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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cheiromancer" data-source="post: 3077253" data-attributes="member: 141">@Nifft: Your suggestion sounds like the syneresis feat- each epic spell slot sacrificed is a -10 mitigating factor.  Here, since an epic slot is two regular slots, it would be one slot is a -5 SP reduction.  @Kaodi: I don't know if the world really needs that many fortresses.  I wonder if aggregate spells could have a factor that only permits the spell to be cast on infrequent occasions. A Reified Vision that is "Built by Moonlight" could only be cast at night, under a full moon, while "Midsummer Night's Dream" has to be cast at the summer solstice, say.  Or you could have an insane wizard building dungeons on a daily basis; that would explain a lot, actually.Oh, and I haven't seen anything about Magnum Opus yet, either.*****I was thinking about the feats that a conventional caster would take at low epic levels vs. the feats that a jacobean spellcaster would take.  When a conventional caster takes Improved Metamagic (IM), it is like all his spell slots are moved one step to the right.  When he takes Improved Spell Capacity (ISC) it adds a slot to the right of his other slots; one slot plus any bonus spells from high ability scores.  I think that a conventional caster would get a little more utility from IM as opposed to ISC, at least at first.  If he is going to get a bonus spell he might take ISC, but otherwise his feat choices will be heavily weighted towards IM.  That and additional metamagic feats.  The IM feats will enable him to cast good epic spells, but he won't have many slots to cast them with.A caster who intends to take the jacobean route has to take ISC or he can't cast any epic spells at all.  He may also find that his ability score is not quite high enough to get a bonus 10th level spell, and so even if he takes ISC he won't be able to cast an epic spell.  So it makes more sense for him to take IM as an epic feat; jacobean magic can wait until he's 24th level or so.  Then he'll have another +1 to his prime ability, and probably enough wealth to get the tomes and headband needed for a 30 ability score.  The IM won't go to waste; it will increase the range of SP that can occupy that 10th level slot.What next?  Say he's a wizard.  If his Intelligence is high enough to provide a bonus 11th level spell, he can double his number of epic spells with another ISC.  If it's not, he can either buy Great Intelligence or else use IM to get access to epic spells whose SP is 2 higher.  IM would also help him when he's acting as a conventional caster.  The cost to research epic spells (xp, gp and time) might be significant, so he might want to take the conventional route.  It's doubtful a jacobean spellcaster would take many metamagic feats, but he might take specialized feats to help him with particular seeds.  He'll have IM and ISC that will help his conventional magic, but the mix will not be optimal for someone who wishes to specialize in conventional spells metamagicked to a great degree.  In fact, I think he will lean heavily toward ISC over IM, while a conventional spellcaster will do the opposite.It looks to me that there is room for diversity in feat choices, particularly in the ratio between IM and ISC.  Each benefits both styles of casters, but to different degrees.  It also looks to me like there will be a strong lure towards conventional magic (and lots of IM) early on.  Conventional mages can use lots of metamagicked spells, and so IM has high utility.  A jacobean caster with one epic spell can't do much.  When he has 10 epic spells it's a different story, but how does he survive until then?  This is Greybar's point, I believe.This reasoning seems to be consistent with the impression I'm getting that at higher levels jacobean magic is superior; it should require some early sacrifices in order to reap later rewards.  But it also suggests that the two styles of magic are balanced somewhere in between, and aren't unacceptably disparate near this "crossing point".I predict that a character who develops organically and doesn't think too far ahead (i.e. tries to optimize his character's development over the next few levels) will veer towards conventional magic early in his epic career, but later on will adjust course and incorporate more and more jacobean magic.  The result will be different from a character who was optimized for jacobean magic from the outset.  And this is not even considering feat choices that don't contribute to either conventional or jacobean spellcasting; feats devoted to crafting epic magic items, say.  Each such feat means one less ISC or IM.I would predict that characters will stay near the crossing point (where conventional and jacobean spellcasting are equal) for quite a while.  My intuition tells me that they will need more than a dozen feats between IM and ISC before the crossing point is even reached, and that early flirtations with conventional magic will delay considerably the time when jacobean magic is brokenly more powerful than conventional magic. At those levels there will be no pure jacobean or pure conventional casters, but characters who are mixtures of each.This will parallel the situation at sub-epic levels, where some characters might use lots of metamagic, and other characters very little.  Even the metamagic characters will still know 8th and 9th level spells, even if they usually use those slots for metamagic.  And characters who rarely use metamagic will probably still have a quickened, silent dimension door in case of emergencies.There are other routes of possible character development besides conventional (metamagic) and jacobean.  Several iterations of Automatic Quicken Spell (AQS) + Multispell could work very nicely as a character concept, especially if buttressed by a custom epic ring of wizardry that doubles multiple spell levels.  Might be a bit of a dead end, developmentally, though it could be supplemented by feats that let you quicken items- that and the feats to make those items.  A very dangerous character, albeit not one with staying power.  But one who could turn a battle around very quickly.Dunno.  It doesn't look too bad.  Of course, it has only been a day.  My whims rarely last very long; perhaps I will dislike the idea tomorrow. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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