Prime Evil's page

My hat of d02 knows no limit. Parfinder is based on d02 and it is still way to liniar. It is over comlicated,and simplist at the same time.

(Let's see who remembers THAT reference...)

Keep in mind that most of the rules content of the White Wolf Everquest book was specifically designated as Open Game Content, so there's no reason why a Pathfinder adaptation couldn't be made. Sony retains all rights to the intellectual property specific to the Everquest setting, but the rest of the material is fair game.

Personally, I always liked the way that the EQ RPG handled weapon speed and iterative attacks - it seemed much closer in spirit to second edition AD&D.

This thread is way too long.

I would have answered more, but we ran out of time.

Lisa

That just means that you'll have to do another session sometime :)

It was very interesting listening to the "war stories" from the early days. I'd love to hear the story from Peter Adkison's side as well. Perhaps you could interview him next time?

(I've still got a copy of The Primal Order with the "Rantings and Other Gibberish" by Lisa Stevens in the back. Plus our group still used the Whimsy Cards from Lion Rampant until quite recently..lol)

Damn, this is a real pity. I was hoping to see Gardner Fox back in print some day. But at least we got some Manly Wade Wellman and the series exposed Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore to a wider audience.

I guess that it's back to haunting second-hand bookstores for a while :(

One question - is there any chance that you would look at negotiating ebook rights for any of the works published under the Planet Stories banner?

I notice that Gollancz seems to be having some success with the SF classics that they are releasing in electronic format under the Gateway branding. They had a blog entry a while ago stating that although it wasn't economically viable to republish these works in 'dead tree' format, releasing them in electronic format effectively allows them to stay in print indefinitely.

It's the room with the monster and the treasure in it.

I prefer that room to the one with the monster and no treasure. Repetition of that one gets old real fast...

Goons are probably the best example you can make for any game to not have any form of Open PvP. They destroy every game they touch.

However, the Goonswarm wiki does have a nice introduction to Eve Online that outlines the things that they do and don't like about the game. This list should give PFO devs insight into the features that attract griefers and those that they don't like.

I think the decision to reveal your plans so early is risky, but it's probably the right way to go about it. Ryan is no fool and I'm sure that he has addressed the issue of risk management in the business plan. He's also a guy who makes bold moves to secure business opportunities and has a decent track record in that area.

I think that the decision to remain public about the development process is an interesting one. However, the open development model has served Paizo well in the past and it may do so again. They probably have more experience in open development of game rules than anybody than anybody else in the world - in either the traditional hobby games industry or the computer gaming industry. This may be a competitive advantage that can be leveraged to validate design choices and ensure that the game satisfies even its toughest critics ;)

Sociopathy isn't an alignment thing (though I'll admit evil sociopaths are more common than neutral ones) it's a behavior thing.

Is it possible to be a lawful good sociopath? What about a Chaotic Good sociopath? Can there be a true neutral sociopath? Forget the MMO for a second - these are interesting questions from a pen-and-paper perspective....

I've got a suspicion that any alignment can produce dysfunctional individuals. For example, a lawful good character might mete out justice a bit to quickly, without making sure that all of their facts are in order - there's a reason why people say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Similarly, evil characters can be regarded as heroes under the right circumstances. Heck, how many times in human history have people admired ruthless dictators for restoring a sense of pride to a nation or religious minority or ethnic group? I can easily imagine situations where good people support a tyrant because he or she seems better than the alternative.

Perhaps players who hit a certain negative reputation threshold should become lootable upon death? Or perhaps the person who wins the bounty on a wanted murderer gets to choose one of the murderer's items as part of their reward for serving justice. Maybe griefers won't be so keen to cause havoc when their cool toys are at risk.

I personally prefer PVE to PVP, but PVP appeals to many people and the game needs to cater for it.

In my own experience, most PVP enthusiasts are decent people who don't want to ruin everybody's fun. Griefers are a small minority of the PVP players out there, but they have the potential to ruin the game experience for the majority of people. It's one thing if you occasionally get defeated by another player who has a clever PVP build. It's another thing entirely to get repeatedly ganked by the same group of griefers over and over using exploits (such as ambushing players as they move from one zone to another while they are stuck behind a loading sreen). The first type of PVP player is an asset to the game; the second is a pain who drives people away from the game.

At the moment, the methods proposed for controlling PVP abuse in PFO look very weak. I know that it's early days, but this is a critical issue for the devs to get right. Failure to do so will drive a lot of people away from the game - myself included. Griefers are such a major issue in some MMOs that they effectively sink the game.

The game needs to have a clear vision of what is legitimate PVP and what is not from the outset and use every method available to discorage griefing.

The choice of the River Kingdoms as the setting is interesting. It permits the injection sandbox elements that might distinguish the game from the other MMOs out there. I suppose that a lot will depend upon how well the implementation is done - nobody has done a sandbox-style MMO well yet!

I wonder if the new game will generate any pen-and-paper tie-in products?

A Bella Sara RPG at last!

Lords of Light, look at the size of those spiders. Ariel! Ookla! To the horses!

I had an inquisitor that ran into a summoning circle at the wrong moment, and wound up infused with the essence of a cornugon demon. Just goes to show that breaking up a cabal of evil wizards isn't always a good idea.

Oh...an involutary acquisition of the half-fiend template! Nasty...

Mind you, I imagine that receiving the half-celestial template comes with some disadvantages too. You acquire a heap of nasty enemies and the higher powers start contacting you regularly to do their dirty work.

I dunno. On the one hand, I figure that the Empyreal Lords might imbue a mortal champion with the half-celestial template as a reward for a great deed performed in their service, but it would need to involve a truly epic achievement - such as slaying a minor demon lord or the destruction of an evil artifact.

On the other hand, this is the sort of thing that should be reserved as the Crowning Moment of Awesome for an entire campaign, rather than something that happens during the course of play. The miraculous transformation of the character should be clearly shown to be an extraordinary event - it's not the kind of reward that the higher powers hand out to their mortal servants on a routine basis. Speaking personally, I would expect any character who ascends to half-celestial status to be retired from play shortly afterwards to continue their journey towards full transcendence.

However, if you allow want to allow a character in your campaign to become acquire the half-celestial template during play, I strongly recommend picking up the old Anger of Angels sourcebook from Malhavoc Press. This book was written by some random guy named Sean K. Reynolds long before Pathfinder came around. There is a section on Becoming Angelic on pp.48 - 50 that might give you some ideas. This section is open game content and could easily be adapted for the Pathfinder RPG. Some of the organizations and factions in this book might also be a useful addition to any campaign in which the celestial powers are pulling the strings from behind the scebnes. I believe that this book is still available in PDF format - although sadly not here at Paizo.

You know, this is the sort of thread that convinces the general public that roleplayers are crazy.

Does it say something about me that I am fascinated by these kinds of topics?

Just got my shipment email, downloading the PDF now!

Now that you've got the PDF, please give us your general impression - I'm looking forward to picking up this one...

I love the barbarian.

"Whoah...I've got rage fatigue..." [Falls Unconscious]

The Advanced Player's Guide introduced the concept of Alternate Racial Traits. These allow you to exchange one or more standard racial traits in order to customize your character to reflect his or her individual heritage.

Is there a way for a GM to use the new system to offer players a couple of alternate racial traits for a campaign-specific custom race?

How would people handle this? Is it reasonable to allow players to swap out one racial ability for one with an equivalent RP cost from a list offered by the GM? Is this a good way to model variant subraces within a single species?

I still remember a trap that we used back in an older edition involving a wizard who was selling frozen meat to adventurers heading off into the wilderness. The 'meat' was actually a chunk of frozen troll and as it thawed it began to regenerate. It gave the adventurers a nasty fright when a hungry troll crawled out of their baggage in the middle of the night! Unfortunately, the character on sentry duty was concentrating on what was going on beyond the mouth of the shallow cave where they were camping - he didn't consider the idea that his companions would be eaten by a ravenous escaped troll from the area that they had thoroughly searched only a few hours before.

When the characters got back to town, they searched for the wizard who had sold them the frozen rations only to discover that he had vanished. Upon investigation, they discovered that he was actually an assassin hired by a nemesis of one of the adventurers.

Although you couldn't get away with this trick in Pathfinder, barrels containing frozen troll parts would be a good way to sneak a nasty assault force into a well-guarded stronghold....

I'm sure that Paizo will eventually release a new edition of the Pathfinder RPG....but this is probably still a few years away. Pathfinder is still early in its edition cycle and has a lot of life left in it yet!

However, with that in mind, here's some general speculation.

When the Pathfinder core rulebook came out, Paizo worked hard to maintain a degree of backward compatibility with 3.5. However, from the release of the APG onwards they have started to put their own stamp on the game and take it in new directions. For example, witness the way that Prestige Classes have been downplayed in favour of Archetypes. I'm sure that at some point Paizo will want to consolidate some of these innovations into the core rules. I suspect that when Pathfinder 2E comes out, it will involve incremental improvements to the existing game system rather than a radical redesign. In fact, I expect the biggest change in a future Pathfinder revision might involve changes to the way that the rules are presented - I get the feeling that Paizo has learned a lot about how to present the rules clearly and succinctly from their recent work on the Beginner Box Set.

The idea hat WoTC will produce a modular "meta-edition" of D&D that is compatible with every previous edition is an intriguing concept. I know that Mike Mearls has mentioned something along these lines a while back. It would would be really clever if such a version included a Pathfinder plug-in that integrated the Pathfinder RPG into the expanded D&D ecosystem on a formal basis. Such a move would benefit both companies, enabling them to strengthen both brands. However, I'm not sure that it is very likely.

I'm waiting for somebody to mention Hitler or the Nazis so that we can invoke Godwin's Law as well as BadWrongFun ;)

Everything is proceeding just as planned....

I wish you luck. Welcome to the BadWrongFun league :)

Huh? I thought that to join BadWrongFun league you had to insist that only people who play 4E fudge rolls...

I find that the following two quotes from the first edition DMG still inform my attitudes towards fudging. On the one hand, Gygax advises the GM that it is OK to fudge under certain circumstances:

You do have every right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur. In making such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player character with your actions. "ALWAYS GIVE A MONSTER AN EVEN BREAK!"

Buit on the other hand, Gygax provides some fairly stern guidance about the wisdom of fudging to save the characters from certain death:

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may! Again, if you have available ample means of raising characters from the dead, even death is not too severe; remember, however, the constitution- based limit to resurrections. Yet one die roll that you should NEVER tamper with is the SYSTEM SHOCK ROLL to be raised from the dead. If a character fails that roll, which he or she should make him or herself, he or she is FOREVER DEAD. There MUST be some final death or immortality will take over and again the game will become boring because the player characters will have 9+ lives each!

Gygax also makes an interesting comment in his afterword to the module Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth that might be relevant to this discussion:

Players will not improve if the DM pampers rather than challenges them. If your players perform badly, do not allow their characters to increase in experience level...Allowing foolish and ignorant players to advance their characters to high levels reflects badly upon the game and even more so upon the Dungeon Master who allowed such a travesty to occur. In effect, it is the excellence of the DM which is judged when the caliber of play by any group is discussed. Keep yours high!

Based on these quotes, I summarize the intentions of the game's original designer like this:

• The GM has the right to fudge the dice on occasion, but it is not something that should be done lightly.
  
• The GM should never fudge the dice in a way that causes direct harm to PCs. (For example, fudging random treasure is probably OK, but fudging PC saving throws is probably not)
  
• The GM should always be fair to the monsters as well as the PCs. If you are going to fudge in favour of the PCs every now and then you should do the same for their opponents to ensure that you are being impartial.
  
• Most of the time, the GM should accept the results of the dice - even if they result in the death of PCs. Adventurers kill plenty of monsters with lucky dice rolls during their careers.
  
• Remember that the game includes a number of ways to reverse the effects of death, so don't be afraid to kill PCs off if that's how the dice fall.
  
• NEVER fudge the dice to rescue characters who have done something stupid or neglected to take basic precautions.
  
• It is acceptable to occasionally save a character from accidental death due to a run of freakishly bad rolls, but the GM should inflict some alternative penalty upon the PC to reflect the will of the dice. This penalty should be quite severe.
  
• At the same time, remember that the possibility of final death keeps the game exciting. There must always be the chance that characters will be permanently lost or the game will quickly become stale and boring.
  
• If you always rescue the characters from the consequences of their choices, they will get lazy and come to depend upon GM fudging in their favour.
  
• GMs who fudge too much deserve ridicule because they are not providing an appropriate challenge for the players (Note the distinction that Gygax introduces between challenging the players and challenging their characters).
  

Call me an old-school GM, but I find this to be a balanced set of guidelines.

Feel free to discuss :)

EDIT: I would also draw attention to the following quote from Gygax's book Role Playing Mastery:

I would also quote from Gygax's book "Role-Playing Mastery":

There are times when the GM will bend or break the rules of the game system in order to allow his players to maintain their characters. Just as he sometimes metes out punishments for infractions, the GM at other times intervenes benevolently, spreading his aegis over the PCs to save them from probabilities gone awry....If the party is in danger of extermination through no direct fault of its own AND because a string of unlikely occurances have all somehow come to pass, then it is time for the GM to step in and set things back on the right track, or at least keep them from getting any worse.!

I find it interesting that Gygax emphasizes again the importance of being even-handed - if you are going to help pou the players every now and then, you shouldn't hesitate to punish them harshly if they do something stupid. He clearly sees the two ideas as being closely related...

"How we teach you" and "how it looks" are very much intertwined, and there was much more of a collaboration between graphic design and game design than we've ever had in any other product.

This is a good thing and I suspect that this is the way of the future for the whole industry. If we are going to make it easier for newcomers to enter the RPGs hobby, we need to make it simple for them to pick up the concepts behind the rules quickly and painlessly. And strong visual design can play an important role here.

I wonder whether the work on this product will influence the graphic design of future Paizo products? Were there any lessons learned during the work on this product that would make Paizo change the way that they would handle a (theoretical) revamp of the core rulebook? Was it possible to explain key elements of the system in a more concise way?

Not only did early editions of the game assume that the distribution of attributes amongst the general population followed a bell curve, they assumed that player characters WERE typical members of the population who achieved greatness through their deeds - rather than starting out with the advantages conferred by atypical attribute scores. There was also an assumption that certain character classes were far more difficult to gain entry to and their incidence amongst the population was much lower.

Neither approach is inherently better than the other, but they do reflect very different assumptions about the kinds of fantasy tropes that the game is intended to simulate. Early fantasy RPGs draw much of their inspiration from Sword & Sorcery fiction where the heroes are more human in scale than they tend to be in High Fantasy. Their ambitions often revolve around getting rich or having interesting experiences rather than saving the world.

However, later editions of D&D have tended to draw more inspiration from high fantasy novels where the characters tend to start out as "special snowflakes" - the lost heirs of important bloodlines or the inheritors of important artifacts. It's easy to point to the release of the original Dragonlance modules as an important turning point in this trend, but I would argue that TSR was merely responding to broader market conditions when they embraced that style of fantasy - this was the period when authors such as David Eddings and Terry Brooks were at the height of their popularity.

By the end of the 2E Era, the RPG industry had embraced the idea that an interesting character concept required an interesting backstory - the idea that your PC might start out as some peasant schmuck was becoming anathema. Things such as character kits (remember those?) encouraged the shift in expectations and fed into the design assumptions for 3E.

In addition, the mechanical complexity of character generation for 3e meant that people were investing a lot of time in creating their PCs. If Pustule the Fighter (CHA 5!) wasn't made of sturdier stuff than a typical peasant, he might not even make it to second level - and that would mean that an hour or two had been wasted. So there was another pressure dictating that PCs should be above-average in at least some areas. Ironically, both Pathfinder and D&D have reduced the need for exceptional stats at 1st level by beefing up low-level characters slightly to improve their survivability.

To me, one of the most interesting relics of how far the game has drifted from it's sword & sorcery roots is a little-known table from one of the early Greyhawk products that spells out the expected distribution of the various classes amongst adventurers (fighter types 50%; thief types 24%; cleric types 15%; magic-user types 10%; and others 1%). This seems distribution reflects the assumptions of swords and sorcery fiction very well - where protagonists tend to be warriors or rogues and arcane spellcasters are quite rare. It doesn't reflect the assumptions of high fantasy, where the protagonists often possess some kind of arcane magic talent that gives them an edge against the Dark Lord. A world where barbarians and assassins are more common than wizards or clerics speaks to a very different set of assumptions than modern RPGs such as Pathfinder do.

These days GURPS and Runequest are better at enforcing the bell-curve than just about any game derived from D&D

We have indeed! Sojan the Swordsman/Under the Warrior Star was our attempt to do some new material. Whether we do so again really hinges on how well things sell. New fiction is a LOT more expensive than reprints...

I quite liked Under the Warrior Star. It's not the best work that Joe Lansdale has ever produced - I still think that The Bottoms is his best work - but it was still an enjoyable riff on traditional Sword & Planet themes.

Unfortunately there aren't many outlets for original fiction in that style any more - with the obvious exception of Black Gate magazine. Perhaps Paizo could do some web fiction under the Planet Stories imprint someday (although I don't know whether that would be financially viable).

No Planet Stories announcements quite yet...

Hopefully we'll hear something soon!

It's interesting that Gollancz has recently announced a venture similar to Planet Stories with their SF Gateway initiative, which aims to make out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks. Doing a bit of a search on Amazon, it looks like they've managed to secure the ebook rights to about half of Appendix N.

As an aside, has Paizo considered commissioning new sword & sorcery novels in the vein of the classics to build the line? I'm not talking about Pathfinder-specific fiction here - I'm talking about entirely new works.

I love me some Guinness, but down here in Australia we've got a good range to choose from.

Personally I'm a fan of Cooper's Extra Stout in winter and Cooper's Sparkling Ale in Summer.

I'm also fond of the India Pale Ale and Jack of Spades Porter's Stout from James Squire's Brewery.

Shifty wrote:

The upside of the Great Northern is the possibility of lunch in the beer garden:

"Currently as part of our outstanding steak special, prime rump and sirloin are available Sunday to Thursday for only $11.90, including full salad bar!".

So I'd be tempted to suggest a noon meeting; the lunch trade wraps at 3...

I agree that the beer garden at the Great Northern is nice when the weather is decent and the food is pretty good for pub fare.

Lol, wouldn't you know that?

But my Stealth skill is *much* better than his Perception ;)

Hey Prime, alas at the moment it looks like I may have too many players. There are 5 of us regulars and 2 once a month players plus we're about to see how The Big L goes which totals 1 DM and up to 7 players. Of course if your after some players in the near future you could probably grab a couple of us from here.

Reebo

\

No problems...I'm actually busy settling into the new place and a new job, so it'll be a month or two before I'm free.

North shore meetup at the Great Northern? :p

That's funny...the place that I've moved into is about 150 meters from the Great Northern.

Hi, everyone. This thread is very interesting to me as I've just moved to Chatswood from the Blue Mountains ;)

I don't have a huge amount of free time at the moment, but I'm hoping to get some space for gaming again over the next few months. I've been a gamer since 1980 and my main interests these days are Pathfinder and the various retroclones.

I'm interested in running a new campaign in the near future, so if anybody in the local area would be interested, please let me know. I tend to prefer sandbox-style games over tightly plotted ones. In addition, my tastes run towards old-school sword and sorcery rather than high fantasy.

Could I also request a copy of your conversion please?

My email is

Hmmm....as much as i hate Bill's work and his destruction of whatever he gets his hands on, i am sad that a man lost a job. Hope that Paizo doesn't take him in though.

Bill Slavicsek did some fantastic work for the old d6 Star Wars RPG from West End Games back in the day. He also worked on the Dark Sun campaign setting for TSR and did some good work for WoTC in the early days of 3E - including large chunks of the d20 Modern product line. Although I don't like the direction that D&D has taken with 4E, I respect a lot of Bill's past work and wish him all the best for the future.

I'm interested that Sailing the Starlit Sea defines space as an airless void - is your depiction of outer space based upon modern scientific concepts or do you have something else in mind?

Hyperion-Sanctum wrote:

I don't understand why this is a thread...

Well, you see, first Louis posted, and then people responded, which is known around the intarwebs as a thread. :)

And the forums are way too long because of all these thread thingies ;)

If you look about two posts up, you'll see that Creighton already assured everyone it isn'r Raging Swan

Fyi - I think the look of Raging Swan's stuff is justfine as is :)

Oh...I didn't notice that! And I agree that Raging Swan's stuff is excellent. But I'm also a big fan of the production values of LPJ Designs.

Congratulations, Louis. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of this venture!

(Personally, I hope that the mystery partner is Raging Swan - it would be awesome to see their cool content pimped out with the kind of graphic design that LPJ does so well...)

I think it's a safe bet Lisa may have a copy.

Did she even work on it?

My copy of The Primal Order has a special mention of Lisa on the credits page:

In particular a special word of appreciation goes to Lisa Stevens who spent many long hours on the phone, and eventually packed up her life and moved to Seattle to join Wizards of the Coast

This was obviously a fateful moment!

There is also an official WoTC newsletter on the last page containing "Rantings and other gibberish by Lisa Stevens (Editor-in-chief)" - along with a funny cartoon of her at her desk. How times have changed!

Some things I'd like to see addressed in a Mythic Adventures book....

I agree with pretty much everything that you have said here - one of the big issues with high-level play is that the maths behind the game system starts to break down around level 18+. At that level, the size of the bonuses that characters have to certain abilities is much larger than the random element introduced by rolling a d20 - effectively reducing the role of chance in the game. High-level combat can be a matter of attrition unless you can target a specific weakness or vulnerability. This slows the action right down at that level, creating combats that hinge on indentifying and exploiting weaknesses in the opponent's defenses.

To make matters worse, the saving throw system starts to break down as you approach level 20, increasing the 'swinginess' of combat. Take a look at the gap between a character's best saving throw and their worst saving throw at different levels and you will see that by level 20 the gap between them grows to a size that is difficult to bridge. For example, at 5th level the gap between a fighter's Fort save and Will save is 3 points, at 10th level it is 4 points, at 15th level it is 5 points, and at 20th level it is 6 points. This means that the vulnerability of fighters towards effects that trigger a Will save actually increases as the characters goes up in level - assuming that the difficulty of the Will Save increases at the normal rate!

In effect, around 20th level characters become almost invulnerable to certain forms of attack - but remain extremely vulnerable to modes of attack that target their weakest saving throw. I would like to see a Mythic Adventures book that re-normalizes the maths behind the system at level 20+, ensuring that the game remains playable at those levels.

Heh...I'd forgotten about the Mongoose book. There's some decent stuff in there.

I thought that you were referring to the Immortals Handbook: Ascension, which was published by the same company who did the "Immortals Handbook: Epic Bestiary Volume 1" (Eternity Publishing).

The Green Ronin Advanced Bestiary is a great book, but most of the contents are designed for non-epic play.

I still think that the Primal Order books are better than any of the above though. It would be awesome if Paizo could produce a Pathfinder adaptation of these works at some point - I believe that the rights reverted to Peter Adkison when he parted company with WoTC. Unfortunately it's not very likely to happen though :(

Is the Immortals Handbook worth the investment, if I intend to play some "post-20th" that has only a hint of divinity in it?

The Immortals Handbook is decent, provided that you accept the author's slant on divine-level advancement. For my money, the best treatment of divine-level entities is still The Primal Order - a generic book published by WoTC way back before they hit the big time. That book got them into a fair bit of legal trouble and it can be hard to find a copy nowadays, but it's worth hunting it down if you are interested in the subject matter.

I have a question for those who want an "Mythic Adventures Handbook"...lets say it gets released. It places a hard cap on level advancement at level 36. How long until this same discussion comes up asking for an "Uber-Mythic Adventures Handbook" covering levels 37+? If we're going to have a hard cap, and actually keep it, 20th levels seems to be pretty good, since that's about the level that nascent demon lords hang out out, and full demon lords are listed as being not that much higher.

If we assume that the transition from normal adventures to mythic adventures occurs at level 20, then I would suggest that the hard cap on mythic-level play should be set at level 40. Divine level entities could then exist in between levels 40 to 60 - which is close to the power level implied in the 3e "Deities and Demigods" book. This would create three distinct tiers of power - heroic, mythic, and divine - each of which contains 20 levels. Even if you don't ever intend to let characters reach such power levels, having such a conceptual model helps when thinking about the kind of things that players might face in the crowning moment of awesome at the end of a 'heroic' (level 1-20) campaign.

Personally, I would emphasize that mythic level play should be qualitatively different from normal heroic adventuring - as characters push past levels 15-17 they start to move beyond the limits of normal human achievement and into the realm of myth. The transition to a mythic style of play shouldn't be based on a sudden leap in power that occurs at level 20, but should be a gradual process that occurs between levels 15 and 25. At this power level, there should be a law of diminishing returns for advancement - characters must push back the frontiers of what is possible for mortals, venturing where only a few of the mightiest heroes and villains of legend have passed before them. I would welcome the introduction of an exponential experience progression beyond level 20 to highlight this fact. Perhaps there is a need to undertake mythic quests to unlock certain advances - a system similar to the Prestige Award system outlined in the Faction Guide might work. This would make continued advancement contingent upon story-related factors rather than the mere accumulation of experience points.

In any case, I feel that any set of Mythic Adventures rules published by Paizo should be subject to a full public playtest, as it is one of those areas where game balance will be extremely difficult to maintain. Although it won't be possible to please everybody, I think that one of the problems with the old ELH was that it did not receive sufficient scrutiny from playtesters before publication.

I'm sure that once Pathfinder has been out for a few more years and has more support material available, people will complain about how unbalanced it can be too if a player uses a particular build based on combining material from multiple splatbooks.

I think it will take Pathfinder longer to reach that point than it took 3.5 simply because Paizo isn't pumping out as much material, but I'm sure that it will happen within a decade or so - it simply isn't possible to build something as complex as an RPG without introducing some bugs here and there. That's why every GM has the awesome power of Rule 0 at their fingertips ;)

Mind you, Paizo's quality control is higher than that of WotC towards the end of the 3.5 era - the fact that Paizo conducts public playtests of major rules elements ensures that they are thoroughly vetted by the community before they go to print. Plus some hard lessons from the d20 boom years have been learned. A lot of the 3PP material coming out for Pathfinder is better than the 'official' material released in the twilight of the 3.5 era

Things are really swingy. You're either super powerful, or totally gimped. I played an epic warlock, and my epic feat let me teleport at will. It was my main big power. And then we were stuck in a dungeon that was a teleport dead zone, so I was pretty much gimped. Most effects are save or die or save or suck.

The dice are far less important at epic-level play. The size of the bonuses that characters possess can be far more important on the outcome of a skill roll or saving throw than the actual result that turns up on a d20. As you reach the epic levels, characters have modifiers so big that they reduce the element of chance in the game dramatically. Epic-level combat is about detecting and exploiting vulnerabilities rather than wading into combat swinging a sword wildly.

My advice is to ease yourself into epic-level play as slowly as possible. In particular, be very, very careful about giving the party access to epic-level toys in the early days - it's far easier to hand these out slowly and make them really earn them than to take them away once the players have them.

Perhaps it is a good idea to impress upon the players that once they make the transition from normal play to epic-level play they go from being big fish in a small pond to being small fish in a big pond that spans the entire multiverse. For good or ill, they start to attract the attention of powerful entities that have agendas of their own. Really impress on the players that their characters that they are moving up to the big league and that although the rewards are going to be mthic in scope, so are the risks.

Impress upon the players that most of the things that their characters are interested in (rulership of the material plane, demilichdom, godhood) are be hard to achieve and may attract opposition from epic-level factions that have interests of their own. For example, many campaign worlds have a group of powerful but shadowy figures who remain in the background, manipulating worldly affairs in order to maintain the status quo. They might be an order of reclusive wizards who regard themselves as guardians of the cosmic balance or a party of retired adventurers who don't want anybody rocking the boat too much. Either way, they are unlikely to be impressed by a bunch of upstarts swaggering around thinking that they can reshape the campaign world any way they please.

Also, try not to use epic-level monsters too much. Instead, throw a few class levels on an standard monster - for example, a Marilith Antipaladin might be a serious threat to most epic-level characters. And try to use groups of opponents rather than a single BBEG - a determined epic-level party can take down a single bad guy quickly no matter how tough he looks on paper.

This is very sad. Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan were a huge part of my childhood. At this point I choose to think of Sarah's lines from School Reunion:

The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world, or a relationship... Everything has its time. And everything ends.