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Tor the Fallen
2007-08-22, 12:58 AM
Outside of ritual magic, how can one possibly meet the spellcraft DCs of 50+ for most epic spells?

Rachel Lorelei
2007-08-22, 01:00 AM
Outside of ritual magic, how can one possibly meet the spellcraft DCs of 50+ for most epic spells?

Make progressively higher-DC epic spells that boost your INT and/or Spellcraft by progressively higher amounts. Each one lets you make the next one.

Of course, there's really an impossibly fine line between reasonable and unreasonable epic spells... it's really hard to build spells that are fine considering enemy spellcaster capabilities, monster capabilities, and the rest of your party's capabilities.
That's part of why I don't like Epic Spellcasting so much.

ETA: also, Spellcraft-boosting items help. You can get a +30 bonus with a pre-epic item using the rules; post-epic, you can go as high as you can afford, really, assuming you're allowed to make items that aren't printed at all.

yango
2007-08-22, 01:00 AM
Outside of ritual magic, how can one possibly meet the spellcraft DCs of 50+ for most epic spells?

By being Epic. With 40+ ranks in spellcraft, you'll get there eventually.

Tor the Fallen
2007-08-22, 01:01 AM
Make progressively higher-DC epic spells that boost your INT and/or Spellcraft by progressively higher amounts. Each one lets you make the next one.

Of course, there's really an impossibly fine line between reasonable and unreasonable epic spells... it's really hard to build spells that are fine considering enemy spellcaster capabilities, monster capabilities, and the rest of your party's capabilities.
That's part of why I don't like Epic Spellcasting so much.

That's... no DM would go for that.

Tor the Fallen
2007-08-22, 01:02 AM
By being Epic. With 40+ ranks in spellcraft, you'll get there eventually.

But that means you have to be level 37 to be flinging them around. I'm looking for level 21-30 work arounds.

Rachel Lorelei
2007-08-22, 01:05 AM
That's... no DM would go for that.

Frankly, that's pretty much what you're expected to do. Epic spells cost time, money, and XP to develop, so it's not that fast a process--and the alternatives are either cheesier or involve just buying more and more powerful custom skill-boosters, which gets pretty ridiculous. I'm not sure why a DM wouldn't go for that: it's very straight-forward, probably too much so for them to have missed, unlike the Epic Leadership/sacrificed-spell-slots combination.
You're investing time and GP (and XP, if you want to save the enormous amounts of GP Rods of Excellent Magic cost) to boost your INT, and then more to boost it further. As you noted, without some way of increasing your spellcraft check, most epic spells (including the published ones) are more or less unreasonable... and in epic, you're going to be fighting creatures with epic spells as spell-like abilities!
Plus, when is the DM going to protest? When you make an INT-increasing epic spell? Increasing your attributes is one of the fundamental purposes of epic spells (it's one of the Fortify seed's primary abilities). When you make the second one? The third? You can get some mileage out of this even with restrictive DMs, I'd think!

You can also use one-time skill boosters when casting epic spells. Skill shards from the XPH, for example--or other epic spells, built along the lines of spells like Moment of Prescience or Improvisation. Heck, just using Limited Wish to emulate the aforemntioned Bard spell Improvisation can get you a significant bonus, especially if you temporarily boost caster level first.

And that's on top of the 23 ranks, +13 Intelligence bonus, and +10/20/30 from an item you can have pre-epic.


ETA: the other way of casting epic spells early is lots and lots of DC-mitigation... a lot of which gets as cheesy as any of your other options.