There have been attempts to do that. The Iron Heroes Arcanist, for example. It's always been a terrible thing. And there are of course many reasons for that. The most obvious of course is that 3e skill results have little to do with character level even when people aren't cheesing it up. The RNG is huge compared to the level-based bonuses, and the optional level-independent bonuses are huge compared that the RNG.Prak_Anima wrote:I like the idea of the spell seeds in ELH, but it should be part of the game from first level as a guide to researching new spells, not a completely broken and stupid epic thing.
I do kind of like the idea that the Epic book is really just a monster manual where the monster is also the adventure.
But the more important issue is that context is king. No "seeds" can tell you how good a spell actually is, because seeds necessarily lack context. So consider that spell which makes a temporary block of wood to fill a square. That's a low level spell, and people don't take it because it's dumb. But imagine if the same spell created substantially less wood and surrounded a square for the same amount of time. Suddenly you have something that is damn near to as powerful as force cage. How could a "spell seeds" system possibly figure out that the spell that creates objectively less temporary wood is massively more powerful than the spell that creates more temporary wood?
-Username17