I was just going through some of my campaign plans, and I was remembering one of my old little excersizes I went through to try and teach myself how the epic magic system works, which also convinced me that the system is... uh... lacking. I know you're going to have some revised epic rules in the IH, and I was wondering if your rules would cover the following situation better:
Narnia-- The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Constructing the spell "Always Winter, Never Christmas". It needs to cover the size of a Kingdom (A Horse and His Boy confirmed that only Narnia was put under this curse, the rest of the planet was uneffected) it needs to be permanent, and it needs to keep Saint Nic away, so it needs to encompass a warding of some sort.
I worked it out with the current epic system, and you need an ABSURD amount of spell craft to cast it without calling in other spellcasters (which obviously weren't available in Narnia). Even giving it the MAXIMUM casting time, MAXIMUM xp expenditure, you need, if I recall correctly, hundreds of thousands of ranks in spellcraft. The problem is both the x5 multiplier on making it permanent, and all those repeated multipliers for expanding the area.
This strikes me as unfortunate... because in my mind, the very ESSENSE of epic magic is that it enthralls entire kingdoms. D&D seems to have this mentality that you're going up against single foes that are no larger than the Tarresque, which is big, yes, but nothing like on the scale I'm interested in. Because once you're at epic levels, as far as I see it, there's very few "single enemy challenges" that are worth the effort, or are even INTERESTING. That's for low level stuff. On the epic scale, your actions should have VAST ramifications. I'm thinking here of Sepulcrave's stuff, of course, but also standard literary things. By one man's actions, a world is altered.
And that's what I -really- want to see with epic magic. Less "power converged at a single point" and more "power dispersed over a wide area".
Will the IH make me even happier than I know it already will?
