Thanks for all the replies so far.
For the love of all things holy, fix save bonus vs. spell DCs so that having a poor fort isn't instant death, and a poor will isn't taking you out of every other fight.
The difference between a good save and a poor save (by progression) is such that by high level, good-save characters cannot fail, poor cannot succeed.
Done that. I boosted the low save to 4/10 instead of 1/3, so the difference at L20 is only 4 instead of 6. Once the EAS kicks in, the saves stay fairly close together.
The worst problem in 3e epic play is 'cascading bonuses' to keep track of.
Yeah... I'm working on that too - I (with a suggestion from someone else) came up with an idea for bonuses - intrinsic (stuff that always applies, like armor, shield, and size), internal (stuff that applies from boosted abilities, like competence and enhancement), and external (anything that's applied from an outside source, like deflection or luck. How it works is that all intrinsic bonuses stack (assuming they're different types), and you get ONE internal and ONE external - the best/worst of each.
I also cut down the number of bonuses a bit, and I changed the animal buffs to end-of-chain boosts - instead of buffing the stat itself, they act checks and rolls related to that stat. Bull's strength, e.g., grants a +2 bonus to anything modified by Strength, but not the actual Strength score itself.
The sheer amount of abilities and information necessary to run a fight with high level monsters: All pertinent SLA information, spell durations, Picking spells (and having all the pertinent info on hand), auras, feats, etc.
That's a tough one. I agree that some monsters have WAY too many SLAs and spells and such (angels!), but I'm not sure how to cut them down without underpowering them.
The amount of abilities that high level players have, and how long it takes them to decipher what they can do, what they are going to do, and how to resolve that.
Part of that is the players, too - the more familiar they are with their characters, the easier things would go.
It was, I think, EN Publishing's Four-Color to Fantasy that introduced the concept of "hyper-rolls."
I've seen that; I saw it posted here as "The Rule of 20" a few years back. I thought about using it awhile ago, then dropped the idea for some reason. I'll have to look at it again.
I also came up with an idea called
"The Rule of 3". Basically, the idea is to fix high skill scores by dividing them by 3 - you keep the existing score, but just divide it by 3, so the DM can scale the DCs down to reasonable levels; making something that would challenge both a cleric with a +15 Spot and a rogue with +45 Spot is impossible, but +5 and +15 is easily doable. Unfortunately, it met with a lot of negative criticism (mostly "Why bother when I can just scale the DCs to fit the skill scores?") so I decided to leave it as an optional rule.
Yeah, the core math of the system breaks down at high levels.
1. Saves become binary, as others have pointed out.
I'm got a solution for save-or-dies already (well, kind of - instead of "BAM, you're dead!" it's "BAM, you're dying and could die!" You're still out of the battle, but you're not completely screwed.
2. Damage becomes overwhelming, and a round of full attacks kills anything. (Hence, combats shrink to a handful of rounds).
Combats don't last very long to start with, IME. The number of hit points monsters have generally scales upward to keep pace with damage output.
3. Hits become pretty much automatic, as AC tops out way before to-hit. You can try to optimize something with high enough AC to not get hit, but to do that you generally have to sacrifice being able to do anything useful.
I've got a couple solutions to that one. One is to boost armor bonuses through mastercrafting; another is to give monsters EAB/EAS (which they really should have had to start with). So, PCs' ACs can get higher, and monsters won't have overwhelming ABs.
The way high level combat can turn into a battle of trump cards.
Immunities. Yeah. I've always felt immunities should be special, not something that everyone and their dog Ralph has, so I've severely limited them. This should make more spells viable for a longer period of time, instead of forcing everyone to rely on stuff that either has no save, or specifically works against the target's low save.
I would suggest that to accurately represent current rules for epic play, but simultaneously streamline the combat and make it less painful, you do the following:
1) Roll for Initiative
2) In initiative order, each combatant rolls a d20. If the d20 comes up with a 1, that character dies from [some big effect the other team has]
If it comes up with a 20, their team gets a point.
3) When one side runs out of characters, the other side wins.
4) Each player drinks a number of beers equal to their team's point value at the end of combat
(more advanced players may choose to drink their beers as each point is scored...in this context 'advanced' could be in terms of understanding of the rules, or in terms of their body weight or level of liver damage)
That's classic.
