The Next Epic, part three

“I don’t care how high your attack bonus is, you can’t punch the sky!”

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.