Ideas for reducing nuclear mythical rocket tag at high level play

[Mightypion]

Hi there,

so, rocket tag. We all know it, very few people like it.

I would like to propose some probably very dumb ideas to reduce the impact of initiative and rocket tag at least somewhat.

1: Mythic instability:
Fluff: "Just as the party defeated the vile spawn of the demonlord, the demonlord himselfs joins the party. Harsh words are exchanged, and emboldened by battlecries such "dibs on the glaive" and "free stat boosts and hugs from Nocticula" the mostly mortal mythical murder hobos charge the father of minotaurs.
However, such a clash could destablize creation (by causing your GM to get a brain aneurysm over one turning a demon lord), the space time continium, and other things!
Thus, the even more mythic forces of balance intervene to dampen the effects!
Mechanically, everything offensively done by everyone is the first round is reduced by 50%. Damage, debuffs, durations, DCs of debuffs. In the second round, everything is reduced by 25%. In the third round, things are as normal. Tinker with these percentage as you deem appropriate.

2: A reasonably well built mythic party is very difficult to challenge in a "direct" fight, without peak nuclear rocket tag. I think a possible solution is to combine fighting with either stealth or social challenges, this will often create achievable failure states, which also arent partywipes. Especially since both stealth and social challenges can be used by the GM to split the party, and draw parts of it into unfavorable positions. If part of the party gets defeated in detail, well, rescue/escape/negotation situation imho.

3: Mutual disarmament. At least in my tables, relations between the players and the GM were considerably better then those between the USSR and the USA, so what worked in the cold war can work at your table. Simply mutually removing some excessively eggregious options from both sides (mythic power attack, arguably also other things such as mythic time stop) should reduce things a bit.

Thoughts?

[Agénor]

Can I ask why you choose to play Mythic or simply high level?

It seems from your description that you'd more enjoy the game at lower levels of power.

Also, it seems a lot of your game revolves around combat. My experience at high level is more politics & influence and less combat but when combat happens, it is an epic battle that will resound in history for centuries afterwards.

Not to go badwrongfun but options 1 and 3 are the kind of discussions to be had at session zero. In short, discuss with the player and come to a tentative solution as a group as this issue is meta-game rather than game hence the G.M. is in this only another player at the table.

[Taja the Barbarian]

Yeah, 'Rocket Tag' is kinda the entire point of Mythic, so the simplest solution (or at least a good first step) is to not play mythic...

[strayshift]

Taja the Barbarian wrote:

Yeah, 'Rocket Tag' is kinda the entire point of Mythic, so the simplest solution (or at least a good first step) is to not play mythic...

This. Also put a maximum level your campaign goes to and adjust experience progression accordingly (i.e. slow).

[Sandal Fury]

Generally speaking, I believe the only way to avoid rocket tag is if the DM and players all agree to actively avoid it. There's no way to remove it, it's sadly baked into the system.

[Ryze Kuja]

My group ran into a rocket tag issue with an Evil Gestalt campaign I ran, and it was because these guys were hitting so hard even in the early levels that they could 1shot each other in the event of the inevitable PvP that would happen (due to Evil alignment). So we fixed this with unrolled max HP/lvl for all characters, including monsters. This turned PvP between PC's into 2-3 hit kills rather than 1 hit kills (and tbh, this was IDEAL; PvP only lasting 2-3 confirmed hits rather than a 1 hit kill or a 6-7 hit kill solved many issues, especially time in sesh to resolve it and not having initiative = insta win). We also implemented a "no killing blow" option on a kill shot for PC vs PC only, where if two PC's get into a PvP situation and they each exchange blows, after 2-3 hits *should* determine the winner, but the PC who "wins" would have the option to "pull their killing blow at the last second" and leave them at -1 HP, rather than doing their full damage on the attack and unintentionally killing the PC (they still obviously could go through with the killing blow if they wanted to, but this turned PvP minor-arguments into storyline-appropriate skirmishes rather than a bloodbath and having to reroll characters every time they had a disagreement).

As far as balancing monsters after that, I use a Combat Manager on my Surface laptop, so advancing the monsters was hardly any effort at all.

[Algarik]

Ryze Kuja wrote:

As far as balancing monsters after that, I use a Combat Manager on my Surface laptop, so advancing the monsters was hardly any effort at all.

That sounds so useful, might i inquire on where you'd find such a tool?

[Ryze Kuja]

Algarik wrote:

Ryze Kuja wrote:

As far as balancing monsters after that, I use a Combat Manager on my Surface laptop, so advancing the monsters was hardly any effort at all.

That sounds so useful, might i inquire on where you'd find such a tool?

Combat Manager

[Algarik]

@Ryze Kuja.

Awesome thanks!

[Ryze Kuja]

Np :) That Combat Manager App is probably one of the top 3 DM tools ever. It has an Initiative tracker too, but I've found that keeping initiative is faster with a tiny whiteboard so I don't use that part. But the rest of the App is simply great.