Epic Level Handbook

[Seto]

Happy New Year everybody !

Say, if I remember correctly, I read on this subforum, on several occasions, that the ELH was badly designed/unbalanced/stupid, that not including it would be a wise decision, and (in kinder terms) that including it changes everything (even for games that go beyond 20th level).
Why is that ? Are there ELH advocates ? If not, what do you advise doing for epic games ?
Thanks !

[Jeraa]

Happy New Year everybody !

Say, if I remember correctly, I read on this subforum, on several occasions, that the ELH was badly designed/unbalanced/stupid, that not including it would be a wise decision, and (in kinder terms) that including it changes everything (even for games that go beyond 20th level).
Why is that ? Are there ELH advocates ? If not, what do you advise doing for epic games ?
Thanks !

Mid and high-level play is bad enough. The Epic Level Handbook just magnifies the problems already there.

Plus, epic spellcasting is totally broken.

[Urpriest]

Low-Epic is ok, if you get rid of Epic Spellcasting. Beyond that, you run out of quality content pretty rapidly.

[The Glyphstone]

Freeform cops-and-robbers style play is more balanced than the ELH. So just use that.

"I hit you with my godslaying sword!"
"I have a godslaying sword-blocking magic shield!"
"But my godslaying sword breaks through magic shields!"
"This magic shield is enchanted to deflect all swords before they hit!"
"But I just instantly summoned an army of time-traveling solars to obliterate you from existence before you were born, along with the inventor of magic shields !"
"But my magic shield is also enchanted to protect me from time travel attacks, and mind controls any solars who attack me into fighting on my side instead!"



That is basically how Epic play works, plus dice.

[atemu1234]

Freeform cops-and-robbers style play is more balanced than the ELH. So just use that.

"I hit you with my godslaying sword!"
"I have a godslaying sword-blocking magic shield!"
"But my godslaying sword breaks through magic shields!"
"This magic shield is enchanted to deflect all swords before they hit!"
"But I just instantly summoned an army of time-traveling solars to obliterate you from existence before you were born, along with the inventor of magic shields !"
"But my magic shield is also enchanted to protect me from time travel attacks, and mind controls any solars who attack me into fighting on my side instead!"



That is basically how Epic play works, plus dice.

I don't agree, personally. If you put forth the effort, an epic campaign can be cohesive.

[Lost Demiurge]

We got a little bit into it. Yeah, it's a mess.

A large part of the problem came from the monsters, which had the usual CR problems and were across the board for their ratings... What should have been casual encounters at a glance turned into near party wipes... Would have been party wipes if the GM was unkind.

Hell, I remember one of the critters was some sort of demon dragon thing, could use Blasphemy at will. We were an all-good-aligned party, and the few of us that had Spell Resistance didn't have it high enough. So every round, at a minimum, we were stunned for a round. Not much you could do, there.

Yeah, we stopped around level 23-24. Ended the campaign a little early, but on a high note, so I'm happy.

[AmberVael]

Happy New Year everybody !

Say, if I remember correctly, I read on this subforum, on several occasions, that the ELH was badly designed/unbalanced/stupid, that not including it would be a wise decision, and (in kinder terms) that including it changes everything (even for games that go beyond 20th level).
Why is that ? Are there ELH advocates ? If not, what do you advise doing for epic games ?
Thanks !

The ELH makes a number of decisions in order to make continual progression work (for loose definitions of work).
1) Many normal progressions cease. No more spell levels or progressions of analogous abilities.
2) Some bonuses scale more regularly for all classes (BAB, Saves)
3) Epic magic items not only grow in cost exponentially like regular items, but have an extra cost multiplier thrown on them.
4) A special epic magic system is introduced so you can make spells scaled to your level.


...and pretty much all of these decisions are poorly considered, problematic, and not well balanced. But while epic magic is hailed for its brokenness, I believe my largest point of contention is actually the first.

See, the problem with making this system that can progress indefinitely is that in order to have control over it things have to be more regular. The bonuses become regular so they won't acquire massive gaps and lead to parties with absurd internal numeric imbalance that makes a GM's head explode trying to figure out what to throw at them. You can't continue creating unique abilities, else they'll run out. (Who is going to write up all the 31st level spells?)
In short, I see the biggest problem of epic that it doesn't really change anything except unreasonably scale up numbers. The few things it does try to change are done so laughably badly that you want to throw them out, and most anything cool you can do at epic can actually be achieved earlier. Really what epic lets you do is get new combinations of old capabilities.

Because of this, lately I've discarded the idea of using epic, and instead embraced the idea of E20. Rather than advancing in levels and numbers after level 20, you progress in feats like in E6. Epic feats, even, allowing people to pick up things like the sweet warlock and binder feats, or feats based on other class features like e6 encourages. This promotes the few interesting things that epic did offer (more breadth of powers, the few epic feats it did well), while at least keeping things at the level of (un)manageability that level 20 offers, as opposed to level 406.

[sideswipe]

Freeform cops-and-robbers style play is more balanced than the ELH. So just use that.

"I hit you with my godslaying sword!"
"I have a godslaying sword-blocking magic shield!"
"But my godslaying sword breaks through magic shields!"
"This magic shield is enchanted to deflect all swords before they hit!"
"But I just instantly summoned an army of time-traveling solars to obliterate you from existence before you were born, along with the inventor of magic shields !"
"But my magic shield is also enchanted to protect me from time travel attacks, and mind controls any solars who attack me into fighting on my side instead!"



That is basically how Epic play works, plus dice.

i also disagree, there are no dice involved!


i had a epic magic fix, which were new spell levels gained as if the table extended for spells per day, the a few feats that you could take that allowed you to cast 2 normal spells equalling that level,
e.g. as a 11th level spell you can cast shapechange and bulls strength as a single spell using only one slot (this is before metamagic).

[eggynack]

Basically, with epic levels, a designer said, "Hey, you know how at level 20 a wizard is so ridiculously much more powerful than a monk that he could murder an arbitrary number of them without blinking, and how only other characters with some level of access to the wizard's array of game breaker abilities can hope to compete on any level? How about we make it so that, subsequent to that point, those casters experience a gain in power level greater than any they'd ever experienced, such that they can essentially alter the fabric of reality in any way they choose, while simultaneously making that monk somehow progress slower, such that their level 20 gains of crappy feather fall, rather detrimental outsider abilities, and boosts to BAB, saves, unarmed strike damage, and AC look speedy by comparison."

And the other designers apparently thought it was a great idea. They gave casters epic magic, along with a pile of actually useful feats, while making mundane epic feats that were usually worse than reasonable normal feats (Armor skin? Seriously? Chaotic rage? You don't even have to look hard to find these), and also inexplicably giving everyone the same attack bonus advantage, and also, because why not, giving monks worse feat acquisition speed than druids, clerics, and wizards. It's not like removing those problems would create balance by any means, but it almost seems punitive. There are a couple of ways to close the gaps a little, with the rare good mundane epic feat like exceptional deflection, but those methods are few and far between.

To make a long story short, epic levels are more than horribly imbalanced and requiring of DM adjudication to such a degree that you might as well make your own rules. They're also stupid. Really stupid.

[Chronos]

(Armor skin? Seriously? Chaotic rage? You don't even have to look hard to find these)
I think my favorite is Legendary Rider (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/feats.htm#legendaryRider). You no longer need to make a check that, given the prereqs, you're guaranteed to be auto-succeeding on anyway, and you avoid a paltry -5 penalty for doing something that you'd never bother to do anyway.

Of course, there's also things like Epic Combat Expertise, from Complete Warrior, which is strictly worse than Improved Combat Expertise, also from Complete Warrior.

[eggynack]

I think my favorite is Legendary Rider (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/feats.htm#legendaryRider). You no longer need to make a check that, given the prereqs, you're guaranteed to be auto-succeeding on anyway, and you avoid a paltry -5 penalty for doing something that you'd never bother to do anyway.

Of course, there's also things like Epic Combat Expertise, from Complete Warrior, which is strictly worse than Improved Combat Expertise, also from Complete Warrior.
Yeah, I was just going with the first random crap I could find, but there's some real reverse gold in there. You just flip around, and oh man, here's improved sneak attack. Now my epic rogue is dealing 3.5 extra damage on a sneak attack. Callooh callay. Or, look over there, now there's improved low-light vision/darkvision. Now some of the least powerful vision modes can be doubled in power. Or, oh wow, deafening song. Now I can deafen people with my music, assuming they don't save, temporarily, and it's its own song rather than a rider effect. I think my favorite might just be all of the random numeric crap though, like epic fortitude or epic prowess or great strength. There's just this weird underlying naivety to the idea that those tiny numbers will matter in epic levels.

[sideswipe]

Yeah, I was just going with the first random crap I could find, but there's some real reverse gold in there. You just flip around, and oh man, here's improved sneak attack. Now my epic rogue is dealing 3.5 extra damage on a sneak attack. Callooh callay. Or, look over there, now there's improved low-light vision/darkvision. Now some of the least powerful vision modes can be doubled in power. Or, oh wow, deafening song. Now I can deafen people with my music, assuming they don't save, temporarily, and it's its own song rather than a rider effect. I think my favorite might just be all of the random numeric crap though, like epic fortitude or epic prowess or great strength. There's just this weird underlying naivety to the idea that those tiny numbers will matter in epic levels.

i honestly allow the boost feats (inherent bonus to a stat, e.t.c) from level 1. even then people ignore them.

[eggynack]

i honestly allow the boost feats (inherent bonus to a stat, e.t.c) from level 1. even then people ignore them.
Yeah, makes sense. There's no real reason to restrict them, and they add some interesting options, if rather weak ones. Really, a whole lot of epic feats could have easily been normal feats, some without impacting optimization to any extent, and others as reasonable choices that don't overshadow existing options.