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I have decided my next game will be WotR, and I have purchased the books. I have run Rise of the Runelords before so this will be my second hand at DMing. After reading over these boards for a while I am becoming very nervous about the power creep that mythic adventures introduces and want to mitigate the high end "rocket tag" as much as possible.
My group will likely range from 4-6 players with varying degrees of experience at the game. I already plan on having them do a 15 point buy... and am going to limit players to 1d6 regained surges per day in addition to using scorpions' stat blocks. Aside from this I am looking for some feedback from DMs who have gone down this path before. What rules would you have implemented if you were to start over from the beginning?
There does not appear to be a comprehensive errata yet so I am looking to you guys and your experiences to guide my own homebrew decisions.
Currently on the chopping block in my mind are: fleet charge, mythic critical focus, mythic vital strike, and wild arcana. Is this going to far or is it appropriate? Should I go further than this? I wan't to avoid having to take away my players toys once they already have them.
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If I would start over from the beginning, I would go down the route of ripping out mythic rules completely (almost) for the player characters and giving them an level for every two mythic tiers they get. I would probably keep surges, mythic power and some of the base mythic abilities, but not the attribute increases and mythic feats and path abilities.
I'd keep the enemies mostly the same as they are in the books, although depending on my groups composition and number of players, I would sometimes still use Scorpions upgrades.
Water under the bridge for me, since we are using mythic rules 75% intact in my campaign, but that is what I would do if running this campaign again for another group.
If I'm to GM this campaign, I would likely only be giving half the planned Mythic tiers so the PCs end the campaign at level 20/tier 5. I would also likely tweak a few feats, like Mythic Power Attack so it's doesn't yield additional damage on a critical hit.
I'm in a similar boat as magnuskn - my group have been running under the enthusiasm and expectation of playing with the Mythic rules, so we're going to give them the best shot we can with them, and agree to house-rule/house-nerf them on an as needed basis.
With a different group of players, however, who had no expectations of playing in 'the Mythic adventure path', I would probably go with the following non-Mythic adaptions (ideas built from varying suggestions from several threads, with the likes of magnuskn, Story Archer, and Tangent being some of the brains behind them - so all thanks should go to them for these):
* Start with a 20pt build (no score lower than 8 or higher than 17 before racials), and award a further 5 points to spend on abilities once they become mythic at the end of Book 1.
* Award an extra level every time they would earn their odd-numbered tier, including their mythic ascension. The class must be a base or core class, and must be different to their designated favored class, or classes in the case of half-elf characters. These additional class levels would not count toward the amount of XP needed to gain their next level. I'd even be tempted to drop XP entirely and level at the suggested points in each book.
* Award a bonus feat at the points where they would earn their even-numbered tiers. They must qualify for this feat as per normal.
* Every ability increase would be a +1 to 2 different ability scores.
I'd also use Tangent's hero point ideas for using Hero Points in place of Mythic Power (as detailed here).
Am not sure if all this would work, but I'd happily give it a try with a second group one day.
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As an alternative to the above suggestions, if you like tinkering with your APs you can keep Mythic and bump up the power of encounters assuming each mythic tier is equal to a level in power, instead of the half level the book suggests.
Regardless of your approach, the AP is totally worth the tinkering to run.
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First thing is probably to determine what your group wants out of this campaign, and also where they fall on the 'tell a good story' vs 'have an interesting/challenging game' spectrum. My player was much more interested in the story, so we kept mythic as it was, and if anything the rocket tag made the endgame better because we were able to just skip straight to the story.
If it is important that you have a tactical game with risk and multi-round combat challenges, I think you're on the right track with some items you suggest. In addition, change power attack to match deadly aim, the other bonuses are just excessive. Remove or reduce the stat increases from mythic. Remove most or all of the 'bonus bonuses' that you get particularly from the grey garrison (or, like me, you can just assign the rewards, which allows you to give flavorful feats or stats, without necessarily boosting power over-much). If you're dropping fleet charge and wild arcana, make sure you kill inspired spell as well. Augmented Mythic Haste maybe should be nerfed for the same reason as Fleet Charge. Mythic Hex on a slumber witch is also very scary. Frankly, if you do all of that, you'll be taking care of a significant percent of the worst excesses of Mythic, in my opinion.
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I haven't had much trouble with my party using Wild Arcana or Inspired Spell yet, as all they do is give the casters more spells per day and a wider variety. Yes, it makes our casters more versatile, but we don't have the optimized god-casters other GMs seem to run into.
Examples? The party cleric was using all her mythic surges a day to cast Create Food and Water to feed the army and reduce its reliance on carrying food. The party sorceress used almost all of her mythic surges just to put Grease under a group of aurochs. Not exactly game-changing, devastating choices... so far...
I think the huge "rocket tag" ones are the ones that turn criticals into insta-kills. Mythic Vital Strike and Power Attack have to go, or at least be nerfed so they don't produce 500+ hit point crits.
Once critical hits stop being such obscene damage producers, the rest don't scare me nearly as much. Fleet Charge gives one extra attack per round? So does a plain old Haste spell. It ignores DR? Do does a paladin's Smite Evil.
I'll see what my PCs choose as they go up in mythic tiers, but so far giving the casters extra spells through Wild Arcana and Inspired Spell has just made them feel more effective in combat while supporting the lone melee character. (Fighter-cleric-sorcerer-bard.)
As I've said in other threads, I'll keep reporting as my non-optimizers try to roleplay their way through the AP, and if they end up in a game of hopeless rocket tag (which I'm fairly sure they will), I'll report on which mythic powers/feats did the most damage.
My personal take before running it? Every mythic feat or power that enhances critical hits seems to be uber-broken, as if they just decided to let criticals always kill. When your fighter is using a keen scimitar, that's a 30% insta-kill chance per roll, which explains all the hate on mythic. I'll see whether other mythic talents are equally broken.
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Fleet charge actually enables a full round attack every round in addition to that extra attack, so it should be looked at as it is the most powerful champion ability.
I would suggest using slow xp and limiting mythic tiers. I nerfed mythic power attack and removed legendary weapon and mythic vital strike.
Ah, missed that, "As a swift action" preface.
Yeah, another of the broken bits is that so many of the mythic abilities are swift. I think downgrading them to standard or move would help immensely as well.
Yes, make sure that you know the rules for swift and immediate actions and enforce them as that helps to reign in mythicness.
Yes, make sure that you know the rules for swift and immediate actions and enforce them as that helps to reign in mythicness.
Oh, don't worry -- we know those in spades. Having a paladin in RotRL with Smite Evil, Fire of Entanglement, and Feather Fall it was an absolute *must* to point out things like, "You smote evil this round so you can't do Fire of Entanglement 'til next round," or, "Everyone's falling and you can only get off one Feather Fall. Who are you going to save?"
Fun stuff!
let me guess, he saved the cleric every time:)
religious types always stick together;)
Except feather fall effects multiple targets now...
..... except if you don't want it to;D
kind of dark for a Paladin tho:)
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It depends if you want your players do the usual stuff between levels 1-20. Or to do epic things. I keep hearing complaints about the Mythic rules. Yet those that do seem to be missing the point imo. Their called "Mythic" for a reason as in doing things that are worthy of being a myth sung by Bard across the land.
To use a example from another thread. Which do you think will go down in history or sung by Bard across the land. The lone cleric who fed a army of 400+ all on his own. Or the cleric who fed his group and maybe a handful of others. The first cries epic legend. The second is about exciting as watch paint dry.
The players doing powerful things is to be expected in such a AP. Or anything that uses Mythic or epic levels. As a DM I expect my players to be doing more than they usually do with spells, feats, classes and equipment. If I am a 23rd level epic character as a player I sure as hell do not want to be using the same boring vanilla lighting bolts or fireballs. Or as a melee character doing the same damage as I was doing between levels 1-20.
I think people expect Epic then with PF Mythic levels to just be little different than regular levels. The spells DC going up by a point or two. The damage dice a extra die or two. Players to still be using dodge and other low level feats. Again that's not heroic. Nor epic. Or even remotely Mythic. So OP if your not sure you can or want to handle the power level of Mythic tiers that I suggest not running the AP.
Now if the npc are not well designed or the encounters too linear I can understand. The devs told us flat out that the power levels would not be the same. It's like a vegan going into a restaurant that only serves meat. Then is shocked, dismayed and complains about a lack of food that has no vegetables.
First thing is probably to determine what your group wants out of this campaign, and also where they fall on the 'tell a good story' vs 'have an interesting/challenging game' spectrum. My player was much more interested in the story, so we kept mythic as it was, and if anything the rocket tag made the endgame better because we were able to just skip straight to the story.
If it is important that you have a tactical game with risk and multi-round combat challenges, I think you're on the right track with some items you suggest. In addition, change power attack to match deadly aim, the other bonuses are just excessive. Remove or reduce the stat increases from mythic. Remove most or all of the 'bonus bonuses' that you get particularly from the grey garrison (or, like me, you can just assign the rewards, which allows you to give flavorful feats or stats, without necessarily boosting power over-much). If you're dropping fleet charge and wild arcana, make sure you kill inspired spell as well. Augmented Mythic Haste maybe should be nerfed for the same reason as Fleet Charge. Mythic Hex on a slumber witch is also very scary. Frankly, if you do all of that, you'll be taking care of a significant percent of the worst excesses of Mythic, in my opinion.
This.
The problems aren't that excessive and can easily be altered.
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I have decided my next game will be WotR, and I have purchased the books. I have run Rise of the Runelords before so this will be my second hand at DMing. After reading over these boards for a while I am becoming very nervous about the power creep that mythic adventures introduces and want to mitigate the high end "rocket tag" as much as possible.
I'd like to offer once more our group's choice which, thanks to our recently finished run, I can say worked perfectly. The changes are simple and much easier for a GM to anticipate.
1) Ditch Mythic rules entirely.
2) Level at the predetermined times, and grant additional levels at what would be Mythic Tiers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 10, meaning that the characters would eventually reach 26th level, though never have more than 20 levels in any specific class.
This has the added benefits of characters actually getting to use those high level spells and capstone abilities that are never, ever provided for in any Paizo products.
This last would be optional but worked well for us:
3) An 'Epic' ability which begins for all characters at 21st level. Any character may re-roll any d20 roll they made (Initiative, attack, saves, skill checks, etc.) and may add X to the second roll. This roll must be made before the results are revealed and must be taken, even if the outcome is worse. They may do this X/day where X = character level minus 20. This means that a 23rd level character may re-roll 3/day and each time may add a bonus of +3 to that roll. A 25th level character may re-roll 5/day and each time add a bonus of +5 to the roll and so on.
This allows characters a bit more control over their 'destiny' as it approaches, and helps even out the power curve post 20th when characters begin to multi-class or go PrC out of necessity.
This alternative system has been tested from start to finish, has worked wonderfully well, and has completely removed those 'rocket-tag' issues so many other groups have complained about. We did make some adjustments to certain high-level Mythic bosses, but my recommendation would be that you wait until you see how your group has matured before deciding which needed modification and how much.
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The big thing to avoid in my game ended up being legendary weapons and damage stacking. Unfortunately almost all the high tier champion abilities are a little excessive when it comes to damage output. I would lose legendary weapons (at least the silly double damage ability) and also limit the amount of damage abilities players are stacking. A knife rogue with maximized crit and precision crit is a terrifying thing to behold.
I would stress making characters feel epic by doing awesome things, not just more damage. Damage is very high at those levels anyways, its way more fun to run through walls and have nifty trick abilities than it is to do thousands of points of damage a round. If all you do is stack damage, it just becomes a game of seeing who nukes who first, and it really seems to devolve a lot of combats into Initiative is all that matters.
Fleet charge actually enables a full round attack every round in addition to that extra attack, so it should be looked at as it is the most powerful champion ability.
I would suggest using slow xp and limiting mythic tiers. I nerfed mythic power attack and removed legendary weapon and mythic vital strike.
How did you nerf mythic power attack. I nerfed it by accident, misread the rule and though you spent as swift action to make your attacks that round with no minus. We've just playing it like that and it works quite well, then I noticed it was 1 mythic power for 1 minute. Well seeing as worked great when we were doing it wrong we just kept it like that, 1 minutes seem too powerful.
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This has been very helpful. So far the major things im looking at fixing:
Mythic vital strike
mythic improved critical
Mythic power attack
Fleet charge
Mythic power regen per day
Stat increases
Mythic haste
Legendary weapons
Metamagic rods with mythic spells
Are there any other things in particular I should be especially critical of?
Make Wild Arcana a standard action.
I don't see an issue with Fleet Charge myself, in fact, in the two mythic games I have played in (one in a homebrew setting, one in WotR), Fleet Charge hasn't been one of the "big things", that I would seriously consider changing.
Like, I guess its ok for what it does, but it a) costs a mythic power per use and b) costs a swift action. The free attack with +your tier to the damage roll and bypassing DR is all nice, but I frequently used Fleet Warrior (move up to your speed before or after your move with no cost), and used my Swift on something else (like a Smite for a Paladin, a Judgment / Bane / alternate Mythic ability / whatever). If you are worried about the "full attack every round", then I would hit Fleet Warrior as well.
If I wanted to limit anything, it would be the unreal power of mythic casters, with Wild Arcana and Channel Power being the main Culprits. Not to mention, mythic blasters are downright scary when practically nothing can take a Mythic Augmented Fireball from 6th tier onwards, and the DC's get pretty unreal (and then add in Channel Power). I also hear that Titan's Bane is pretty scary on a well built rogue / ninja since you can just sneak attack everything, and with a legendary weapon you can be undetectable if invisible while holding your item, which makes it very hard to deal with.
Stat increases develop things pretty hard as well, and Mythic Vital Strike can get out of hand. Couldn't comment on anything else on that list as I have yet to see it / its been fine.
Personally, if I wanted to GM a mythic game, I would look seriously at what my tactics are. Mythic characters can very easily blast through encounters, and in both games thats initially exactly what we did, until your GMs developed encounters to make us use our mythic power more smarter, managing resource management on a larger scale. That said, Mythic games are highly fun to play (in my experience), and I wouldn't recommend ripping out half the mythic rules to start with.
Really talk to your group, if they want to be "mythic", let them go crazy. Run the Mythic rules as written, just know you'll need to go completely off-script with most of the encounters.
I would run the first two or three books close to as written. Towards the end of the third book, I would liberally wing the rest. Make the mooks proactive as you see appropriate. You most likely will have to increase the BBEG's HP by 3-5 times, rewrite the feats and spell selections, bring in more support mooks and don't forget to add in environmental effects.
When it looks like the party is going to win, create an environment for a decent story. Stretch it out so everyone gets to do something cool (including you!).
It's going to be a lot of work to make Mythic work as intended in this AP. Judge how much time you want to spend rewriting the encounters and go from there.
Beyond that I would encourage you to run the AP. The storylines are great. There is a lot of room for player interaction.
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I have thought of making it more of an enviromental thing that affects the PCs from just 1 hit splatting the BBEG in the curb.
Shifting ground, lava, broken terrain, water and such. There are mythic feats and skills that allow you to by pass this but it seems most people are going to take the make the BBEG go splat abilities.
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The changes I have decided to make:
1. We are keeping mythic rules and will level up via GM fiat at the appropriate times listed in the books
2. Regain (1d4 + tier) power per day
3. Wild arcana is now a standard action and does not get the spell level boost.
4. Fleet charge is now a standard action that allows the player to make a full attack after moving his speed. This does not bypass DR
5. Legendary Item path ability has been removed
6. Amazing Initiative now only grants an initiative bonus equal to half tier, cannot use mythic power for another standard action.
7. Improved Initiative has been removed
8. Mythic Power attack has been removed
9. Mythic improved critical has been removed
10. Mythic vital strike has been removed
11. Rods may not be used in conjunction with mythic spells
12. Mythic haste has been removed
13. Characters are a 20 point buy
14. No dual path
15. Will be using scropion's stat blocks
16. HP of all mook enemies maximized
17. All single enemies now have cohorts
18. Stat increases gained via mythic cannot be granted to your highest stat
For those of you have run this, will this be sufficient to provide some challenge to the players? If not what am I leaving out?
The changes I have decided to make:
1. We are keeping mythic rules and will level up via GM fiat at the appropriate times listed in the books
2. Regain (1d4 + tier) power per day
3. Wild arcana is now a standard action and does not get the spell level boost.
4. Fleet charge is now a standard action that allows the player to make a full attack after moving his speed. This does not bypass DR
5. Legendary Item path ability has been removed
6. Amazing Initiative now only grants an initiative bonus equal to half tier, cannot use mythic power for another standard action.
7. Improved Initiative has been removed
8. Mythic Power attack has been removed
9. Mythic improved critical has been removed
10. Mythic vital strike has been removed
11. Rods may not be used in conjunction with mythic spells
12. Mythic haste has been removed
13. Characters are a 20 point buy
14. No dual path
15. Will be using scropion's stat blocks
16. HP of all mook enemies maximized
17. All single enemies now have cohorts
18. Stat increases gained via mythic cannot be granted to your highest statFor those of you have run this, will this be sufficient to provide some challenge to the players? If not what am I leaving out?
I just hate that you have to make 18 different changes to make Mythic rules 'playable'. I hope you haven't left anything out - that's already a lot to keep track of.
I too will be running WotR soon (about 5 month is soon for me), and after reading all the threads about balance, as well as the fact that learning a whole new set of rules does really make me all that giddy, i thought of dropping mythic.
My players have no problem with that... still, i feel that giving them some Mythic abilities would be nice. At first i thought of limiting to 5 Tiers (or less), but that still means learning a lot of new stuff.
Then i thought why not ditch the Mythic Paths and give characters only the "Base Mythic Abilities" (no feats, no paths abilities); perhaps even nerfing those a bit (for example: limited number of mythic power points, and other such things). And even then, limit the number of tiers they get.
Any thoughts?
I'd say that its the 3rd tier ability that is the most powerful of all mythic abilities; the one that grants an extra standard action. However, by nerfing everything else it should save a lot of work for you.
Going to be running this soon, and there's lots of useful advice in this thread. We'll see how it goes.
Might I suggest using the Alternative Mythic Feats I created in this thread here? They provide alternative abilities that are interesting and different than many regular Feats.
To be honest, I rather like the Hero Point system I came up with. It's much easier to keep track of and simplifies the rules! But if you're using Mythic, not allowing "mythic feat enhancers" helps reduce some of the power creep.
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Going to be running this soon, and there's lots of useful advice in this thread. We'll see how it goes.
Best advice I can offer you is to keep it simple. If you're going to skip Mythic, don't institute 20 all new homebrew rules to just make up for it.
Extra character levels at what would be Mythic tier 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 10. That's all you really need to compensate and it'll make your life as a GM infinitely easier.
More confirmation of what I see on paper. Mythic Adventures was the biggest rules design failure Paizo has ever released. I bet they will take this book and forget about it. Probably why we haven't seen much errata for the book, even though it needs it more than any rules book I've read. It was great idea, but extremely poor execution.
Pretty lame that Mythic Adventures is nearly impossible to run as is because the Wrath of the Righteous story is damn good. I put the story up there with their best APs. If they could have nailed the Mythic Adventures rules, it would have been much more user friendly.
More confirmation of what I see on paper. Mythic Adventures was the biggest rules design failure Paizo has ever released. I bet they will take this book and forget about it. Probably why we haven't seen much errata for the book, even though it needs it more than any rules book I've read. It was great idea, but extremely poor execution.
Pretty lame that Mythic Adventures is nearly impossible to run as is because the Wrath of the Righteous story is damn good. I put the story up there with their best APs. If they could have nailed the Mythic Adventures rules, it would have been much more user friendly.
I have to second the opinion (though by now its probably fifty-seconded) that Wrath of the Righteous is a superb AP and ranks among the very best they've put out there. The story simply didn't need the distraction of a convoluted and complicated ruleset (Mythic) to be laid on top of an already convoluted and complicated ruleset (Pathfinder) to be told. Its beautiful without those new rules and, if adopted properly, finally, for the first time in any AP, actually lets you play a character to 20th level and even beyond. Just imagine, actually getting to USE your capstone ability for once in all of Paizo's published material!
I ran Kingmaker to 20, just so my players could use their capstone ability. It is pretty fun, even though it is hard to run as a DM. I'll get my players to 20 in this one. It's going to be hard as poorly as Mythic Adventures is designed. Very hard. I think my Mythic Template should give me a nice starting point that I'll refine as I see how these abilities work.
It could easily have been a 1-20 module without Mythic - all that would be needed is for the players to have some minor artifacts to improve their survivability.
Heck, when you get down to it, Mummy's Mask did that: the players get their hands on a major artifact at the end of the 2nd module and keep it.
They even include (as side-encounters) artifacts in Book 2 and 3 that could be acquired. I'm sure any GM who did include those regretted it quickly as things went even more pear-shaped. But they could likely be included for non-Mythic characters going through the AP.
That may, in fact, be the solution for a future 1-20 AP. Provide artifacts for the characters - they could even be multi-part artifacts that increase in power as the players get more parts of it. The artifacts could provide damage resistance and the like which would let the characters face more powerful foes worth more experience... and thus face the increasing level of danger that WotR was supposed to provide but failed to.
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I might sound like a total idiot by this point, but I have still hope for the mythic ruleset, I like a lot of the new abilities and the new build options this creates.
Is is just, that the numbers break down even quicker than in normal pathfinder, and there is a certain multiplicative nature of certain abilities.
And while Wotr does have it's issues, Kingmaker requires A LOT of additional work - at least, that is how it ended for me. My players were very quickly sick and tired of random encounters, and I had to cook up some more political intrigue including Mivon.
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I've taken to not even bothering with most random encounters.
You see, time is a precious commodity for my friends and I. We meet for games maybe once a month and game for up to four hours of that time. When even a minor combat encounter can take over half an hour to deal with (and is mostly pointless if only two people got to act) then that's a half hour not spent on the main storyline.
Back in my youth we used to game weekly for six to eight hours at a time. But we have lives now. RPGs are something that brings four or five friends together (some online) for fun... but we have lives outside of that. So extraneous details are getting cut by me. And I'll continue to cut them to streamline the game.
That sounds exactly like what is happening with my group. :)
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I'm in the opposite boat (nearly 50 and still 4-5 game sessions a week), but I too have removed almost all random encounters. It's not just burning game time, it's that "just another ho-hum fight against some generic monster" adds nothing to the game. Even my combat-craving kids' game (Serpent's Skull on Wednesday with two 10-year-olds and three 13-year-olds) sees them quickly tire of non-plot-driven encounters.
So I have my groups roll for random encounters. I have them roll on the table. I look up the encounter. If it's something cool or interesting (Pezock in SS, or a stray glabrezu in WotR that I feel I can do something fun with) I go ahead and run it. If it's "1d4 island lizards" or "2d6 babaus" I just skip it because I know the party's going to win without taking significant losses, and it adds nothing to my story.
Instead, I'll try to have some ideas for neat things they might encounter in the Worldwound ("You wake up to find your bedroll full of human body parts, with eyes in the dirt gazing at you and blinking curiously"), and rolled encounters result in things like that.
In short, for my groups random encounters are there to make the story more interesting, not to add combat and XP. So I skip all the "vanilla" ones.
Actually, one thing I did with my Reign of Winter game before dropping the Random Encounters was to use a rolled random encounter for atmosphere (inspired from someone talking about it on the forums in fact) - the group found Yeti footprints crossing their path. That was their Yeti encounter. Not the actual monster. Just footprints.
I haven't had an issue with mythic power points, my players burn through them fast. Like on your turn you spend a free action for amazing initiative, you use shadow stealth and move action, as a swift action you Fleet Charge and as an Immediate action you surge the die to hit. You just blew through 4 mythic power points in 1 round. At tier 4 you have 11, that over 1/4 of your power in 1 round. You can blow through it all in 1 encounter. So my players tend to conserve it and nova once in a while.