Introduction
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What Is Epic Path?
Epic Path is a D20 system game, and everything here is based upon the hard work and love of the game of thousands of players over decades. We all love this hobby and have a ton of fun with it, and everything published here is with one goal in mind: Fun!
These rules are designed as enhancements and balance tweaks for the marvelous D20 engine. The 'core rules' of the D20 system are embodied in the D20 System Reference Document(SRD). If there's anything unclear in these rules anywhere, it's because we've missed telling you something that's probably in the SRD. An excellent copy of the SRD can be found here.
The spiritual successor to the 'DnD 3.5' game is Pathfinder. We cannot praise Pathfinder enough, as we were developing, balancing, and re-tuning these rules we were continually impressed by how much thought and hard work went into everything that Pathfinder did. Huge sections of the game rules are untouched from Pathfinder, and that's because we found them to be spot on, just the way they are.
Many players and referees have commented on the balance issues in D&D3.5 for decades. Tremendous amounts of work went into D&D4E to correct those imbalance issues, but in the process of doing so, the developers of that (mechanically quite good) game discarded the classic DnD spell-casting system and made all the classes feel very similar to each other. This created a mechanically sound game with excellent balance, but it threw away the 'soul' of the game in the process.
Pathfinder attempted to bring the D20 system back to its roots, and succeeded wonderfully in doing so. But, once again, imbalance issues showed up.
We began writing Epic Path to re-tune and re-balance the ENTIRE game, across all classes, to all levels, while still keeping the wild and crazy soul of the game completely intact. We've had to make some large changes, but we've run analyses of all of these changes and we think we're on the right track. This job was made much easier by the tremendous amounts of work Pathfinder put into the spellcasting system, the excellent ideas embodied in all the various D20 system games, and the thousands upon thousands of fans whose work we have built upon in working on these rules. Nothing here would ever have been possible without the fans of the game and all those thousands of great, creative ideas.
So what did we do? First, we worked to make all the classes relevant in and out of combat at all levels. We worked very hard to make all the classes perform well in combat at all levels. We used every mechanism we could think of to make all the classes interesting and unique. We tried to make sure that for every main role (damage dealer, healer, buffer, and tank) there were multiple classes that could do the job either well or 'ok'. No longer must every party have a cleric. No longer must every party have an arcane spell-caster. Obviously, it's still possible to make parties that won't work perfectly, but it's much harder to find a combination that simply can't function.
We worked very hard to make sure that the game stayed 'within a d20 roll' between the various classes and at all levels. This means fewer cases of needing only a 20 to hit the monster, or fights where a strong tank makes the encounter completely trivial. Fewer fights where one class is singly made useless because the monster is immune to their brand of combat.
Many of the classes are radically different, although we tried very hard to preserve the 'feeling' of the old favorites. Rangers are still rangers, although they are mechanically completely different than they've ever been before.
We've expanded character development all the way to level 35 and beyond. But we have not neglected the lower levels! Indeed, far more development effort went into levels 1-20 than was expended on the Epic stuff. We wanted EVERY player, at ANY level to feel like they could step into a high-fantasy epic and hold their own right beside the characters of literature and screen.
Even at first level, an Epic Path character is already a person to be reckoned with, a budding hero (or heroine!) worthy of the greatest stories ever told. We deliberately sought to create that larger-than-life swashbuckling heroism even at first level. A first level Epic Path character isn't a delicate flower, it's a genuine hero, ready for heroic challenges!