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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Estlor" data-source="post: 2709480" data-attributes="member: 7261">Personally, if the system starts to break down around Epic levels, it comes from a two part problem - inherent assuptions and hasty afterthoughts.One of the driving forces behind 3.0 from the get go was the idea of balance.  Everything has to be balanced with everything else so nothing is more ideal than anything else.  Now don't get me wrong, I believe balance is a good thing.  It's what keeps the game from spiraling out of control through around the first 10-15 levels of play.  But it seems like the understood benchmark of class balance was the Wizard.  That's where problems creep into the system.From OD&D through 2nd Edition, there was an assumption about playing a wizard.  By choosing this class, you were deferring power until later levels.  For the first 10 levels, you're hiding behind the party fighter after you've blown your wad in the first round of the encounter.  And boy is that fighter carving some meat, especially when they get into multiple attacks and can pretty much hit every time.  But about the time that happens, you're stopping time and hurling meteors, generally blowing things to a crisp before the fighter can even close to engage them.Now, along comes 3rd Edition with the philosophy everything must be balanced.  So the wizard, who starts out weak and becomes godly needs to start as a match for the fighter.  But, likewise, the fighter needs to end a match for the wizard.  Obviously the fighter's godly power (and any power with mundane abilities - fighters, rangers, rogues, etc) can't be something inherent to the class.  Hence, the quick fix of slapping on magic items.  Of course, because they're trying to keep things balanced, they have to assign wealth levels to PCs and wealth values for magic items.  And while the assumption is wizards will carry around more single use items - scrolls and potions - with a few wants tucked in while fighters, rogues, and the like will have more wondrous items, it can result in a snowball effect that, by the time you hit 20th level, you simply HAVE to leave for the outer planes to keep challenging your PCs.Of course, I can't blame all of the problems on the obsessive need to balance the classes against each other.  If you look at the historical growth of the D&D ruleset, this is a legacy issue that they've been dealing with incrementally over time.In the beginning, there was Basic D&D and Expert D&D.  And that was it.  And you got maybe, what, ten levels before you retired and started over.  Then along came AD&D and the revised edition of OD&D that pushed the game to levels 20 and 36 respectively.  But you'll notice in both cases things seem to go wonky after the old OD&D level cap.  In AD&D, racial levels caps kick in and human classes spiral out of control to the point where the game just stops being fun.  In D&D, certain class aspects freeze and others continue to progress at different rates, causing a dramatic shift to the way the rules work.  An attempt was made to stretch out the old Expert levels over Expert, Companion, and Master, leaving you with some strange, powerful, and oddly broken characters by the time 36th level came calling.Another sign of this was D&D Immortal rules.  The original, gold box rules were utterly confusing, changed the game in a way to make it hardly resemble the original, and could hardly be used in play.  The Wrath of the Immortals revision made them highly playable, but did so by completely changing the ruleset to run more in line with D&D, piggybacking off of something that worked better in the first place.Honestly, I don't think there's a way to fix Epic play in 3.x D&D without making some kind of definite change to the exponential increase in power from level 1 through 20.  It begs a couple of questions, though:1. Should every class be balanced?  Should I expect my wizard to perform as well as my friend's fighter?  Or should it be understood that my wizard will underperform for a while and "make up" for it later?  On the other hand, is it acceptable for class balance to be achieved by separate XP tables?  Should we consider a return to "Name Level" concepts where hit point and attack progression slowed?2. Can Epic level gaming be achieved without a major adjustment to the system?  Is successful Epic play even necessary?An aside: I've noticed each time they revise D&D, they get closer to the goal.  Originally it broke down after 10th level.  Now you can get much closer to 15th before things go haywire.  Should we expect 4e to take us all the way to 20 without problems?(And I'm still fishing for Elements of Magic: Mythic Earth, but this post was more about throwing up some thoughts and questions I have about the system than winning a PDF.)</blockquote>

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