Epic Level Spells and Deities

[codewarriorpro]

It seems contradictory to me that mortal level spellcasters, who have reached a high enough level, would have more skill points in knowledge (arcane) and spellcraft than a god of magic. This would mean that a mortal would be able to cast more epic level spells and craft more powerful epic level spells than a god. I'm sure that there will be a nice sidebar in the upcoming epic level handbook (ELH) that will deal with this (I hope), but I'd like to her your thoughts on the matter. How can a god of magic who is able to cast a 20+ level spells (using metamagic) not be able to cast as many or more epic level spells than a mortal? How could a god of magic not know all epic level spells? It stands to reason that a deity of magic should be able to exceed any mortal spellcaster in every way conceivable.

One way to overcome this is to give the god of magic more levels as wizards or some other epic level prestige class and to give gods epic level feats. But, gods have the advantage of having salient abilities that are equal to 3-4 epic level feats. We all know that the designers of the ELH and Deities and Demigods worked with each other. So they must think that there is a balance between them.

 

[Crothian]

Until the bnooks come out, I'm unsure on how to do this but I am thinking of giving dities a bonus of one pure divine rank. I imagine I'll be doing a lot of editing to D&Dg when ELH comes out.

 

[James McMurray]

Well, considering that Boccob has a +127 Kowledge (Arcana) and a +127 Spellcraft, his +20 stat mod (from a 50 int) would lead me to believe that he has 107 ranks in the skills. Looks like he gets tons o' epic spell goodness per day. And when you consider that he always recieves a 20 on checks, he'll be casting some pretty mean spells. Give him an item that grants +30 to those skills (easily creatable by him) and you won't be disappointed by his skills.

Of course, a human can still get higher skill totals, but he's gonn be around 100th+ level yb then. If a 100th level guy shouldn't be able to contend with the gods in your capmaign, then by all means don't use stats for them.