Out of curiosity, where can one find this Immortals' Handbook?Got mine at umm... RPG Drive Thru, or Drive Thru RPG, or something like that. One of those PDF stores.
There's also the main Immortals Handbook site, but the author completely dropped 3e support for 4e (and took years to do things that were scheduled for weeks, anyway), so the 3rd edition stuff's not in any way, shape, or form complete aside from a couple of released PDFs.
He did post a few freebies scattered around his site. I found the "Absolutes" entries to be interesting.
Got it, thanks Shinmizu! Interesting reading material.
I would love to see Paizo take a pinch of Fantasy Flight Games' Ascension expansion for Dark Heresy. What I mean by that is the transfer and literal ascension of Dark Heresy characters to a new level of power. The most brilliant thing is that the "epic" abilities and feats simply act as a bevy of other lower level feats. Stuff like "Gun Fighter Saint" wraps up any of the juicy rule abilities available in Dark Heresy for extra shots in a round, called shots, etc. It's an amazing epic feat ony suited for epic characters...BRILLIANT. You can just erase all the other crap on a character sheet because it has the rules for all of it under one simple heading. It cleans up stat blocks as well as the ultimate time consumption of "which of my 100 feats do I use this round..whirlwind, cleave, power attack?" You could apply the same thing to epic spellcasters. Just give magical characters a generic all-spell that can duplicate any effect of up to X level that they can cast Y times per day. Bam. For fighters you have an epic level attack bonus (this would be more complicated but no less necessary) that allows them to simplify how awesome they are at smackin' the living hell out of things.
By splitting off epic gaming in a 100% compatible sideshow you are freed of the "rocket strapped to a Pinto on I-90" effect of simply tacking on 10-16 or 20 extra levels (skill points alone are /wrists). Sure that Pinto goes super fast but you have to ignore an awful lot of physics, common sense, and uncomfortable eye rolling to avoid it crashing into the mountain side or an IHOP. Much easier to just creat a new sleak and sexy jet-car with the same paint and driver as the pinto and take it to the Salt Flats...
Well you have remember that these new-fangled...top....rocks..er, whatever are still kinda new to us 3rd (and 2nd, and 1st) Edition vets. I personally have two epic PCs from the 'old days', one who is ECL 37. You see he was 20th level when 3e came out, and the way all the numbers and powers worked...well we wanted to keep playing our 'mains'.
I can understand wanting to play with no cap. My disconnect comes from folks who have agreed that a cap is a good thing but who don't seem to see 20th level as a suitable level cap. My figuring is that if you're going to have a level cap, then why not go with the implicit cap in the game? I only see the need for epic levels if you're either going to do away with a level cap entirely or if you're going to make levels beyond 20 vastly different from normal levels (i.e., something similar to the Immortals set).
Well you have remember that these new-fangled...top....rocks..er, whatever are still kinda new to us 3rd (and 2nd, and 1st) Edition vets. I personally have two epic PCs from the 'old days', one who is ECL 37. You see he was 20th level when 3e came out, and the way all the numbers and powers worked...well we wanted to keep playing our 'mains'.I can understand wanting to play with no cap. My disconnect comes from folks who have agreed that a cap is a good thing but who don't seem to see 20th level as a suitable level cap. My figuring is that if you're going to have a level cap, then why not go with the implicit cap in the game? I only see the need for epic levels if you're either going to do away with a level cap entirely or if you're going to make levels beyond 20 vastly different from normal levels (i.e., something similar to the Immortals set).
I think a lot of it is perception of what "epic" is, based on a tradition of high level NPCs and villains, and the desire to want "more life" than what is perceived as available (kinda like Roy Batty). I actually sort of agree with you. But I "came up" on the Forgotten Realms, and like I said, we had made it to 20th when 3rd released. But....we tired of the epic, and in general have kind of tired of high level. Or rather, we want to appreciate high level for longer. I think the pace of advancement and reward for it's own sake is much of the problem. We are using Pathfinder RPG now and one new thing is the built-in medium and slow advancement rates (fast is standard 3.5). We are trying the slow rate. Now if I can just dial down the magic items, I think we can have an "epic" 20 level game.....but we'll only stop if we don't want to keep going!
After all you didn't see Elminster popping a new level every year or so.
Well, if he'd move from the 3.5 rules to Pathfinder, he's stop burning so much XP on Epic Snuggies of Cold Immunity that he'd probably level every few weeks!
(Of course, he'd take a big hit to income...)
I have finally removed my name from the title of this thread, because it wasn't really something I could answer anyway, and it keeps making me go "Huh? What?"
Ah, in that case, do you have any idea on a new unified theory of gravity?
Ah, in that case, do you have any idea on a new unified theory of gravity?
It's all about "down."
Down? What's epic about 'down'?
How about sideways or up? Now that's an epic use of gravity :)
Saves? well, I like the idea of taking a epic feat once in a while that could up your Fortitude (in case of a epic wizard) in order to deal with the disparity between different saves. The ELH just changes the scale (which I hate, suddenly everyones scales the same on saves.)
Funny, that's one of the things I like - have you read the design notes in the ELH on why they did that? I totally agree with them.
Otherwise, how do you design an encounter when there could be differences of 20 or 50 between different character's saves? You basically end up with everything being "roll a 20 to make it" for half the party and "roll a 1 to miss" for the other half of the party.
It seems that the definition of "Epic" vary wildly between people.
For me Level 20 is pretty much "Epic". Wish, Time Stop, Teleport, Gate and their equivalents are pretty much "as good as it can get". A little bit behind of this powerwise come the Fighters/Rogues/Bards... who need/will have other things to compensate (leadership...).
But epic, for me, isn't "you can now maximise your timestop and your polar ray now does more damage and has a burst". For this reason I paged through the old ELH and dismissed it as uninteresting and needlessy cumbersome.
So what do I want from an Epic Level Pathfinder Handbook?
Well, I found that WotC actuallyhad a good idea by introducing epic destinies (the execution of that idea was meh, but the idea itself was great).
I thinkt hat in order to do an really "Epic" Handbook you need to tie in a strong concept that carry the new and epic powers in order to make them interesting (more so than what wish can already do) and in the same time balances them.
Andy Collins and Bruce R Cordell did a nice job with he D&D Epic Level Handbook, which wasn't an easy task.
That said, the 3er Ed. Epic Rules were inconsistent for multiclassed characters, and many multiclass combinations were basically penalized in epic levels.
So I'm happy that Paizo is planing to make it from scratch.
I liked the expansion of epic skill uses, levitating with insane jump checks was great. Expanding your usual class abilities with new epic feats was also a good idea. I also liked the overall simplicity of the aditional epic rules. However, I didn't like the epic items prices and the epic wealth progression.
To be honest... I'd MUCH rather see more Core non-Epic stuff than Epic rules. One thing I love about Golarion is how there are very few super-high level NPCs. I generally prefer that the epic stuff is left to deities and planar rulers. 20th level seems like enough of a mortal cap to me.
I wouldn't blast their work persay, I generally consider the ELH an attempt at an inherently impossible task given the nature of caster/noncaster imbalance when D20 goes to higher levels. The rocket tag of saving throws vs. save or die pretty much reduced epic battles to who got the first spell off, or who failed the first save.Andy Collins and Bruce R Cordell did a nice job with he D&D Epic Level Handbook, which wasn't an easy task.
The "first fail loses" thing isn't something I see a lot of. In fact, epic battles for us don't really take too much longer than non-epic battles unless something weird happens (for example, a party thin on casters vs. a ruin swarm - THAT was ugly). However, we ran a battle in a forest with:
A necromental primal earth elemental with the horseman of death template.
Four advanced necromental earth monoliths.
Four advanced earth monoliths.
Three advanced balors.
vs.
A dozen forest giants.
A party including a wizard, fighter, druid, and monk, all over level 50 and most heavily multiclassed.
It was a few weeks ago, so I don't recall exactly, but I believe the combat took us between 2 and 3 hours. Regardless of edition of D&D/Pathfinder or level (except very low), a combat involving 12 vs. 16 is going to run a while, so it wasn't too bad.
Frankly, the biggest issue I have with epic combat is mobility. We end up artificially staying in an area the size of a combat mat or two.
However, we don't play epic for the combat, really. It's the non-combat stuff that we all remember more than the combats.
BTW, I didn't mean to be (too) snarky there. It's just that the mathematical underpinings of d20 are clearly designed to function from level 1-20. It makes a lot more sense to fluff the top end of the scale as the realm of the absolute most powerful entities (whatever they may be), and then scale everything else to that, than it does to try to extend the math to fit the fluff.