So, I have been working on a mythic campaign where I intend for my players to end up at 20th level with all 10 mythic tiers achieved. My problem with this is that I have yet to find any good sources on how to level a party beyond 20. Paizo has stated in the Core Rulebook that you should double the XP required to get to the last level. The problem with this, though, is that if you want to take characters to level 30, they need 1,075,200,000 XP to go from level 29 to 30. Mthic adventures states that level 29 encounters award 6,553,000 XP in total (1,638,400 per person). This would mean, though, that to get to level 30 your party would need to fight 657 average difficulty encounters.
Nope. Not doing it.
So, I decided to see if I could come up with a more reasonable solution. I think I have. Behold.
What I wound up doing was basing the XP needed to get to the next level beyond 20 off of how many encounters the average party of 4 would need, at medium XP progression, to achieve the next level while still going from level 2 to 20. I actually found that when encountering nothing but average difficulty encounters it almost always took about 20 encounters to level. So, I just kept assuming the same thing for levels 21-30 and ended up with level 30 being achieved with a grand total of 114,704,000 XP.
The spreadsheet actually goes into more detail than that, and even has a comparison of my method vs the method using Paizo's numbers. Check it out, let me know what you think.
If I gave my 4th level operative Jack of All Trades at 2nd and Alien Archive at 4th, how much of a bonus would I get to a physical science check to identify a creature if I had no ranks in that skill?
I swear I read something about multiple x2 bonuses stacking but it may just be wishful thinking, as that would give me a +8 bonus to the check just from Operative's Edge.
I just recently started a mythic campaign following a story of my own devising. I will be posting playtest updates on this thread. Got to make this mostly from scratch so updates may be infrequent.
I have only recently started running a mythic campaign. The story is my own creation so the playtesting hasn't really gotten too far yet. I love the concept for Mythic immensely, and look forward to throwing epic baddies at my PC's in a bid to murder their faces.
I have however been looking ahead and have discovered one issue that could be a major problem at higher levels/tiers: the XP curve is ridiculous.
(Author's note: Now I'm going to throw some numbers out, so feel free to double check and see if I go wrong or if I have missed something)
If I read correctly, as a GM we are supposed to award the players XP in accordance of the CR of the encounters, factoring in the adjustment for mythic tiers. The only problem is that when the players get into higher levels they can advance from level to level not in 2-3 ADVENTURES, but in 2-3 ENCOUNTERS. For instance
Spoiler:
A party of with APL 21(14th level/7 tiers) has an encounter of average difficulty (CR 21). The XP reward from this encounter is 409,600. With a party of 5, that's 81,920 XP per player. On slow progression a player hits 14th level at 665,000 and hits 15th at 955,000, a difference of 290,000. That means that they can hit the next level after 4 AVERAGE encounters on SLOW progression. An epic encounter (CR 24) would grant 1,228,800 XP (245,760 per player) and level them up almost instantly.
Mind you, this is only at character level 14 and is the recommended '1 tier per two levels' guideline in mind. I also factored it on a slow progression, as recommended. In other words, what I'm saying is that as far as I can tell this method will never work. There is no way that I can see that could fit that many greater trials in between level gains to stay on the recommended tier progression.
That is why I have devised a method that I intend to try out for my campaign. I plan on giving my players XP based not on the CR of the encounter, but instead I will subtract their mythic tier from the CR of the encounters they face. For example, my party is still only APL 3 (level 2/1 tier) so I am designing the final encounters to my adventures at CR 6. However, I will only be rewarding them the XP of a CR 5 fight. But to compensate for the lack of XP, I will be rewarding the players with the LOOT of a CR 6 encounter.
I think this particular method has several advantages. The first obvious one is that there is no longer any worry about the party leveling too quickly and outpacing their mythic tier progression. Secondly, by awarding loot based on the higher CR I can direct where I want my party to go with relative ease. Yes, sure, you guys can go into the cave. You can even find monsters there that are a challenge, but the loot is going to suck because I don't want you there.
Finally, I feel I should note I am running this campaign on a moderate XP progression. My justification for this is that I have done the math to see how many encounters it takes for a party to level (factoring in encounters at APL-1, APL and APL +1, 2 and 3) during moderate progression and I like the numbers (I can post these somewhere if anyone wants to see them). The party will be getting a God-awful amount of loot (versus a slow campaign), but the fact that my primary villain has access to as much money as he needs (through a fantastic character bio, might I add) will allow me to easily match them in terms of gear. At least for fights that are key to the story.
At any rate, those are my current thoughts on the system, from a GM perspective. Please feel free to comment or bring things I missed to my attention.
