What is wrong with Epic Material?

[Tharen the Damned]

Hmm. the whole problem with the Epic Level Handbook is the artificial powercap on level 20 in the PHB. This had purely historical reasons.
Monte Cook elaborated on this in his design diaries a while ago. For his Arcana Evolved he decided to put the power cap at level 25. So AE Characters can advance 5 levels more than PHB Characters. There are even 10th level Spells (9th level cap is also historical).
Never played or Dmed such high level group but all Classes seem pretty balanced. They gain cool abilities without being ueber powerful.

So you can create smooth mechanics for very high level Characters.

Now what is Epic? For me Epic level gaming means that the Players are legendary Heroes like Hercules in the real world. They are starting to transcend what is thought to be possible for mortals. Maybe they even start to transcend their mortality?
These Heroes should not have to resort to magic items. Wouldn't it be far cooler if an epic Fighter could take a normal sword and Fight a Balor and ignore his DR? His strentgh and willpower are enough to wound the Demon? In our legends, Hercules is not renowned for the deeds with his super powerful magic club of slaying. Gilgamesh and Chuchulain (sp?) did not need a +10 Fullplate of more than improved fortification. Siegfried had a powerful sword, but he created it by his own Hand with no magic user helping.
And magic users? Is a country destroying Fireball so much fun...ok, is it so much fun after your first five? Wouldn't it be far more interesting to be able to change spells and bind them to your will? I want to create a Tower of Force. So I take the Spell Wall of Force and stretch it and change it and voila!
An epic level cleric is like a living saint or more, an avatar of his god. People from all over the world will come to see him, the living impersonation of his god. I think it would be cool if he could give spells to clerics who pray to him. If he would take on a portfolio.

This is IMHO what the ELH should have addressed.

 

[S'mon]

3e was designed with escalating complexity, designed to top out at 20th level. The Epic rules just took that escalation and continued it on up to infinity.

I think the best approach would have been one not based on escalation at all, but an alternative would have been to seriously reel back the complexity at 21st to the level of low-level 3e, then let it grow again from there.

 

[Jedi_Solo]

Our group has hit [Booming Voice] EPIC!!! [/Booming Voice] for the first time just a few months ago.

No one has taken Epic Spellcasting because we just don't want to deal with the system. Why spend massive amount so gp and xp for spells that can mostly be duplicated with high level regular spells and meta-magic feats. And then the stuff that they already have caculated out require spellcraft checks above 40 or 50?

Magic Item prices are just crazy. I understand not wanting a 15th level character to have +8 or +10 stat boosting gear but if a group is using the gp guidelines it'll take a character to be 26th or above before they can even start to afford EPIC!!! gear.

Death by Massive Damage. It has gotten to the point where if someone fails a save on a damage spell the player immediately rolls the die hopes to not roll a 1. If someone gets hit by the charging barbarian they roll the die and hope to not a roll a 1. This roll happens too often at this level.

The fights are just taking too long at this level. We used to be able to get through three fights or so in a session. Now it's a single fight a session - assuming we even get to finish. There are too many out-right immunities so many tactics just don't work. Except that players have so many options they need to go over the character sheet and go 'should I use this? What about this? What if I need this for later?' And then it usually just ends up attacking with a weapon or spellcasting for damage anyway.

Should something 'go wrong' in the fight (someone rolls the aformentioned 1, players just aren't rolling well for the day) the fight can drag on... and on... and on. Rounds take so much time (because so many dice are rolled) that people get bored between actions. Non-fighter types can't hit anything; spells face insane SR levels; monsters hit you if they roll a 2.

We've hit EPIC!!! but it doesn't feel any different (except for the time element of teh fights). Maybe we aren't just EPIC!!! enough. Right now it's just more: more hit points, more AC and more damage. It's not different and I, for one, am not a big fan of it.

 

[hong]

To be fair, the ELH does address the issue of autofailing saves on a 1, as I recall. There's an optional rule to treat a 1 as a -10 penalty and a 20 as a +10 bonus.

 

[Razz]

Take 20 levels in wizard, then a 1000 in fighter, yet you're never going to have more than 2 attacks per round thanks to your BAB?

I've house ruled that one. I allow iterative attacks to continue rising even after 21st-level until it caps at 4 attacks per round.

 

[Razz]

These Heroes should not have to resort to magic items. Wouldn't it be far cooler if an epic Fighter could take a normal sword and Fight a Balor and ignore his DR? His strentgh and willpower are enough to wound the Demon?

They can. There's an epic feat that allows this. ELH provided it.

And magic users? Is a country destroying Fireball so much fun...ok, is it so much fun after your first five? Wouldn't it be far more interesting to be able to change spells and bind them to your will? I want to create a Tower of Force. So I take the Spell Wall of Force and stretch it and change it and voila!

They can, epic spells provide this. ELH provided it.

 

[Imruphel]

There was also the included "Epic setting", a planar city called "Union".
Which was... less than inspiring.

I would refer to you my earlier post about the design philosophy being along the lines of pretending to be 12 again but being able to be published.

Compare the turgid dreck of Union with the ideas that can be found in the Companion Set for D&D about 20 years ago. Union is about "more boss monsters" and "really tough guards" (actually, I should deliberately misspell all of that to give the proper effect... or perhaps use 733t speak [is that correct?]); the Companion Set was about thinking how your character could affect a city, a barony, a nation or even a continent.

 

[pawsplay]

And the Master set described some guidelines for becoming an Immortal.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I think hong pretty much nailed it: there's really nothing EPIC you can't do by 20th level (There's nothing Epic you can't do by 5th level, either, but let's leave Pun-Pun out of this ).

A 20th level character can already do at least as much as any mythic hero. Fighters can slaughter whole armies single-handedly, clerics can bring people back from the dead with nary a scratch and without a physical body, wizards can change the nature of reality by pure personal power (albeit dangerously). Give some 20th level characters a place to stand (and a sufficiently heavy object to throw) and they'll not only move the world, they'll destroy it outright!

I think there are other games that scale better (e.g. HERO, which has more rigorous mathematical underpinnings and scales damage the same for 'casters' and 'non-casters,' or Super Console, where ability is expressed relative to other creatures rather than as an absolute), or are expressly designed for this kind of play (e.g. Exalted, which was designed from the ground up to handle demigod-level characters), or simply play faster and can be tweaked to handle Epic play (e.g. FATE or Wushu).

If you're explicitly out for the things Razz cited in the first post - and many of those are, indeed, extremely fun to play - any of the systems I cited would likely do them better than D&D's epic rules (or D&D's high level rules, for that matter).

 

[GQuail]

I want to like Epic play, I really do: my current campaign is at level 12 and I've mooted with the players rising to as high as we go. But I think there are issues with it that a 3.5 revised book could really do with coming out to sort out...

1. Epic spells are fundamentally flawed.
3. Epic BAB and save progression is a terrible kludge; not only is it inconsistent with monsters, it produces some weird effects described above. Error checking epic characters would be a nightmare, since it matters drastically when they took what.
4. "Oh, yes, and magic items can actually be +6 or higher and advance indefinitely and aren't artifacts after all" is stupid from a campaign design standpoint.

These three are probably the obvious ones: Epic Spells are a good concept with a clunky execution that leaves an awful lot of room for rules-lawyers to go to town; epic BAB/Saves adds a whole new "when did you take this level?" question to D&D that makes character generation more complex; realigning the magical item powers after crossing level 20 and adding in a x10 cost modifier is a somewhat rough way of adding in new gear.

Then again, I do really like a lot of the monsters therein, and find the general advice on running high level adventures to be good; and some of the epic spells aren't all that bad. The book is certainly not irredeemable, and as I said, it's something I'd like to toy with at a later date: but I think it might help that I've used bits and pieces from it since the start of the campaign rather than trying to shoehorn it in as level 19 approaches. (E.G. races like the LeShay have been namechecked, and a few NPCs operate as Epic Level to demonstrate what a high level adventurer can do)

The previously mentioned Upper_Krust's Immortal's Handbook might be worth a look for those who want an alternate epic idea, although with just one bestiary out right now and a player's guide lingering on not-quite-yet-dom, the update speed may prove too glacial for those who seek to pick up and play tomorrow. It certainly sets out to fix all the problems of the Epic Level Handbook, and reading the Bestiary reignited my interest in epic level play.