Report of Mythic Adventures Playtest Session (spoilers)

[DigMarx]

On 11/25/12 I GMed the Mythic Adventures Playtest scenario "The Wrath of Nature".

There were 3 players present. We used the existing 7th level builds of the iconic characters Valeros (fighter), Ezren (wizard) and Kyra (cleric). I felt the 7th level builds were appropriate due to the fact that we were running with 3 PCs rather than 4, and the character sheets were readily available and didn't need to be modified for play (beyond adding the 3 mythic tiers).

The players were all experienced and generally made well-considered decisions while refraining from using out-of-character knowledge and/or metagaming.

I ran the monsters in a manner appropriate to their intelligence. The only change I made to the adventure as written was to substitute a Fire Goddess's Blade for the Bow of Erastil after the second encounter. The gp values aren't equal but the swap had a negligible effect on the adventure.

Encounter 1:

The first encounter, with the agile dire wolf, 3 wolves, and 2 constrictor snakes was the most challenging for the party. The agile dire wolf tripped the wizard and it and another wolf put a fair hurt on him before the party was able to mop them up. The fight took 3-4 rounds as I recall. The dual initiative ability of the agile dire wolf made it a reasonable threat to the party, and I can see dual initiative being a way to make lone enemies more viable, but more on that later.

Encounter 2:

The second encounter, with the treat and the savage grizzly bears was less of a challenge for the PCs. The treant and one of the savage grizzly bears took a mythic fireball at the outset, with the wizard burning another mythic point on Amazing Initiative and later casting mythic magic missile. It's been said on the playtest forum before, but this ability has really got to be dealt with. The cleric was grabbed early on in the combat by a savage grizzly bear and took a fair amount of damage, but the fighter and the wizard dealt with the other two monsters and helped the cleric out. The party was never in any real danger, and generally controlled the fight from the beginning.

Encounter 3:

The party bypassed the rope bridge with a combination of spider climb and rope, which led to the mythic hydra fight. That lasted all of two rounds. The wizard and the fighter used Amazing Initiative and got the drop on the hydra. The fighter used Fleet Charge to close while the hydra was flatfooted, and the wizard cast glitterdust, which the hydra failed to save against. Its scent ability mitigated the blindness somewhat, as it was able to pinpoint the fighter, but still afforded the fighter total concealment (50% miss chance). As the hydra was only hitting the fighter on a natural roll of 18+, this was crippling. The cleric used mythic power with the Fire Goddess's Blade to summon a large fire elemental, but it didn't really do much in the fight. The party elected to attack the body of the creature, and it went down in 2 rounds.

To sum up my experience:
* I think the players enjoyed using the mythic powers, but Amazing Initiative is just too obvious of a choice. I don't know that it's irredeemably broken, but it needs to be brought in line with the other uses of mythic power. Perhaps as an extra standard action that stacks with Haste, etc.
* I like dual initiative as a monster ability, but it would be unfair to make it a monster-only ability.
* Consideration should be given to making the use of mythic power a once-per-round ability.

I'll let the players speak for themselves here, but I think the Mythic Adventures path abilities are generally good, but there are some very obvious choices, which to my mind means an imbalance. No one used mythic power to add a d6. Similarly, the mythic spells have some clear winners. Mythic CLW compared to Mythic Bless? No brainer. Anyway, that's it for now.

Zo

[DigMarx]

Oops, noted this might be better served in the Adventure Feedback forum.