a mount thats more like a cohort.

And yet I know right now at this end of the first chapter were fighting low level stuff around CR 15 to 20, in the next chapter were gonna be facing some even stronger monsters in our midst. He has created so many unique and varying encounters for us using a mix of custom monsters and Monster Manual creatures and working within the rules of the game. You guys wished you had a game like this. Our top end he tells me is going to be around lvl 40-60, depending on how much we do, what we do, and how we go about it. Theres a lvl 50th NPC that basically does 3-5k a swing with his sword.

I went from a group of guys that played super low level campaigns, and tended to start a new one every other week cause they felt like rolling up new toons, to going to a fully fleshed out world with real consequences and such and insane customization options. Im even working on building my own class for the 30-40 levels. I honestly think this is the way epic should be played. Numbers like 60d6? Thats chump change damage to our groups current caster. He can cast a spell that does close to 1.5k damage. Epic spell only available to a pure wizard. Our DM wants us to feel epic so he makes the game epic by giving us amazing abilities and such. He wants us to enjoy the game as much as possible. He also wishes he could play in his own game but knows that no one knows his world better than he does. This is what I feel epic games should feel like.

[Eldan]

It basically takes all the issues you have at mid to high level and makes them worse. Spellcasters get to write their own spells, cast several spells per round and make all their spells stronger. Fighters get better criticals or +1 to hit.

[Vrock_Summoner]

It basically takes all the issues you have at mid to high level and makes them worse. Spellcasters get to write their own spells, cast several spells per round and make all their spells stronger. Fighters get better criticals or +1 to hit.

Well, that's not a fair comparison at all! Look at the Monks, they're the real examples of power. Check out that +2 to Stunning Fist DC. How broken. How... Epic.

[kardar233]

I think Flickerdart has grasped a large part of Epic's problems. There are very few works that deal with the sheer scale and power of Epic characters and creatures. Any fantasy I can think of pales in comparison to the things that go on at Epic levels; the only Epic-level stories I can think of are the highest power tiers of comic books.

The other bad source for Epic calibrations (apart from the source list in the ELH) is Faerun, in my opinion. In Faerun the people of Epic power never really do anything all that earthshaking. As epic-level casters, people like Elminster, the Simbul and Szass Tam (to take a few NPCs out of the ELH) should be doing more than shaping history, they should be shaping geography. Instead they sit around with ambitions that seem more worthy of tenth or fifteenth level characters and never seem to do all that much. The one time I recall seeing a real Epic moment in all I've read of Faerun is the time the Simbul storms Hell by herself, and that is one rare occurrence. It was pretty awesome, though.

[NichG]

A (somewhat rhetorical) question to the original poster - why can't you have a campaign with all of the high points you're mentioning about epic, but in the Lv1-20 range? What precisely stops you from making interesting customized stuff before you hit Lv21? Its not like the DM isn't allowed to create a unique special ability on a CR 9 creature, or that the DM isn't allowed to permit players to perform spell research or heck even introduce their own PrCs to the world and have disciples/etc. The problem with epic is basically one of the mechanics being lousy. If you can replace the mechanics with something that plays well (as your DM has done) then that same game design ability lets you replace mechanics at Lv10 or whatever with something that plays well too.

To the argument about the Wish for a Book of Secrets gimmick - all this points out is that world-shattering, planes-altering campaigns about taking care of threats that the rest of the gods can't touch shouldn't be run with RAW in mind as their major driving force. 'I wish for a book containing Mad God X's secrets', 'okay, your Wish goes out into the fabric of the aether; surprisingly, you find that rather than your soul being drained away by the cost of the Wish, it seems to be eager to be granted. In front of you, you see great patches of the weave of magic twist and change, becoming tainted with the energies of the Mad God. The energies of the universe flood towards you - at least thirty thousand xp worth - want to make a Will save, or do you voluntarily fail? Oh, and there's a book made of twisted fragments of frozen mercury and the breath of the void itself hanging in the air in front of you that seems to be whispering 'open me'.'

[Totema]

In my experience, aside from what everyone else has mentioned, it's also really hard on DMs to maintain control. If you're epic level, you're ready to unravel the fabric of the universe; at this point its the DM bending to the will of the player. If they want to basically remake the entire world according to their rules, they can. And I don't know any DMs that like losing their main role in the game.

[pwykersotz]

To the argument about the Wish for a Book of Secrets gimmick - all this points out is that world-shattering, planes-altering campaigns about taking care of threats that the rest of the gods can't touch shouldn't be run with RAW in mind as their major driving force. 'I wish for a book containing Mad God X's secrets', 'okay, your Wish goes out into the fabric of the aether; surprisingly, you find that rather than your soul being drained away by the cost of the Wish, it seems to be eager to be granted. In front of you, you see great patches of the weave of magic twist and change, becoming tainted with the energies of the Mad God. The energies of the universe flood towards you - at least thirty thousand xp worth - want to make a Will save, or do you voluntarily fail? Oh, and there's a book made of twisted fragments of frozen mercury and the breath of the void itself hanging in the air in front of you that seems to be whispering 'open me'.'

Well said. Epic description. :smallsmile:


I personally don't enjoy epic level play for the same reason I don't like Superman: If I'm effectively invincible, there's next to no drama. I like my games gritty, bloody, and dangerous.

It's okay, Superman will still save you. He's awesome like that. :smallwink: Also, welcome to comic books, where the plot armor ensures that the hero will suffer an adequate amount before managing to overcome/outwit/defeat the challange. Even the heroes who are considered 'down to earth' like Batman, Spiderman, Wolverine, etc have this same thing going for them. If you think Superman doesn't have this 'drama' too, just try cracking open the first few chapters of New 52.

But your point definitely stands with regard to D&D. Although now that I think about it, Rocket Tag happens at both extremely high and extremely low levels...the only difference seems to be how relevant melee is.


GM arbitration is unfortunately very inconsistent and nearly impossible to quantify in any meaningful way. So the only thing people can go by when discussing rules on the internet is what those rules actually allow.

That argument wears a bit thin when you have the epic rules explicitly calling for GM intervention. The quantification would occur when we discuss what each of us would whitelist and why. The meaningfulness is dependent on the reader. This is valuable and relevant to the OP, and anyone else who is looking for advice that might fit their game.

[Prime32]

There's a 6th level spell for 40d6... Save DC be damned, as most everything in Epic is going to have Evasion to make Hellball cry.You forgot that tons of epic creatures are immune to at least one or two of hellball's energy types, while disintegrate deals untyped damage. If instead of Epic Spellcasting you'd picked up Improved Spell Capacity you could be throwing Empowered Twinned (Efficient) disintegrates for 120d6.

[Phelix-Mu]

Alright, first context. I have DM'd several campaigns into the mid 20s, and they had fuel to go further, just life intervened and things got wrapped up early. I've played in a campaign that went past 30 before crazy optimization finally crushed the system mastery of the DM (and, admittedly, the plot was screwed up, too...after the DWK sorcerer pc was possessed by the WH40K chaos daemon and proceeded to steal the TARDIS, the game was pretty soundly off the rails).

My opinion:

1.) Epic is doable, just hard, especially on the DM. See the next point.

2.) Published resources in 3.x for epic are piss-poor, encompassing just a couple books, much of which is reprints of the 3.0 ELH. This puts even more onus on the DM to invent stuff from scratch, adding game design to the already formidable list of DM responsibilities. Many DMs probably aren't up to this, even with a low-op party. With a party scraping the top of the PO scale, the DM must have a truly formidable level of system mastery and creativity to continue to challenge and maintain the interest of the players.

3.) Numbers v fluff: I believe Karnith and several others have a real point here, especially for non-spellcasters. Spellcasters can come up with novel effects through standard spell research, innovative combos, and the advanced metamagicking opened up by Improved Spell Capacity and few other epic tools (ignoring the almighty power of epic spells). Mundanes generally have more of what they always had. While this can work in campaigns on the lower end of the optimization scale, where parity between the tiers is more intact, it totally blows up when someone takes a tier 1 or 2 and shifts it into high-optimization mode. The fluff is good, but there aren't epic powers for mundanes that can hold a candle to even 9th level spells, which have been available for 3-4 levels by the time the party cracks open the ELH. The closest the game comes are a few magic items and maybe a couple feats (Infinite and Exceptional Deflection, for instance). Everything else is pretty much up to the DM to rectify the gulf, if it emerges.

So, in short, the game past 20th is even more dependent on homebrew, houserules, and the Gentleman's Agreement than it already was. Mix in that the tier gaps widen, and a DM would be well-advised to only focus on epic with ample time and material for making up a whole bunch of stuff from scratch, and only if the DM has confidence in their ability to keep well-optimized high-tiers in line (a full-time job in itself).

For DMs that manage that, ofc, bully for them.

[NichG]

There's always Immortals Handbook if you really need to make all that stuff Tier 1s can do seem passe and give mundanes a leg up. Even though it gets a lot of (honestly, deserved) flak on these boards, its probably actually less broken than by-the-book Epic Spellcasting even if it does get a bit silly.

That said, for really epic-level plots, 'mundane' should be a non-word. No one should be 'mundane' at levels where its expected that your character can go and party with the gods, hunt down Time and have a little chat about laying off the temporal paradoxes, or personally beat up the core of a planet. You aren't going to be able to do this kind of stuff without it coming off as 'unrealistic for mundanes' or 'deeply supernatural'. What you can preserve is theme - do you make reality sit down and shut up by waggling your fingers and comprehending the deepest secrets of reality, or by shaping the chi in your body in such a way as to turn back and rewrite time, or by shouting so loud that the universe quakes in fear and does your bidding? But then, this becomes true long before epic level in D&D anyhow - by the time they hit Lv10, no one is strictly 'mundane'.

[Asteron]

The other bad source for Epic calibrations (apart from the source list in the ELH) is Faerun, in my opinion. In Faerun the people of Epic power never really do anything all that earthshaking. As epic-level casters, people like Elminster, the Simbul and Szass Tam (to take a few NPCs out of the ELH) should be doing more than shaping history, they should be shaping geography. Instead they sit around with ambitions that seem more worthy of tenth or fifteenth level characters and never seem to do all that much. The one time I recall seeing a real Epic moment in all I've read of Faerun is the time the Simbul storms Hell by herself, and that is one rare occurrence. It was pretty awesome, though.

That is a subject that has been touched upon several times by the authors of Realms works (it's even a quote from Elminster in the beginning of the Campaign Setting!) These characters don't exactly live in a vacuum... If one epic guy moves, his opposite moves to counter, another counters his counter only to have that countered by another, and so on and so forth. Either nothing happens, or the whole world explodes. The status quo is much more preferable to them than either alternative. They actually prefer to work through proxies, kinda like playing chess with the fate of the world at stake if someone screws up bad enough on the wrong move!

[Eldan]

There's always Immortals Handbook if you really need to make all that stuff Tier 1s can do seem passe and give mundanes a leg up. Even though it gets a lot of (honestly, deserved) flak on these boards, its probably actually less broken than by-the-book Epic Spellcasting even if it does get a bit silly.

Was that the book that has those monsters with scientific notation for their statistics, that are sometimes brought up on the board? Such as the, I think, Neutronium Golem that moved at near lightspeed and killed entire solar systems with its death?

[Phelix-Mu]

Was that the book that has those monsters with scientific notation for their statistics, that are sometimes brought up on the board? Such as the, I think, Neutronium Golem that moved at near lightspeed and killed entire solar systems with its death?

Oh...that's sounds like a pretty cool monster theme there. Mmm. Dark matter golem or something. Hmm. That would be a pretty cool BBEG for a campaign. Kind of like a nice mix between that one planet-sized Elder Evil and Ideon, the planet-sized mecha. As the golem's eon's long self-repair system nears being able to bring the golem back online after being damaged in the distant past, the laws of physics start to go haywire. Party must investigate to find out why. Eventually, they discover a new heavenly body...but, wait..."that's no ordinary moon." Load everyone onto a spelljammer helm and Set Controls for the Heart of the Sun.

Haha. Thanks, Eldan, that's a whole campaign idea. And I didn't have to even have to read whatever book it is you were talking about (which sounds dreadful).

[NichG]

Was that the book that has those monsters with scientific notation for their statistics, that are sometimes brought up on the board? Such as the, I think, Neutronium Golem that moved at near lightspeed and killed entire solar systems with its death?

So there's actually two books - one is a bestiary, the other is a system for building characters at epic through post-deific power levels (e.g. things like Ao). Its kind of sad that everyone remembers the monster design, which was basically a list of extremely high-numbered creatures (like the Neutronium Golem), but people don't actually remember the things like the expanded/tiered list of epic feats and salient divine abilities, some of which seem to be quite thematic for epic level play. The Immortals Handbook numbers are pretty broken, but as a place to scavenge ideas for epic-tier powers and abilities I've found it quite useful.

But you really do have to watch the mechanical side of things, because they're all over the place.

For example, Sideways Stealing, an epic feat that allows you to steal two-dimensional things - stripes from a tiger is one of the examples used in the book. Very thematic for something an epic level rogue might be able to do. There's another one that makes it so that you are immune to stat loss from diseases and instead you get a bonus to any stats a disease would damage (most recent disease only) - but if you didn't think to fix up the mechanics so that it was a flat bonus rather than turning the disease's penalties into bonuses, then you'd really be in trouble.

At a slightly higher tier, you get things like 'Malaclypse', which lets you wield cursed items but change who gets hit with the penalties of the item, 'Dream Stealer' where those rewards which the target of the ability gains instead go to you, etc.

[Gemini476]

The biggest problem with Epic is the lack of material. Most published material is for the lower levels, with a bit of thinning out the closer you get to level 20 - Epic often gets left out in the cold when the cool classes and monsters are handed out.

The same thing happened for 4e, too. Maybe Wizards of the Coast just don't really know what they're after with Epic.


Another problem with Epic is that the rules start to break down. But that's alright, because magic broke at level seven and the mundanes turned irrelevant in the teens. Epic Spellcasting is nonfunctional, but magic was already crazy four levels ago when the Wizard first cast Genesis.


Honestly, if I wanted to play Epic I'd play some game that actually had support for that level of play, like Exalted or something. (At least you don't need to worry about game balance in the switch from 3.5 to Exalted 2e.)
Or Amber Diceless, like someone said earlier in the thread. Or Nobilis.

Really, there are a ton of games that do the rules at that scale of play better than Epic, and that's because they were made with that in mind rather than be tacked onto the end of Murderhobo Simulator: Caster Edition. Not that there's anything wrong with being a murderhobo sim: it's just that the scale of the early game is so small that the huge scale of Epic just turns into bigger numbers around the board.

...Maybe I'll dig out a copy of Wrath of the Immortals some day, just to see how Basic tried to handle this stuff. I doubt it was very successful, but still.

[Cirrylius]

Was that the book that has those monsters with scientific notation for their statistics, that are sometimes brought up on the board? Such as the, I think, Neutronium Golem that moved at near lightspeed and killed entire solar systems with its death?

And IIRC, it was only Medium :smallbiggrin:

Even if you don't like the material, it's a fun read; one of the high (even in that system) level encounters involve a Nexus Dragon, i.e. a miles-long roughly draconic entity made of an ever-expanding region of force and shaped space-time...

...being used as a whip by a Macro-Human of vastly higher capabilities.

[Urpriest]

So there's actually two books - one is a bestiary, the other is a system for building characters at epic through post-deific power levels (e.g. things like Ao). Its kind of sad that everyone remembers the monster design, which was basically a list of extremely high-numbered creatures (like the Neutronium Golem), but people don't actually remember the things like the expanded/tiered list of epic feats and salient divine abilities, some of which seem to be quite thematic for epic level play. The Immortals Handbook numbers are pretty broken, but as a place to scavenge ideas for epic-tier powers and abilities I've found it quite useful.

But you really do have to watch the mechanical side of things, because they're all over the place.

For example, Sideways Stealing, an epic feat that allows you to steal two-dimensional things - stripes from a tiger is one of the examples used in the book. Very thematic for something an epic level rogue might be able to do. There's another one that makes it so that you are immune to stat loss from diseases and instead you get a bonus to any stats a disease would damage (most recent disease only) - but if you didn't think to fix up the mechanics so that it was a flat bonus rather than turning the disease's penalties into bonuses, then you'd really be in trouble.

At a slightly higher tier, you get things like 'Malaclypse', which lets you wield cursed items but change who gets hit with the penalties of the item, 'Dream Stealer' where those rewards which the target of the ability gains instead go to you, etc.

Sideways Stealing sounds potentially Epic, but also really emphatically not the sort of thing that makes any sense in D&D. Stealing spell effects is plausible (make Incantatrix a Rogue PrC :smallwink:), but what, mechanically, would stealing a tiger's stripes even do?

The disease one is either a small ability score bonus that could fit in pre-epic, or the same problem as Cancer mage but for any stat and as a feat. The curse one is similar, in that it's either not justifiably epic or it's just dumb. Even Dream Stealer falls into that category.

This, broadly speaking, is my problem with epic: in general, the only reason for something to not be reasonable for the 1-20 range is because it's too dumb for the 1-20 range. Otherwise, it could have just been written as nonepic in almost every case.

[atemu1234]

Epic Spellcasting is meant to have the highest possible level of DM oversight for a reason. I mean, it's powerful, but if your DM isn't horrible, you stand a shot. Also, I personally built the campaign setting for my group to fit things from all campaign settings with a healthy overdose of epic level stuff. I mean, for example, one of the PCs is a level eighty dwarf fighter, in charge of a nation. Building enemies for him is the most fun I've ever had in a game, quite simply because it stopped being "how do I make a balanced encounter" and "how can I screw him over in the worst ways possible?" He once faced down a city full of dragons, at least fifty supra-advanced great wyrm dragons, with an army of soldiers, and survived! If a DM doesn't want to use epic stuff because they feel like the system isn't built for it, then make your own campaign setting with the epic stuff omnipresent. Or don't. Up to them. But complaining about epic spellcasting because it makes the casters overpowered (from a DM) is a little hypocritical. You make as much stuff as you want. Let the PCs do it too.

[NichG]

Sideways Stealing sounds potentially Epic, but also really emphatically not the sort of thing that makes any sense in D&D. Stealing spell effects is plausible (make Incantatrix a Rogue PrC :smallwink:), but what, mechanically, would stealing a tiger's stripes even do?


You get a thin scroll bearing the pattern of the tiger's stripes, which could be wrapped around ones-self as a shawl to take on the appearance of a tiger, or placed against a surface to imbue it with that pattern. Its not mechanical, but that's not actually a downside. At epic level, individual-scale mechanics should probably be irrelevant anyhow because the sorts of stories you're telling absolutely require more thought-out, connected logic than a set of game mechanics can provide.

E.g. if at epic level you say 'I go and burn down a city' I as DM should be less concerned with the gory details of how you actually burn down the city - you're epic level, even as a Fighter you can stand there and just pick off people one at a time without them having any real recourse. What I need to concern myself with is what the consequences are for the world as a whole, or even the multiverse as a whole (in terms of e.g. changing the various balances of faiths), now that that city has been destroyed. The multiverse-scale consequences are likely to be the equivalent of 'take 1d4 damage', but thats basically where the real game is being played.



The disease one is either a small ability score bonus that could fit in pre-epic, or the same problem as Cancer mage but for any stat and as a feat. The curse one is similar, in that it's either not justifiably epic or it's just dumb. Even Dream Stealer falls into that category.

This, broadly speaking, is my problem with epic: in general, the only reason for something to not be reasonable for the 1-20 range is because it's too dumb for the 1-20 range. Otherwise, it could have just been written as nonepic in almost every case.

The thematics are different, which is non-trivial. Thematically as a Lv10 character if you have, say, Malaclypse, its because you have some particular spell that twists the nature of cursed items so you can borrow the curse and send it out. As an epic character, its because your relationship with the universe is fundamentally different - the curses see you as their child, or some other Nobilis-esque idea.

I feel that sort of mindset is important for making epic actually interesting to play. Its not about the game mechanics getting bigger numbers, its about the feel of the game being less 'skilled/powerful people' and more 'beings whose natures cause them to warp the world around them.

[Flickerdart]

...Its not mechanical...individual-scale mechanics should probably be irrelevant anyhow...I as DM should be less concerned with the gory detail...
This is exactly why there's so much hate for Epic levels. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

[Urpriest]

You get a thin scroll bearing the pattern of the tiger's stripes, which could be wrapped around ones-self as a shawl to take on the appearance of a tiger, or placed against a surface to imbue it with that pattern. Its not mechanical, but that's not actually a downside. At epic level, individual-scale mechanics should probably be irrelevant anyhow because the sorts of stories you're telling absolutely require more thought-out, connected logic than a set of game mechanics can provide.

E.g. if at epic level you say 'I go and burn down a city' I as DM should be less concerned with the gory details of how you actually burn down the city - you're epic level, even as a Fighter you can stand there and just pick off people one at a time without them having any real recourse. What I need to concern myself with is what the consequences are for the world as a whole, or even the multiverse as a whole (in terms of e.g. changing the various balances of faiths), now that that city has been destroyed. The multiverse-scale consequences are likely to be the equivalent of 'take 1d4 damage', but thats basically where the real game is being played.

What that says is that the rules for this are fundamentally different, not that you can't write rules for them. And if the rules are too fundamentally different, then you run the risk of playing a game that has no reason to be based on D&D mechanics in the first place.

As for stealing images so you can wear them...honestly, I could see that as a pre-epic PrC capstone for some appropriate class, like a PrC for changeling illusionist/rogues or the like.




The thematics are different, which is non-trivial. Thematically as a Lv10 character if you have, say, Malaclypse, its because you have some particular spell that twists the nature of cursed items so you can borrow the curse and send it out. As an epic character, its because your relationship with the universe is fundamentally different - the curses see you as their child, or some other Nobilis-esque idea.

The fluff you described sounds fine for a 14th level hexblade, so I don't really see the epic-ness here.



I feel that sort of mindset is important for making epic actually interesting to play. Its not about the game mechanics getting bigger numbers, its about the feel of the game being less 'skilled/powerful people' and more 'beings whose natures cause them to warp the world around them.

I don't see that as an especially "epic" theme either. For example, if Polyhedron had released a mini-campaign-setting (or whatever you call the stuff Polyhedron did) about anarchs in Limbo, it would have explored similar themes.

If anything, I see this as something you could explore via an orthogonal progression, like the Mythic system in Pathfinder or the Birthright rules, rather than just by extending the level progression.

[NichG]

This is exactly why there's so much hate for Epic levels. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Actually I'd say that a lot of the poorly run epic games are poorly run specifically because they don't realize what details matter or not anymore. A game of Lv30 characters going through a dungeon isn't really the same as 'epic' - you're playing to the weaknesses of the situation rather than its strengths.


What that says is that the rules for this are fundamentally different, not that you can't write rules for them. And if the rules are too fundamentally different, then you run the risk of playing a game that has no reason to be based on D&D mechanics in the first place.


The feel of D&D is fundamentally different at Lv10 than it is at Lv1, so having something where the feel of the game changes in fundamental ways as you advance is... well, kind of what D&D is about. You start as farmers, then you become heroes, then you become superhuman, then you become myths, then ...

Certainly this may be why some people don't like playing epic levels, if they really liked the feel of Lv8 or Lv13 or whatever. Its pretty well established that D&D has certain sweet spots where things work best for certain genres, so it makes sense that people would have particular tastes. But it doesn't mean that, e.g., there's something fundamentally bad about taking the game to a place where you have to break down all the assumptions of the previous levels and reinvent how you look at the game. I would say if you aren't doing that by Lv9 you're going to start having problems anyhow.



As for stealing images so you can wear them...honestly, I could see that as a pre-epic PrC capstone for some appropriate class, like a PrC for changeling illusionist/rogues or the like.

The fluff you described sounds fine for a 14th level hexblade, so I don't really see the epic-ness here.


Well to be fair, you can start epic plotlines and thematics before hitting Lv21 if you like, since it is primarily a thematic difference not a mechanical one. So if it sounds fine for a Lv14 character to you, then go for it. I don't think this is something you can understand by looking at the power level of abilities and assigning them to a character level. Its a thematic boundary, not a mechanical one.

I'd put it in terms of saying, for something pre-epic in theme, they do what they do because they are supremely good at something - they're incredibly skilled or well trained or gifted or whatever, but they're still 'just' doing the same things as other people. Anyone can become a Lv14 Hexblade and learn a very subtle manipulation of curses. So if you give a Lv14 Hexblade that ability, you're saying that this sort of relationship with curses is a technique or something anyone can learn given a lifetime of adventure and practice.

On the other hand, in the epic range, each character is something the universe has never seen before. Someone who wraps curses around themselves like cloth, or who steals the color of Sif's hair and holds it ransom, or the like is basically overtly doing the impossible - its somehow their nature/circumstance/strength of being that forces the impossible to be possible, and as part of that it isn't easily copied or taught. While mechanically if something is a feat anyone could take it, thematically it'd make sense to e.g. restrict each of these abilities to one or at most a handful of characters anywhere. This idea of forcing the impossible to be possible or changing the nature of the universe by one's existence dovetails with the idea that at epic level you're rewriting reality with your actions - if you have an adventure and do something, then those acts become the template for all of the 'whys' that come later that determine how the world is. Troll regeneration becomes weak to fire everywhere in the multiverse because you had an adventure where you maimed the god of the trolls with a fire whose property is that its wounds cannot be healed - that kind of thing.



I don't see that as an especially "epic" theme either. For example, if Polyhedron had released a mini-campaign-setting (or whatever you call the stuff Polyhedron did) about anarchs in Limbo, it would have explored similar themes.

If anything, I see this as something you could explore via an orthogonal progression, like the Mythic system in Pathfinder or the Birthright rules, rather than just by extending the level progression.

That's because Limbo is a plane whose nature is to be warped. Its not really the same thing at all - instead of overcoming the nature of what is, its just playing into a nature which is inherently different but still dominant.

[Urpriest]

The value of uniqueness is an interesting point, and one I hadn't considered...but the epic rules don't help with that. If there's a level 80 Fighter in the world, that means that there were 13 level 79-appropriate challenges, 13 level 78-appropriate ones, etc...basically, continue the level progression and you have to level up the world too, at which point you stop really being unique, especially if what you are mechanically isn't "Loki" but "a level 80 rogue".

I think you've convinced me that there's a certain amount of room for uniqueness...but that should all be fine in the low-Epic. The kinds of thematic ranges you're trying to create shouldn't take more than ten new levels or so in total. As an example, check out the Epic Destinies for 3.5 (http://lonelygm.blogspot.com/2011/02/epic-destinies-for-d-35pathfinder.html). Heck, if you took the Epic Destinies and tacked them on at the end of the normal 20 level progression you'd probably replicate what you are going for better, since you wouldn't have the numbers and level-appropriate encounters getting in the way of your vision.

Really, how many distinct levels do you need for this concept? Can you tell me the difference, thematically, between a level 40 Fighter and a level 80 Fighter?

[NichG]

The value of uniqueness is an interesting point, and one I hadn't considered...but the epic rules don't help with that. If there's a level 80 Fighter in the world, that means that there were 13 level 79-appropriate challenges, 13 level 78-appropriate ones, etc...basically, continue the level progression and you have to level up the world too, at which point you stop really being unique, especially if what you are mechanically isn't "Loki" but "a level 80 rogue".

I think you've convinced me that there's a certain amount of room for uniqueness...but that should all be fine in the low-Epic. The kinds of thematic ranges you're trying to create shouldn't take more than ten new levels or so in total. As an example, check out the Epic Destinies for 3.5 (http://lonelygm.blogspot.com/2011/02/epic-destinies-for-d-35pathfinder.html). Heck, if you took the Epic Destinies and tacked them on at the end of the normal 20 level progression you'd probably replicate what you are going for better, since you wouldn't have the numbers and level-appropriate encounters getting in the way of your vision.

Really, how many distinct levels do you need for this concept? Can you tell me the difference, thematically, between a level 40 Fighter and a level 80 Fighter?

Well, are you asking how I would do this in the context of D&D, or how I would design an arbitrary system to best represent the thematics I'm describing mechanically? If I wanted to optimally represent the 'uniqueness' thematic emerging from the underlying structure of D&D, I think the way to do it would be to have the system itself switch over from level-based to point-buy once you hit Lv20. At least, in the campaigns I've played in where that sort of thing was done well, thats basically what happened - the GM assigned an XP cost to certain powers and allowed them to be purchased in a modular fashion. You could still level up if you wanted to shore up your numbers or expand into other PrCs, but the modular abilities were attractive enough that most of the XP in the campaign went there. As far as numbers go, by the end of the one campaign the characters each had about 1.5 million XP total. I'd say maybe 30% of that went into levels (I ended up in the low thirties level-wise, and I think the highest was 40-ish) and 70% went into abilities, of which the most expensive had something like a 300k price tag.

In some sense, thats what Epic Spells are kind of trying to be. You could gain 5 levels, or you could research a single Epic Spell that lets you do something utterly crazy. Of course, because the epic spellcasting system is all over the place, it probably doesn't really end up being like that in practice.

In my own campaigns, the highest level that had any concrete thematic effect was something like Lv45, which was what one character needed in order to manage to finagle his way into the Dragon Ascendant PrC and complete it. At a lower level, he would not have been able to actually complete the PrC and get the faux divine rank associated with its capstone.

Incidentally, a separate issue 13 CR-equivalent encounters per level is that it makes sense when gaining a new level represents a significant fractional increase in your power level. This is both true numerically (Lv2 is a ~25-50% power boost over Lv1 dependent on ability score modifiers), and also due to new synergistic abilities coming online every few levels (e.g. access to higher level spells). ' Much like the other numbers in epic D&D, the math has left its regime of validity, so I wouldn't try to hold to that. Gaining a level every session would actually be 'slow' if you were Lv100 already - but this goes back to mechanical problems with the levels system/etc when you push it too far.

[Prime32]

I'd put it in terms of saying, for something pre-epic in theme, they do what they do because they are supremely good at something - they're incredibly skilled or well trained or gifted or whatever, but they're still 'just' doing the same things as other people. Anyone can become a Lv14 Hexblade and learn a very subtle manipulation of curses. So if you give a Lv14 Hexblade that ability, you're saying that this sort of relationship with curses is a technique or something anyone can learn given a lifetime of adventure and practice.

On the other hand, in the epic range, each character is something the universe has never seen before. Someone who wraps curses around themselves like cloth, or who steals the color of Sif's hair and holds it ransom, or the like is basically overtly doing the impossible - its somehow their nature/circumstance/strength of being that forces the impossible to be possible, and as part of that it isn't easily copied or taught. While mechanically if something is a feat anyone could take it, thematically it'd make sense to e.g. restrict each of these abilities to one or at most a handful of characters anywhere.But the real world caps out at level 6 (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2). :smallconfused: You're "something the universe has never seen before" at level 7, not level 21. I mean, a 7th-level barbarian can get so angry he turns into a bear.

[Jeff the Green]

But the real world caps out at level 6 (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2). :smallconfused: You're "something the universe has never seen before" at level 7, not level 21. I mean, a 7th-level barbarian can get so angry he turns into a bear.

Eh, at level 3 a swordsage can teleport without magic. A level 1 Crusader can hit someone so hard it retroactively nullifies the damage it did to him six seconds before.

[NichG]

But the real world caps out at level 6 (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2). :smallconfused: You're "something the universe has never seen before" at level 7, not level 21. I mean, a 7th-level barbarian can get so angry he turns into a bear.

No, you're something the real world hasn't seen before at Lv7. In the context of the game world, 7th level characters aren't even all that rare. If we go by the real world, you're actually something the real world hasn't seen even at Lv1 if you have any sorts of supernatural abilities.

[Jeff the Green]

No, you're something the real world hasn't seen before at Lv7. In the context of the game world, 7th level characters aren't even all that rare. If we go by the real world, you're actually something the real world hasn't seen even at Lv1 if you have any sorts of supernatural abilities.

Or even if you don't. Remember that Ex abilities can violate the laws of physics.

Also, that's dependent on the game world. In Eberron, double digit characters are pretty rare.

[Yawgmoth]

But the real world caps out at level 6 (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2). :smallconfused: These are the dumbest arguments, right beside "gandalf was only level 5" and Int <=> IQ ratios. The real world can't be mapped to D&D because people IRL don't "level up" and suddenly become better fighters and more resilient and more skilled at what they do and and and. They also don't pick up new abilities at predetermined moments in life (i.e. feats), nor are we limited in how many we get to know. It's absolutely ridiculous to even attempt such a conversion, much less expect anyone to agree with it.

As for epic rules, everyone saying that you can't/shouldn't be concerned with individual mechanics or that X things don't really need stats is only highlighting the major problem with epic games: the system doesn't work for it. What mechanics exist are crap, and the mechanics that are missing are necessary for such a game to function. If you strip off caring about individual characters or small group interests, you're not playing D&D. If you stop statting out major plot points and resolve things through logic chess, it's not really D&D anymore. Whether or not such a game has merit or is enjoyable is completely immaterial to the main issue, which is that the system just breaks down after a certain point and that point is well before epic. This unfortunately makes the best advice for epic games "play a different system, one that is equipped for that style of game."

[Naanomi]

The value of uniqueness is an interesting point, and one I hadn't considered...but the epic rules don't help with that. If there's a level 80 Fighter in the world, that means that there were 13 level 79-appropriate challenges, 13 level 78-appropriate ones, etc...basically, continue the level progression and you have to level up the world too, at which point you stop really being unique, especially if what you are mechanically isn't "Loki" but "a level 80 rogue".
Not that I don't agree, but thematically one imagines that past a certain point you just head for the Planes to find your challenges... a good month long vacation in the deepest parts of the Astral or Far Realm (or just repeated trips to the Mirror Realm?) could fill your quota right?

[The Oni]

Thing about it is that most people don't ever make it to Epic levels, unless they're starting really high and/or fasttracking XP. The game is meant to end before twenty; if it was meant to go higher the base classes would go past twenty-one.

[NichG]

Or even if you don't. Remember that Ex abilities can violate the laws of physics.

Also, that's dependent on the game world. In Eberron, double digit characters are pretty rare.

So I was about to just brush this point off, but there is something key to this.

Namely, you could run Lv7 as 'epic themed' if you wanted in the sense of what I've been talking about by e.g. saying 'every PC class in the game can only be taken by one PC, no NPCs have class levels beyond NPC classes, etc'. That would certainly make a game/setting where the PCs were perforce unique, and you could run their abilities as being the sort of 'warping of the world' that I was talking about. The physical embodiment of Death is not some nasty thing with SDAs, but is a cleric with Slay Living at will, etc.

The problem is, you'd be working against the understanding that the community has developed about D&D over the past however many years. A cleric or a wizard is fundamentally familiar. Even if the DM says 'there aren't any others in the world than you', its treading over ground that the player has almost certainly tread before, and has preconceptions about - it's going to be very hard to convince someone who has played any D&D at all that, say, Fireball is thematically a world-shattering ability, and the game that results will probably be hard to take seriously in any real way.

So if you went this route you'd really need to lie to the players quite a bit to make it work. Hide D&D under a complete rebranding of the names of everything so you haven't even told them you're running D&D.

On the other hand, Lv21+ games are rare. Most players don't know what to expect from them, so you can use the contrast with the Lv<20 games they have played in to enhance the experience and make the thematic distinctions much more clear. Basically, the fact that people have played a Lv10 character in the same system helps you make playing a Lv25 character feel distinct.



As for epic rules, everyone saying that you can't/shouldn't be concerned with individual mechanics or that X things don't really need stats is only highlighting the major problem with epic games: the system doesn't work for it. What mechanics exist are crap, and the mechanics that are missing are necessary for such a game to function. If you strip off caring about individual characters or small group interests, you're not playing D&D. If you stop statting out major plot points and resolve things through logic chess, it's not really D&D anymore. Whether or not such a game has merit or is enjoyable is completely immaterial to the main issue, which is that the system just breaks down after a certain point and that point is well before epic. This unfortunately makes the best advice for epic games "play a different system, one that is equipped for that style of game."

D&D is very moddable and gives a large number of design hooks for new abilities, which really does make it a very good substrate for this in my experience. Generally the way the 'play a different system' train of thought goes is to jump for something rules-light, but thats actually probably the worst thing you could do in this case. You need something which is very rich at the underlying level to make wide arrays of options feel distinctive at the top level. Part of this is setting up assumptions and then knocking them down - identifying the things that you can't do tells you where you can add abilities to do those things that will be surprising.

So if you really did want to use a different system for this, it's a very nontrivial thing to go find one. First of all, you need something that has a 'low level' epoch of play (and the sort of exponential power scaling of D&D is pretty unique as far as game systems go). Secondly, you need something where the underlying game mechanics are sufficiently complex and sophisticated that you have lots of mechanical hooks to create a wide array of abilities from. Thirdly, you need something where the players are familiar with how it plays in the low end so that the contrast with the high end is actually meaningful.

Given those particular requirements, I think its a lot easier just to mod D&D.

[Urpriest]

Well, are you asking how I would do this in the context of D&D, or how I would design an arbitrary system to best represent the thematics I'm describing mechanically? If I wanted to optimally represent the 'uniqueness' thematic emerging from the underlying structure of D&D, I think the way to do it would be to have the system itself switch over from level-based to point-buy once you hit Lv20. At least, in the campaigns I've played in where that sort of thing was done well, thats basically what happened - the GM assigned an XP cost to certain powers and allowed them to be purchased in a modular fashion. You could still level up if you wanted to shore up your numbers or expand into other PrCs, but the modular abilities were attractive enough that most of the XP in the campaign went there. As far as numbers go, by the end of the one campaign the characters each had about 1.5 million XP total. I'd say maybe 30% of that went into levels (I ended up in the low thirties level-wise, and I think the highest was 40-ish) and 70% went into abilities, of which the most expensive had something like a 300k price tag.

In some sense, thats what Epic Spells are kind of trying to be. You could gain 5 levels, or you could research a single Epic Spell that lets you do something utterly crazy. Of course, because the epic spellcasting system is all over the place, it probably doesn't really end up being like that in practice.

In my own campaigns, the highest level that had any concrete thematic effect was something like Lv45, which was what one character needed in order to manage to finagle his way into the Dragon Ascendant PrC and complete it. At a lower level, he would not have been able to actually complete the PrC and get the faux divine rank associated with its capstone.

Incidentally, a separate issue 13 CR-equivalent encounters per level is that it makes sense when gaining a new level represents a significant fractional increase in your power level. This is both true numerically (Lv2 is a ~25-50% power boost over Lv1 dependent on ability score modifiers), and also due to new synergistic abilities coming online every few levels (e.g. access to higher level spells). ' Much like the other numbers in epic D&D, the math has left its regime of validity, so I wouldn't try to hold to that. Gaining a level every session would actually be 'slow' if you were Lv100 already - but this goes back to mechanical problems with the levels system/etc when you push it too far.

See, I agree with you, but I think a consequence is that epic per se is unnecessary. Once you pass a certain level, you should start gaining thematic abilities like the Epic Destinies, not gaining more levels. They represent different things, and aside from the occasional PrC qualification (which I'm sure could have been min-maxed to a lower level), higher levels themselves don't help you reach new thematic points.


Not that I don't agree, but thematically one imagines that past a certain point you just head for the Planes to find your challenges... a good month long vacation in the deepest parts of the Astral or Far Realm (or just repeated trips to the Mirror Realm?) could fill your quota right?

The gods themselves are only level 60 max. The planes don't give you anything more scary to fight than the Material: compare the biggest non-ELH demons and devils to the biggest Dragons, or Elder Brains or the like. Even the Far Realms are only covering CR 27 or so (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/uvuudaum.htm), while you're still in the realm of things that can be fought anyway. There just aren't things in the multiverse that make sense for a level 80 character to fight, beyond things so boring and unnecessary that their only thematic characteristics are "big" and "old" like Draeden.

[NichG]

See, I agree with you, but I think a consequence is that epic per se is unnecessary. Once you pass a certain level, you should start gaining thematic abilities like the Epic Destinies, not gaining more levels. They represent different things, and aside from the occasional PrC qualification (which I'm sure could have been min-maxed to a lower level), higher levels themselves don't help you reach new thematic points.


I'd phrase it differently - specifically that 'epic as a level-based system is unnecessary'. I think that what we're describing - epic destinies, modular abilities, a completely new 'type' of plotline - very much does require a different way of thinking about it and different sets of things that make it good material for an expansion book. As far as levels, I'm generally of the feeling that if you get into this range of play and want to spend your resources picking up another couple of levels, finish off a PrC, whatever, that's not really an issue - its fine just to use the logical continuation of the existing mechanics for that and there's no real reason to forbid it.

Incidentally, Dragon Ascendant has a 30 BAB prereq and is a 12 level PrC, so I don't really see how to get it below Lv43 at the soonest.



The gods themselves are only level 60 max. The planes don't give you anything more scary to fight than the Material: compare the biggest non-ELH demons and devils to the biggest Dragons, or Elder Brains or the like. Even the Far Realms are only covering CR 27 or so (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/uvuudaum.htm), while you're still in the realm of things that can be fought anyway. There just aren't things in the multiverse that make sense for a level 80 character to fight, beyond things so boring and unnecessary that their only thematic characteristics are "big" and "old" like Draeden.

There are certain logical hierarchies you can construct, which is actually one of the things the Immortals Handbook tries to do (not incredibly successfully in that particular case, IMO, since it has you doing things like fighting the physical embodiments of multiverses with multi-lightyear movement rates and things that just end up feeling more silly than distinctive). But basically, this is tied to cosmology - in general, you probably need to go deeper into the cosmology for a really epic game than what's available in Manual of the Planes and start addressing things like 'Why is the universe the way it is? Aside from the deities, who are a dime a dozen, who actually had the power to set things up this way and create the current order?' and the answers to those questions will lead to the logical source of valid challenges.

Beyond that, scale can be used. Fighting against the physical manifestation of the secret death-wish of all living things on a material plane, for example.

[Urpriest]

I'd phrase it differently - specifically that 'epic as a level-based system is unnecessary'. I think that what we're describing - epic destinies, modular abilities, a completely new 'type' of plotline - very much does require a different way of thinking about it and different sets of things that make it good material for an expansion book. As far as levels, I'm generally of the feeling that if you get into this range of play and want to spend your resources picking up another couple of levels, finish off a PrC, whatever, that's not really an issue - its fine just to use the logical continuation of the existing mechanics for that and there's no real reason to forbid it.

Incidentally, Dragon Ascendant has a 30 BAB prereq and is a 12 level PrC, so I don't really see how to get it below Lv43 at the soonest.

BAB cheese is the stinkiest cheese, but with liberal enough readings it's doable. That said, I feel like if you've got a point-buy-ish system for abilities, you'll have a less silly way of achieving DvR 0 for a PC.

Epic without higher levels isn't epic in the sense we're discussing in this thread, it's a different system altogether. A few additional levels are fine, you've convinced me of that. But I don't think there's any reason to go past 30, espeically when the bulk of your proposed system isn't level-based anyway. That keeps you within the thematic space of D&D, which, well, see my next point:




There are certain logical hierarchies you can construct, which is actually one of the things the Immortals Handbook tries to do (not incredibly successfully in that particular case, IMO, since it has you doing things like fighting the physical embodiments of multiverses with multi-lightyear movement rates and things that just end up feeling more silly than distinctive). But basically, this is tied to cosmology - in general, you probably need to go deeper into the cosmology for a really epic game than what's available in Manual of the Planes and start addressing things like 'Why is the universe the way it is? Aside from the deities, who are a dime a dozen, who actually had the power to set things up this way and create the current order?' and the answers to those questions will lead to the logical source of valid challenges.

Beyond that, scale can be used. Fighting against the physical manifestation of the secret death-wish of all living things on a material plane, for example.

See, the problem is that here you're introducing things that just don't fit into the thematic space of D&D. Take the Neutronium Golem, or similar "humongous thing measured in light-years" entities. Those miss the point that in D&D, space is small. Space isn't filled with neutron stars and black holes and galaxies, it's filled with phlogiston and gnomes in ships powered by giant hamsters. Space in D&D is just a lower-level place than planescape, thematically speaking, a prosaic Prime locale only slightly bigger in scope than the worlds it connects.

Then you've got the planes, the real high-level thematic space of D&D. There, you've got the difficulty that the top of the scale is already mostly occupied. At most you've got, as you say, the architects...but unless you're in the Gurren Lagann-verse, you don't fight the architects. They're background entities, and there are only a few of them. You have a final adventure that unveils the truth behind the world, and that's as far as you need to go in that direction, because there's only a need for one ultimate answer there before you're just putting on scale for scale's sake like the Immortals Handbook.

Death gods themselves are in the level 60 range, and that's probably unnecessarily inflated, considering that you can comfortably represent demon lords at level 30 or so. The secret death wish of all things on the material plane is actually a lower-tier entity. Being not anthropomorphic enough to hold an important position in D&D's genre, and not political enough due to all of the politics of beings of that scale involving actual gods, you're looking at something Elder Evil-esque, and that doesn't need to be very far past 20 really.

It's also another "campaign-ending fight" rather than the "Tuesday" that an epic progression needs. Remember, not every session is the end of a story arc. What does an epic level filler episode look like, in your view? Because I could imagine a level 20 filler episode, or even maybe a level 30 one, but I can't think of enough to fill that space past there.

[cosmonuts]

GM arbitration is unfortunately very inconsistent and nearly impossible to quantify in any meaningful way. So the only thing people can go by when discussing rules on the internet is what those rules actually allow.

This is true, but I think we can agree that GMs in general won't allow enormous amounts of DC mitigation the standard way (get casters via leadership, uncanny forethought an epic slot, supernatural spell an epic spell).

In which case mythal is still broken, but I think the others are generally fine. Feel free to correct me, though; it may be the case that I can make a horrendously powerful DC 30 spell without needing mitigation at all.

[NichG]

See, the problem is that here you're introducing things that just don't fit into the thematic space of D&D. Take the Neutronium Golem, or similar "humongous thing measured in light-years" entities. Those miss the point that in D&D, space is small. Space isn't filled with neutron stars and black holes and galaxies, it's filled with phlogiston and gnomes in ships powered by giant hamsters. Space in D&D is just a lower-level place than planescape, thematically speaking, a prosaic Prime locale only slightly bigger in scope than the worlds it connects.

Then you've got the planes, the real high-level thematic space of D&D. There, you've got the difficulty that the top of the scale is already mostly occupied. At most you've got, as you say, the architects...but unless you're in the Gurren Lagann-verse, you don't fight the architects. They're background entities, and there are only a few of them. You have a final adventure that unveils the truth behind the world, and that's as far as you need to go in that direction, because there's only a need for one ultimate answer there before you're just putting on scale for scale's sake like the Immortals Handbook.

Well, IMO, one of the hallmarks of this is that you do fight the architects and the sort of thematic range I'm talking about can in fact get Gurren Lagann-ish. This particular epic theme does have a ceiling, but that ceiling is basically the point at which your characters have achieved the ability to rewrite the universe in their image. Once you've crossed that particular threshold, then the fundamental questions become ones of philosophy, morality, and meaning - e.g. things like 'is it right to create creatures who suffer?' or 'should death be a thing?' or 'if I can rewrite time, and my solipsisms are actually true, does anything have meaning anymore?' - and that's a different thematic range (the 'next' one in series after epic if you believe they're linear).

So fighting/becoming the architects is basically the transition moment into that next thematic range. And then of course you can in fact run games in that thematic range, but it requires a whole different set of assumptions/structures, much like epic did. A game in that zone looks a lot like DMing, basically.



Death gods themselves are in the level 60 range, and that's probably unnecessarily inflated, considering that you can comfortably represent demon lords at level 30 or so. The secret death wish of all things on the material plane is actually a lower-tier entity. Being not anthropomorphic enough to hold an important position in D&D's genre, and not political enough due to all of the politics of beings of that scale involving actual gods, you're looking at something Elder Evil-esque, and that doesn't need to be very far past 20 really.

It depends on cosmology, which is kind of my point. There's nothing stopping you from making 'the secret death wish of all beings' a higher tier entity than, say, Nerull, because Nerull is a personage. Its sort of like the question of whether or not 'magic' should be a higher tier structure than 'Mystra'. In this particular take on it, the gods themselves are basically office-holders, the equivalent of clerics of fundamental concepts; when you kill the god of death, that doesn't make death stop being a thing in the multiverse. Another god of death emerges, because you haven't altered the underlying structures that make death happen - whether its via belief in a Planescape-esque fashion, or some physical reality. So the next tier above gods is a class of entities that are basically what one might call 'lynchpins for concepts' - take them out and their concept itself goes away or changes hands.

For example, a high-epic quest might be 'I want to change the alignment system - I don't like how Good works right now'. In standard D&D cosmology, alignment is a higher-tier structure than the various aligned gods.



It's also another "campaign-ending fight" rather than the "Tuesday" that an epic progression needs. Remember, not every session is the end of a story arc. What does an epic level filler episode look like, in your view? Because I could imagine a level 20 filler episode, or even maybe a level 30 one, but I can't think of enough to fill that space past there.

Well, let me split this into 'low-epic', 'mid-epic', and 'high-epic'.

Low-epic (Lv21-24 lets say): Filler episode is something like dealing with a new planar race that is invading the world, stopping an illithid plot to travel back in time and extinguish the sun, personally founding a kingdom/church, etc. The high points/boss fights might involve something like conquering a layer of the Abyss, taking out a demon lord, etc.

Mid-epic (Lv25-30): Filler episodes is something like investigating why souls have stopped flowing to all the afterlives, stopping a demiplane from falling from the Ethereal into the Plane of Fire, negotiating an armistice between a pantheon of deities, prison break from the Demiplane of Imprisonment. The high points/boss fights might involve taking out minor deities in direct combat.

High-epic (Lv31+): Filler episode is something like seeing why deities are going mad, travelling back in time to witness the forming of the Pact Primeval (and messing with it), dealing with anomalies in the Plane of Fire causing all fire everywhere to behave strangely, fighting against a thought-virus which has caused a feedback loop in the beliefs of an entire crystal sphere and is causing issues elsewhere, journeying to an alternate copy of the multiverse through the Plane of Mirrors in order to revive Aoskar, fighting Elder Evils in their full forms (the gods are afraid of them, so...), freeing the Lady of Pain from Sigil, taking over the duties of a Concept for awhile for some reason. High points/boss fights might involve taking out concepts themselves (end Fear everywhere) or creating new ones (there is now a concept called Spiral, cue Guren Lagann...).

At the end of all this, the campaign ending fight would be something like going after the architects of the concepts themselves or trying to capture the source of all power/fountainhead of creation/whatever mythical representation of the ability to determine all things about reality that you might want to use.

[Urpriest]

See, I don't see "fighting concepts" as working for those scales. If you're fighting a concept in a D&D-like world, it's because some god or caster or the like has brought it out to fight you. The god or caster is the interesting part, because they're a person, with goals, interests, political aspirations, involvement with the world, etc. The concept is just a superweapon being used by the god/caster, and shouldn't steal its master's spotlight.

[Yawgmoth]

D&D is very moddable and gives a large number of design hooks for new abilities, which really does make it a very good substrate for this in my experience. Generally the way the 'play a different system' train of thought goes is to jump for something rules-light, but thats actually probably the worst thing you could do in this case. You need something which is very rich at the underlying level to make wide arrays of options feel distinctive at the top level. Part of this is setting up assumptions and then knocking them down - identifying the things that you can't do tells you where you can add abilities to do those things that will be surprising. That's not actually true. There's plenty of crunchy systems out there that handle playing Beings of Phenomenal Cosmic Power that at least have the option for lower level play. It's easy to scale down effects, but there's a definite ceiling wherein the math just stops working and playing the game is functionally no different than flipping coins while staring at an excel spreadsheet.

So if you really did want to use a different system for this, it's a very nontrivial thing to go find one. First of all, you need something that has a 'low level' epoch of play (and the sort of exponential power scaling of D&D is pretty unique as far as game systems go). Secondly, you need something where the underlying game mechanics are sufficiently complex and sophisticated that you have lots of mechanical hooks to create a wide array of abilities from. Thirdly, you need something where the players are familiar with how it plays in the low end so that the contrast with the high end is actually meaningful.

Given those particular requirements, I think its a lot easier just to mod D&D. I disagree. As I said above, there's a lot of crunchy systems wherein the mechanics at least try to be built with an eye towards power levels approaching DC or Marvel just before a continuity reset. D&D is not an easy system to mod because the parts where it actually functions well are quite small in comparison to the design space it tries to occupy. D&D does not handle "gritty realism" well because magic takes most of that out. You can't take magic out because the monsters are designed with the expectation of magic, specifically magic items. D&D similarly does not handle large scale intrigues well because the assumption is on "these 3-5 people and their personal exploits". Once you start worrying about armies and continents, it breaks down into either rolling thousands of dice or handwaving it; handwaving is not mechanics and thus is not something one should consider here.

If someone wants to play a modern game with a lot of politicking, I'm not going to suggest D&D; I'm going to suggest V:tR.
If someone wants to play a game of nascent godlings competing with similar forces, I'm not suggesting D&D; I'm suggesting Exalted.
If someone wants to play a kitchen sink game where everything is possible and nothing really needs to make sense to be viable, my vote is going to RIFTS, not D&D.
If someone wants to play a game about kung-fu fighters in a vaguely asian setting, it's not going to be OA, it's going to be Legends of the Wulin.
If someone wants to play an 80s fantasy cartoon plot with a vaguely video game feel to progression, then I might suggest D&D.

[NichG]

See, I don't see "fighting concepts" as working for those scales. If you're fighting a concept in a D&D-like world, it's because some god or caster or the like has brought it out to fight you. The god or caster is the interesting part, because they're a person, with goals, interests, political aspirations, involvement with the world, etc. The concept is just a superweapon being used by the god/caster, and shouldn't steal its master's spotlight.

Hm, at this point maybe we'll just have to disagree? I think this is a matter of taste. For me, I rather like games that involve very alien intellects/circumstances. What sort of motivations might 'fear' or 'death wish' or whatever have, independent of sort of person-scale things like 'I want to rule this kingdom' or 'I want to get back at the people who wronged me'. In D&D, even the gods tend to be petty like that - their mindsets are very 'mortal'. So there's a lot of room for things whose relationship with the universe is fundamentally based on different assumptions, and I think 'those should all be weapons of a person with human-like motivations' is pretty limiting.

I also don't particularly have any attachment to the specific D&D cosmology as written, especially when running a game that intends to get to epic scale. Everything can and will be redefined to suit the needs of whatever ideas that particular campaign is exploring. And I don't think that's particularly unusual either - Eberron doesn't have the same cosmology as Faerun or Dragonlance or Greyhawk.


That's not actually true. There's plenty of crunchy systems out there that handle playing Beings of Phenomenal Cosmic Power that at least have the option for lower level play. It's easy to scale down effects, but there's a definite ceiling wherein the math just stops working and playing the game is functionally no different than flipping coins while staring at an excel spreadsheet.
I disagree. As I said above, there's a lot of crunchy systems wherein the mechanics at least try to be built with an eye towards power levels approaching DC or Marvel just before a continuity reset. D&D is not an easy system to mod because the parts where it actually functions well are quite small in comparison to the design space it tries to occupy. D&D does not handle "gritty realism" well because magic takes most of that out. You can't take magic out because the monsters are designed with the expectation of magic, specifically magic items. D&D similarly does not handle large scale intrigues well because the assumption is on "these 3-5 people and their personal exploits". Once you start worrying about armies and continents, it breaks down into either rolling thousands of dice or handwaving it; handwaving is not mechanics and thus is not something one should consider here.


Handwaving is perfectly fine. If we're talking about 'what system is best' then something that can actually do it well would trump handwaving, but if we're talking about how to make a functional campaign then handwaving absolutely is a powerful tool to do so. There's no such thing as perfect gaming, and having the inflexibility that everything must be codified and written down in the rules is going to strongly limit what you can actually pull off and make entertaining.

My advice on how to run a good D&D campaign would start with 'never be afraid to throw out RAW'. That doesn't mean that D&D is a bad starting point, it means that I think D&D is closer to what I'd consider 'reasonable gaming with a D&D-like feel' than other systems. Using FATE or GURPS or whatever would lose far more than having to discard a few broken bits of RAW.

Anyhow, being able to get D&D to do all sorts of things just requires an understanding of how the system works. If you want to do low magic, you actually can do so, but you have to understand that its not as simple as making no magic items. Eliminate all full casters/spellcasting, and replace the mechanics of classes with partial spellcasting to instead have (Ex) at-will abilities based on the sorts of spells they should be getting. Avoid incorporeal enemies and enemies with flight. Give save-or-die-ish effects a two round grace period where the effects can be undone with a Heal check. Take certain things that generally magic is used for and shift them onto skills (e.g. reverse petrification is a Heal check, removing a curse is a Knowledge(Arcana) check, etc). Consider the party's effective level to be about 50-60% what it should otherwise be, and customize encounters not just based on CR but based on what you know the characters in the party can in fact handle. Add a few more mundane-ish homebrew classes, possibly make Leadership a bigger deal, and create a system for non-magical items 'of high quality' with magic-ish bonuses.

No, its not as simple as the 'I refuse to give out magic items!' that most people try when they first try low magic, but if you understand the system and what makes things easy/hard, its pretty simple to make something that works.



If someone wants to play a game of nascent godlings competing with similar forces, I'm not suggesting D&D; I'm suggesting Exalted.


Only relevant one to the question of 'epic', so I'll address this in particular. Exalted is a much flatter system than D&D - it doesn't handle the sorts of power gaps that are part and parcel of D&D very well. Furthermore, mechanically speaking the combat system is pretty screwed up; not really any better than the broken math of D&D at epic levels, if for different reasons (perfect defense economy). Most of the charms are also a lot more boring than the stuff you tend to find in D&D because there is less to connect to mechanically; adding tons of dice to things is not really sophisticated game design.

In D&D, effectively each character has between four and eight separate lines of defense: DR, AC, Saves, HP, regeneration, SR, resistances, miss chance. Out of these, there are roughly three categories of defenses that behave mechanically different: 'reduction' like DR and resistances, 'buffers' like HP, 'evasion' like AC/Saves/SR - and regeneration is a sort of special fourth. That's pretty mechanically rich. Add on to that specific immunities, which become more important at high levels, and also differential mobility (flight/incorporeality/burrow/etc), and even just looking at simple combat interactions its already pretty mechanically rich. Now to that you can add the huge breadth of utility powers that D&D has; I don't think I've seen a game system that comes close as far as the types of non-fighting things you can do. There's everything from birth control to creating planes of reality to raising armies of minions to causing crops to grow faster to communicating over long distances to finding anyone/anything anywhere to seeing the future to forming materials into any shape/building structures rapidly to ...

So yeah, I'd start with D&D over Exalted for this particular theme any day. No contest.

[TuggyNE]

Well, let me split this into 'low-epic', 'mid-epic', and 'high-epic'.

Low-epic (Lv21-24 lets say): Filler episode is something like dealing with a new planar race that is invading the world, stopping an illithid plot to travel back in time and extinguish the sun, personally founding a kingdom/church, etc. The high points/boss fights might involve something like conquering a layer of the Abyss, taking out a demon lord, etc.

Mid-epic (Lv25-30): Filler episodes is something like investigating why souls have stopped flowing to all the afterlives, stopping a demiplane from falling from the Ethereal into the Plane of Fire, negotiating an armistice between a pantheon of deities, prison break from the Demiplane of Imprisonment. The high points/boss fights might involve taking out minor deities in direct combat.

High-epic (Lv31+): Filler episode is something like seeing why deities are going mad, travelling back in time to witness the forming of the Pact Primeval (and messing with it), dealing with anomalies in the Plane of Fire causing all fire everywhere to behave strangely, fighting against a thought-virus which has caused a feedback loop in the beliefs of an entire crystal sphere and is causing issues elsewhere, journeying to an alternate copy of the multiverse through the Plane of Mirrors in order to revive Aoskar, fighting Elder Evils in their full forms (the gods are afraid of them, so...), freeing the Lady of Pain from Sigil, taking over the duties of a Concept for awhile for some reason. High points/boss fights might involve taking out concepts themselves (end Fear everywhere) or creating new ones (there is now a concept called Spiral, cue Guren Lagann...).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't seem to go much beyond level 35, or 40 at the latest. What might you be doing at level 60, which should be as much of a sea change in campaigns as going from level 1 to level 21 is?

I submit that Epic ends before level 40 (and usually well before that; whether the ending point is 30, 35, or 40 is up to some dispute I guess). The game just can't go on, because there is an immense paucity of the needed concepts, and even the aggregate of thousands of years of human imagination still cannot fill that.

[NichG]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't seem to go much beyond level 35, or 40 at the latest. What might you be doing at level 60, which should be as much of a sea change in campaigns as going from level 1 to level 21 is?

I submit that Epic ends before level 40 (and usually well before that; whether the ending point is 30, 35, or 40 is up to some dispute I guess). The game just can't go on, because there is an immense paucity of the needed concepts, and even the aggregate of thousands of years of human imagination still cannot fill that.

Arguably, because of how levels work in epic, 40 to 20 isn't as big of a (mechanical) difference as 20 is to 15 even, which is part of the reason why epic in principle stretches out much further (and why Urpriest and I were discussing alternate advancement methods from gaining levels to really do epic right). If you aren't actually putting new modular abilities into the system, then I'd say that pretty much no matter what your character level is - 30, 40, 100, 1000, etc, it doesn't help you actually participate in the 'high epic' category I listed. Basically the concepts there absolutely require new things to be added into the system so that characters can even interact with them in any mechanical sense.

But once you add new abilities, the campaign pacing (in the sense of a range of levels) is roughly right for things to cap out around 35-40. Beyond that, there is a post-epic that you could do, which is that each character is basically DMing the universe but the game would somehow focus on the philosophical conflicts that arise from that. It'd be very much like forum god-games.

[jedipotter]

Im just curious to hear your guys thoughts on epic levels and how your group would handle em.

The normal D&D rules are bad enough, Epic is beyond bad. And it all comes down to the ''Epic Problem Player''. This player is unreasonable, thinks the rules are absolute, that the DM is ''just a player'', and that the game group exists to be spectators to how great they play the game.

The normal rules are bad enough with typos, mistakes, oversights, loopholes, bad editing, no editing, and just down right pure ''beyond crazy''. The Epic rules are worse.


Too often Epic players are just too powerful, they are not just Epic......they are Optimized Epic. This makes the games hard to run as the OEP can defeat most things in seconds.

But it does depend on how you play the game. If you play a tough, ''unfair'' game, then Epic can be tons of fun.

[Dimcair]

*pokes his head out of his private, secured plane of existence*

Brr... so much dirt, and blood and ugly ... slimy things ...

Gonna go back and scry on the cheerleader shower again....

or I could finish that scroll of timestop...?

Hm, naah, cheerleader it is!

*pulls head back*

[AuraTwilight]

The normal D&D rules are bad enough, Epic is beyond bad. And it all comes down to the ''Epic Problem Player''. This player is unreasonable, thinks the rules are absolute, that the DM is ''just a player'', and that the game group exists to be spectators to how great they play the game.

The normal rules are bad enough with typos, mistakes, oversights, loopholes, bad editing, no editing, and just down right pure ''beyond crazy''. The Epic rules are worse.


Too often Epic players are just too powerful, they are not just Epic......they are Optimized Epic. This makes the games hard to run as the OEP can defeat most things in seconds.

But it does depend on how you play the game. If you play a tough, ''unfair'' game, then Epic can be tons of fun.

For someone who understands that the problem is how poorly written and edited the rules are, you sure do seem unnecessarily and vitriolically eager to act as if the only reason Epic falls apart is due to jerky optimization rules lawyers.

As if well-intentioned players don't accidentally screw things up due to these aforementioned crappy rules.

[jedipotter]

As if well-intentioned players don't accidentally screw things up due to these aforementioned crappy rules.

Well-intentioned players, or even good players, won't be ''rule following zombies'' and other bad things. They will have the common sense to say ''well sure the rule on page 22 says that...but will ignore it or change it to make the game better.'' They would even be great players if they said ''let the DM fix up things and lets game.''

[atemu1234]

Following rules is essential, especially rule 0- The DM is always right.

[Augmental]

Well-intentioned players, or even good players, won't be ''rule following zombies'' and other bad things. They will have the common sense to say ''well sure the rule on page 22 says that...but will ignore it or change it to make the game better.'' They would even be great players if they said ''let the DM fix up things and lets game.''

If the rules weren't broken in the first place, they wouldn't need to be fixed.

[ericgrau]

Well, most campaigns I've played in ended by ~14 partly because of all the craziness that comes. But I've played epic and it went fine. It is hard to manage the craziness even when you mean well, but it is plenty manageable.

We did use epic spells too. I've only ever seen them as "let me use a cool powerful spell as allowed by the DM" never "the world immediately breaks".

I do think epic is broken, but anything can be made to work and there are plenty of things harder to pull off than having fun in a manageable epic campaign.

There was another epic campaign before the one I played in and another one afterwards. I didn't get to play in either. I heard the first one fell apart because people had too many actions in a turn between multispell and time stop, especially spell stowaway time stop. In the one I played in multispell was limited to one extra spell and we were encouraged not to take 20 minute turns. I heard the one after the one I played in went well too. Actually the one before me also went very well, but too many actions was the main reason they stopped.

[AuraTwilight]

Well-intentioned players, or even good players, won't be ''rule following zombies'' and other bad things. They will have the common sense to say ''well sure the rule on page 22 says that...but will ignore it or change it to make the game better.'' They would even be great players if they said ''let the DM fix up things and lets game.''

So you've literally never had a player try and use a rule that they didn't realize had severe problems with it, causing buttloads of issues that required retconning or backtracking to do what you're suggesting?

You've literally always caught every single problematic rule BEFORE you saw it in action? Every time? Call me skeptical.

[jedipotter]

So you've literally never had a player try and use a rule that they didn't realize had severe problems with it, causing buttloads of issues that required retconning or backtracking to do what you're suggesting?

You've literally always caught every single problematic rule BEFORE you saw it in action? Every time? Call me skeptical.

It is more accurate to say ''have a player that attempted to cheat and be sneaky and slip a problem rule past the DM''. This is one of the dirty tricks of a complcated character. The player hopes the DM won't look through the character stats to see if an effect works or not.

Lots of the problem rules can be fixed by changing the overall rules. For example, the houserule of All Conjuration(Creation) attack spells are Evocations fixes all the silly conjuration cheats where a character can to a bucket load of damage with no spell resistance.

It's rare for my game to backtrack. It is more like the player say something like ''I do this or that and this happens as it's my interpertation'' and I as DM just say ''your attack has not effect'' or ''nothing happens'', and move on to the next player.

[Urpriest]

It is more accurate to say ''have a player that attempted to cheat and be sneaky and slip a problem rule past the DM''. This is one of the dirty tricks of a complcated character. The player hopes the DM won't look through the character stats to see if an effect works or not.

Lots of the problem rules can be fixed by changing the overall rules. For example, the houserule of All Conjuration(Creation) attack spells are Evocations fixes all the silly conjuration cheats where a character can to a bucket load of damage with no spell resistance.

It's rare for my game to backtrack. It is more like the player say something like ''I do this or that and this happens as it's my interpertation'' and I as DM just say ''your attack has not effect'' or ''nothing happens'', and move on to the next player.

What about when something sounds reasonable and then it turns out it isn't?

Remember, every single unbalanced rule is something that somebody at WotC thought was completely reasonable at one point.

[jedipotter]

What about when something sounds reasonable and then it turns out it isn't?

Remember, every single unbalanced rule is something that somebody at WotC thought was completely reasonable at one point.

If it sounds reasonable, I'd allow it even if the rules said it did not work. To me ''rules'' are ''suggestions''.

I'm not sure that anyone at WotC ever though anything was ''reasonable''. I think the bigger problem is the disconnect: WotC is playing old 2E stlye D&D, and worst of all: Bad or no editing.

[Ionbound]

The normal D&D rules are bad enough, Epic is beyond bad. And it all comes down to the ''Epic Problem Player''. This player is unreasonable, thinks the rules are absolute, that the DM is ''just a player'', and that the game group exists to be spectators to how great they play the game.

The normal rules are bad enough with typos, mistakes, oversights, loopholes, bad editing, no editing, and just down right pure ''beyond crazy''. The Epic rules are worse.


Too often Epic players are just too powerful, they are not just Epic......they are Optimized Epic. This makes the games hard to run as the OEP can defeat most things in seconds.

But it does depend on how you play the game. If you play a tough, ''unfair'' game, then Epic can be tons of fun.

Jedi, obviously you have had some problem players in your past as a GM. But, you don't seem to recognize that the problems you're having are a result of not having a dialogue with you players. Look at Tippy. He plays with other people, including his GM, that optimize just as hard as he does. And they have an agreement that this is how their games go, because that's what they find enjoyable.

But not everyone does that. There is no need to say, "We can't play Epic" or "These options are game-breaking" or "Optimization is bad". All you need to do is make an agreement with your players that they won't break the game, and you won't disallow them from playing options that they like. And if someone breaks that agreement, then you are well withing your rights as a GM to say to them, "Hey, you're making the game not fun for other people", and then if they keep it up, kick them.

[Urpriest]

If it sounds reasonable, I'd allow it even if the rules said it did not work. To me ''rules'' are ''suggestions''.


So just to clarify, you'll do that even if it makes the game stop being fun for everyone? Because that's what I was asking you.

[jedipotter]

But, you don't seem to recognize that the problems you're having are a result of not having a dialogue with you players.

I don't see that as a problem. The player will say ''I want to do this broken rule legal thing'' and I will say ''not in my game''. So it is a short non-dialogue. And even if they all got together and said ''we want to do the gate genie wish loop to get tons of wishes'', I'd still say ''not in my game''.


So just to clarify, you'll do that even if it makes the game stop being fun for everyone? Because that's what I was asking you.

I'd say yes.....but it would be rare for this to happen. I weed out what might be a problem player quite quickly.

I'd not do something that ''made the game unfun for everyone'', my rulings are more ''I'm keeping the game fun for the DM and the other players not trying to ''do something'' that would be fun for just them." Like if player X said ''I do scry and die to win the game'', I'd say ''it does not work'' and keep playing with the other players as they try and track down the bad guy in a normal game.

[Urpriest]

I'd say yes.....but it would be rare for this to happen. I weed out what might be a problem player quite quickly.

I'd not do something that ''made the game unfun for everyone'', my rulings are more ''I'm keeping the game fun for the DM and the other players not trying to ''do something'' that would be fun for just them." Like if player X said ''I do scry and die to win the game'', I'd say ''it does not work'' and keep playing with the other players as they try and track down the bad guy in a normal game.

Look, we've tried to explain this in multiple posts already, but I'm going to try one more time because I'm still holding out hope that you just haven't understood what everyone has been saying. Let's break it down step by step:


You read a rule.
You think about the rule, and decide that it looks reasonable.
You use the rule in your game.
After several sessions, you realize the rule is actually unreasonable and is ruining everyone's fun.


Are you saying that this has never happened to you?

Are you saying that this does happen, but that it isn't a problem?

Please clarify.

Note that, except in step 4, the players never make an appearance. This might be a rule you're using to construct NPCs and monsters, which you at first think is fine and then realize is unreasonable. Players who intentionally twist the rules never come in to this situation at all.

[Ionbound]

I don't see that as a problem. The player will say ''I want to do this broken rule legal thing'' and I will say ''not in my game''. So it is a short non-dialogue. And even if they all got together and said ''we want to do the gate genie wish loop to get tons of wishes'', I'd still say ''not in my game''.

That misses the point of the dialogue. The point of the dialogue is coming to an agreement with your players that they won't do something sillier than you're ready for, and, in return, you'll let them play what they want to play. Such a simpler system than unilaterally saying, "You can't play this because it's breakable".

[georgie_leech]

That misses the point of the dialogue. The point of the dialogue is coming to an agreement with your players that they won't do something sillier than you're ready for, and, in return, you'll let them play what they want to play. Such a simpler system than unilaterally saying, "You can't play this because it's breakable".

Quibble: While I generally agree with and prefer this position on such matters, coming to a reasonable compromise in in fact less simple than just saying "no."

[icefractal]

To me, the issue is more that it's not clear what is reasonable or unreasonable at Epic levels. Some of the material in the ELH makes it look like a slow progression from 20th, other stuff makes it look like a quantum leap upward. Let's just take a plain old Wizard, level 20-something, no Epic Spellcasting.

That Wizard has the capability to operate out of a series of demiplanes which are extremely difficult to enter, have more favorable conditions for his magic, and let him recover his spells (effectively) in seconds. He never has to leave his demiplanes, because he can simply send out a projected copy of himself, which will have minimal impact if it dies. He can also have a small army of powerful creatures under his control, which likewise he sends out copies of.

Now - is his behavior:
A) Cheesy?
B) Appropriate?
C) Underpowered?

I actually don't know, and I don't think the writers of the ELH knew either. On one hand, that stuff could make several other classes obsolete, so it must be cheesy, right? On the other hand, he's fighting the mishapen offspring of the gods, the primordial shapeshifter, the king of the wild hunt, the ultimate forms of heat and cold, things that make a lich look like small potatoes - maybe that kind of modus operandi is appropriate. Or even not good enough?

That's the issue, and it's why IMO, telling people to "use common sense" or "just don't be cheesy" are not sufficient. The DM needs to construct their own standard for what's appropriate at what level, and get the players on board with it.

[jedipotter]

Look, we've tried to explain this in multiple posts already, but I'm going to try one more time because I'm still holding out hope that you just haven't understood what everyone has been saying. Let's break it down step by step:


You read a rule.
You think about the rule, and decide that it looks reasonable.
You use the rule in your game.
After several sessions, you realize the rule is actually unreasonable and is ruining everyone's fun.




That has never happened. I can't think of a reasonable rule that did not work out. Though I cut out huge amounts of rules and homebrew a lot of stuff right from the start.

[Ionbound]

That has never happened. I can't think of a reasonable rule that did not work out. Though I cut out huge amounts of rules and homebrew a lot of stuff right from the start.

Riiiight. Like the whole, "Summon Monster I can summon an uncontrolled demon that wants to kill it's summoner". That worked really well, didn't it?

[Urpriest]

That has never happened. I can't think of a reasonable rule that did not work out. Though I cut out huge amounts of rules and homebrew a lot of stuff right from the start.

You might not be able to, but every WotC writer has a rule like that. Every rule that you've cut out and decided was unreasonable is something that some WotC writer thought was perfectly fine. Unless you think you're smarter than everyone who wrote the rules (note: I find this a tempting worldview sometimes, but seriously), you'll have to admit that sometimes, you'll make incorrect rulings too.

That's why the rules exist. The idea is that some group of smart people got together, talked about what each one thought was reasonable, and figured out which of those ideas were actually unreasonable. They didn't get them all, but neither will you. Better rules, better products, better games, these are the ones that were made by smarter people who put more effort into checking for rules that, while they may have seemed reasonable at first glance, failed at their purpose. The better rules are the rules that put less of the effort and pain in your group's sessions, and more in the hands of the playtesters and proofreaders who signed up for it. So when we say that Epic is a bad ruleset, that is precisely what we mean: Epic, moreso than other parts of 3.5, has rules that seemed reasonable to someone and may seem reasonable to you, until suddenly they're not, and you have a retcon a month's worth of play.

[Elderand]

To me, the issue is more that it's not clear what is reasonable or unreasonable at Epic levels. Some of the material in the ELH makes it look like a slow progression from 20th, other stuff makes it look like a quantum leap upward.

Ouh that's one of my pet peeve. A quantum leap is literaly the smallest possible leap you could ever make.

[NichG]

You might not be able to, but every WotC writer has a rule like that. Every rule that you've cut out and decided was unreasonable is something that some WotC writer thought was perfectly fine. Unless you think you're smarter than everyone who wrote the rules (note: I find this a tempting worldview sometimes, but seriously), you'll have to admit that sometimes, you'll make incorrect rulings too.

That's why the rules exist. The idea is that some group of smart people got together, talked about what each one thought was reasonable, and figured out which of those ideas were actually unreasonable. They didn't get them all, but neither will you. Better rules, better products, better games, these are the ones that were made by smarter people who put more effort into checking for rules that, while they may have seemed reasonable at first glance, failed at their purpose. The better rules are the rules that put less of the effort and pain in your group's sessions, and more in the hands of the playtesters and proofreaders who signed up for it. So when we say that Epic is a bad ruleset, that is precisely what we mean: Epic, moreso than other parts of 3.5, has rules that seemed reasonable to someone and may seem reasonable to you, until suddenly they're not, and you have a retcon a month's worth of play.

There are actually advantages acting in the lone DM's favor that the designers didn't have. The designers needed to make a game which, communicated in text alone, could be played functionally by, say, 10s of thousands of people. They also had a very short window and a lot of job pressure to get the work done - a year of playtesting maybe.

In comparison, the lone DM only has to tune things for his own group - 6 or 7 people. That means they can customize the rules to the idiosyncracies of their players rather than generalizing over the entire market. The lone DM can talk things over, listen to players, perceive confusion, and re-explain things - that means a higher level of communication than a text document, and also allows the use of shared abstractions (like 'don't break the game' - which might make perfect sense in light of a campaign where everyone there experienced what that means, but which in something like the DMG would be hopelessly vague). The lone DM also has the benefit of a decade+ of people playing D&D 3.5 and finding all the various things that can go wrong.

So given that, its entirely possible for that lone DM to not be a better designer than the people who made the game, but at the same time make better calls and decisions as to the rules and mechanics of said game.