YES! Everything in the Epic Legacy Player’s Guide will be integrated into the Epic Legacy Core Rulebook. This means it will receive significant updates to address balance issues, reformatting for a unified ascetic, and gone over with a fine toothed comb for typos and other errors.

Players will also receive new content for characters of all shapes and sizes, the previews of which can be found in the project’s story.

Last updated: November 02, 2017 22:07

That is a great question! And one we asked ourselves almost immediately when we started this project. Its guided our design on almost every level, so we definitely understand that concern.

I could talk for days about how we approached this issue, but I think it would be best if I laid out our process on how we tackled the issue.

Firstly, we operated from a position that the martial classes would be more powerful than the spellcasters. Meaning their average damage per round would be higher, their abilities more useful, and their utility more significant. Throughout the testing of each class, we would then nerf the martial classes down until they got within an acceptable range of a spellcasting class.

Secondly, we felt just scaling the already existing class framework to epic strength (ie. just increasing the raw numbers) was the wrong approach. We have played older edition’s renditions of this concept, and the results were disastrous. Instead, each classes Epic advancement from 21-30 would be marked by a new “Epic Mechanic”, meaning a new tool that the class would acquire that would scale with their epic level. Some base features would still improve, but this “Epic Mechanic” was the primary focus. This mechanic NEEDED to be a few things.

1. It needed to “Feel epic” in both theme and play. If it didn’t feel and play awesome, then it wasn’t worth doing.
2. It needed to be powerful. Fairly self explanatory, but the mechanic is where the majority of the character’s new features come from.
3. It needed to be unique. Each mechanic needed to feel separate from all the other classes, affording them interesting choices and abilities no other class could have/replicated. Each class needed to have “their thing” that no one else could do, making each path of advancement compelling and interesting.

Swinging all this back to martial classes, because of these rules we set for ourselves they were the HARDEST to design by a huge margin (Ranger in particular gave me headaches for months and went through over four playable models). But, when it came to playtesting, not only were people playing these classes chosen by often (if not the most often), they were performing extremely well when compared to the spellcasting classes. We still wanted those casters to have those world shattering magic, but the cost associated with it was high, and the ability to do so limited enough, that martial characters could have their day in the spotlight over the course of several encounters while the Wizard was waiting for the right moment to cast Pyroclastic Cannon. Some of the martial abilities do border on the supernatural, and in the Core Rulebook we will talk about how to incorporate these supposedly normal people doing truly absurd things with their bodies as a Dungeon Master, but in terms of how it plays, you’ll find martial classes in Epic Legacy to be some of the most effective classes in a lot of scenarios.

Fun fact, the Epic Barbarian currently holds the record for most damage done in a single hit, at over 1600! It also involved no cheese or assistance from other classes, was done with just the raw mechanics.

Last updated: November 04, 2017 22:00