So, the PCs got through the first book and I kept generally tougher fits. This is a mythic campaign and its a demon army after all. Party came close to wiping a few times, but no one ever managed to go down. Now in Sword of Valor, my players just cleared the Lost Chapel on the way to Drezen, and got to 7 a little early, mainly due to us skipping over army fighting and just giving them some fun encounters.
I designed some encounters to really challenge the party for the army fighting, which they liked for the most part, but now that the AP starts to put monsters back in place, they party cleared this chapel without much of a hassle. I made four templates to make enemies tougher and its been working so far, but I quickly adjusted starts on some of the later demons in the chapel and it just wasn't even close to a fair fight.
The demons had better DR, better AC, rolled max instead of average HP, +4 to all stats, better weapons, blah blah blah. I sprinkled around a couple more of the Babau demons as well to try and make the fight better, but with mythic first tier the party just gets stuff done.
Party is currently Warpriest, Unchained Monk, Unchained Barbarian, Psion, and Tactician. They have managed to very successfully recruit Irabeth, Anevia, and Aravashnial to tag along. They don't bring a whole ton of combat power, with Anevia scouting ahead, Arav buffing a few people, and Irabeth healing when needed.
The one way I've found to "balance" the encounters is just adding in so many creatures that the turns take forever to get to and generally turns into a fuster cluck. I realize part of the problem is the large group, but its all friends and there isn't a way to downsize it.
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You're going to find that the this problem continues as the party gains more mythic tiers. As written they will begin to blow though listed DCs and encounters without breaking a sweat, especially non mythic ones. I knew this going into the AP and we decided to run mythic as is fur the PCs to find the breaking points.
My advice is to pick up Legendary Games Mythic Heroes Handbook and look at the suggestions to fix the mythic rules before you get too far. It'll save you a ton of headaches
-Vrock and Awe!
Thanks for the suggestion. Luckily I have a while to fix things. Two of the players are out of the country for a month.
Yeah...the mythic rules are bad.
People who can optimize even a little bit will pretty much blow everything out of the water with mythic. It's very hard to balance somewhere between trivial challenge and TPK'ing the party.
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As a player, we've just completed the third adventure with watered-down Mythic rules, so here are my observations so far:
- The 'Mythic 5 Minute Workday' is rather ridiculous. Basically, when the PCs understand that today's 'mini dungeon' will be the only serious fight for the day, they can spend their Mythic Power quite freely. Module 2 has this issue until you get to Drezen, and Module 3 is all about the 5 minute work day.
- The Mythic Bosses have been extremely 'hit or miss' so far: Those with high-crit weapons tend to hurt our Paladin a lot (if he gets hit, it's a crit somehow) before they died, while some were just annoying due to a combination of special defenses that make them hard to kill (incorporeal, made of worms, swarm vulnerabilies + fire resistance, etc.) plus special attacks the PCs countered due to being forewarned (Magic Circle Against Evil FTW). And then, there were the embarrassing large sacks of XP (any oversized opponent vs. our mythic pistilero).
- On the topic of bosses, you'll need to watch out for the occasional WTF ability: One of the bosses we downed before she got to act was supposed to have 'Power Word Stun' essentially at will (Apparently, she TPKed the last group my GM ran through this AP before he rewound the fight and nerfed that ability).
- The best defense is, of course, a Mythic offense with Mythic Initiative: So many opponents never got a chance to roll anything other than initiative and maybe a saving throw or two. Per my GM, when he ran the previous group through with full mythic abilities and competent characters (fairly straightforward builds that didn't involve scouring every supplement for the best option), he maybe got to roll two or three attacks in entirety of the last two modules (Note that our current group is a High-Dex Ninja, High-Dex Pistilaro, High-Charisma Oracle who uses Cha for Init., and a slowpoke Paladin with a mere 20 Dexterity, so we tend to win init. a lot).
My first point is probably the most important one: Your PCs won't seem quite so powerful in Drezen itself, as it is a fairly large dungeon to clear and they shouldn't have that many MP to spend, but most of the next module will probably have you rolling your eyes...
Currently the only one winning initiative is the party's tactician with an implanted psicrystal. I'm sure that will change soon. The party seems to be cursed with initiative, constantly getting horrible rolls for it.
I have noticed that the recently added (and annoyingly optimized by other players) i's the main problem with the "5 minute work day", as he expands all his power points in a single combat, killing most everything.
Book 2 has no real problems with power creep compared to later. As written no encounter in book 6 can survive a single full attack from a Paladin PC (slightly nerfed from RAW my pc paladin by the end of the game did between 750 and 1500 damage in a round depending how hard he was trying with mythic points and could automatically land all of his attacks on an AC 71 opponent).
Someone provided a list of upgraded npc's elsehere in this forum , this is a good start , then start multiplying hp by the number of the AP, I ended up giving Deskari 16,000 hp and he lasted about 3 maybe 4 rounds
You have to rewrite either the rules or every encounter in this campaign and do so drastically , the module is not even slightly balanced against the mythic rules as written. I normally enjoy high level games and encounter balancing this one I gave up on early in book 6 and had no fun for the last few session.
Great plot, interesting places and characters , worst rules ever, I have dumped my mythic book in a dark cupboard as I will never use it again.
Killing your pc's is easy mirror images of them will do enough damage for a tpk easily , making fun challanges is almost impossible
edit I really should not psot on these threads as I cannot manage any optimism or positive advice