Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Tigger11 10-03-07, 12:21 AM	Are the DCs for the Epic Spells in Dragons of Faerun way off, or have I been calculating how big a casters Mythal is completely wrong? -Tig
The Simbul 10-05-07, 12:21 AM	As a general rule, almost every Forgotten Realms accessory to contain an Epic Spell has managed to present one or more of them with errors in their formula, spell header, or some other technical aspect. Some of the mistakes are minor, others are profound, and many become compounded errors when you consider that misplacing a number in this part of the spell can make other aspects of it incorrect as well. Among the most notorious offenders are Ioulaum's Longevity, Proctiv's Move Mountain, and Aumvor's Soulshatter to name a few. In addition, some of the books that contained epic spells did not--at least in my opinion--handle them very well. Champions of Ruin gave us a number of epic spells that no one can actually cast. By that I mean that a 100+ spellcraft DC epic spell is intended to be learned and cast by a character with 100+ character levels. They basically seem to have taken the fact that since 100+ Spellcraft DC epic spells exist in the Epic Level Handbook (as examples to show how the epic game can scale infinitely), that somehow that is the norm. An epic spell with a spellcraft DC of 300 would have a research cost of 2,700,000gp and 108,000 XP. No "normal" epic character would have wealth resources or the expendable XP to learn or even fathom such a spell...unless you plan on killing a demigod every other tenday. While I enjoy having concrete rules for mythals, Lost Empires of Faerūn gave us a somewhat too complex system for creating them (i.e. why can we not just have flat spellcraft DC increases for arointed, prevalent, and vanguard properties of various spell level equivalents, instead of all this excessive multiplication and division). In addition, it broke all previous precedent in the Epic Spell system by linking the effects of the mythal seed to the actual caster level of the character (i.e. the number of powers it can contain is directly tied to your CL). Prior to this, ALL of the actual effects of an epic spell were entirely based on your spellcraft modifier and the number of mitigating factors you could rely upon when finally casting the spell. Your CL only factored into an epic spell for purposes of dispelling or resisting it. Linking the potency of the mythal seed to caster level, aside from breaking precedent, also meant that a mythal raised by an Elven High Mage will actually be weaker than one created by an equal level human wizard, since the Elven High Mage prestige class has only 1/2 caster level progression To be fair, the Epic Spell system is a bit complex, and a number of Epic Spells that appeared in the Epic Level Handbook also had many errors as well. However these errors were fixed the 3.5 SRD equivalent of the Epic Level rules, and may also have been addressed in errata files as well. By contrast, the Faerūnian epic spells have not been addressed fairly well. I have often wished I could sit down with many of the realms authors and have a long discussion on the issue of epic spells and properly implementing the formula rules for them. However, I do not imagine we will see any published (outside of Dragon, Dungeon, and Gleemax at least) anytime soon, and I find authors in general do not always enjoy having mistakes, errors, omissions, and typos being bluntly pointed out to them.