Is the ELH a complete train wreck?

[Plane Sailing]

I'm afraid that I voted on it as train wreck. Completely useless for me.

That doesn't mean that it is no good per se, some people obviously are making great use of it. I just hate the way that they have done it and it doesn't work for my "vision" of epic play, which would be extraordinarily unlikely to go above 30th level at the tops (guessing)

For the record, if my PC's ever reach those heady heights I'll have some fairly simple rules in place to handle it. Among those are

* no base class can exceed 20 levels
* no prestige class can exceed 10 levels (or whatever its normal is)
* BAB and saves just add together like normal. If you decide to be a ftr8/barb8/rgr8 you just have to accept that your will save is hosed and take some magical precautions!
* spell slots above 9 as per Forgotten Realms, to be filled with metamagiced versions of high level existing spells.
* a small range of feats which I consider to be EPIC, mostly of my own devising.

I'm sure that these simple rules will work well within the confines of my game, and without introducing a lot of additional concepts/rules that I don't want. Naturally it wouldn't scale up to level 100 characters (but I don't think d20 / DND is the system for handling that anyway)

Cheers

 

[Plane Sailing]

What I *would* have liked would have been a book on epic-scale adventures (rather than, as Patrick puts it, adventures which are just the same as low level adventures with the enemy CR adjusted upwards!)

It would have been a great opportunity for them to introduce brand new rules covering, I dunno, ascension to godhood, taking control of a kingdom, ruling a demiplane, forging an artifact - that kind of thing. Rather than extrapolations of existing rules for feats, skills, classes (which were relatively simple to concieve) brand new concepts and rules to support them would have been great.

Unfortunately much more difficult to do too!

Cheers

 

[mhacdebhandia]

This is why you are unable to provide insight where the issue of the quality of the ruleset is concerned.

You can take it to mean anything you want. People who understand English, however, will take it to mean "you are unable to provide insight into the issue of the quality of the ruleset".

Free hint: your ability to babysit a ruleset does not imply the ruleset is good.

Michael Scott Brown does this better than you.

 

[jasamcarl]

My intuition says that they are probably atleast somewhat workable for the first 5 levels, but there is little chance I would ever take them beyond that. And Epic magic does indeed suck.

I do however take the word of those who say they've maintained an ok balance in early epic levels (relative to level 15+ in general), simply because, assuming the pcs developed organically, the dm would have the experience neccessary to make the gradual adaptations neccessary to keep his/her game under control. UK is right in that is generally speaking little difference between 21 and 20.

Oh, and as to the poll, I would be somewhere between 'tweaking' and 'trainwreck'. Numion had the right idea in emphasizing a fixed level cap and class abilities. At 20+ some limits are absolutly neccessary to keep any sort of balance at all.

 

[Pagan priest]

I've read the epic book and played a little bit, but not a spell caster. I saw no problem with the RAW for some parts, other parts needed "adjustment". I feel that an epic charcter should be able to gain some form of class abilities, perhaps creating groups of ability trees... every 5 levels pick a new tree to learn, then gain abilities over the next 5 levels.

Perhaps a spell caster gains new spell slots, both 10+ slots and additional 0-9 slots. Possibly a combat oriented class could gain a tree that increases BAB and attacks per round... but has a prereq of 40 levels in combat classes.

One of the problems seems to be that some of the feats in the ELH were epic at the time they were written, but have been devalued with the changes of 3.5. That is certainly an area that needs to be addressed.

 

[Sir Elton]

If you haven't seen those posts, I encourage you to actually read the thread then. There are several. And then I'd encourage you to not make bald-faced wonky assumptions, like "only people who've never actually played this will dislike it." Or to assume you know what people are "really thinking, but not saying" as in, "if you don't like the ELH it must be because you were prejudiced to not like it already."

I have the book, but it's mostly uselessto me because I have yet to use it. Even though I'm writing an adventure that is challenging to a bunch of 12 levs.

 

[Shemeska]

Well I was wishy-washy on the book when I first bought it (Thank you buy.com, even if it took over two months to ship), and my opinion has decreased a bit since my campaign has reached into [booming voice]EPIC[/booming voice] levels since around the turn of the year. Having seen the rules in the book used in play I've noticed several things:

1) people who multiclass in core classes or more than 1 PrC get screwed
2) As others have noted, the feats vary wildly in terms of 'bang for the buck', some are no better than non epic feats, while others are monstrously powerful by themselves, or in combination w/ others.

The book can be a power gamers wet dream, though it needn't be. My group hasn't gone down that dark and doomed path, but I've personally found that you're less prone to such abuses IMHO when you've worked a character up past level 21 from an earlier level, rather than being handed 50 levels and told to have fun (Of which such things, and even worse, draws my ire and unabashed amusement and scorn on the WotC boards).

The saving grace for the book was the monsters, some of which are just cool. The book, in that section alone, avoids the "Curse of Andy Collins" as my players have called it, which in their words makes their reaction for a WotC book go from "Huzzah!" to "Kazaa!". Though I don't really share their opinion, he, like any game designer, has had some good work and some klunkers alike, though I don't personally care for some of his statements on planar things (see the Planar Handbook Chat, just not the edited WotC version, go for the original transcript). I found him to be nice in person at GenCon.

Edit: Union blows goats. Or perhaps it blows half mercane fiendish dire goats of legend w/ EPIC levels of cleric. It was created in a vacuum for all I can see. It was a pale attempt to recreate a quasi Sigil without going into Sigil and its associated flavor. [joking]Whoever was responsible for this atrocity deserves to fight me in a dark alley and have it videotaped for them to watch on their birthday for the rest of their life for the savage mocking and beating they richly deserve.[/joking]

 

[Dragonblade]

The Epic Level Handbook is a great book and most of the rules work fine if you keep scale in mind.

In the default PHB and DMG core assumptions, NPCs and monster scale from levels 1 to 20. By the time PCs are pushing the teens, they are already forces of nature.

This works fine if no PC can ever exceed 20th level. But if does not work if you want to go beyond that and use the ELH.

You have to rescale everything. The average NPC should be around level 10. And a powerful PC is one above level 50. Add class levels to monsters so they can keep up and the ELH works just fine.

I've never understood why so many DM's have vitriol for anything over 10th level. Truly epic games played in epic worlds are loads of fun.

 

[Treebore]

We didn't find PrC's to shaft the character in Epic level. In fact I preferred to take PrC's in the epic range. I even took a PrC prior to Epic and completed it. I didn't feel cheated. I guess I didn't catch the drawbacks like your group did.

 

[Toras]

The complaint is that if you take 1 or more prestige class, that trying to fit the epic progression required for the epic feats or classes are difficult if not impossible to achieve.