Epic Spells: Caster Level instead of skills?

[ruleslawyer]

The key phrase here is "of lesser level". In order to avoid the problem mentioned above, that requires that the gods put most of their levels into cleric or druid. Most of the gods I've seen don't do that. Many of them, including some of the fairly powerful Faerunian deities such as Mask, Shar, and Talos have no divine spellcasting levels at all. None of the existing gods have more than 20 levels in anything. None of the existing gods even have the Epic Spellcasting feat.

Well, neither DDG nor F&P require use of the ELH, so the designers couldn't really use class levels above 20th, epic feats, epic spells, EAB, epic save bonuses, or other epic goodies. I know, it's silly, but it's a function of the basic design philosophy. In any case, I never could figure out why we need stats for gods anyway, but if you were to need 'em, I doubt you'd want them straight "out of the box" anyway.

As for gods without cleric levels: Deities don't exactly need them. Being able to cast any spell as an extraordinary ability with a huge save DC (Alter Reality, anyone?) and being able to use any domain spell as a spell-like ability with a high save DC and caster level pretty much make cleric levels irrelevant.

A brief digression and rant follows, for which I beg the indulgence of my audience (all 3 of them, at this point, I am sure): Does the handling of epic spells in the Forgotten Realms make any sense whatsoever to anyone else at all? First of all, magic of greater than 9th level is supposedly no longer possible ever since the fall of Netheril. Not even Elminster, who was one of those present when the mythal (a 10th-level spell effect) of Myth Drannor was created, has the ability to cast epic spells, even as he is presented in the Epic Level Handbook--despite the fact that he is one of the Chosen of the goddess of magic, who can and does make exceptions to the "no 10th level magic" rule for those she favors (one of which was the aforementioned mythal creation). No one in Faerun presented in the ELH has Epic Spellcasting... except for Iyraclea, a disciple of the lesser deity Auril, a goddess so insignificant she doesn't even get a stat write-up in Faiths and Pantheons. What were they thinking?

Nope; it makes no sense. The mechanic I've used to reconcile the text in the FRCS with the ELH is to say that Mystra's Refusal is the in-game explanation for why the DM gets to veto any unacceptable epic spell. Moreover, I state IMFRC that rather than bar "spells higher than 9th level" completely, Mystra instead made epic spellcasting really, really difficult compared to its Arcane Age equivalent. In other words, while Tolodine's killing wind or Procliv's move mountain might have had an epic Spellcraft DC of 50 or 60, and required correspondingly low XP and gp costs, back in the time of Netheril, such spells now have Spellcraft DCs north of 100.