Spellcraft DC 419, wtf?

[notjer]

I have never played a epic character and I won't in a do so in the nearst future, however yesterday I was looking at the epic spells and there is a thing that Ican't understand or imaging.
Vengeful Gaze Of God require a spellcraft dc 419 to cast it, and some other needs 170, 120 etc., really hight checks. I can only think of a lot of +X spellcraft magic items.
Are there any other ways to overcome the extreme hight spellcraft check dc except from magic items?

 

[Asha'man]

Well, Vengeful Gaze of God was really only included as an example (and a rather crappy one, I might add) of how Epic levels are completely uncapped and you can go as high as you wish. As for most epic spells, it's not really all that hard to make your Spellcraft roll skyrocket. Consider a 30th level sun elf wizard:
Base Int 16+2 racial+5 inherent bonus+7 for level increases+8 for Epic Headband of Intellect= 38. That's a +14 spellcraft modifier
33 ranks
+4 synergy modifier for more than 25 ranks in Knowledge: Arcana
+10 for Epic Skill focus Spellcraft
+3 for Skill Focus Spellcraft
=64. Now consider that this character could easily craft a Wondrous Item to give +30 to spellcraft and buy/find a Rod of the Epic Spellcaster for another +10
=104. With that Spellcraft modifier you could make an epic spell that lasts for days and gives something like +48 to Intelligence, which boosts your check by a further +20 (Doesn't stack with headband of intellect) and has the fringe benefit of getting your spell DCs through the roof, good against the impregnable saves of epic monsters.
Final result 124, taking 10 you can get a check result of 134, and this is all off the top of my head. With greater effort you can get even better results fairly easy. (And that's assuming you can't use Epic Spells to boost skill checks. If you could...)

 

[Goolpsy]

Epic handbook is 3.0... back ten is was cheaper to get +X skill items .. bonus^2 * 20 instead of *100 iirc..
an item with +30 to a skill was the limit before getting epic.. so +60 skill wouldn't be unrealistic at all etc. (would cost 720000 from 3.0 guidelines, i think) so if a lvl 30 Char has a few millines... 0,72 mil for an item to boost spellcasting is nothing at all...

 

[Jack Simth]

Eh, ignore the examples in the book. They're not very optimally designed.

Now, if you use the rules as they're written....

When you mitigate an Epic spell down to DC 0, it costs no time, money, or XP to research; that is, technically, you can pretty much cast it on the fly.

Consider the generalist Wizard-21 with Epic Spellcasting. Let's suppose he's got Charisma-8 (base, never actually improved it), and picks up a Cloak of Charisma +6 for this particular task (it's needful) for a final Charisma score of 16. Base Intelligence 18 (or 16, and +2 racial), +5 for level, +5 from a Tome, +6 from a Headband; intelligence of 34. Let's say he also took Spell Focus (Conjouration).

With Planar Binding, Magic Circle Against Good, Dimensional Anchor, Quickened Dispel Magic, and Moment of Prescience (each prepared four times), and a month of down-time, he can Call a Couatl with a 95% chance of success for it falling into his trap (he's got a save DC of 29 on Planar Binding, and a couatl only has a +10 Will save - needs a 20), and a 95% chance of success of convincing it to do his bidding (Couatl has a Charisma modifier of +3; as it's an opposed Charisma check, Wizard gets a +21 from Moment of Prescience, and a +2 from Charisma-14; rolling a 2, he gets a 25; most the Couatl can get is a 23; the Wizard only faces the nat-1 clause for failure, which happens 5% of the time; due to the Calling Diagram and Dimensional Anchor, the Couatl has no other way to escape). He's got a 90.25% chance of succeeding on both rolls. Just for a safety margin, we'll call that 80%. Preparing and casting four such sets each day (which still leaves him with all his 9th Level, Epic level, and bonus spell slots for defense) in 20 days, he's expected to have 64 Couatl's under his control (and they'll start leaving on day 21 - but that's okay, he can keep this up indefinately, and maintain a supply of 64 Couatls). Each Couatl casts spells as a 9th level Sorcerer - which means they have 4th level spell slots to contribute to a ritual epic spell. With 64 of them, that's 448 points of mitigation.

Permanently Summoning a Solar by way of the Epic Summon seed is DC 280. More than enough. Each Solar casts as a Cleric-20, which means 9th level spells (and mitigation factor 17 in an Epic ritual). Wizard has two Epic spell slots, and does this twice per day.

After four days (8 Solars), with the Couatl's he's still Calling, he can get the ritual spell mitigation up to 584; and the Summon seed has a note that you can double the DC to get more (and with D&D doubling, that's triple for three, quadruple for four, and so on). For DC 560, he can Permanenly Summon two at a time. In four more days (16 more Solars, total 24), can can Permanently Summon three at a time. In three more days (18 more Solars, total 42) he can Permanently Summon four at a time (and can make a mitigation DC of 1,162). This is exponential growth. He can mitigate some truly absurd spellcraft DC's to 0 this way; after a year of this, DC 10^100th is no sweat at all. The only question? Where to put all those Solars.... I hear the Plane of Air is infinite....

 

[Asha'man]

This level of shameless abuse would, however, be curtailed in any actual game (as opposed to theoretical discussion) of D&D by the simple fact that Solars (and to a lesser degree, Couatls) exist in finite numbers with positions and duties in celestial hierarchies. Under no circumstances would the Heavenly Hosts allow you to co-opt its foremost champions for your own benefit.

 

[ShaggySpellsword]

But boy would that make a great campaign villain: powerful enough to summon the forces of the heavens to do his own bidding--and the gods call upon the PCs to put an end to him before he can truly do some damage with all of the celestials he has in forced servitude.

 

[Gumby]

The epic magic rules from the Epic Handbook were stupid. There's really no point in seriously trying to use them in anyone's campaign.

 

[Jack Simth]

This level of shameless abuse would, however, be curtailed in any actual game (as opposed to theoretical discussion) of D&D by the simple fact that Solars (and to a lesser degree, Couatls) exist in finite numbers with positions and duties in celestial hierarchies. Under no circumstances would the Heavenly Hosts allow you to co-opt its foremost champions for your own benefit.

Actually, Solars show up on the Celestial Encounter Table in the Manual of the Planes (3.0). The Celestial Encounter Table is used for the Twin Planes of Bytopia, which is doubly infinite; with a nonzero Solar density on an infinite plane, there actually ARE an infinite number of Solars.

But yes, the cheese runs freely when you do that type of thing, and the DM should lay the smack down on a player who tries this (or similar - Planetars are actually the most efficient, at CR 16 casting as a Cleric-17; Permanent Summon DC 210; you can grab them at day 10, warming up with Couatl's; and they get two 9th level spell slots for you to abuse; Leadership is the more commonly cited version of this - low-level NPC classes? Adepts get 1st level spell slots at level 1, and are an NPC class; with a good Leadership score, and the feat, you can quite easily be Permanently Summoning outsiders on day 1).

There's a couple of basic house-rules that prevent this type of abuse (any one does the job):
1) You cannot mitigate an Epic spell down below some fraction of the spellcraft DC before mitigation (e.g., 1/4th; that Permanently Summoned Planetar can't be done without a spellcraft DC of at least 52... with the attending 468,000 gp, 18,720 xp, and 10 days to research).
2) Some part of research costs is calculated before mitigation factors (XP is my favorite here; sure, you're "donated" spell slots brought the spellcraft check from 210 to 0... but you still need to spend 75,600 xp to research it. Have fun doing so before level 40).
3) Summoning variant: It's the same one each time. When you Permanently Summon one Planetar, and try to summon another the next day, the spell returns "not available". If you research another spell to get two, but still have the first one out, you only get one (as the other is currently in use).
4) No. Just.... no. (technically not a house-rule; per RAW, all Epic spells MUST be approved by the DM).
5) Stuff I didn't list (e.g., Divine intervention).

 

[Cheiromancer]

The epic magic rules from the Epic Handbook were stupid. There's really no point in seriously trying to use them in anyone's campaign.

QFT