Results from simple playtest

[gbonehead]

This is the results from a simple playtest with our Friday night epic group. Ordinarily we play a 3.5e/Pathfinder mix as a mind-boggling level. To get a feel for the system, we created Pathfinder characters at level 12 with 2 mythic tiers. We had six people (not 100% sure that the barbarian was a guardian, as I don't have copies of the characters yet, but that's what my notes say). I'll be getting copies of the characters after the next game:

• alchemist 12/marshal 2 with weakness: hubris
  
• barbarian 12/guardian 2 with weakness: furious rage
  
• cleric 12/hierophant 2 with weakness: weapon weakness/flails
  
• gunslinger 12/champion 2 with weakness: dependency/sexual [1]
  
• rogue 5/assassin 7/trickster/champion 2 with weakness: weapon weakness/hammers
  
• sorcerer 12/archmage 2 with weakness: dependency/flayleaf [1]

[1] Of course, requiring sexual activity or flayleaf aren't technically listed dependencies, but they're likely to be far more debilitating in practice than many others (e.g. furious rage for the barbarian or weapon weakness/hammers for the rogue) ... and certainly more interesting :)

The first night we primarily finished up character development, followed by a straightforward encounter. During character creation, a few questions came up:

• What effect does a variable ability score have on mythic power? If you cast a spell like cat's grace or owl's wisdom, can you gain additional mythic power? How about if you put on a belt of incredible dexterity or a headband of inspired wisdom, or even have the rage ability?
  
• How does the mythic weakness furious rage interact with the barbarian's rage ability?
  
• For dependencies, how much is enough? Ironically, choosing sexual dependency made that one straightforward, but for flayleaf or even any standard food/drink dependency, how much is needed? If a character has to eat spinach once per day, is a half a leaf enough?
  

My personal take on the weaknesses is they're better when assigned by the GM; it's far, far too easy to choose a relatively harmless weakness as a player. As a GM, I defined a reasonable portion of flayleaf for that character's dependency (and stated they had a week's worth). However I also defined that given the dependency, the character just might have a "need" for additional flayleaf beyond the minimum daily amount :)

As far as overall character development, both the alchemist and the rogue struggled to find useful mythic power selections; that's one of the reasons the rogue took Dual Path and went champion.

Once we settled all of that, we had a fairly standard combat encounter just to test out the system, 16 harpies vs. the 6 mythic characters in a surprise situation. By the numbers, 16 harpies is a CR 12 encounter which should be cake and keep it simple.

Surprised by eight of the harpies' captivating song, about half the party failed their saves and headed for the trees; the other half either waited or did the same without being captivated. After the second round the other 8 harpies sang, resulting in a few more failed saves. Overall, the battle took about 5 rounds before the few remaining harpies fled; while the victory wasn't trivial for the party, it didn't feel dangerous, which is what I'd expect for a CR 12 encounter versus a 6-character APL 14 table. Rather than give a round-by-round synopsis, I'll give our overall impressions and what we viewed to be rough edges.

Initiative:
First and foremost, I'll join the choir stating that Amazing Initiative is just way too much. I *do* like the ability to go twice per round, that's an impressive and useful ability, but to give it to every single mythic PC along with a +20 to initiative is way powerful.

Personally, I'd like to see the bonus to initiative separated from the ability to go a second time and possibly lessened - a bonus to initiative proportional to tier would work well and could still result in a +20 at tier 10. Also, making it one point for move action, two points for standard and three points for a full turn might lessen the impact. In addition, this technique could be used to burn one mythic point to take a move action, for example, and save the full turn of actions for the second initiative count, allowing for additional strategy.

Originally, I liked the idea of turning Amazing Initiative into a mythic feat that allows a second turn given an appropriate expenditure of mythic points (independent of the initiative bonus), but I'm concerned that it just ends up as a feat that all mythic characters need to take, at which point it might as well be a standard mythic power.

Also, the ability to take a second turn doesn't mesh well with delay and readied actions. If a creature's initiative count is 37 and they go a second time and ready, what exactly happens? How about if they ready on their first turn and then go at initiative count 7? Can they go again at -13? I'm in favor of a second turn only being allowed if the second count is also greater than zero.

In games, I use 3x5 initiative cards to run encounters, and that got really klunky when people started moving their initiative counts around and taking second turns. I'm going to experiment with two cards per PC next game with the second one only coming into play if they use their second turn.

Spending Mythic Points:
Because the harpies had captivated several of the characters, there was some discussion on whether the characters would use their mythic points to take extra turns to approach the harpies. By the PRD, "a victim under the effects of the captivating song moves towards the harpy using the most direct means available," so an argument could easily be made that the captivated PCs should burn mythic points to move faster. A charmed or compulsed mythic character could easily be forced to burn all their mythic points.

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Final Thoughts:
The first game was primarily to get familiar with the system. Next game (this Friday) we'll be dealing with a number of encounters in succession to see how an adventuring day plays out. We'll also be running at full cap (level 20/tier 10) to more closely match our usual game, and we'll play at least three games that way.

Overall, we all liked that this felt a lot like our usual epic game, even though it was only at a theoretical CR 14. On the other hand, it felt like there was a fair amount of extra record-keeping necessary. I'm not sure exactly why this was, but we all agreed. I'll be paying close attention next game to see if it was primarily due to unfamiliarity with the system or the new characters or something inherent in the gameplay.