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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kelleris" data-source="post: 2708927" data-attributes="member: 19130">You know, this irks me on a conceptual level too.  I don't ever actually play that high, but it's fun to think about.  I might even try my hand at something if I were to drop off the face of the earth for a year or so.I think I would try to handle it with a system of enormously large penalties that increase the scale of the action in question, to kill two birds with one stone - to solve the problem you note and to make sure the trusty ol' d20 stays relevant at very high levels.  Plus, it's always annoyed me that epic rules never seem to respect the exponential nature of bonus increases - each point of bonus represents a lot more "oomph" than the previous point, as evidenced by the increasing difficulty of gaining levels and the bonus-squared price structure of magic items.  The epic rules should reflect that.So there would be a -30 penalty (or whatever) to have a sword-slash that affects everything in a 60-foot line, with an additional 5 feet per -1 penalty you take on your attack roll.  Assuming the character can also blow apart a 5-foot cube of earth or stone with that (easy at that level), you can have fighters doing things like making a new pass in the Pyrenees when they miss.Ditto for spells (-5 caster level to double a spell's radius/number of targets) and skills (something like Iron Heroes' stunts) and the like.  I'm not sure if you would need a feat or something similar to access a particular penalty-based variable-power ability or not, though...Actually, come to think of it, the best way to handle a system like this might be to gut the current epic rules (on the assumption that everyone has all their basic skills at level 20) and make a small set of epic classes whose primary benefit is some kind of vastly expanded action-points system with which epic characters offset the enormous penalties to various actions they rehularly accept.  Just three generic classes (offensive, skill, and magic-based), and piles of action points, increasingly large bonuses from those points, and increased rates of point regeneration.  No new capabilities, just dramatic, hero-point increases in scale.The best part would be how freeform it could be with the right guidelines.  DM - "Okay, you want to stun the World Flayer by dropkicking it through that mountain peak so the wizard can act out of turn to telekinese it into the sun?"  Player - "Ayup."  DM - "Okay, that's an attack roll at -73 for you, and make sure you do enough damage to clear the 1500 feet to the peak.  The wizard takes a -10 on his caster level for acting out of turn and a further -30 for the thousand-fold range increase in the telekinesis spell.  Get rolling!"That would be cool.  Crazy-hard would be hard to balance right, though!  Ah well, I can dream.EDIT - You, to make it really cinematic, don't require them to take penalties before doing whatever-it-is - see what the character's margin of success is and then let them take penalties to increase scale and make the result suitably impressive.  That would make sure each point on the d20 mattered again...  Hard to do with spells, though, since caster level isn't a "roll a d20 and add" sort of thing, and so a margin of success would be hard to come by.  Maybe use saving throw DCs?Hey, thanks!   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />   I was wondering if my little spiel(s) in the press release thread had piqued your interest.</blockquote>

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