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You could also use a completely different game system. 

If you want to stick with d20, you could try running a fantasy Mutants and Masterminds campaign. Set it Power Level 10 (standard super hero power level), and you can easily get a pretty epic level feeling game without all the madness of 3E or 4E D&D play.

If you don't mind steering away from d20, you could use a game like Savage Worlds or a FATE game like Legends of Anglerre. You could easily set one of these games in a D&D world. Building monsters in these games is fast and easy, so coming up with stat blocks for D&D epic tier monsters would be fairly painless. Building Characters in these games is also fairly fast, so it wouldn't be a big issue for players to start with Epic Style characters, and you'll never run into the problem of the 9 page long character sheet.

D&D can be a good system for certain kinds of stories/play styles, but there are a ton of great games out there. I recommend looking around a bit and finding the right tool for the job. 

A major problem with epic:

Very few individuals are interested in/play/buy epic stuff.  WOTC doesn't really see a point in supporting it.  Have you noticed that 4e epic support has disappeared since Essentials came out?  That's not by chance.  They don't see anybody playing at those levels. 

Personally, I really like the concept of Epic play (and I appreciate the concept of the Epic Destiny, one of my favorite things about 4e), but they aren't seeing the money in producing it, which is really sad but there it is.

I agree, an entirely different style of game is more appropriate for Epic.  After all, a 4e character at level 29 doesn't play that differently from a 9th level character.  You have your dailies, your encounters, and your at-wills.  They do different things, but it's not like your power at 29 blows up a game-world mountain and slays an opposing army.  It just kills a monster whose stats say "level 29" on them.  An actually Epic game should deal with concepts on a different scope, not just renamed dungeon-crawling.  It begs for a more...abstracted game. 

Concepts of interest- mass battle, plane/stronghold/kingdom building, mighty works of magic.  It could be run with similar rules concepts, but instead of fighting five monsters, your powers affect 500 monsters, and the DM runs unit/gaggles/hordes of 100 at a time.  Or, perhaps you enjoy the Sim-RPG style of game.  Magically create a world and rule and defend that thing Populous style!

The challenge with this sort of thing is that it's hard to translate that sort of experience to the cooperative tabletop RPG environment. 

You should go talk to the Paizo people, they've been talking about this for awhile, even though they aren't close to hammering out what this "actually Epic" game would be.  They agree that it shouldn't be just more of the same ol' same ol', though. 

Oct 15, 2011 -- 12:35PM, bone_naga wrote:

I'm also in favor of reflavoring level 1 as level 21. I actually considered basing a campaign around this. The PCs would level up to 30, slay a powerful being, and then the other gods, in fear of their power, strip them of their memories in the River Lethe. They find themselves in Hades with no memories of their former selves. Part of the game would revolve around them finding out what happened to them.

Mechanically, they would be level 1, but with some custom themes that give them some cool powers to reflect that even without their memories, they are still powerful beings (so damage would be scaled down but you could give them powers like flight that are normally reserved for later). I'm also going to give them use rituals/practices of any level (since they already hit level 30). They would face epic enemies that would be adjusted to their level. Demigods, lesser deities, epic monsters, and other powerful creatures would be heroic tier. Paragon tier was going to be the greater gods (main ones like Zeus, Hades, Thor, Odin, Cronos, etc). When they hit epic tier again, they would have surpassed all the gods and would face elder beings that were older than time itself.

You could take the same idea but of course cut out the first part of the campaign (skip them leveling to 30 the first time) and compress the latter part all into the heroic tier. Demigods and legendary heroes are low-level, lesser gods and such become mid-tier, and at level 10 they are facing the most powerful deities in the universe.

Did something similar in my previous 3.75 game (so-named because I used mostly 3.5 material with a lot of modification on my part). The party began as 1st level characters then began a quest to find a set of vials which contained their memories or previous lives. They'd just gotten to 20th level and realized they had once been deities (or at least god-like) when the campaign came to a crashing halt with the real-life death of one of the players. None of us have the heart to continue. But had it gone on, the characters would have been knocking heads with the deities from various Material Planes of existence as they went about claiming vengeance against those who had cast them down in the first place (the party this time around was mostly evil with one or two "less evil" types in the group) AND setting about finding their own world to create. Although fun, I found putting things together for these higher levels to be rather chore for 3.5 (and figure it likely similar for 4e as well). I'll not be running another epic game for awhile. But they can be amusing.