Pathfinder 1E Ideas for Epic Pathfinder

[charcoalninja]

What I've done is take the wonderful example from E6 and applied that to create my epic tier.

This Epic 20 allows characters to gain a feat anytime they would normally have gained a level, or after a certain amount of exp. This doesn't mess around with the game's math and lets all of the epic monsters currently out there remain epic. I personally feel that a Balor should never be a joke, but a mighty opponent at every level of play.

The one thing I did include was some Archtype feats that allowed players to gain the class features of another class. The feats would improve BAB to a max of 20, grant spellcasting, sneak attack, what have you. It solves the problem of multiclassing and power scaling since you just base it off the character's level.

Gaining the spellcasting power of a 1st level wizard, but at a caster level of 20 is still a significant power boost in versitility. But you can decide how long you want people to continue. The longer you want the game to go in terms of getting feats the more involved you make it. For example I went with the long route, so each feat grants 2 levels of spellcasting, requiring 10 feats (and therefore levelups) in order to gain 20 levels of spellcasting.
Another feat would be converting HD, such as turning 5 HD into another.

Some other feats I thought of were assuming different types and monster abilities so that players could ascend and become unique angels/devils/demonlords what have you.

The concept works so well for making E6 engaging long term that I felt it was simply an elegant solution to the whole epic tier thing. All those feats and additional abilities would allow you to take on some pretty hefty challenges eventually.

 

[SillyDodger]

Epic and Diety thoughts

After reading through the Advanced Race guide I've found the fine people at Paizo have given us another tool we can use to include epic and diety level play in our games.

There, races are given a new measure for how powerful they are compared to each other (Race Points, RP), and some decent rules for adjusting difficulty of encounters based on the average power level of a party's races.

I couldn't help but think that epic level characters would have the ability to slowly alter their race increasing it's power along with the power of their classes. I also thought that a large number of the special abilities that Dieties are usually described as having would actually be racial abilities rather than class abilities.

It's another measure to keep track of but I don't imagine it would be hard to include boosts to racial abilities as part of the reward at the end of some epic quests, perhaps eventually leading to low power god characters.

I've not implemented any of these ideas yet but plan to.

I like the idea of multiclassing into new epic versions of the existing classes, as well as perhaps having diety classes which require specific racial abilities in order to take levels in them. Chances are that will be the route I take even though it will take some work to build the classes.

One of the major barriers to good epic level and diety level play which hasn't been discussed much is the ability of the GM to easily challenge players or keep them interested.

At the same time as developing rules for epic characters we should be considering rules for epic level creatures, challenges, and stories. Without a set of guidelines for GMs which is balanced with the character rules every game will fall short.

With that in mind reaching into more exotic and fantastic settings similar to the Ad&D2 Plane Scape setting may be the right thing to do. Leave normal play in the Prime Material plane, and if players and GMs want epic play, move into the other planes of existence.

For when introducing epic play are we not reaching from low or mid fantasy into a higher fantasy.