Epic Spells....huhwhat????

[WizarDru]

The spells that Sep uses in his story hour always seem pretty sool and interesting to me. Then again, it's a story hour and sep writes well. Also check out his rogues gallery thread as it details some of his epic spells.

They ARE cool...they are also only used by NPCs and monsters who don't need to pay x.p. Note that Sonellion has a unlimited pool of x.p. to cast spells like 'Be Not!'. Mostin, or any other mage, has no incentive to develop such a spell, and has just as little incentive to actually cast it.

 

[TuDogz]

I don't have the ELH but I am using the BoVD. I will be using silly PC dupes to protect a caster for the day required to cast Apocalypse from Above. How does a spell that crazy crunch out in the ELH system?

I was considering getting ELH as the players are nearing those levels. Sounds like the opinion is that while the spell system sucks the rest of the book has value.

 

[kreynolds]

Instead, I would treat the spells as if I was running a 1e/2e game and the spellcaster wanted to create a new, unknown so far, spell.

If I didn't think 1e/2e sucked so bad, and oh boy do I ever, that probably wouldn't be a bad idea.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I ran a lot of math a while back on this system because I saw that it was broken. IMHO, the major problem with the system is one piece of flawed logic they used to create it. In the Behind the Curtain section of Epic Spells, they say that they based the seeds on the minimum level spell that fit the "typical" spell for that seed. Then, they added 10, because...well, 10 is what the D20 system is based on. This is a major flaw, as it is basically saying "Our system was designed so that if you were 5th level and wanted to cast an EPIC lightning bolt exactly the same as the real one, you'd fail 50% of the time."

Since, a lot of the spells have a LOT more power at 9th level than the minimum, once you use the Epic Spell system to increase Lightning Bolt to the power of most 9th level spells, it is too expensive.

IMO, the best way to fix this is rework the seeds, assuming the HIGHEST level spell that fits the seed. Set the minimum damage of energy to 24d6 of a meteor swarm, then don't add the +10 for no good reason. I don't have the book in front of me now, so I don't know what that would make the DC (You'd have to use the numbers for a 9th level spell instead of a 3rd), however, using this method, I found I was able to create MUCH more interesting spells that actually did something other than kill you when you cast them.

I was also directly comparing my numbers to being able to take higher level slots of using empower or energy admixture to make higher damage spells instead of Epic Spells. Reducing the DC the way I suggest is the only way to approximately even them out.

Majoru Oakheart

 

[James McMurray]

They actually based it on the number of ranks a sorcerer that could cast the minimum spell level would have, making it even higher.

 

[Cheiromancer]

I ran a lot of math a while back on this system because I saw that it was broken. IMHO, the major problem with the system is one piece of flawed logic they used to create it. In the Behind the Curtain section of Epic Spells, they say that they based the seeds on the minimum level spell that fit the "typical" spell for that seed. Then, they added 10, because...well, 10 is what the D20 system is based on. This is a major flaw, as it is basically saying "Our system was designed so that if you were 5th level and wanted to cast an EPIC lightning bolt exactly the same as the real one, you'd fail 50% of the time."

Since, a lot of the spells have a LOT more power at 9th level than the minimum, once you use the Epic Spell system to increase Lightning Bolt to the power of most 9th level spells, it is too expensive.

IMO, the best way to fix this is rework the seeds, assuming the HIGHEST level spell that fits the seed. Set the minimum damage of energy to 24d6 of a meteor swarm, then don't add the +10 for no good reason. I don't have the book in front of me now, so I don't know what that would make the DC (You'd have to use the numbers for a 9th level spell instead of a 3rd), however, using this method, I found I was able to create MUCH more interesting spells that actually did something other than kill you when you cast them.

I was also directly comparing my numbers to being able to take higher level slots of using empower or energy admixture to make higher damage spells instead of Epic Spells. Reducing the DC the way I suggest is the only way to approximately even them out.

Majoru Oakheart

I think you are right on. Have you elaborated this new system of seeds? Could you post them?