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Message: <blockquote data-quote="merelycompetent" data-source="post: 2881345" data-attributes="member: 33830">The first thing I did in my homebrew was establish what critters are at the top of the food chain. I chose Dragons. It was a toss-up with beholders, but Dragons just seemed cooler, and more fun for the players. Then I worked my way down from there, modifying as made sense to me, and with rules changes that came along with the various editions for consistency's sake. Since Dragons can have a CR > 20, that meant that the epic rules were taken into account for my homebrew. This is assuming, of course, that you use CR as the power rating. YMMV.With the top predator on the material plane set at CR 20-30, that made it relatively easy to estimate the power levels of unique outsiders (demon princes and devil lords), and even divine entities. Since the ruler of an entire plane shouldn't get slaughtered out of hand by a mere Dragon, that meant their CRs had to range from about 30 on up. As for Avatars, their CRs had to start around 20 so they could compete. Add a Divine Rank of 0, plus associated powers and possibly god-granted artifacts, and your average Avatar could challenge the greatest of wyrms and probably win, but wouldn't just wander off to the Abyss or Nine Hells to whack a prince or lord - instant logical consistency. It also meant that if a party of 20th level PCs killed a prince or lord - especially on his home plane! - then that was a feat worthy of legend!As for Divine entities, I set their power levels as dependent entirely on the number of worshippers they had. Players in one campaign changed the entire focus of the campaign as they conducted a guerilla war against one god (Bael, CE), and created an opportunity for another god (Set, LE) to take his portfolio and become the supreme Divine power of the pantheon. Can we say, "Ooops!" ? Killing a god is entirely possible - destroy his/her/its worshippers and watch the Divine ranks drop away. Kill the souls that were transformed into servants (solars, planetars, Minions, demons, devils, etc.) and watch the Divine ranks dwindle. Then watch the other Divine powers maneuver for the kill... creating the prime opportunity for a mortal to strike. You *have* to take out a Divine entitity's power base (remove the faith, reduce the souls going to that Divine power), to reduce it to a point where it *can* be fought on a physical/magical level. Yes, at that point you might be taking on a CR 30, 40, even 50 entity, that will reincarnate within a week at a lower power level, but you killed a *god*!!!!(FWIW, the players shifted focus again, once they realized that Set was making a power-play, and that they really didn't want the LE god of Night and Darkness in charge while the campaign world was being invaded by mind flayers. Yes, I had LG characters fighting to save a CE god... Muahahahahahahahaha!!!)Bottom Line: I set the power limits for heroics on the material plane, and on a cosmology-scale while I was building the campaign world. So players had the pleasure of arranging, and seeing, a (believed to be dead) god's Avatar getting drop-kicked through a gate off the campaign world by the eldest silver Dragon in existence (at great cost)... and the sense of accomplishment when they used an artifact to defeat Grazz't's summoned Avatar (equivalent - I used slightly modified rules for planar entities vs. Divine Avatars) and forced it to retreat back to the Abyss or be destroyed (and Grazz't having to wait a full decade before he could form another one, while the other princes exploited the power vacuum...). Then they looked at the EHB rules and started drooling...Note to The Serge and other contributors (?) on DiceFreaks: Great bit of work there with The Gates of Hell. That codified very closely with my own notes about the whole planar entity/divine entity (Cosmic/Divine) relationship. I only discovered DiceFreaks in the last couple of weeks, and have spent that time reviewing and digesting the information. I am *very* impressed. I plan to flagrantly yoink the good parts, with all due credit to the sources cited for the players. Thank you very much for providing me with so many great alternative ideas!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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