Epic level game rules? Help!

[Treebore]

The rules in the ELH suck!! For the most part anyways. Too much of the most part. Anyone written up "house" versions to hopefully make things work better? If so can I have a copy? One of my DM's, my group, and I could really use some help, especially from the spellcasting perspective.

 

[Fieari]

As for basic house rules, start with these: Forget "Epic progressions" for BAB and saves. Toss 'em flat out. Continue progressions for class levels and HD as per sub-epic. Heck, monsters do this already... PCs should be no different.

Expect, with regards to attack bonuses and AC:

Full BAB progressions (Fighter, Barbarian, etc) will always hit unless they power attack too much. In this case, AC actually acts as DR for the most part, by preventing too much power attack.

2/3 BAB progressions (Rogue, cleric, etc) will generally be able to hit, but not power attack any. You may find that they actually have to roll the d20 sometimes.

1/2 BAB prgressions (wizard, etc) will not be able to hit anything but touch ACs.

Many saving throws will be more or less automatic for one side or the other. Consider this in your tactics.

On the other hand, you may want to consider removing immunities from the game, replacing them all with resistances. This makes for a more interesting battlefield, because as it is, between two characters, there will be pseudo immunities between them anyway... might as well get rid of the absolute immunities, and make it possible for a dedicated character to be effective anyway in specific situations. For example, replace Energy Immunity with Energy Resistance 50, make it 100 if they also have the energy subtype, and make it 150 if they're primarily composed of the energy (like an elemental). That's practically immunity in most cases, but with epic levels... you might have dedicated players able to get by them. This is cool. And a far better solution than just making an endless series of trumps: "This feat bypasses X immunity. This feat makes them immune anyway. This other feat makes them vulnerable anyway." back and forth, back and forth, without effecting their power against non-immune things at all, which is stupid.

You'll be interested in Upper Krust's "Immortal's Handbook", I think. The main rules should be comming out this month actually, but U_K is notorious for missing his deadlines. The Epic Bestiary, on the other hand, is already out. It may be a bestiary, but it's got a bunch of general epic rules too. It has two feats that practically replace epic spellcasting. But most importantly, it gives meaning to what a given level should look like. (Link: Eternity Publishing)

 

[Treebore]

I've already caught on that all immunities need to go. All of them. Capping damage resisting and spell damage resisting to 30 looks good too. Plus removing dice damage caps.

Need to figure out how to have an Epic Summoner summon epic monsers to fight the epic monsters.

Hopefully this company you gave me the link to is addressing all of this in a workable manner.

Thanks.

 

[Lucan_Desmond]

I agree that the ELH was handled very poorly. In fact, I would go as far as to say the WotC staight up dropped the ball on that one. It's a useless book. Mainly because it's just full of numbers. Nothing interesting. And above all, nothing that denotes that it's for a role-playing game.

As for helping you fix those problems, I have no clue. My players and I have always felt that when a character reaches level 20, it is time for them to retire. We feel this way because there really lisn't anything you can do at levels above 20 that you can't do at levels below 20. You can't kill an orc god, but you can kill an orc chief that claims to be a god. Same scenario, smaller numbers. Thats the only real difference between epic and non-epic. Smaller numbers.

Later,
Des

 

[paradox42]

Sure you can kill a god. You just have to have the stats for said god and more importantly its weaknesses. Two adventures in recent issues of Dungeon have, in fact, been about precisely that problem; the first was "The Quicksilver Hourglass" in #123, the second (which isn't even for Epic characters, though one can reasonably expect the characters going through it to get enough XP for Epic during the adventure) is of course "Dawn of a New Age" in #135, when the PCs go after Kyuss to stop the Age of Worms. Both deities are demigods during the adventure, but they're deities nevertheless. Taking on higher-power deities is just a question of how far up the scale you want to go.

But FWIW, the Immortal's Handbook tidbits revealed so far are very good, both those in the Bestiary and those in the numerous threads started by Upper_Krust while he's been working on it. The main set of rules for the IH line is the next book due for release, and you can get the PDF for pre-order here at ENWorld (as I and many others have already done). Mongoose is introducing a new line called Fiery Cobra which is going to publish print versions of all the IH books at some point in the future, though only the first volume of the Bestiary is currently scheduled (since it's the only book that currently exists outside of U_K's hard drive and head). It's due this fall.

immortalshandbook.com is U_K's site, and there are several articles about improving Epic games on the site. I'd advise the OP to check those articles out, and see if some of them help the game.

But whether or not those articles help, I'd like to ask, could you be more specific about what sucks in the ELH rules? What do you find wrong with them? Answering that question should give the readers of this forum a better idea of how to help, and what sorts of house rules you need.

I got that you dislike the Epic Spellcasting rules, and that's a very common complaint- several alternate systems have been developed. The one I use myself is the dicefreaks variant, wherein existing spells of levels 1-9 can be used as seeds to develop new Epic spells, and Epic spells come assigned with levels of their own (based on the final Spellcraft DC arrived at for casting). Unfortunately I lost the link to it, or I'd give you one- but a search on the dicefreaks Epic-Level forums should let you find it. (Edit: they refer to it as the "Feanmerc" system, so look for that.) You can download a PDF of the system, and a hundred or so spells statted up using the system (along with reworked spells from the ELH); I printed that PDF out and it's what I use in my sessions (hence the reason I lost the link).

 

[Kerrick]

I got that you dislike the Epic Spellcasting rules, and that's a very common complaint- several alternate systems have been developed.

Since we're pimping alt spell systems, I'll once again toss mine into the mix. t's a level-based system that takes the existing system and greatly expands on it. I'll post a few things tomorrow when I have some time.