I disagree. Fax Celestis' seeds system, while it is complete looking, is exactly the kind of seed system I feel we should NOT design, or even close to it. His is incredibly complex, with varying degrees of augmentation for each seed, varying augments, a whole Secrets subroutine layered on, AND he's designed it to be used spontaneously, creating spells from these seeds IN GAME, ROUND BY ROUND.
Anyway, I'm now going to explore the seeds in the Epic Handbook and see what can be done of streamlining them and evaluating their effects for low level play. Can we all still agree on the basic principles that Spellcasters have these areas to work with: Powerful healing, area effects, debuffs, ranged attacks?
Okay, seeds have a base effect of some kind. Do/should seeds have a base range, save DC, target, etc? If they do, would they be able to be cast as the seeds themselves, perhaps as a sort of "cantrip" or "orison?" Should spellcasters have access to all spell seeds, or should a Wizard have it's own list of available seeds and a Cleric have another list? Just some thoughts.
Animate and Animate Dead are two separate seeds in the Epic Handbook. This is because Animated Objects and Animated Dead are two very statistically different creatures. However, part of me wants this to become streamlined so that they can both be a part of the same seed, I'm just unsure how to do it. Of course rules could be altered to make Animated Objects and Animated Dead more closely resemble each other statistically wise, but that seems like an extreme solution.
The Armor seed, while awesomely better than Mage Armor, seems superfluous as a seed all its own. All it does is buff AC. Seems like it could be a part of a Creation or Conjuration seed. Shrug.
The problem I keep having while I look through these effects is that I want a streamlined system that is very easy to pick up and play, but then it becomes difficult to justify some more esoteric spell effects that really seem like they belong in the game like Banishment. That's one whole seed in ELH. Thoughts on this?
Idea on streamlining seeds: Perhaps a good idea would be to limit the system to 8 seeds total. Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation. The base effects of each seed we would need to discuss, but I imagine them as whatever we come to agree upon being the "basic essense" of, say, Divination. Or perhaps each seed can have up to three separate "base" effects for a virtual total of 24 seeds. I can see this working fairly well with a very uniform system of augments.
As far as augments go, I'd start with the Epic Spell Factors table (the one that modifies the spellcraft DC). So there would be an augment to modify casting time, an augment to eschew components, an augment to alter the duration, another to increase the range, another to change/add targets, another to alter the area, etc, etc.