By now, everyone has had a chance to get used to the new d20 game system that Dungeons & Dragons has built the 3rd Edition around. However, no one really expected that the game system would be limited in this age of super gaming. Much to the dismay of many players, that is exactly what the base game system does, limits a character to only 20 levels of advancement. Could that be due to the "d20" system name itself? Personally, I thought that the entire idea of the 3rd Edition was to remove all the hindering limitations imposed on the players so that they could develop and grow their character to the fullest possible extent.
This unfair restriction is remove, or at least partly, by allowing levels higher than 20. The Epic Level Handbook offers many more powers and abilities than the standard bonuses listed in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeons Master Guide, yet it still puts a bit of a limit on the players.
Limits
The first, and perhaps most important limit, the this book retains for the player is to force a player to make long range plays for how he/she wants to develop the character at the character creation process. Simply put, in order to qualify for any of the "epic" bonuses the character must be 21st level in a basic class OR 11th level in a prestige class AND 21st level in the player level. To give an example, my personal character in the 3rd Edition game is Trinity, a rogue. At 8th level, he became a Shadow Dancer and then after 4 levels at that became a Wizard and after 5 levels there became a Loremaster. He is currently a 2nd level Loremaster. That is a total of 18 character levels with only 2 remaining before he achieves level 20. Even if I returned the character to a path that would allow him to qualify for any of the "epic" abilities (Shadow Dancer would be the closest) He would have to gain 7 levels of advancement before he would get the first Epic power. In other words, Trinity would be a level 25 character before ever receiving his epic abilities in a system that is designed to hand out those powers at level 21. That's a HUGE limit laid on the heads of the players at the character creation phase of the game. Heaven help Trinity should he wish to become an Epic Wizard or Epic Thief at this time in his career. Either of those require level 21 in the single class to become Epic. You do the math and you will see the problem.
Granted, this book does show the progression of gaining feats and ability increases for all characters above level 20, but the only way to gain the Epic feats and the Epic Attack and Save bonuses is to become an Epic Class. I think that reaching a total character level of 21 is a pretty epic thing to accomplish, period. There should be some reward for those players who were forced to diversify themselves during the course of the game upon reaching level 21. The case of Trinity, the character became a Wizard due to the fact that the group he was adventuring with simply didn't have a real spell caster and the opponents always had at least one or two. The logical thing to do when faced with magic is to fight back with magic, or at the very least be able to defend against the magic. Real life is that way as well. I don't think I know but a handful of people who have stuck to a single career for 20+ years. I know plenty who are retired from a field of work, but they changed jobs (the work they actually do) several times during the time they worked for the company.
The good things:
On the other hand, there are many fantastic things offered in this volume. There are Epic Feats, Epic Classes (all the classes offered in the previous volumes of the series can become Epic Classes), Epic Prestige Classes (all new classes, the standard prestige classes merely become Epic Classes), Epic Skills, Epic Spells almost anything that you can think of that was in the normal game can become Epic! The are now no limits whatsoever to the character levels or the power levels of the opponents you will encounter. All of this makes for some extremely fun power playing, something that AD&D and 2nd Edition always had a problem with.
In the previous versions of D&D, the only way to challenge the high level party was to over power them with sheer numbers of creatures! Sending a thousand orcs at a group of 5 level 20 characters would force them to fight hard, but such a massive attack really offered no reward the players at all and often would accomplish nothing more than to eat up the playing time with a time consuming fight of rolling attack after attack for hours. After all, orcs aren't really that good at fighting and even a mass attack like the one described above devolves into one on one combat very quickly. The new Epic creatures will allow the Game Master to create a single being that is strong enough to destroy the entire group unless they think carefully and use every attack wisely. Now that's a game!
At the back of this volume, there is a detailed Epic Level adventure to help the Game Masters understand just how to use this new area of the game. There are also some detailed information about many of the legendary characters of the D&D world and tables with quick stats for every Epic Class (by level) so that it won't take hours of prep time to build an adventure.
The bottom line is that the Epic Level Handbook does indeed add a new dimension to the game, but there are a couple minor flaws in the transition phase from normal characters to Epic. Perhaps one day they will revise this volume and make the transition a bit smoother and more fair to those characters like Trinity.
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