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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9593045" data-attributes="member: 6799660">The problem I foresee in this is that they two materials still have to be mechanically married to each other*, but the developers of the lower-level stuff will have little reason to design to ensure that the upper level stuff works well. That seems to have happened with 3.0's Epic Level Handbook. Not an insurmountable problem, but a challenge. *at least or else there will be a lot of mechanical dissonance when people hit the cut-off.It's worth mentioning that Cook and Marsh made clear on p. X8 that they expected there to be follow-up material taking the levels up to 36. I think it's very hard not to do this. I know EGG supposedly initially mostly wanted high-levels (especially upper level spells) for enemy archmages and the like, but the instant you put them, artifacts, and epic monsters like beholders and elder dragons into the game, people want to play around with that stuff. I don't think there's a right answer. However, if you are going to include that stuff, and expect people to actually play it, it really behooves you to make the system work well at that level, and I don't think they ever did. Mentzer put a lot of stuff in the game in his expansion from B/X -- rulership, war, and tournament rules; planar travel; description of the game universe, etc. -- but most of it didn't really need levels (except maybe 'name level and past' although even that is often arbitrary). Re-building the upper levels to make a more mechanically cohesive game would have been do-able, it's just not really been done with D&D.Or you can go the Godbound route and still play epic characters, but just reset the mechanical scale back down to not unlike low-level D&D characters (just redefining the in-fiction level scale of the units, etc.).</blockquote>

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