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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rantrite" data-source="post: 7796790" data-attributes="member: 7015676">Hi everyone! New here; literally just created this account to ask this question, since this was the first active community I could find who might have answers to my questions.I used to really enjoy the Immortals Handbook - especially since it gave me the tools vanilla D&D lacked for handling campaigns across universes, with truly enormous creatures, armies of billions, duels between gods, and all that fantastic stuff. Recently, though, I've become somewhat disillusioned by how it grinds up against significant faults in the d20 system it's built on, in particular the fact that the d20 is only so big of a die and that exponential scaling from size doesn't play well with deity progression.I've been playing with making a system (or merely a very large D&D patch) of my own to allow for proper scaling, but it's obviously slow going and something of a mathematical nightmare to sort out. I figure people who've run mortals-to-deities campaigns in IH and the like might have something to help me out.To elaborate:1. The d20 is kind of small compared to the numerical disparities present in high-level conflicts. Two characters building themselves in only slightly different ways, thanks to the way feats can stack, can end up with armor classes far, far more than 20 points apart, meaning that the same enemy with an attack bonus between them could hit one character 95% of the time and hit the other only 5% of the time. The stylistic differences between characters only get smaller as levels increase, too; at standard levels, you might need them to be a fighter and a wizard to have such a disparity, but at epic levels, two slightly different fighters will be different enough. Obviously, this note applies to much more than AC, like ability scores and spell resistance, so merely having alternate methods of attack doesn't always seem to do it.(In the system/patch I'm sketching out, I'm considering giving characters fixed attack numbers that are multiplied or divided by a result generated from their roll. So you could maybe hit someone with an AC twice your attack, and always hit someone with an AC half your attack, irrespective of the absolute numerical difference.)My question is: how do you all handle this in your games - how do you threaten different players with attacks at different times? Surely having only the weakest character or two threatened by enemies while the others are nigh-invulnerable isn't very fun or balanced.2. On the one hand, it makes total sense that hit dice (and thus HP, etc) would scale exponentially with size due to the square-cube law and such. It never seemed right to me, though, that a time lord - literally the embodiment of a universe and dozens of infinitely large planes - would have about the same number of hit dice as, say, an average human scaled up to Macro-Medium, "merely" mountain sized and surely incapable of threatening much more than a planet on its own. Against anything significantly larger, new problems arise; the amount of natural armor, DR, spell resistance, etc. that monsters gain via feats as their HD rise get too large for time lords to handle, and you're left with problem #1.(I've toyed with just massively multiplying the hit dice and stats for deities, to properly scale with the domains they command and the power they wield, but the numbers get redundant fast when you try to factor in planes which are literally infinite or the like - and that's only sidereal level!)Similarly - when designing monsters and the like to challenge divine characters, do you just accept that roughly Macro-Medium is about what you need to challenge universe-tier characters, or do you work something else out?I'll be incredibly grateful if people here shared adventure/monster/character design tips to ensure balance while still allowing fun with the absurd scales that IH so helpfully allows. Looking forward to hearing from you!</blockquote>

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