Wrath with limited rez

[juballa]

I've been reading the various threads about Mythic balance, or lack thereof, with great interest.

My players and I dislike Raise Dead and the like; we prefer death to be relatively permanent. To that end, we've decided that Raise Dead (as written) is now a 9th level cleric spell. No other forms of resurrection exist. We're also considering making Raise Dead have a very long casting time, to account for the roleplaying aspects we want (convincing a god to allow the soul to return).

Given that tidbit, does anyone have any advice on how that decision will interact with the Mythic rules?

[Caius]

At tier 9 and 10 they can auto-res after a day unless killed by certain creatures/items.

[magnuskn]

Err, it will result in pretty drastic character turnover, given how rocket tag-gy the entire deal gets later on.

[Lochar]

About mid-end Book 4, no one in the party will be on the same character. At least one person will be on character 3. Maybe 4.

By the end of Book 4, as a DM I am counting successes in one of two ways. How quickly I can force the party cleric to burn through his Mythic Points, and if I can cause a death, even temporarily. Much joy was had in killing the party cleric twice in thirty minutes. He was true rezzed the first time, then raise dead/greater restoration'd the second.

There's a few treasures you'll have to change out, as scrolls and oils of rez/true rez become fairly common.

What is your thought on Breath of Life/Relentless Healing resurrections? You'll have to made a ruling on those as well.

[juballa]

@Caius, My intent is either to replace that ability, or just limit our use of Mythic so that we never reach that tier.

@Lochar, I intend to replace those treasures with other goodies. Breath of Life will stay as-is. Relentless Healing will also stay, but the ability to spend 2 mythic points to allow someone to bring themselves back will be nixed.

It's a complex problem; mythic offers a lot of powerful options, but it appears that lots of PCs die regardless. That sounds less like the heroes of myth and more like video games, which is disappointing.

[Lochar]

All it takes is one bad critical. And save the double death that happened to my cleric recently, no one has stayed dead more than a Breath of Life or similar effect could fix.

Even for what you're trying to do, there's a difference between Breath of Life/Relentless Healing and the Raise spells.

Let them do Relentless healing, as it's still tied to one or two rounds after death. The soul hasn't completely left the body so when you heal it enough that the body can work again, the soul doesn't actually hit the Boneyard.

Death longer than the few seconds it takes to do Breath of Life stuff the soul has finally moved on.

[juballa]

Are people using hero points with Wrath and Mythic? I'm looking in particular at Cheat Death, which might also help keep some subset of the group alive through the course of the AP.

[Lochar]

No, as Mythic Points do more than Hero Points in most cases.

You're welcome to let them burn a number of Mythic Points to activate Cheat Death though, which would resolve a lot of the issues you're going to run into.

[Tangent101]

Mythic replicates a lot of the abilities of Hero Points but at a lower "cost" (as the points regenerate daily).

That's why I am thinking of any Mythic ability that replicates a Hero Point to cost 5 Mythic Points instead. In the case of Cheat Death, you might want to up it to 10 Mythic Points as it's normally 2 Hero Points to use.

This could have the odd benefit of reducing the use of Mythic powers as people will want to keep their Mythic Points at a minimum of 10, just in case. However, they'd not be able to use Mythic for that purpose until Tier 4 in most cases, so 5 Mythic Points might still be viable for this.

[Xymor]

All the games for my group in Pathfinder have resurrection turned off, we rarely have character deaths, I ran Kingmaker as written but with all monsters with max HP and all PCs survived. I am running Wrath with out Mythic as well but with James's suggestions and action points, mid way through book 2 and no deaths yet.

Although with Mythic still present I believe that Magnunskn is correct, Mythic is very rocket tag'y unless you work some of the fixes in that the community is suggesting.

Of the several I have played in I have only had 1 character death and that was at the end of Rise of the Runelords.

[Tangent101]

I've actually considered doing the opposite to this: Run WotR without practically any Mythic abilities at all... but have the Wardstone explosion have infused the players with the Tier 10 Resurrection ability. In short, the characters would wake up the next day, fully healed, after having died. Nor will the Demons necessarily know about this ability at first, and may assume they're just liberal with the use of resurrection magic.

Given the extra complexity of Mythic and the problems people are having with broken Mythic Feats and abilities... this might be the best solution.

[captain yesterday]

Tangent101 wrote:

I've actually considered doing the opposite to this: Run WotR without practically any Mythic abilities at all... but have the Wardstone explosion have infused the players with the Tier 10 Resurrection ability. In short, the characters would wake up the next day, fully healed, after having died. Nor will the Demons necessarily know about this ability at first, and may assume they're just liberal with the use of resurrection magic.

Given the extra complexity of Mythic and the problems people are having with broken Mythic Feats and abilities... this might be the best solution.

You might run into a Groundhog's Day situation:)