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First of all, let me explain why I’m posting this: I am very, very disappointed with Mythic Adventures. I’ll try to explain why in as short an amount of text as possible.

To use an analogy of sorts, say that your current Campaign is a Volkswagen – a dependable, versatile vehicle that gets you from A to B (in other words, it gets you through the story)

Now, Mythic Adventures is pure rocket fuel. It says on the tin that you can safely pour it into your Volkswagen and watch the magic happen. So let’s say you bite and chuck the rocket fuel in the gas tank.
Sure enough, you’ll be in for a wild ride and have lots of fun! But your car isn’t going to last...

Naturally, there are going to be people reading this post and saying “That’s complete nonsense – Mythic works fine with me!” And I’m sure it does. But those are the people (we continue here with our little analogy) who have traded in their Volkswagen for an actual rocket ship, which runs on rocket fuel. And what does a rocket ship do? It goes thousands of miles per hour in a straight line and takes you to the stars at breakneck speed while you leave the normal world behind entirely. And that is what Mythic Adventures does. You either sign up for the power trip campaign where it’s all taken to the next level, or you don’t and you end up with a car wreck.

Permit me to explain in a little more detail here. I do not have a problem with the Mythic abilities being overpowered. After all, this is Mythic Adventures, it’s supposed to be high-powered. What bothers me to no end, however, is that the powers are all but trivial to use.

As famously quoted by a certain superhero: “With great power comes great responsibility.” I’ve always liked that theme. Take Clerics, for example. They are allowed a small modicum of divine power, but are restricted to using it responsibly, lest they anger the Divine and lose their powers altogether. Or Paladins, whose tenets are even more restrictive. Heck, even Wizards are kept in check by the need to keep spellbooks, ingredients and all – they owe respect to the art of Wizardry, you might say. Now I imagined that Mythic Power (cue children’s choir) would have a similar caveat to encourage responsible use. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Each day, Mythic characters gain a pool of ‘power points’. How much? Three plus double their Mythic Tier. That’s 5 points right from the onset, all the way up to 23 points at the high end of the scale. Consider now that these points fuel the really neat powers – those who can really turn around encounters. Even the most lowly Mythic characters (assuming a party of four) have 20 of these to spend each day. And they don’t even need to do anything to get them. When was the last time you threw over five respectable encounters at the party each day? Unless you keep the pressure on 24/7 (and that means you’re flying a rocket ship!) there is no way you’ll be able to deplete the party’s power points before they refresh at the start of the next day – let alone present them with continually believable challenges.

So, If you were hoping to hear something like this at the table:
“OK, we’ve wounded the Mythic Troll King and he seems staggered. Should I use my Mythic Ability now or wait until we really need it? Oooh – this is so exciting – I can’t decide!”

Forget it. Prepare instead for something like this:
“OK, I still have four points of Mythic Power left for today and we’re nearly in the city anyway. I’m going to use them all on those two kobolds for a bit of fun. Whee!

There’s nothing wrong with you if you think that the second situation sounds like fun. It IS fun. But it can hardly be called Mythic, can it? Some of you might argue that the DM should, in this case sic some bandits or monsters on them in the city to ‘punish’ the players for flaunting their powers. As soon as you, as a DM, agree to step into such an arms race, however, you are boarding the rocket ship and mumbling good-byes to your good old Volkswagen campaign.

I’ll say it again: the problem is not the powers. The problem is that they can be used so trivially that it all becomes a joke.

On the meaninglessness of rewards

Mythic Rocketship... err... I mean ‘Adventures’. Also has a chapter devoted to Mythic Boons. A Mythic Boon is a reward you receive for performing an act of Mythic proportions. To name but a few:
- Exceed the DC of a skill check by 20 or more
- Defeat a Mythic creature who is at full hit points in a single blow
- Score three critical hits in a row without failing an attack roll.

All pretty much entirely luck-based and unlikely to happen. Still, when it DOES happen, I agree that the PC has indeed committed an act of epic proportions. So, what does he get, you wonder?

One Mythic Power point.

Oh.
Go on – re-read that bit and count em. One. It’s completely and utterly pointless. Say we’re back in the Mythic Troll-King’s chambers and the Fighter somehow manages to land three crits in a row. The whole table gasps in awe as that final threat confirmation comes up a nat twenty and the DM grants the PC a Mythic Power point. Cool. What’s he supposed to do with it? In all likelihood, the Troll-King is now very, very dead. It was probably the final climactic encounter in the adventure, right before the heroes collect the loot and rest up. Remember how you automatically regain all of your power points every day? That Boon was meaningless.
Of course, this might be the sort of Campaign where the Mythic Troll King was only defending the door to the chambers of the Troll Emperor who bursts into the room seconds later... But then I dare say you’re flying a rocketship through a galaxy chock-full of Mythic Monsters. And as we all know: if everyone’s special, no-one is.

I’m nearly at the end of this litany now, so if you’ve stuck with me this long, you might as well read the final bit.

Mixing it up: Mythic PC’s in an ordinary world.

In short, the book boldly states: “You can do this, and it will be fine!” In other words, the text on the tin says that it’s entirely safe to pour rocket fuel into your Volkswagen. I’m here to tell you that that’s a bad idea.

The reasoning according to the designers is simple:” Mythic Ranks fit right into the CR system.” Har-har! Seriously guys - pull the other one!

Now hold up for a bit: I like the current CR system. It provides fairly accurate, at-a-glance information on how encounters might go. It’s simple and flexible. Of course, if you’ve played Pathfinder at all, you know it can be broken in several ways. Abusing templates, exploiting certain combinations etcetera. However, that potential for abuse does not make CR a bad system. Let’s continue.

The math goes like this: for every two Mythic Tiers a character has, add +1 to its Challenge Rating.

Excuse me?

Let’s take a closer look, shall we? I’m DM’ing for a party of 4 first level adventurers tonight and I’m going to have them face off with 4 average encounters with 4 Mythic NPCs, one at a time. To keep things simple, we’re making four 1st-level Fighters with two Mythic Tiers. A 1st-level Fighter is a CR1/2 encounter. So, bumping that up by a point to account for Mythic Tiers, we’ve got a CR1 encounter; a perfectly average fight that should cost the party around 20% of their resources. No biggie. Or so, they would have you believe...

I’m not even looking at the stats, not looking for loopholes or obscure synergies to beef up these guys. All I’m doing is giving them their standard allotment of Mythic Power points – 7, if you remember correctly – and two Mythic Path abilities. In fact, let’s just give them one ability (to keep things ‘fair’). That ability would be Absorb Blow and its as common and obvious a choice as, for example, the Power Attack feat. Only without any prerequisites.
What have we created? That would be a CR 1 encounter with in excess of 80 hit points! Absorb Blow is a little bit of awesome that allows you to ignore up to 10 points of damage from a single source at the cost of a single Mythic Power point. Also, it gives you DR1/epic for a full minute afterwards. Yes, our CR1 Mythic Fighter NPC can pull that neat little trick 7 times a day (naturally, he’ll blow it all on a single encounter), effectively giving him over 80 hit points! If the party manages to defeat him, they’ll gain 400xp for their troubles. His three buddies are waiting down the road, by the way.

It doesn’t take a genius to spot that this is just sloppy design. It’s bad math. Worst of all, it can’t be countered. What are you going to do? Toss in more Mythic monsters? Prepare for takeoff!

So, is Mythic Adventures a complete waste of time and money?

Well, no – I believe there’s stuff to be salvaged. Here’s four bits of advice to make it work if you wish to run a long-term Mythic Campaign in an ordinary world where the heroes are special, but they are also challenged and choices are hard. If you prefer the inexorable powertrip rollercoaster ride, the book is fine for you.

1) Reduce the maximum amount of Mythic Power points per day to HALF the character’s Tier, with a minimum of 1. So, A 1st Tier Character has a single point and doesn’t gain an extra point until Tier 3. I’m willing to bet they’ll treat those powers as special now. Don’t forget to make the same adjustment for Mythic Monsters.

2) Characters regain a single point of Mythic Power after a minimum of 8 hours of rest. The rest is mandatory and cannot be circumvented by other powers and abilities that allow you to regain ability uses without rest. That means a 6th-Tier character will need to rest at least 3 days in order to fully regain his 3 Mythic Power points if they were expended.

3) Remove the ‘mythic’ requirement from all Boon conditions. The only requirement is that the foe has a CR above the character’s ADJUSTED level (see below)

4) Consider that each Mythic Tier possessed by a creature adjusts its CR by +1. So, A 1st level/1st Tier character is CR 1. A 3rd Level/2nd Tier character is CR 4.

What we’ve done here is diluting the rocket fuel a little, so we can still drive our trusty, sturdy, proven, Volkswagen campaign through the world, only this time it goes quite a bit faster and has an awesome little flame coming from the tailpipe.
It might still blow up if the mechanic (aka the DM) doesn’t give it a regular checkup, but overall, you’re good to go now.

Hope this was useful to you. Feed-back is welcome.

Just a quick question:

I always assumed the damage bonus from Power Attack was doubled, since it's neither precision damage, nor an extra damage die granted by a weapon.

However, the Mythic Power attack feat explicitly states that the bonus damage IS doubled on a crit.

Can anyone clarify?

According to the rules, Mythic Characters can:

"draw upon a wellspring of power to accomplish amazing deeds and cheat fate. This power is used by a number of different abilities. Each day, you can expend an amount of Mythic power equal to 3 plus double your Mythic tier. This amount is your maximum amount of Mythic power. If an ability allows you to regain uses of your Mythic power, you can never have more than this amount."

Now, I've run the playtest and I thought 3+(#Tier) power per day was plenty cool already.

Then I started re-reading this bit. Nowhere does it say that you automatically gain your full complement of Mythic power points every day.

Hm. Could it be so?

I looked into similar 'refresh points'-type powers in the rules. Grit points, spells per day,... you name it. They all have the specific instruction to '(re)gain X at time Y'.

Furthermore, there's the mechanic of Mythic boons to regain Mythic power uses and certain Mythic artifacts that can leech Mythic power with a succesful hit 1-5 times a day.

Interpreting the Mythic power refresh as automatic, these rules seem pretty trivial to me. In the campaign I'm running, I had trouble depleting the player's arsenal of power points each day, which stood at a mere 4. Sure, you can always chuck in more encounters, but that would have seemed contrived.

So anyway, this got me thinking. Have we been playing this the wrong way? Regardless, I believe the wording here should be adapted to explicitly state the way Mythic Power is refreshed, one way or the other.

I'm currently rebuilding the Werewolf to better suit my own campaign. While I'm not really touching the core concepts of Lycanthropy, I would prefer 'my' werewolves to be more like those from contemporary movies; Large creature, claw attacks, regeneration etc.
Now, I've managed to do the math on most of those extra's and I'm quite pleased with the result vs. CR.
However, I'm left wondering how swapping DR10/Silver for Regeneration 10/Silver factors into the creature's CR.

In your opinion, which is better? DR? Regen? And regardless, how would a change affect the Werewolf's CR? If it's not an even trade, what would you suggest I add / subtract to get a fair 'challenge vs. CR' creature?

All advice welcome!

I admit this is a total newbie question, but the issue has cropped up in my game and I can't seem to find a straight answer to it either in the CRB or on the forum...

Here's what I'd like to know (if possible with some sort of rules reference backing the answer):

1) Can spells and special abilities that affect a 'creature touched' also be used to affect the caster?

2) If such a spell or SA has casting time of 1 standard action and duration of 1 round, when does the effect kick in?

Concrete example: the PC's encounter 3 L1 Inquisitors serving the War domain and thus having the Battle Rage SP (You can touch a creature as a standard action to give it a bonus on melee damage rolls equal to 1/2 your Inquisitor level for 1 round (minimum +1)).
Combat starts and each Inquisitor uses Battle Rage on himself as a standard action. So:

1) Can they even do that? Or do they need to have a manly group hug to share the BR?

2) Since using BR is a standard action and its duration is 1 round, when does the effect (+1 damage) kick in? Is it on the same combat round? If yes, it's useless anyhow since the Inquisitors cannot attack anymore on the same round. If it's on the next combat round, that makes the power more useful. However, if that's the case, does the same logic apply when Inq.A uses BR to buff Inq.B in combat round 1? i.e. does the power only start affecting Inq.2 in combat round 2 or does he already benefit in combat round 1, provided B hasn't acted yet?

Thanks for clearing this up :-)

I usually re-do the math on any creatures I include in my encounters and I spot tiny little errors now and then...
Is there a place where such things can be posted for inclusion in a future errata doc or how does that work?
For instance, the Skeletal Champion is listed as having a Touch AC of 12 and a +1 Dex bonus... that can't be right (medium creature, no special items)

Reference:

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/monsters/skeletalChampion.html#_skeletal -champion

I'm currently running a Mythic Campaign with the playtest rules.
My PC's are Level 4 / Mythic Tier 1 and will soon face their first greater trial freeing a small town from a terrible curse.
One of the party - a Ranger - has chosen the Mythic Champion path and the 'To the Death' ability that comes with it.

To the Death allows you to continue taking standard actions beyond 0 hp without the loss of extra hit points. Tough, but not necessarily a gamebreaker.

However, as I was reading through the playtest doc, I came across the Mythic Toughness Feat which I'm absolutely sure the Ranger will take the next chance he gets. Mythic Toughness doubles the extra hp you gain from regular Toughness, which is pretty decent in itself. In addition, if you are reduced below 0hp (as often happens to our Ranger friend) you gain DR 10 / epic.

Now that seems like a combination that'll give me, the DM, problems...

I like the current item/power curve in my campaign (slow treasure progression) and am not inclined to start sending enemies armed with +5 Magic Weapons into the fray anytime soon. If I don't, however, I'll be facing a nigh-invulnerable Ranger at 6th or 7th level who will soak up hit points until below 0 at which point he will slowly, steadily (he's staggered after all) start killing everything with little risk to himself.
Now I realize that there are PLENTY of tactics left to use to lay him low - I just don't want to have to resort to those every time I want to provide a challenging encounter - it would seem too contrived (always the enemy wizards, the capture attempts etc).
Anything I do add to the mix that poses an additional threat to the Ranger-tank will likely hurt the other players also.

I fear such a powercombo will take the fun out of good, healthy, bread-and-butter combat encounters, as I can envision the group saying "Let the Ranger handle 'em and stand back, guys - it'll take a little longer, but it will cost us a fraction of the resources. We'll just heal him back up to full hp when he's done!"

Any advice on whether this has been errata'ed (scoured forum, can't find it)? Looks to me like this one needs fixing...

If a Shadow rolls a 20 with its touch attack and confirms the Critical Hit, is the Ability Damage (1d6 STR) doubled (2d6 STR)?

This is one thing I couldn't find in the rulebooks; it could very well be that I'm just not seeing it, but I would appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction.

Hi,

My PC party is set to trek through a dangerous marsh next session and I wanted to add a patch of quicksludge to their challenges...

My basic idea was this:

- A Survival DC 15 check notices that there's quicksludge in the area.
- Anyone entering a quicksludge square becomes stuck in the sludge and starts sinking. DC 18 Strength checks can be made each round to break free and enter an adjacent square. A failed check means you sink deeper.
- Sinking PC's have d4 rounds before they become submerged.
- The rules for being rescued are otherwise identical to those found on p.427 of the PFRPG Core Rulebook.

Now, I want to assign a correct CR to this hazard, but I can't work out how to do that using the guidelines presented in the book.
If I use the guidelines for creating traps, everything quickly adds up to a very high CR: Liquid CR +5, Never miss CR +2, Multiple targets CR+1, ... That makes CR 8 already! And I don't believe for one second that my quicksludge hazard is in any way comparable to a CR 8 trap; it will delay the PC's - surely. Maybe one of them will stumble in and catch a cold after being rescued. Worst case - one of 'em drowns. No way does that compare to a CR 8 encounter (which I assume would wipe them out entirely within six rounds).

Any advice on the matter is much appreciated!

Edit: I know I could easily substitute the drowning rules for a set amount of damage-per-round, but I don't want to do it like that.

-B

First of all, I want to say I don’t have much experience designing PFRPG encounters. I’ve played 3.5 quite a while ago and have only recently started DM’ing a homebrewed Mythic campaign (Grey Dawn) for four 1st-level (well, 3rd in the mean time) players.
Secondly, I’m not posting the following as a rules suggestion or anything like that. I simply wish to present you with the reasoning behind designing my own adventures and balancing the number of encounters per sleep cycle. For me, it works – so far at least- but your mileage may vary quite a bit, depending on the level of your players (no idea how this will scale at higher levels) or level of actual game experience (experienced players with strong builds).

Designing encounters in PF is relatively easy, but for a new GM with little experience it can be a daunting task to design a string of encounters; you don’t want the adventure to be a spring picnic, nor do you want it to devolve into a curbstomp TPK. Of course, there’s always reference materials, such as existing modules and good ol’ trial-and-error’. However, the following rules of thumb I extrapolated are far less time-consuming than that and seem to work, for me at least.

The idea is to assign an ‘Attrition Rate’ to every type of encounter (Easy, Average, Challenging, Hard and Epic). This AR (for short) reflects the amount of resources the encounter is likely to consume. Of course, this is nothing new; I got the idea from the 3.5 DMG initially:

“Since every game session probably includes many encounters, you don’t want to make every encounter one that taxes the PCs to their limits. They would have to stop the adventure and rest for an extensive period after every fight, and that slows down the game. An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PCs’ level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources — hit points, spells, magic item uses, etc. This means, on average, that after about four encounters of the party’s level the PCs need to rest, heal, and regain their spells. A fifth encounter would probably wipe them out.”

So that provided me with a baseline: If APL=X, then a CR(X) encounter has an Attrition Rate of 20%, as it would cost the party around one fifth of their resources.
In order to allow a little room for error, I decided (entirely arbitrarily) that I would not normally tax the PC’s beyond four-fifths of their capacity. In other words, 80% total AR worth of encounters before resting.

Still with me? Ok then.
Since I find it easier to work with 100% as a suggested maximum for AR, I reworked the numbers to reflect this: Average encounters have a 25% AR rate now (20 divided by 80 to get the new percentage)

Then the following paragraph allowed me to extrapolate AR to lower and higher CR encounters:

“The PCs should be able to take on many more encounters lower than their level but fewer encounters with Encounter Levels higher than their party level. As a general rule, if the EL is two lower than the party’s level, the PCs should be able to take on twice as many encounters before having to stop and rest. Two levels below that, and the number of encounters they can cope with doubles again, and so on.”

It makes sense that if an encounter with CR = (APL-2) consumes half as much resources, an encounter with CR=(APL+2) consumes double as much. Not sure about the math behind it all, but that’s what I thought sounded plausible anyway. Extrapolating the numbers, that gives us:

• 1 Dead Easy CR(X-2) encounter has a 12% AR
• 1 Easy CR(X-1) encounter has a 18% AR
• 1 Average CR(X) encounter has an attrition rate of 25%
• 1 Challenging CR(X+1) encounter has 37% AR
• 1 Hard CR (X+2) encounter has a 50% AR
• 1 Very Hard CR (X+3) encounter has a 75% AR
• 1 Epic CR (X+4) encounter has an 100% AR

(note that I changed the classes somewhat to account for APL-2 and APL+4 encounters, not mentioned in the PFRPG Core book)

The rest is pretty easy; when designing an adventure I now simply add up the Attrition Rates of encounters in chronological order until I reach around 100%. At that point, I ask myself if it would be a good idea to give the PC’s an opportunity to rest for a bit. Of course, they are free to rest before that point; if I don’t think they’ve earned it, however, there’s a (greater) chance of encountering a wandering monster – see below.

Now I want to say once more that this is nothing more than a helpful DM tool which allows you to gauge more or less accurately when your PC’s will decide to set up camp. Feel free to allow them to do so sooner or much later – that’s the DM’s prerogative. Use these ideas as much or as little as you like.

Lastly, I’ve some personal advice that I use in conjunction with the AR guidelines, inspired by the excellent articles mentioned below.

- Low-level encounters: I use these quite often, as it adds to the sense of heroism in the campaign. Read this: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2050/roleplaying-games/revisiting-encou nter-design. AR lets you gauge how much of those they can take and thus invites you to use them more often.

- Wandering monsters: don’t forget about these! Wandering monsters discourage PC parties from taking early naps to stock up on spells, hit points etc. Also, fighter-type PC’s tend to be less useful early in the adventure when magic-users are still chock-full of lethal spells but become more important later on as those spell reserves are nearly or fully depleted. Read the full article here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1668/roleplaying-games/the-death-of-the -wandering-monster Anyway, I nowadays always keep a few wandering monster encounters on hand to use whenever the party declares it an early night and I don’t feel they’ve earned it yet . Chances of encountering such a wandering monster are equal to 100-(AR since last rest) – or whatever you want it to be as a DM. I also tend to make such an encounter hard enough to bring the total Attrition Rate before resting close to 100%. Again, do what you like – it’s just guidelines.

Enjoy!

-B