|
Firstly, Mythic isn't very well balanced at all- once you add that to a character, game balance pretty much goes out the window. If this is Wrath of the Righteous and you need Mythic, check out the Forums for that AP for how to challenge your party. If you don't need mythic, I strongly suggest your drop it and replace it with regular levels, or exclusively have them fight mythic stuff. Also, a Mythic Tier should probably be calculated equally to a Level when considering CR, so go ahead and start things off with CR16s, to see how that works.
Secondly, Leadership Cohorts should definitely add to the APL of the party- there is no other Feat in the game that has even close to its impact on combat. And unless I'm missing something, a Cohort should never be Mythic. But I haven't checked that recently.
In general terms, attack your party's weaknesses. They have no Arcane Caster. They might suck at ranged combat. Do the Barbarians have Blind-Fight? Deeper Darkness? Don't play any enemies dumb enough to get into melee with this party.
Make them fight Solars. Most challenging enemy my mythic party has faced.
Or make them fight Mythic NPCs-- you have four mythic PCs with 2 tiers so put them up against 4 their level +2 mythic NPCs.
|
Here's an option that plays to their strengths, yet will challenge them to the utmost.
Give them the chance to try to stop a medium-sized army. It could be an army of outsiders, undead, or monsters, but even a low-level goblin army could thoroughly challenge them. Just pump up the numbers! The enemy rallied in some backwater place the PCs ignored. They come in numbers at least 10,000 above whatever the local allied defenses can handle. They come with murder and rapine to pillage cities and places the PCs know and love. They leave pyramids of skulls in their path. The PCs might fight alone, but it would be more interesting to have them assist a friendly army. This also makes it tougher for the PCs to quit the field.
Give the PCs the opportunity to defeat the enemy army WITHOUT the help of an allied army. Show them this will not work. Force them to retreat. Once they understand that they can't win alone they will be more willing to accept the restrictions than come with supporting an allied army. Allow the PCs to be a Force Multiplier for their allies.
Arm every foe with a minor missile weapon. Slings are ideal and free. The PCs lack an arcane caster, so they have no easy way to block normal missiles. Even if they did, such spells have time limites. Each turn every foe in range fires a sling bullet at the PCs. With a 5% chance to hit for 1d4+1 damage (average STR 12 bonus), every five attackers will inflict 1 HP of damage per round. Armor class does not matter, and damage will be evenly distributed between PCs unless one of them draws attention. While some PCs may have DR, does the Life Oracle have DR? the Life Oracle will be Prime Target #1. Are the PCs prepared to deal with that?
Give the PCs every benefit of the doubt. Allow their tactics to work. let them cleave hordes of foes, slay officers, and annihilate whole companies. Set the situation up such that the enemy has huge numbers. The enemy can afford massive losses.
Make the members of the enemy army individually weak. Emphasize discipline, organization, and prepared tactics. They've dealt with parties of heroes before. They will have terrific scouting and excellent internal security. The enemy will expect infiltration attempts, and will have numerous smart security options in place to eliminate sneaky intruders with extreme prejudice. Roving wolf-rider scouts will circle the army, literally sniffing for trouble. If engaged they will flee and report back. Have the enemy generals use rules straight off the Evil Overlord List.
The enemy army will be prepared for a decapitation strike, and will be organized to function effectively despite elimination of the command structure. A general has a dangerous job.
When our PCs openly confront this army it is reasonable that only a small fraction the foes will actually be aware of them and in missile range. Perhaps allow the PCs to face the enemy army in groups of 500 at a time. Of those, 50 engage the PCs in melee, while the other 450 shoot sling bullets. 450 slingers will inflict about 90 HP per round on the PCs. Once the PCs kill the first 50 foes, 50 more close to melee, leaving only 400 slingers.
Do this for a while. Give the PCs every benefit of the doubt, and emphasize how they are conquering against impossible odds. Choose the actual numbers to ensure the damage is at or below what the Life Oracle can heal. Force the party to use up their daily resources. Force them to use up their consumable resources.
Allow the PCs to defeat the first battalion they face. And the second. By the time they face the third battalion their resources should be exhausted and they should all be frazzled.
The enemy has smart commanders who stay well protected. A direct attack on the enemy commanders will have to contend with at 2000+ foes at once. If they all sling stones at once that's about 400 HP per round to the party. So the PCs can't just rush the enemy Generals.
Play up enemy morale. A battalion of 500 will fight until about 25% are dead, then the rest will flee. The PCs will realize that demoralizing the foe can have a bigger effect than killing a few hundred. Also play up enemy signalling devices, be they drums, flags, or bagpipes. Play up the noise, stink, and sheer horror of the mythic battlefield.
Finally, after the PCs have heroically triumphed against foe after foe, all their healing is used up, when they are wounded and exhausted, the enemy commander makes his move. The PCs have been known as a major threat, and part of the purpose was to weaken the party, leaving them vulnerable to a killing blow. You decide how nasty that will be, but that would be the time to throw several consecutive difficult encounters at them. By that point even CR12 encounters will be a threat, because they will be out of healing magic. They will have to defeat encounters without taking much damage.
The enemy generals have a plan in place if the PCs decide to flee. The PCs will not be allowed to withdraw in peace. Wolf riders will follow their scent, and two battalions will be sent to hunt them down. The enemy will rest in rotation, but allow the PCs no rest. Emphasize how sleepy and exhausted they are. When the PCs pass normal fatigue limits warn them you will only start to enforce fatigue penalties when they are Mythically Fatigued. Make it so.
Always have groups a few dozen slingers around. These will punish the PCs whenever they show themselves, and must be chased down one by one.
See to it that the PCs have some allies, someone who will bravely join them in their most desperate hour. Think Beorn, or a friendly dragon, or eagles, or something. Set it up in advance, so the PCs don't expect it yet think, "Of course, we knew they were coming to help us!".
Something like this.
You will need to brew up, or choose, some mechanical ways to speed up combat. For example, when facing hordes of foes you can let the PCs choose: either everyone rolls dice for the round, or everyone does fixed damage: enemies get exactly average rolls (about 0.2 HP each per round ;-) while PCs automatically hit with every attack for maximum damage. Roll dice normally for bosses and waves of special mooks.
Have available, and practice with in advance, a way to quickly roll and total hundreds of dice at once. There are computer programs that do this. A spreadsheet might be handy. Make a simple and efficient recordkeeping system. The PCs need to understand that there is a LARGE but FINITE NUMBER of foes. Determine the numbers at the start, and stick to them. Let them see the enemy numbers dwindle. You control enemy morale, so you have final say on how things go down.
Rehearse the situation several times with how things go if the PCs are absent. This will make your book-keeping system quick, simple, and efficient, and will impress your players. It should be several crushing ROFLstomp battles as the enemy rolls over friendly cities. Set things up so that the PCs can, through their mythic actions, save some friendly cities. The PCs should have traveled through this area when it was at peace, so they have friends, allies, and loved ones in the path of the invading army.
Holy wall of text! Personally, I find mythic to be appropriate Only in two cases. 1.) 3 or less PCs.
2.) All mythic campaign setting.
|
|
I've got some suggestions, learned from having to challenge a party of eight.
1.) If feasible, change the type of battleground. These are melee guys, so avoid the 'melee closet' style of map. If possible (and it might not be given table size, etc), push the engagements out beyond 120'. If they have to close the distance while taking whallops it causes trouble.
2.) Kite. Its difficult, but not impossible to kite barbarians and melee types. Mounted opponents, ride by attack, or horse archery work.
3.) Enfilade. You know what the horrible beauty of lots of low level wizards is against a party of oracles and barbs? None of them have evasion. I once wore down a level 12 party of eight including rogues and the like by using CR 1 steam mephits (the martials didn't mind as much, but the spellcasters sure did), the mephits just kept laying on their fort for half steam clouds and after like 10 of them, the party had taken some damage from the little insignificant HD puffball mephits around them.
4.) Layered encounters. Dudes are mythic. Maybe take two or three of your daily encounters and make them into one. Have the enemies come in at stages and different locations, make the heroes get pulled out and then attack while their machine falls apart.
5.) Might not be as bad as you think. I thought some of my party were steamrolling encounters I put before them, only to find out that they were steamrolling because every encounter they got into (to them) appeared so dire as to require them to pull out all the stops on it before they themselves got erradicated.
I don't think they could take a 13th level wizard. I don't think they could take a 13th level cleric, druid or witch either. How do they deal with flying invisible opponents? How do they deal with Dominate Person? How about earthglide? Heck, how would they deal with archers at 500 feet?
I don't think they could take a 13th level wizard. I don't think they could take a 13th level cleric, druid or witch either. How do they deal with flying invisible opponents? How do they deal with Dominate Person? How about earthglide? Heck, how would they deal with archers at 500 feet?
2 Barbarians and 2 oracles can easily take on level 13 casters. Barbarians are great caster killers. Add mythic surges, amazing initiative and that wizard isn't getting a spell off so no need to worry about flight, dominate or earth glide. As well dominate isn't much of threat to mythic characters. A barbarian probably has superstitious and can surge the roll.
Now against mythic 13 level wizard, that would be just deadly.
yes to basically everything that's been said so far.
i think the two most important factors are:
- resource management. the barbarian aren't likely to run out of rage, and the fighter won't run out of anything, but the oracle only has so many spells/channels per day (and everything will grind to a halt with out her). try using more encounters/day (or noticeably longer ones), or do something to control the healer (like a hold or fear, or even better something like Nauseated that's a fort save) for an encounter. if they have to really start paying attention to how much more healing they have (or if/when healing is even coming) they'll feel a lot more challenged.
- controlling the battlefield. any opponent that charges a super-melee party like this is pretty screwed, so only really stupid/foolish/arrogant opponents should even consider that. any enemy with any intelligence should try to engage from a distance, with any terrain advantages they can find. once in a while they may meet people face to face in closed quarters with just a simple initiative roll, but with a party with little to no stealth and little to no divination/scouting ability they'll often be facing opponents who had a round or two to pick an advantageous location and potentially kick off or receive a buff or two. that can make a big difference in combat. a couple of guys who have bows (even if they're not really archers per se) that are on top of a little cliff or across a decent chasm can drain quite a few resources even if they're APL-2 with no Mythic tiers, and (as already stated) it looks like they'd be totally hosed against flying/invisibility/all kinds of things they should face at that level... heck, any 7th level wizard worth his salt could cast improved invisibility and fly and give this whole party a pretty rough time!
@voska66
Sure the party can beat anything if it isn't optimized, but I'm not talking about some NPC from a book. I'm talking about the GM sitting down and making an APL+2 encounter of one enemy spellcaster, who is just as optimized as the party members.
What sources do you allow?
Playing up on some previous mentions: Numbers of weaker foes- aid another. Terrain- caves, gullies, etc., that mean squeezing. Cliffs/ledges so the combat is as vertical as it is horizontal.
The army idea is actually really interesting! If the party tries to fall back to rest their allies would take heavy casualties. This means that while it would totally be possible for them to snag some resource recovery, doing so would be a major moral conundrum. It also allows the plays to still feel awesome and powerful(like mythic campaigns should) while still providing a challenge.
A well built enemy army would challenge them greatly and a war would take place over a variety of terrains which could provide even more of a challenge. Difficult terrain would severely hamper a fully melee party from reaching smart ranged enemies.
This may not work for the story though, can you give us a brief description of the overall plot so we can see if we can find a solution that fits well?
I think it's also important to not just focus on beating the party but to challenge them. While some crazy optimized Wizard (If build for the sole purpose of killing the party) could win, it wouldn't be satisfying to the players or probably the DM. (Though throwing in some battlefield control lower lever casters could help any group fighting the party)
Are they having fun? Are you having fun?
If so, carry on. Change nothing.
If not, you need to address the problem (optimization) and not get involved in an arms race that's going to leave everyone frustrated.
I think it's less "arms race" (a GM can always kill PCs, but also always expects to lose) and more that the OP's PCs are walking through the encounters the same way each time, so the OP is looking for ways to make things different and fresh, not ways to "win".
I certainly agree with your main point about fun all around the table being key.
How about this? A maze filed with acid gas? They take constant damage so the cohort is busy, then give them a few easy encounters
Ok, first up, I don't think you need to treat each mythic as +1 (the +1/2 is fine) -- but I *will* say a few things here:
- Leadership is a force multiplier and not just "a feat" -- if you want to balance out the party's encounters, you need to include the cohorts in determination of APL. (Especially when you're allowing mythic cohorts -- which seems odd to me -- where's the "mythic hero" part of being someone else's lackey? Personally, I would have given the cohorts the Mythic Companion feat, and that's it..)
- How many encounters are they facing in a day? I mean, yes, 10 channels is a bunch, but if they're facing 4-5 encounters of an appropriate level, it's not at all hard to think that they'll be running out before the end of the day (or, at least, need to get into spell use)
Beyond that, if you're looking to challenge them, I'll repeat what was said -- don't give them encounters that play to their strengths all the time.
[Having that, however -- One exception to that would be to swarm them with undead -- and let the Oracle burn them to ash with their channels.... and then have the "true" threat reveal itself when they're depleted.]
I don't know what they've faced or been facing.... but....
The party doesn't sound like it's well-suited for ranged opponents -- so have them fight a few rangers who start, say 400-500 feet away and were able to set up Spike Growth and Stone Call (or other difficult terrain) to slow the approach while getting pelted with missiles. (Or, same deal, but using a chasm - fired down from cliff walls 100' up). Or have them deal with hit-and-run tactics -- cavaliers in open fields with Ride-By or Fly-By attack (depending on the mount) would probably really ruin their day. (This could be mixed with the archer-threat if we cast feather step or have flying mounts). Use enemies with a lot of magical ability -- persistent damage effects, slow and hinder, battlefield control.. Throw in some negative energy channels against them.
As mythic heroes, at least some of their opponents should also be mythic -- so don't be afraid of that. And, if you're having them going after a BBEG mythic villain, then have his henchmen also take Mythic Companion -- giving them some defenses to the threat of your party.
But, at the end of the day, the point is for everyone to have fun -- so if it ain't broke, don't fix it.