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So I offered to run the next game after we finished a rather enjoyable run of Rise of the Runelords. I have always wanted to have players go the extra planar extra mile and vanquish a demon lord, so I am incredibly excited to be running Wrath of the Righteous. Thank you to the Paizo crew for writing an invigorating chance to allow players to take on the big bad evils.

At this point we've just finished book 1, and haven't gotten into the real crazy stuff that is Mythic. As an avid follower of the forums here, I've seen many of the stories stating how challenging it can become to really have an involving fight with 4 mythic characters, let alone 7 of them. I've also been reading that it's pivotal to adjust the campaign to your players' needs, as suggested by the Devs, so that's what this thread is attempting to address. Alternative solutions to providing compelling (and hopefully challenging) combat situations that subvert normal game mechanics to resolve the imbalances Mythic gameplay has the potential to cause.

I've run hundreds and hundreds of hours of 3.5, and have finished 3 different high level campaigns. The players I've ran for have often been optimized, and I am very used to adjusting on the fly to wacky intensely powerful ideas that the group comes up with. I'm still nervous about providing a strong challenge for my group, but I've found that as long as I put forth the effort to offer a good fight (even if they absolutely trounce it) all 7 of my players have a wonderful time. So, here is my effort to lose every fight to my godly PCs in a way that will keep them interested.

My solution has been to keep the flavor of fights, but adjust game mechanics in brutal and completely non-standard ways. I call these "puzzle fights", as winning the fights is nearly impossible without the PCs finding the key to bypassing the challenge I present. Now, with that said, there is always some off-the-wall solution that a Wizard or Cleric will toss out now and then that throws me and bypasses everything, but I've found that keeping a "yes" attitude makes those players feel incredibly accomplished for having found a neat solution on their own.

With all that said, let me present one of my simpler early puzzle fight examples that I've used against the players (it should be noted this was pre-mythic gameplay, but they're still twinked to the max):

The Abrikandilu demon is pillaging a besieged shop (pg. 28 of Worldwound Incursion) and tearing it apart trying to destroy all the beautiful things. The PCs rush in ready to smash the demon to bits, but on it's turn as a move action it explodes into mirror images (19 of them, to be exact). The players were balking at how to attempt to damage this beast with 1/20 odds of having a chance at hitting it. They tried swinging at it while closing their eyes to try to have a 50/50 shot of hitting it, but the images make noise and chatter, causing them to have to reroll each 50% chance of hitting (but still giving them some chance of hitting it). Three rounds of swinging away at it occured before one of the PCs noticed that it was never attacking the players, but moving from one mirror to the next in the building and taking it's turn to sunder the mirrors apart. The quote "how the heck do we beat this thing, all we have to interact with are these stupid mirrors" was a favorite line of mine at this point, said by our Paladin. The bard rushed over and grabbed a mirror, and they noticed that the images didn't reflect in the mirror and that the demon hissed and shied away from looking into it. They could look into the mirror and swing at the demon with a 50% chance of hitting, which managed to score them a few more hits over the next round before the Abrikandilu sundered that mirror as well. Finally, the wizard grabbed one of the mirrors and forcibly brandished it at the Abrikandilu, which allowed it a saving throw that it failed. The Abrikandilu's images were absorbed into the mirror and it was stunned for a round unable to deal with the sight of it's own reflection. This opening was enough for the melee to smite the demon down and save the shop owners, who were very grateful and suggested the players keep a mirror or two just in case.

I have more examples of scenarios like this, but here's the basics of the fight: with so much melee damage in my party, there's no way the single demon could survive without absolutely absurd defenses. So that's what I gave it. Surmounting those defenses required noticing what it was doing and the environment that was around it, and using those to the player's advantage. The melee felt they did their part, smashing the demon down, and those players that aren't as aggressively inclined has a puzzle to solve to allow the damaging character's their opportunity to defeat the enemy.

This sort of situation allowed the players to feel like it was a very challenging fight, even though they took almost no damage at all. Now, I definitely didn't threaten them with death on this early puzzle fight, but they still walked away from the game session feeling involved and delighted at the interesting situation. So I'm calling that a GM win.

I'll be writing out more puzzle situations, if only to allow my own typing to give me ideas for future fights, but right now there's some HTML coding I'm forced to get back to. A brief summary of the players in my party, and what house rule modifications I've made, will follow this post as soon as I'm able to find the time to do so. I'd also be remiss not to note that many of my puzzle mechanics, for future fights, are inspired by Raid Boss mechanics on various online MMOs, as I've felt some of those fights were absolutely epic.

If you've managed to read this much, please take a moment to comment about any interesting puzzle mechanics or ideas you've had. Are there moments in WoTR that you feel could have been modified to be more interesting? Were there specific fights you felt were "iconic" to the story, that deserve to be truly challenging? Any feedback is welcome.

Thanks for reading this wall of words. +1xp for you!

It is pretty disheartening to see the creative director basically stick his fingers in his ears and say "lalala it's the gms fault not ours" every high level adventure 12+ needs massive tinkering to not completely fall apart from my experience. this is from someone who has been running D20 system since it came out, you have to try hard to NOT break the system.

It could SOMETIMES be a case of inexperienced or bad DM's but not acknowledging the glut of terrible problems high level play has and addressing them in the adventure design (make the battles harder) seems to give off a "I don't give a crap people will buy this stuff regardless" kind of attitude.

"There are no problems everything is going according to plan"

*SIGH*

I love the adventure paths (greatest rpg idea ever) but there is big room for improvement in the back halves of these paths, not even seeing a problem is really disheartening.

Huh, I absolutely didn't see what he said in that light. Strange how something can be interpreted so differently between two people.

I suppose it depends on what you wanted the AP to provide for your purchase. If your intent was to purchase it so that you could use the mechanics of it to challenge your players, I can see why needing to modify it to your needs would be a frustration.

Much of the reason I wanted it was to find a strong story core that I could bend my own mechanics around. In that light, it's been an excellent purchase. The statistics of NPCs and monsters presented I do tend to greatly modify, but thanks to the forum resources it's not a huge challenge to do. Really, the gold within the pages comes from the story presented, which I absolutely love.

With the amount of responses on the WotR forums we've had from Mr. Dinosaur, I certainly don't think the intention is to say "people will buy this stuff regardless". I think it's to clarify that the mechanics will cater to a less experienced player base, while the story will still be a strong reason to purchase the AP even if you're hosting a more experienced group of players.

I'm definitely in the latter category, as some of my players have made monstrously powerful characters. I'm looking forward to modifying the encounters heavily and adding my own mechanics to give them a challenge, but I absolutely respect that sometimes that can be quite a lot of work for me or any GM.

Forget talking to the GM. Just do it! If he plays with gm fiat with this, then grab your dice, stick them in your pocket, fold up your character sheet, then rip it into pieces and shower the table with confeti and walk away...either a gm let's the players help tell the story, or the gm loses players...its that simple. He needs to be able to adapt to what you do as much as you have to adapt to what he does.

Some day I hope someone makes a web series about what a gaming table would look like if people followed this sort of forum advice.

A creative player I had the opportunity to play PFS with had a neat solution to that problem, which was to pick a sub-par character focus and optimize it as much as possible. A master at using a whip, a crossbow ranged character, etc. He did quite well, but it was very balanced by him having to account for the inherent drawback of his character focus.

Personally, the most challenging and enjoyable encounters I've ran are ones that have "puzzle combat" scenarios. I'll elaborate.

* Example: Main villain is being funneled energy from 12 acolytes around the room. While the energy is being channeled the boss has DR 30/-, regen 15, and can make ranged energy attacks similar to a lantern archon. Destroying the acolytes makes the villain vulnerable, which should be able to be deduced from your description of the situation.

That's a pretty simple situation where it's obvious that the players need to solve puzzle part A (destroying acolytes) before they can resolve fight B (boss). It's very important that the puzzle has hints before hand, is able to be learned mid-fight, or is very apparent in its resolution.

I have an abundant number of situations where you can add flavor like this. The only challenge is thinking outside of the rule books and creating effects that don't exist within pathfinder. It's not for everybody, but for the groups I've ran for, it challenged the optimized characters (and the un-optimized) to have to come up with new strategies. They usually felt elated at their success in such scenarios.

Two of my other personal (less complicated) favorites:

* Scenario 1 (ran by a friend of mine): the boss, vs a level 8 party, has DR 20/(truly greedy person). It was a pirate game and 5 of the 6 players had wound up being rather generous, while one of us was greedy the entire time. As it turns out, the greedy person was the only one who could damage the monster mastermind and take his place, so the entire party had to protect/help this one individual to ensure he could attack them every turn.

* Scenario 2: Three demons that had to be killed at exactly the same time (aka, on the same turn all had to be brought to negative their con), or else they would all receive a heal spell and be brought back to full health. The party had the opportunity to talk with a survivor who fought against the demons and described his regiment being slaughtered by them, so they had clues as to how to defeat them.

I have a huge array of these that I've run in other encounters. Ones where the party had to kill one of them to turn them into a ghost to fight an enemy, ones where the party was forced to possess tiny animals to go into a den and fight a wizards familiar, etc. Mostly what I'm suggesting is that adding raw numbers is probably my least favorite way of challenging powerful characters and that creating your own spells/effects/situations that are puzzling is a very rewarding way to offer a challenge.

Huge fan of your articles and analysis, TarkXT. It seems like you wrote this to inspire people to try to utilize combat maneuvers more often, but sadly this summary did the opposite for me.

Just as an example let’s say the group is fighting a Crucidaemon. At 42 CMD it would seem that any attempt for our, let’s say level 12, group to shove her around would end badly. Or would it?

A +9 initiative isn’t bad. But by now, a forge model group can easily beat that. Our level 12, let’s say Fighter(Cad) really likes the dirty trick maneuver and is wielding a Guisarme he took the dirty trick line up to Quick Dirty trick allowing him to do it as an attack action. His group’s wizard and bard go first. The bard electing to cast Mass Heroism and activating inspire courage while his wizard opts to give the cad a Quickened Enlarge person and casually chucks a waves of fatigue spell at the crucidaemon (we’ll say he rolls the SR which by now he can get a check of around +18 anyway).

So, some quick number crunching here gives the CAD a base CMB after buffs a base CMB check of +24. The Crucidaemon is sitting at a much less mighty 35. This allows the Cad to perform any maneuver he likes on the Crucidaemon on a roll of 11. This is with normal buffs for the level and a debuff which only makes a 1 point difference.

So we have three attacks for the fighter to perform. Obviously we want to use our most invested in maneuver first so we’ll use Dirty trick to start off. With the investment of feats with our class we hit a +31 on our CMD allowing us to blind the crucidaemon for several rounds on our first attack. Our Crucidaemon is now blind taking an additional -2 penalty to armor class knocking her CMD down to 33.

Our next attack is at a -5 penalty knocking our base CMB down to +19 versus 33. With this second attack our CAD gets cheeky and decides to trip her with his guisarme. Because he’s a fighter who actually invests in such things like weapon focus his weapon focus and greater weapon focus feats apply along with his weapon bonus (+2 for now) to get a CMB to trip of 23. A 50/50 shot.

In this case if he hits the trip attempt she’ll be knocked prone granting him a +4 bonus to attack rolls on her. If not it’s unlikely she’ll be able to trip back. For arguments sake let’s say she’s now, prone, blinded, fatigued, and flatfooted. Her CMD drops further down to 29 for this round. With an additional -5 on our last attack making our CMB a +14.

He now opts to attack her now 17 AC with his +17 attack roll. Smashing her in the back and taking an immediate action to Dirty trick her once more through a class ability. At this point it makes no real difference whether or not it affects her since she’s already significantly debuffed by the time the Cad does it.

So by the time the Crucidaemon gets around to acting, she’ll be prone, blinded, fatigued, and possibly entangled. Three of these conditions would cost a standard action to remove to allow her to fight effectively (if at all) and that would just allow the group to pound her with impunity.

Now he could have just straight up full attacked her. And indeed this would have been a fine thing to do. But, keep in mind that at 212hp and 20/good and silver DR the crucidaemon would have most likely survived at full potential to harm the group rather badly.

Now, there are opponents with much higher numbers for CMD but we can get on that later.

It took the party having a devoted exceptional buffer utilizing both of their most optimal attack boosters, a wizard blowing two high level spells, and a maneuver specialized fighter to get the odds to 50/50? That's... painful. So much action economy and damage output completely sacrificed so that we could *possibly* inconvenience the demon? (who is only a single target, and what GM uses only single opponents in serious fights that require so many resources to be used?)

Am I looking at this the wrong way? I really want combat maneuvers to be worthwhile at higher levels. Please help me see what I don't seem to be seeing?

I like to think of my gaming group as being a sports team. The player needs to show up to the matches to participate. If they don't have time for it, then that's fine, but showing up on time is very crucial to the success of your game. In my opinion, it has equal levels of commitment as you'd have to have for a baseball/soccer/dodge-ball/whiffle-bat-extravaganza team.

Alters your place in the initiative order. Without an initiative order to alter, it isn't an available action in my opinion.

I'm also on the "it would be a surprise round" side of this.

I would never play this character, but it was a fun thought experiment that a friend and I created once back in 3.5. I'm sure there are optimizations for pathfinder I didn't discover, but here she is.

Molly Happyfriend, Master Diplomancer

str 7, dex 7, con 14, int 18, wis 13, cha 16

Human Synthesist Summoner 1, Divination Wizard (Foresight) 3

Diplomacy +32

Skill points +4, Ease of Faith trait +1 (also in class, so +3), Charisma +3, 1 Evolution point for Skilled +8 (diplomacy), silver-tongued human racial option +2, Barnaby your trusty pig familiar +3, Circlet of Persuasion +3, skill focus (diplomacy) +3, persuasive +2.

As much invisibility memorized as possible. Wander until you find a place with unhappy people, turn invisible and sneak about talking to them as they try to find you. After interacting for 1 minute (of your 3 minutes of invisibility) you can shift their attitude up to 3 steps, possibly from hostile to friendly (dc 25+their cha to get them to not stab you on sight). Use foresight power of prescience to get two rolls on diplomacy if you feel that'd be helpful. Now your friends can be happy, just like you!

Take profession (tea party hostess) and lead your group of happy new friends to your favorite park for a tea party. If necessary, convince your friends to "give you aid that could result in punishment" providing help on your dangerous adventuring career.

Obviously, this is a silly build and any reasonable DM wont really let it work. Diplomacy has so many DM options available that it really wouldn't work like this, but I just enjoy the concept of a "power gaming" character that skips about invisibly convincing people to be happy and play nice.

I went from "Arcanist will be interesting to try I suppose, and good training wheels for teaching my new players" to "I MUST PLAY THIS, where can I find a group to play this character in?!"

In a game I ran we handed everybody one random beneficial card at character creation. 900 extra gold, a useful NPC mentor, and "play a nonhuman race" were all options. Players were allowed to trade cards as they wished. Worked well for me in keeping nonhuman races feeling special, but your mileage may vary.

First off - whatever you have the most fun doing is the right choice, and it sounds like you're having fun, so keep it up.

If you'd like some suggestions, here are a few ideas that might work for you:

-Falchion will crit more often, if not for as much, and I'd agree with your notion to switch to it. I prefer this personally, as even a x2 crit is a game changer often times. If you expect the game not to last too long (and thus wont eventually get improved critical feat) then greatsword is another excellent choice.

-Weapon specialization is available at fighter 4th, and is a pretty amazing milestone feat to pick up. +2 to damage with your chosen weapon is a wonderful thing. I'd snag that over improved trip.

-Combat Expertise and Power Attack seem to be taking your fighter in two different directions. I'm guessing that your fighter may get more mileage out of dodge, toughness, iron will, or a more passive defense rather than having to reduce your offensive potential.

Obviously, you know your group makeup and what your fighter needs to accomplish better than I do, but off of what you've explained so far those are the changes I would suggest. Good luck! Or in this case, Evil Luck!