Tag: Epic Levels

The turn of the millennium had comparatively little impact on the world; quasi-religious prophecies ranging from the Rapture to Y2k had failed to materialize, leaving the world untouched by dramatic upheaval. The same could not be said for Dungeons & Dragons, however.

The year 2000 marked the full results of TSR’s acquisition by Wizards of the Coast several years previous, as the Third Edition of Dungeons & Dragons debuted, along with the Open Game License. While the full scope of these events is beyond the aim of these articles, they are noteworthy for their impact on epic-level gaming.

Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition

The third edition of the D&D game had dropped the “Advanced” descriptor from its title. As the Basic game had been quietly retired during the mid-late 90’s, the thinking was that there was no need to confuse (if not intimidate) potential new customers with the implication that there was a “less complicated” version of D&D that was still in production.

In terms of its game mechanics, Third Edition was a huge break from its ancestors. Many basic assumptions were altered radically, or even discarded in their entirety. Demihuman level limits, for example, were now completely removed from the game. All classes advanced according to a single, unified experience table, rather than each class having their own. All characters could now multiclass (as opposed that being reserved for demihumans, whereas humans would dual-class), taking levels in any class they wished as they gained experience (though a control mechanism was instituted in the form of experience point penalties if your various classes had wildly differing levels; a corresponding loophole was introduced in the form of each race having a “favored class” that didn’t count against them in this regard).

One aspect of the previous edition remained the same in Third Edition, however: character advancement was capped at 20th level. As with the introduction of Second Edition, this cap was introduced implicitly, rather than explicitly – the simple lack of rules for advancing beyond 20th level was all that kept characters from going any higher, rather than a strict prohibition.

Unlike Second Edition, however, this would be a situation that would not be allowed to remain undisturbed for very long. With the transition of the D&D game came the requisite transition of many of its campaign worlds, some of which included popular characters with levels well in excess of 20. So it was that when the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting was released in 2001, a year into Third Edition, it had to address this particular query.

Of course, that didn’t mean that it had to address it directly. In answer of levels beyond 20, the book presented only a single sidebar, largely limited to explaining the stat blocks for the “epic level” NPCs in its pages – this was the first time that the term “epic” would be used to describe level 21+ characters. It wouldn’t be the last, however, as the sidebar promised that the forthcoming Epic Level Handbook would cover this area in far greater detail.

Said handbook would debut almost exactly a year later (and had a book on deities in Third Edition precede it by only two or three months), marking the first time that a Dungeons & Dragons book had been devoted exclusively to characters that transcended the number of levels present in the game’s main rulebooks.

The credo surrounding the release of Third Edition had been “options, not restrictions,” and this was faithfully reflected in the Epic Level Handbook. Rather than the hard caps on levels found in Basic or Second Edition, Third Edition followed in the footsteps of First, placing no upper limit on how high PCs could ascend. While one could charitably say that the book’s intent, as part of the “toolkit” mantra of Third Edition, was that each Dungeon Master would use the book to determine their own hard cap on levels appropriate to their campaign, such a message was never articulated in the Epic Level Handbook itself.

No credible discussion of epic levels in Third Edition can be had without mentioning just how badly the book was received among the gamer community. Popular opinion of the book was poor, mostly due to the implementation of its game mechanics. While the specific list of complaints are many, most can be distilled down to a single charge: that the book exacerbated the deficient areas of the Third Edition rules.

Some elucidation is worthwhile here. The Third Edition game mechanics – popularly known as the d20 System – focused around a task resolution system of rolling a twenty-sided die (aka a d20) and adding relevant modifiers, with the task succeeding if the resulting score equaled or exceeded a specific target number.

The problem came from the open nature of the game’s “options, not restrictions” stance. Simply put, so many options were put into print (both from Wizards of the Coast for D&D itself, and from compatible products by third-party publishers via the Open Game License) that, presuming that a large number were allowed by the Dungeon Master, the modifiers that were added to the d20 roll would soon eclipse the 1-20 range of the die roll itself.

Because a character’s level was the natural manner of restricting the total number of options they could pick, characters that went up in level naturally gained more and more options, and so more and more ways to affect a given d20 roll (particularly among spellcasters). As such, epic-level characters were perceived as being “broken” simply for how widely they could vary in their efficacy, meaning that two characters of equal level could face a task that would be virtually impossible to accomplish for one, and impossible to fail for another. This made writing epic-level challenges more and more difficult, to say the least, as the characters’ levels climbed.

While there were complementary issues, the above goes to the heart of why epic levels in Third Edition were so poorly received. Whereas First Edition had been content to let characters gain levels infinitely, it had restricted the mechanical gains of new levels to nothing but hit points. Third Edition, by contrast, had attached much more power to each level gained, making it somewhat inevitable that – absent any kind of ceiling – that power would rapidly balloon out of control.

Divine ascension was still available for those who wanted it, of course. As with First Edition, this was a purely orthogonal choice, and was generally assumed to mean the retirement of the character. Perhaps ironically, this didn’t necessarily have to result in the character becoming an NPC; as mentioned above, a book on gods for Third Edition had come out a few months ahead of the Epic Level Handbook, this being Deities & Demigods.

Named after the First Edition book of the same name, the Third Edition Deities and Demigods was more similar to the Immortals rules of Basic D&D in that it not only had stats for a number of divine entities, but provided comprehensive rules for how to build gods, rules which (thanks to Third Edition’s using the same stats for monsters and NPCs as for PCs) could be applied to PCs with no conversions necessary. By contrast, OD&D and First Edition had portrayed gods purely as unique monsters, with no particular discussion of what (if any) powers ascended PCs would gain (Second Edition, by contrast, gave no rules for deities at all beyond some general limits to their powers; the only stats listed were for godly avatars).

Even more in vein with Basic was that, in the appendix on divine ascension, Deities and Demigods had a section on running adventures with the PCs as gods. Presumably presented in accordance with the “options, not restrictions” ethos of Third Edition, this was a complete nonstarter with Third Edition gamers.

This wasn’t to say that epic-level, and even divine, game-play were completely unrequited among the Third Edition community. Thanks to the Open Game License, instances of adventures and sourcebooks that spoke to these concepts crept up every so often (though in the case of the latter, they were just as likely to try reinventing them as they were to expand on them). None of these attempted to fix the underlying issue of power-inflation, however. How could they, after all, when the problem was expressly tied into the nature of the d20 System itself?

A fix of that magnitude would require a new edition entirely, something we’ll cover in the next article.

The evolution of D&D with regards to mandated end-points of character progression – and ways to bypass those end-points – was not a precise one. While OD&D had largely been silent on the matter, and BD&D had gradually pulled back the curtain on higher and higher levels (save for demihumans, who were capped at comparatively low levels) all the way to playing as a deity (and subsequently evolving beyond even that), the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game would not present quite as coherent a picture.

Advanced D&D First Edition

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is presumably “Advanced” in relation to the Basic edition of the game. The truth of that idea, however, is somewhat murky. AD&D officially debuted in 1977, with the release of the Monster Manual. It wouldn’t be until 1978 that the Player’s Handbook was released, followed by the Dungeon Master’s Guide in 1979.

By contrast, the very first “basic” set (by Dr. J. Eric Holmes, as mentioned in the previous article) was itself only released in 1977, the same year as the Monster Manual – by contrast, the subsequent iteration of the Basic rules (which would be the first half of B/X), wouldn’t appear until 1981, by which point AD&D was well-established whereas Basic wouldn’t achieve its “final form” until the Mentzer boxed sets, which began in 1983.

This is all worth mentioning because it reminds us that AD&D wasn’t originally meant to be the next logical step up from “Basic” D&D (though it would eventually be branded that way), so much as it was taking the same basic ideas from their shared predecessor (OD&D) and running in a different direction with them. The foundation is the same, but the implementation is where things differed.

This “similar, but different” approach can be seen in the AD&D game’s approach towards upper levels and divine ascension. Whereas BD&D’s allowed only humans to pick their class, with demihumans having their class define their race (e.g. you could start the game as a 1st-level human cleric, whereas if you wanted to play an elf then you were a 1st-level member of the elf “class”), AD&D allowed for race/class combinations for all characters.

These combinations, however, were highly limited. Even leaving aside that races and classes had minimum (and maximum, for races) ability score requirements, AD&D implemented the idea of humanocentricism by including hard limits on how many levels demihumans could attain in various classes… presuming that they could take those classes at all, since each type of demihuman could only take certain classes to begin with. Humans, by contrast, could take levels in any class they wished, with no upper maximum.

Of course, even these hard-and-fast rules had their exceptions. Each demihuman race in the Player’s Handbook had one class in which they could advance without limit, just like humans (this was the thief class for all demihumans save half-orcs; for them, unlimited potential was found in the assassin class… which was rather ironic, as the next sentence will show). Likewise, no race, not even humans, could advance endlessly in classes for which only a finite number of levels existed, such as with druids or assassins – once you hit the maximum level in either of those classes, there was no further advancement to be had (unless you were already multiclassing if demihuman, or could dual-class if human).

This was the first time that the D&D game, in any incarnation, featured level advancement that was potentially unlimited. Strictly speaking, if you were of the right race/class combination, the sky was the limit for how high you could climb. Surprisingly, however, that degree of advancement made very little difference in a character’s overall power.

The reason for this is that, at a certain point, gaining new levels offered virtually nothing. Every class stopped gaining new Hit Dice around 10th level or so, after which point you gained only a small, set number of hit points, usually ranging from 1 to 3 (to which you didn’t get to add your Constitution bonus). Likewise, your saving throws and to-hit bonus tended to top out at around level 20.

In other words, your character didn’t gain very much at all by leveling past 20th level or so. You got a new hit point or three, but that was about it. So your 75th-level fighter and your 20th-level fighter weren’t going to be that much different, save that the 75th-level fighter was a better meat-shield (one notable exception to this, however, was that spells with effects based on caster level had no cap – that meant that your 75th-level wizard could unleash 38 magical blasts with a single casting of magic missile!).

Now, your character might have gained a supreme amount of magical items by that point, and possibly political powers as well if they’d chosen to dabble in rulership (the game tended to suggest that around “name level,” which was usually around 9th, that your character would begin to have a political impact on the world around them), but this wasn’t mandated by their level, being the result of the character’s in-game exploits.

One alternative goal, for those who wanted to try for it, was divine ascension. Introduced with the Deities & Demigods book in 1980 (and easily predating BD&D’s Immortals boxed set, which didn’t debut until 1986), divine ascension was highly different from how AD&D’s Basic counterpart would define it. True, both included a set of difficult conditions that had to be fulfilled before your character would be accepted into the ranks of a pantheon, but the similarities ended there.

For one thing, AD&D divine ascension was not a natural end-point for character progression. Indeed, an AD&D character that didn’t run aground of racial or class-based level limits could theoretically level-up forever (presuming that they found some way of dealing with problems of age), all the while remaining mortal.

A much more stark change between the two games was that, for AD&D characters that became gods, their apotheosis marked the end of their participation in the game, at least insofar as being a player-character went. Deities & Demigods explicitly stated that the newly-ascended deity was given non-player-character status, making them under the control of the DM.

Further, there was no option for their “removal” from the game world. Whereas BD&D’s Immortals could, through great difficulty, ascend beyond the game world and its rules, AD&D’s gods had no such lofty goal to shoot for. Once you were a god, you were pretty much an established god of the game world from that point on (unless the whims of the DM had some cosmic fate befall your divine NPC).

This formula, where your class and race combination determined if you would have unlimited potential or hit a hard cap, with divine ascendancy as an orthogonal option for character retirement, would be comparatively unchanged in AD&D Second Edition… but what changes it did have would be notable indeed.

Advanced D&D Second Edition

The Second Edition of AD&D introduced several twists on many of the ideas regarding upper-level limits for characters that its predecessor had introduced. For example, while demihuman level limits remained in the game, new rules about allowing demihumans to exceed these limits appeared (though these exceptions were dependent on having exceptional ability scores, and only allowed those limits to be pushed by a few levels). More notably was the fact that no class allowed for unlimited demihuman advancement; that was now a privilege reserved for humans alone.

Of course, that privilege was to be taken in light of a far more dramatic change: all classes were now twenty levels long. While not presented as a hard cap (the Second Edition DMG even said that advancing beyond 20th level was “theoretically possible”), it was fairly well understood to be just that; the lack of information about how many experience points were needed, and how many hit points were gained, meant that adventurers were effectively capped at 20th level.

Interestingly, this cap was first extended not by a generic rulebook, but by the Dragon Kings supplement for the Dark Sun setting. Dark Sun had, from the first, been presented as a very tough campaign world (PCs were told to make their starting characters level 3, rather than level 1), and this book was the natural conclusion to that. It showed how all types of classes (albeit with racial limitations, though ones tailored for that campaign world) extended to a new limit: 30th level.

Despite the fact that this was a campaign-specific supplement (and as such had campaign-specific aspects to these higher levels), it had impact for all Second Edition D&D characters; indeed, since the campaign settings of Second Edition AD&D were all set in the same multiverse, there was ample understanding that these rules could be used for all 21+ level characters.

This approach was eventually formalized in the generic supplement Dungeon Master Option: High-Level Campaigns. Here the 21st-through-30th-level rules were given in a generic presentation (differing from those presented in Dragon Kings), allowing them to be easily used for characters in all types of campaigns. It was also here that the hard cap on gaining levels was formalized, as the book out-and-out stated that no character could ascend beyond 30th level.

Of course, divine ascension was still possible. Indeed, divine ascension rules were presented fairly early on in Second Edition’s (in the Legends & Lore supplement, which debuted roughly a year into Second Edition), and were reiterated again in the High-Level Campaigns supplement as well. There is little to merit special attention here, however, as Second Edition’s divine ascension rules were near-totally the same as their First Edition counterpart, differing only in minor details of how to perform the act of apotheosis itself.

Indeed, the most noteworthy aspect of Second Edition’s divine ascension rules is in how they’re perceived compared to previous editions of the game. Like Basic, ascending to become a god was something that naturally seemed to follow once you ran out of available levels to gain – when there was no further advancement to be had, godhood is the only way left to go. Unlike Basic, but in the vein of First Edition, however, this is a closing chapter to a character’s career; something done as a grand send-off for your character, rather than entering a new phase of play. In this regard, Second Edition can be said to have split the difference between its predecessors.

Next time, we’ll look at how Third and Fourth Edition handled the questions of epic levels and divinity.

While there’s no official release date yet, it goes without saying that we’re getting fairly close to the formal release of D&D Next (the most likely date being August of 2014, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons).

D&D Next, also known as D&D Fifth Edition, has a lot to live up to. It purports to use a series of add-ons, which it calls “modules” (not to be confused with the adventures for older editions) to allow groups to set the style of game they like, from rules-light exploration to intricately combat-focused. Moreover, these modules will purportedly cover specialized areas of game-play, such as underwater or planar adventures.

The idea here is that every niche will be spoken to with a module of its own, and that these will be – if not complementary – then at least clearly delineated so that it’s easy to mix-and-match. That’s an admirable goal, though I wonder how well it can be accomplished, but what I’m curious about is one such module in particular: epic-level play.

Epic-level play is (much like rules for gods) something of a divisive issue among D&D gamers. There’s a general consensus that the higher the game’s level goes, the more the rules “break down.” Attempts to define what that means tend to be poor, but usually vacillate between problems of administration when there’s so much information to keep track of, and bonuses that are far and away larger than the range of the die roll that they’re attached to. As such, those who want to “go epic” with their game – which is usually understood as leveling characters beyond level 20 (or whatever the basic rules’ level cap is understood to be) – tend to be something of a minority.

One of the problems with discussing epic levels, to my mind, is that there’s no real consensus on what such levels actually constitute (beyond the aforementioned definition of “going beyond what the rulebooks list”). In fact, if you look back at the history of D&D in its various editions, each version of the game has tackled this particular question in very different ways, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Given that D&D Next is still a little ways off, and that its module regarding epic-level game-play is likely a bit further than that, it’s worthwhile to look back at the history of the game and seeing how each version of it dealt with the concept of going beyond the upper limits.

Original D&D

Original D&D – the “woodgrain/white boxed set” and its five supplements, also called “OD&D” or “0E” – is something I’m hesitant to speak about. Of all the various versions and iterations of the game, it’s the only one I’ve never directly seen in one form or another (though I hope to change that in the future). As such, take the following with a grain of salt, as it’s based on second-hand knowledge.

Original D&D had only a few character classes (three in its original release – the fighting-man, wizard, and cleric – with the thief added in the first supplement), and the listed set of levels for these classes was quite low: in the single digits. There was no real reference to going beyond these levels, either in terms of a prohibition against doing so, or as a how-to for those who wanted to. This aspect of the game, like quite a bit of game-play using these rules, was open to the interpretation of the Dungeon Master (and his players).

It does seem safe to say, however, that at this point there wasn’t really a codified sense of “where the game wanted you to stop” and how to move past that barrier. Rather, the game rules seemed to paint a picture of taking you so far, and then leaving you to your own devices. What we’d later come to think of as “epic levels” simply wasn’t something that was fully conceived of yet.

Basic D&D

Before talking about Basic D&D, we need to clarify exactly what this term encompasses. Moreso than any other edition of the game, Basic (also called “BD&D” and interestingly not having an edition number) is made up of several different versions of the game, all superseding and reinventing each other as they went.

The first Basic Set, written by Dr. J. Eric Holmes (aka the Holmes Basic Set) was meant to be a repackaging of OD&D, but included enough changes to the rules that it’s generally considered to be its own animal. Like its predecessor, it didn’t really speak to the idea of going beyond the listed levels, more as something not considered than deliberately ignored.

It was only later, with the release of the B/X set – that is, the Basic Rules boxed set by Tom Moldvay and the Expert Rules boxed set by David “Zeb” Cook and Steve Marsh; these were another introduction to D&D that changed just enough from their predecessor to be their own animal – that the rules started to speak to strict limits on how high characters could advance. Ironically though, this series never got that far (at least, not for most characters. Demihumans, however, hit hard caps here); a third set of rules that was supposed to present the upper limits of character advancement, called the Companion set, was never released.

Or rather, it wasn’t released for B/X. Once again, the Basic D&D game was re-released as a series of boxed sets that changed enough of the rules to be considered their own thing. This time it was in the form of the five boxed sets known as BECMI – Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals – by Frank Mentzer (though they would eventually be re-released, with some tweaks by Aaron Allston in the form of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia and the Wrath of the Immortals boxed set). The first four of these boxed sets established, for the first time, that there was a ceiling to how high a character could advance (AD&D First Edition had already been released by this point, but it didn’t have the same cap; see below), that being level 36 (save for the aforementioned demihuman level limits, which were far lower).

Notably, the game didn’t stop here. The Immortals/Wrath of the Immortals boxed set(s) showed how PCs who had reached their level limit could potentially ascend to become deities (that is, “Immortals”) in their own right, at which point they could begin ascending the Immortal hierarchy.

PCs who hit the top of the Immortal hierarchy then had only one potential method for advancing further: they could give up their immortality and start as 1st-level mortals all over again. That certainly sounded harsh, but for those who managed to once again make it to the limits of mortal experience, and then ascend to the uppermost ranks of immortality for a second time, earned a special send-off for their character: they immediately attained the status of being one of the Old Ones (beings as far above the Immortals as the Immortals are above mortals) and were taken beyond the Vortex Dimension (which is to say, being the Basic D&D game’s multiverse).

The above is notable as it not only presents a hard-cap, but does so in a way that mandates that the character be retired from play, something not seen again until D&D Fourth Edition. Moreover, unique to all forms of character retirement, this one removed the character from the game world. Every other method of retiring a character, from death to divine ascension, turned the character into an NPC that was still part of the game world (and so could conceivably be featured again at some point). A character that attained the status of Old One in Basic D&D, however, had literally moved beyond the game itself.

Next time, we’ll look at the various editions of AD&D, and its ways that PCs could (or couldn’t) surpass the common limits for characters.