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Interestingly, it makes them stronger, since rolling with Mythic Proficiency makes the math much more favorable for the PC. Imprisonment in particular is probably far better for it's intended use case.Also somewhat ironically given the explanation that these should be special things that only the greatest can do... the primary caster only has to be Trained in the skill now.
So we've gone from "only the greatest masters of Arcana/Religion/Occultism/Religion can even attempt this" to "a Mythic Fighter who picked up a skill because a class granted skill was already trained by their background can attempt this and have exactly the same proficiency modifier as someone who is legendary at that skill."
For a reasonable chance at success, your secondary casters are really going to want as much proficiency as they can get, but it's utterly irrelevant to the primary caster now (and with the extra +2 it got easier than it was in premaster).
That is... a thing.
You can totally be a 20th level Wizard without ever raising your Arcana above Trained. You can totally have INT 10 too BTW.
And that is per RAW PC creation rules.
You can. Your spells will suffer for the INT, and you used to not even be able to attempt these rituals because of the Arcana, but yes, you can. (Hell, one of the players in my SoT campaign has Wizard Dedication with 8 INT because you get to ignore the requirement in that AP.)
One of those things has now changed, where how skilled you are at the skill that's actually required to do the ritual is utterly irrelevant to doing the ritual. Skill gating behind proficiency is one of those parts of the game that says "me with workplace first aid training can't do surgery while a surgeon can".
Likewise, it used to be "someone who took dragons 101 during Fighter training doesn't know how to create a demiplane with arcana, but someone at the forefront of the field does."
Now your actual proficiency in the skill is completely irrelevant, and an amateur can do this as long as they have enough INT to reasonably succeed. You literally want more proficiency as a secondary caster now, since its actually relevant to their outcome.
I fail to see any way this is supposed to benefit immersion or be anything other than patently absurd. It's actually one of the things I dislike about Mythic in general in this implementation: if I become mythic, I'm suddenly better at surgery with my workplace first aid training than an actual surgeon who isn't mythic, a couple of times a day. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and it's exactly how these rituals work now. Like the character can't even explain how this ritual works until they spend a mythic point and then suddenly are super good at it somehow.
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The whole problem with this is that every time the PCs lose the ability to do something like this while NPCs still get to "because NPCs follow different rules", it makes the game world feel less cohesive as an actual world, and feel more like a plot contrivance.It also frankly causes strife between GMs and players. The justification that "NPCs do not follow PC rules," whenever I try to explain it, has never ended with nods of understanding. It usually just ends with them saying that it removes them from the game's immersion to think things are impossible for them themselves, alongside various badmouthings of developers.
Yeah I don't think this is a thing that non-GMs ever actually like. Players will generally accept it, especially when it's not really being thrown in their faces. Ultimately players benefit from things being easy for the GM, and making creature stat blocks easier to create and work with is good for GMs.
Verisimilitude also factors into this. Players will generally accept "the dragon can do that and you can't because you're not an ancient dragon." That isn't difficult to accept. Likewise with "this Sorcerer can do this and you can't because you haven't seen this spell before and don't know how to recreate it", especially if its theoretically possible for them to go looking for that spell (even if they never actually do).
"You can't do this because you're not mythic, but that doesn't apply to the NPC that just did it" doesn't fly, by comparison. It's not internally consistent within the rules, or the setting. It feels like an arbitrary restriction put on the PCs that will be ignored anytime it becomes inconvenient for the plot. Players don't like that.
I don't like it as a GM either because it's an utterly unnecessary restriction on something that wasn't a problem in the first place. Creating Demiplanes wasn't that big of a problem in PF1 when any old 17th level Wizard/Cleric could do it. It certainly wasn't a problem in PF2 when it became both uncommon and more difficult.
And of course, the coup-de-grace is Paizo putting the restriction in and then immediately having to explain why it doesn't apply to a bunch of NPCs that canonically can already do this. That works fine from a game rule perspective, but when it comes to telling a narrative in a world? It feels lousy, just like when movies/books set up rules in their world for how things work and then later on have to come up with excuses to ignore those to keep the plot moving.
I can fix this easily enough at my table by going "no that's stupid and doesn't exist", but I have been doing a LOT of that in the last few months in PF2 and considering how little of it I had to do for the previous several years, I'm really not liking the trend.
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Beyond Rule Zero, there is also a specific call out in the book that allows for Mythic Destinies to be high level archetypes for non-Mythic characters. Just remove the Mythic tag and proficiency.
As a GM, that feels like the easiest solution to me. Or just use the non-mythic version for non-mythic characters.
Timmy the Talented can get a cabal of friends together to create a demiplane for use as their secret base. When a Mythic Max the Miracleworker does it, his is bigger. End of problem.
To me, the easiest solution is
"Mythic dumb. Implementation of Mythic bad. Totally and utterly ignore Mythic".Not really sure that is the conclusion that Paizo WANTED me to come to, mind :-).
Yeah I don't think this is a thing that non-GMs ever actually like. Players will generally accept it, especially when it's not really being thrown in their faces. Ultimately players benefit from things being easy for the GM, and making creature stat blocks easier to create and work with is good for GMs.
I would argue it is more complex than that, players can appreciate something without knowing that it is what they are appreciating. Asymmetrical monster design is a big part of what keeps pf2e combat engaging. Not talking about this specific example, but in general
"You can't do this because you're not mythic, but that doesn't apply to the NPC that just did it" doesn't fly, by comparison. It's not internally consistent within the rules, or the setting. It feels like an arbitrary restriction put on the PCs that will be ignored anytime it becomes inconvenient for the plot. Players don't like that.
I feel this is a disingenuous way of framing it, especially since the example of an npc like the runelords was given before. What James was saying from what I read was that npcs who have access to stuff like this do so through other equally uncommon or particularly unique means.
It would be like calling out it as being unfair that belcora can have the gauntlight created for her and the PCs can't just create a similar magic structure. Of course npcs often come part and parcel with new abilities, spells and items that players didn't have access to purely from levelling.
And it isn't like npcs have access to everything players do by default either. How many npcs are wandering around with hero points and gaining hero points across the session.
Pf2e, whether you like it or not is not a simulation.
BTW I don't like the mythic rules and have in general been a bit burnt out on pf2e post remaster, maybe even a bit before. I don't know if it is why, but since Mark left the design direction feels like it has changed a bit.
However, you are spending a lot of time (to my reading) justifying why your stance is what it is and why that is objectively right. Rather than taking the "I don't like mythic rules, I want alternative access routes for these iconic options. Npcs seem to have access via alternative ways" route.
Edit:
Oh and saying that previous editions didn't have potential demi plane issues is amusing, I get that not all groups had disruptions from it. But it was a meme for one of my old GM's group that create demiplane was the chocks ahoy solution (a reference to a convoluted plan executed at the end of one of their longer campaigns)
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Also I really don't think you can use the commonality of quitting threads to determine how popular something is. No matter what game, system or hobby you're in there's always loads of quitting threads. People have been making them for 5e forever and that's still around and popular.
Yeah, it's pretty common that people who enjoy something don't spend their time posting about how they enjoy it - they just continue to enjoy it.
It's more common for people who dislike something to post online somewhere that they don't like it - but its hardly indicative of any trend or anything like that. Negativity is just a much higher draw for engagement (or monetization, in places that do that sort of thing.)
I think that one just shouldn't mix "mythic" and "non-mythic" that much in a way that disadvantages the players.
Like mythic PCs should fight some non-mythic opponents, and have fewer conventional fights which are easier side of things. You shouldn't really have non-mythic PCs dipping their toes into the mythic side of things unless the mythic things are largely set-dressing rather than actual opponents/allies. Like if PCs are involved with Old Mage Jatembe and/or Baba Yaga, the PCs should be doing something different in the given scene than what two of the most powerful people on Golarion are doing.
It's sort of inherent to any sort of story about people who start out entirely ordinary and become exceptional that they will lack certain advantages that people who have been exceptional for literal thousands of years would lack. Like if you gave PCs a thousand years of downtime (without having to worry about aging and all that) then the things they'd be able to accomplish would need rules they haven't written yet because Pathfinder stories have timetables generally on the order of "months" rather than "centuries."
What the Godsrain changed is that people can now reach the levels of potential power some of our millenium-old NPCs have been able to reach, but you're never going to be able to reach their current level of "preparedness" within a year. You could get there in time (all of the mythic destinies give you "immortality" in some sense) but they have a head start.
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snip
I agree strongly with something you highlight here: the thing that tends to most believably and credibly separate PCs and NPCs is time. There are exceptions for particularly long-running (in-universe) campaigns, mind. But it's almost always easy for a player to swallow that they could do something like make a demiplane, if only they had a few years to research it—they just don't have that luxury. It is not so easy for a player to swallow that they could never do this just because they're a PC and they abide by different rules than the NPCs.
It is the difference between these:
-seeing the rules as absolute, regardless of situation
-seeing the rules as only covering situations expected to come up in play, and thus leaving open room for the GM to make rules as needed for other situations to bridge gaps in storytelling and cohesion
Just saying "NPCs and PCs are different, and that's the end of it" feels like it's taking local abstractions and making them globally applicable when they don't need to be. If your excuse is that Karzoug took ten years to research how to make his demiplane, say, then the GM can and should let you research making demiplanes if they give you 10 years of downtime. It shouldn't be literally impossible for you.
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It's just the only one we've currently published for PLAYERS to access in 2nd edition remastered rules.
So it was the developers intention to take away existing options from players?
That seems kind of like a dick move, no?
Or was it the intention that there be two versions of these spells; the non-mythic versions in Core Rulebook/Advanced Player's Guide and the mythic versions in War of Immortals?
Creative Director
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It's just the only one we've currently published for PLAYERS to access in 2nd edition remastered rules.So it was the developers intention to take away existing options from players?
That seems kind of like a dick move, no?
Or was it the intention that there be two versions of these spells; the non-mythic versions in Core Rulebook/Advanced Player's Guide and the mythic versions in War of Immortals?
You'll have to talk to the Design team for those answers, and I apologize if I came across as stepping in to provide answers for that team. I'm looking at this mostly from the Narrative side of things, had some free time to engage, and was trying to contextualize and do what I could to provide insight particularly into the idea that Karzoug was now somehow "an illegal build." That said... saying things like "a dick move" aren't likely to encourage positive feedback or entice engagement, so please be more diplomatic about things.
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Sure thing. Thanks for the feedback. Your taking the time to participate in the discussion at all is greatly appreciated.
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I think its perfectly fine for NPCs to work differently from PCs, though as Tridus said I think in this particular instance it feels internally inconsistent and arbritary. Another change brought by the Remaster that I also think is inconsistent and arbritary is the removal of drow for example, but I don't mind it because I know its because of the OGL and because Paizo doesn't want to risk a lawsuit. I won't blame Paizo for wanting to protect themselves from the power-hungry executives of WoTC. However, the changes made to create demiplane don't really have an explanation besides being a retcon. CD wasn't an overpowered thing so a nerf doesn't make sense, there's characters that already were capable of creating demiplanes so its not even to keep it consistent with how it was represented in APs or something (yes, I knok there's some examples like Karzoug that used an external source to create his demiplane as JJ pointed it out, though I'd argue that makes sense too because the demiplanes created by BBEGs are usually bigger and have unique effects that the ritual itself doesn't allow you to replicate). For example, I'm currently GM'ing Stolen Fate and the Harrow Court is leagues above anything CD could possibly allow you to make.
Also I really don't think you can use the commonality of quitting threads to determine how popular something is. No matter what game, system or hobby you're in there's always loads of quitting threads. People have been making them for 5e forever and that's still around and popular.
I don't think this is wrong necessarily but I think it doesn't apply to this situation. If a community is so huge like D&D's you can't take the opinion most people seem to have in a particular site or forum as "factual truth" because its very likely all the people there represent like 10% or less of the people that actually play the game. In PF however since its relatively more "niche" (still one of the best selling TTRPGs, though popularity and sales-wise it doesn't even reach D&D's heels) I feel more % of the people that play the system are willing to engage in online discussion either with comments or upvoting similar opinions to them. The biggest PF communities can be found here and in the subreddit, and both were shown to be highly receptive of changes and new stuffs that was released in the past, but from the beggining of the Remaster it has became more common to see people having complaints about some stuff. I'm not trying to imply Paizo has been releasing exclusively bad content since then, but I think its widely agreed upon in both communities that there's recent content that feels unplaytested.
I know for sure since the Remaster is pretty much over that next year and beyond we are going to go back to quality standards we used to have with Paizo content in the past, though I feel its quite sad because the chance to have mythic in PF2e has already passed and, at least I, really don't like its execution at all. The same with all the other content that was released in this time frame that had similar issues, in a sense the Remaster took away from us the chance to see this content being more polished, though in contrast we saw some of the unpolished content from the early years of the system being brought up to current standards.
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snip.
Sure, but I'm not talking about people's general opinion of the system, (I wouldn't know, I only really started engaging with this forum whilst waiting on PC2 alchemist news, and now I just like the vibes here relative to Reddit or whatever) I'm talking about the idea you can determine how much the general public plays a system based on quitting threads, which is just not a reliable way of telling how much people are bouncing off a system.
Hence the comparison to 5e. The idea you could go to, r/dndnext, say, look at the quitting threads and go "Aha! Players and GMs are bouncing off 5e!" It's just not a sound way of doing things.
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Simulationist design makes players happy.
You know who it doesn't make happy? GMs.
You know who there's always a dearth of? GMs.
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So much of this talk about players and GMs inherently bouncing off certain types of games feels like making up a thing to be angry about because it doesn't fit your personal preferences. I run PF2, World of Darkness, and all manner of indie games. Some people definitely prefer certain types of games but the gaming still remains fun whether gamist, simulationist, or narrative. It just isn't that serious.
To the question of mythic gating of rituals? Eh. Maybe the least of all complaints I could have with PF2. Right down there with alignment removal and rarity tags.
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I do think that regardless of how mythic work or how the rules are implemented in general, taking some rituals that were "normal" preremaster and locking them as "mythic only" wasn't a great move. I think a lot of peoples were excited for mythic precisely because of the prospect of it being a "higher level of play" that would allow them to have "bigger/badder" effect and stories, but taking an existing option and locking it to mythic gives off the feeling that rather than building a new "tier" of play with higher ceiling, instead they lowered the ceiling of "normal" play and build mythic in the now vacant space.
It isn't really the case as to my knowledge it's the only existing option that was "taken away" from normal play, and mythic is way more than that, but I think the move still left a bad taste for a lot of peoples. I can get why some of these ritual can "feel" more mythic than normal (altho I do think Wish would deserve the mythic tag way more than Emprisonment or Freedom), but then the rule shouldn't have been so absolute in forbidding anyone nonmythic from casting them.
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I agree, an NPC should not be required to be built by the same standards as a PC. But I disagree that NPCs should be allowed to do things that PCs can never do. If an NPC can do it, there should be a reasonable path for a PC.
If the example Runelord can make a runewell to craft a demiplane. A PC should be capable of crafting an expensive item that leads to the creation of the demi plane if he has the time and funds.
My stance as a GM if a player wanted to build a runewell in order to make a demiplane would first be "great, do you know how to do that?" and once that hurdle is cleared would be "okay, but it takes ten years to do all the stuff in order to build a working runewell, do you have ten years handy?"
There are certainly things that can be build that will take a long time (the Great Pyramid at Giza took 20-30 years to build), so we don't have rules for projects that take multiple decades of downtime because there's only so much space in rulebooks and mostly PCs work on the time-scale of months not decades.
So I think there's no problem with having there be two ways to do something:
- Be mythic and have a handful of cohorts.
- Have an incredible amount of time, resources, and people who work for you.
If a game actually operated on the scale where something like "the great project of an Archmage" could be completed, I think that's the sort of thing that you have to make house rules for. Nex didn't build those Quantium Golems (are they still golems? It seems like "as guardians of a city" the term might still apply) in a day.
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This trend of further distancing NPCs from PCs regarding how they work and their abilities is a blight on the industry. It kills any sense that the game is anything but a game and doesn't even attempt to obfuscate the various tricks that have historically been used to make NPCs seem closer to PCs. At this point why even have the same core stats for NPCs/monsters? Surely we could make the stat blocks trimmer by cutting anything that isn't specific to their role in the game.
This trend of further distancing enemies from PCs by giving them 'natural armour bonuses', 'special abilities', and 'monster exclusive feats' is a blight on the industry. It kills any sense that the game is anything but a game, and doesn't even attempt to obfuscate the various tricks that have historically been used to make NPCs seem closer to PCs - they're not even trying to rely only on giving monsters huge ability scores to give them the power level they need, instead they're just giving them arbitrarily abilities that PCs can't get for no reason. At this point, why even have feats and bonus types for monsters?
(the game is in fact a game! it's good to make game design decisions that make life easier for the GM, especially for making custom content! this is not reflective of the mythic rituals discussion, but neither is your post!)
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In fairness, I don't think it's working.
Any rules change that offends enough people will create a schism,like religion, but with less bloodshed.
Some will cling to the old and others will champion the new.
Unless Paizo somehow forces Mythic onto the organized play space, I suspect it will die on the vine.
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This trend of further distancing enemies from PCs by giving them 'natural armour bonuses', 'special abilities', and 'monster exclusive feats' is a blight on the industry. It kills any sense that the game is anything but a game, and doesn't even attempt to obfuscate the various tricks that have historically been used to make NPCs seem closer to PCs - they're not even trying to rely only on giving monsters huge ability scores to give them the power level they need, instead they're just giving them arbitrarily abilities that PCs can't get for no reason. At this point, why even have feats and bonus types for monsters?
(the game is in fact a game! it's good to make game design decisions that make life easier for the GM, especially for making custom content! this is not reflective of the mythic rituals discussion, but neither is your post!)
3.x, which I prefer even to PF1, gave PCs access to nearly everything you listed by giving rules for playing monstrous PCs. Thus that system had almost perfect parity between what a monster could have and what a player could have. So your example is completely incorrect.
As a forever GM I find anybody who needs a simpler game must either have a group that is extremely difficult to GM for, is lazy and doesn't want to spend time on game prep, or is simply a poor GM. It isn't hard to have a rule zero, set expectations for the kind of character power levels you're comfortable GMing for, and then fix any outliers as they pop up in play. This forum makes it seem as if Pathfinder's player base can't communicate with their fellow players and nobody has friends to play with and has to resort to PUGing with the dregs of the earth who live only to break the game and make the GM's life hell.
I think blanketly insulting anyone who doesn't like games in exactly the same way you do is not any kind of way to make a point, and your words also reflects that you seem to have 0 experience with rules light games.
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Just another example of Paizo making existing options worse in order to sell the new options in their new products.
It's a trend I hope to see them move away from.
I honestly have enormous difficulties trying to fathom how making 3 high-level rituals Mythic will make or break War of Immortals' sales.
If anything, judging by opinionated posts on this thread, it should actually push people to not buy the new book.
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I honestly have enormous difficulties trying to fathom how making 3 high-level rituals Mythic will make or break War of Immortals' sales.Just another example of Paizo making existing options worse in order to sell the new options in their new products.
It's a trend I hope to see them move away from.
It won't - this is just hyperbole, as is a lot of the other stuff here, imo. I highly doubt most tables actually care about this issue, or are even aware its a thing. Just change it back if you don't like - issue solved, end of concern.
Plus, some comments here that are needing to insult other players and games just to make their (supposed) point really shows to me they don't have much to say at all.
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Excuse the ignorance but how is making the game easier to run not putting power back in the GM's hands? If you're spending less time on-the-fly balancing the system, you have more time and attention to spend on actually running the game.It's not giving them any added power to do things they couldn't already do. Even in the most broken system, a GM has every tool the PCs have plus tools generally exclusive to the GM. Making those tools easier to use lowers the skill floor for GMing but gives them nothing they didn;t already have access to.
Also I really don't think you can use the commonality of quitting threads to determine how popular something is. No matter what game, system or hobby you're in there's always loads of quitting threads. People have been making them for 5e forever and that's still around and popular.I think you can use their increase post-remaster to show that people dislike how the game has been trending over the past year.
Unless you have a running count of how much it's been increasing, you are more or less operating off vibes, which is why it's unreliable. And even then I'd have my reservations because sites like Reddit are infamous for people just making stuff up for attention.
Also, entirely anecdotal and speculative, but I hung around the WoW community enough to learn the people constantly talking about quitting weren't the ones quitting. The people, in my experience, who want to quit will just do it, no theatrics required.
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Just another example of Paizo making existing options worse in order to sell the new options in their new products.
It's a trend I hope to see them move away from.
I honestly have enormous difficulties trying to fathom how making 3 high-level rituals Mythic will make or break War of Immortals' sales.
If anything, judging by opinionated posts on this thread, it should actually push people to not buy the new book.
While I don't disagree that the rituals aren't really important aspects of the game, the inclusion of new classes, archetypes, abilities, spells, and alternate rules, all with varying levels of (im)balance, is significantly more important (and takes up a lot more of the book), and we have had a few threads regarding a couple of these things already.
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In fairness, I don't think it's working.
Any rules change that offends enough people will create a schism,like religion, but with less bloodshed.
Some will cling to the old and others will champion the new.Unless Paizo somehow forces Mythic onto the organized play space, I suspect it will die on the vine.
What will make or break Mythic will be the first AP that incorporates it. If that AP is good and fun to play, people will use Mythic, if it isn't they won't. (See also: Wrath of the Righteous, which had a great story but was utterly broken. So this time, Paizo has taken care to not write a Mythic AP until *after* the rules were finalized.)
We know that Mythic rules will see some use in PFS, because they have already announced that. I do hope it gets more use than in 1e, where we got to play with it for like the back half of a 3-parter and then never again. I always enjoy the PFS scenarios that shake the rules up a little bit.
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As a forever GM I find anybody who needs a simpler game must either have a group that is extremely difficult to GM for, is lazy and doesn't want to spend time on game prep, or is simply a poor GM. It isn't hard to have a rule zero, set expectations for the kind of character power levels you're comfortable GMing for, and then fix any outliers as they pop up in play. This forum makes it seem as if Pathfinder's player base can't communicate with their fellow players and nobody has friends to play with and has to resort to PUGing with the dregs of the earth who live only to break the game and make the GM's life hell.
What a dismissive perspective. For one, you're wildly underestimating the time issue - I still have the notes from when I was in university and turned Serpent's Skull into a 20th-level mythic campaign instead of 17th level non-mythic campaign for PF1. I think I had about ~100-150 pages of statblocks I created for only book 6 of the AP. It took an immensely long time, and was only possible because I was in university - I'd never have time to do something like that now that I'm working full-time and have other responsibilities. A rulesystem that allows quick, effective, and fun creation of new content would allow me to do that in a fraction of the time it took in PF1, and with a better experience for players. That's very valuable, regardless of your assertions that this is only needed if you've got a terrible group, you're a bad GM, or you're "lazy and don't want to spend time on game prep". I'm happy to spend time - I can spend an hour sometime in the week getting the next session's content ready. I'm not happy to spend 10 hours in a week getting ready for the next session - especially as I GM Pathfinder twice a week; I'm not looking for a 20-hour/week part time job creating content for my campaigns just because someone is theoretically interested in maintaining parity between PC and NPC options. If I had 20 hours/week to spend on ttRPGs, I'd far rather do much more interesting work than laboriously making sure that they fey creature I'm making has enough hitdice to get the BAB they need, but not so many that their Will save is completely out-of-balance, and that's not laziness or lack of GMing skill, that's desire for better design. I don't even know how the "group of players that are extremely difficult to GM for" is relevant, as this is far more about 3.x making a GM's life difficult when trying to make custom content that fits the rules of the game than anything about a player's reactions.
P.S. you can still play a monster in PF2 if you want to. I can just give you the stat block for a dryad and you can play them. Does that mean there's almost perfect parity between what monsters and players can have? No it doesn't - as in PF1 and 3.5, the rules for how a human fighter and a dryad's stats are constructed are fundamentally different.
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As a forever GM I find anybody who needs a simpler game must either have a group that is extremely difficult to GM for, is lazy and doesn't want to spend time on game prep, or is simply a poor GM.
I'm biased and so not really the person to ask whether or not I'm a good GM. But I proudly proclaim that I am indeed a lazy one. I'm SO lazy that I'm actually willing to pay others to write rules for me that mostly work for the games I want to play and want to adjust those rules as little as possible.
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I feel we're getting sidetracked somewhat -- the issue here isn't so much about PCs not being able to play monsters, because the rituals being discussed are designed specifically for PCs, and up until recently were doing just fine as part of non-mythic play. We never needed to be able to recreate the Eye of Avarice or the Glass Lighthouse in order to be able to create a demiplane, and the GM already had full control over whether or not the party was special enough to have access to that rare ritual. Re-enabling that ritual or Freedom/Imprisonment for non-mythic play would take no effort at all, and in the very unlikely event that a non-mythic party gets access to this ritual and has to deal with mythic creatures, gating the targeting of mythic creatures for the latter two rituals behind a Mythic Point expenditure would be trivially easy to houserule.
I really don't ascribe to the narrative that Paizo is somehow committed to taking away our toys, but I do think in this case it feels like Mythic's special status was treated like a bit of a zero-sum game. I get the impression the designers didn't really know how to handle mythic rules in a game that's made to have a very consistent balance framework, and that also already tries quite hard to make the party feel special as they level up, so gating some existing content behind mythic play was probably done to make Mythic more special by comparison, rather than on its own merits. It's not that Paizo wants us to suffer, they just wanted to promote a new expansion, and did so in a way that I don't think worked out all that well in practice.
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I feel we're getting sidetracked somewhat -- the issue here isn't so much about PCs not being able to play monsters, because the rituals being discussed are designed specifically for PCs, and up until recently were doing just fine as part of non-mythic play. We never needed to be able to recreate the Eye of Avarice or the Glass Lighthouse in order to be able to create a demiplane, and the GM already had full control over whether or not the party was special enough to have access to that rare ritual. Re-enabling that ritual or Freedom/Imprisonment for non-mythic play would take no effort at all, and in the very unlikely event that a non-mythic party gets access to this ritual and has to deal with mythic creatures, gating the targeting of mythic creatures for the latter two rituals behind a Mythic Point expenditure would be trivially easy to houserule.
I really don't ascribe to the narrative that Paizo is somehow committed to taking away our toys, but I do think in this case it feels like Mythic's special status was treated like a bit of a zero-sum game. I get the impression the designers didn't really know how to handle mythic rules in a game that's made to have a very consistent balance framework, and that also already tries quite hard to make the party feel special as they level up, so gating some existing content behind mythic play was probably done to make Mythic more special by comparison, rather than on its own merits. It's not that Paizo wants us to suffer, they just wanted to promote a new expansion, and did so in a way that I don't think worked out all that well in practice.
Yeah, I subscribe to the idea others have shared that the reprinted rituals should have had optional mythic boosts attached. So you can make your regular demiplane, or your Mythic! demiplane (only $2 extra per month). Not that I really use rituals of that scope in my games but that's what i'm going to houserule if a player wants to use one of those rituals.
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In fairness, I don't think it's working.
Any rules change that offends enough people will create a schism,like religion, but with less bloodshed.
Some will cling to the old and others will champion the new.
It's been that way for basically every edition of every RPG. Nothing new.
It's a bit weird to see it during an edition like this, but I definitely feel that PF2 book release quality has declined in 2024. That's where the tone shift is coming from, IMO: there's just more stuff coming out that clearly needed more time in the oven and a lot more "huh?" than there was earlier in the edition's lifetime.
Unless Paizo somehow forces Mythic onto the organized play space, I suspect it will die on the vine.
Full mythic will never come to PFS: they want PFS to be accessable. That would require mythic pregens and a lot more GM explanation at the table and it's just not going to happen.
It looks like scenarios will be coming out where you temporarily get a mythic power, which lets scenario authors play with pieces of the mythic rules in a way they can control. For PFS play, I think that makes a lot of sense and those have the potential to be super interesting scenarios.
I don't think they ever expected Mythic to become the standard mode of play. Mythic in PF1 never did. Course Mythic in PF1 was totally broken, but it absolutely delivered on the fantasy of "you are extremely powerful and stories will be told about the bonkers things you did." I ran one PF1 Mythic campaign and while it was a lot of fun with some really exciting moments, it was also a huge amount of work and required limiting mythic tiers to before it goes totally off the rails. It was also really stressful for me at times because there wasn't much between "this fight will be trivial" and "this fight will be a TPK".
Comparatively, I don't think PF2 Mythic has that problem... but I don't intend to ever GM it because the way its designed, I don't find it interesting. I'm not feeling any story beats that I could do with it that I can't do without it that I actually want to do ("Fighter trained in Religion leads Create Demiplane ritual while Wizard legendary in Arcana is a secondary caster because the proficiency tier only matters for secondary casters" is not a story beat I want to do).
If a good mythic AP comes out, that will probably get more tables to run it. As someone else pointed out, Wrath of the Righteous did that in PF1 pretty effectively.
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As to the "NPCs using different rules than the PCs" issue, I'll +1 that it's a problem / something that should be pulling dev effort to minimize.
I can identify that specific "grumble" denting the fun on multiple occasions, including my very previous session.
In Strength of Thousands, the AP seems allergic to giving the PCs magic items that sell / are on level, and multiple times this stinginess has been absurd.
Last session, we had a combat vs 4 humans stabbing us with tridents. This session took us from L9 --> 10.
Because these were outright humans with weapons, that created an expectation that they were using the same weapon and damage rules as us, and that we were (finally!) going to get some runes that we could at least sell. Nope.
Despite them doing upwards of 40 damage a stab, the weapons were L3 +1 Fighters Forks. As in, not even carrying a Striking rune. And their armor had 0 runes. Yeah.
It was a joke for a while, but it's not funny anymore when the math says I should be using cantrips instead of Strikes.
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It was certainly a "f-ing seriously?" moment for the whole party. This is also just a few sessions after an undead martial appeared to have a lightning rune in their weapon, but nope, monster-cheat rules for damage. I'm still stuck with +1 Striking at L10.
When I actually sit down and retrospect, I will say that NPCs not obeying the normal rules is actually a pretty common contributing factor / "blame scapegoat" to these "fun dents" and wtf moments.
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It is important to say that the reverse has been true as well. It was actually super cool in Gatewalkers when we fought a foe spellcaster, and they actually had a spellbook for our PCs to learn from!
Which does make SoT look all the more hollow in comparison, as I think the magic AP has had 0 spellbooks or other "spell-get" rewards thus far. There was one ritual we were supposed to learn & use for a chore, but its effect was so poor it motivated us to learn/use Phantasmal Custodians instead. Which saved our impoverished PCs roughly 1/3 the gp cost. SoT is a campaign that rail-roads you into one "answer," even when it means that said quest/chore will *reduce* the party's coffers instead of increasing them, lol.
(I forgot about the lizardfolk that offered us 2 unique spells! They just happened to be so unusably bad, and I think primal-only, that they slipped out of my mind.)
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Oof, uh, putting that repressed Strength of Thousands "feedback," to the side,
I strongly think that while the "not using the PC rules" is an occasional unavoidable reality in ttrpgs, that it is absolutely a significant factor that hurts/helps the player experience, and is well worth the dev effort to minimize that "NPC rules cheating" whenever possible.
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Maybe I'm playing wrong, but I've literally never, ever, ever had an issue with NPCs having different rules than PCs - nor has any table in my 20+ years of GMing.
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Maybe I'm playing wrong, but I've literally never, ever, ever had an issue with NPCs having different rules than PCs - nor has any table in my 20+ years of GMing.
Well, you revealed a key clue as to why.
20+ year vets have a completely different world of expectations compared to newbies.
I've only played half of a 3.5 campaign a decade ago, and then pf2 starting 2.5 ish years ago.
I will say that blank-slate players absolutely do not accept / assume that other humanoids just get to have entire stat blocks and damage profiles that "cheat" via monster rules.
Monster-monsters getting arbitrary stats, sure.
But if the foe is using armor and weapons, and even is a known humanoids species, players rightfully expect them to follow the same mechanics that the PCs are bound by.
Some stretching is fine! Special abilities from telegraphed uniqueness, like some Rough-ish precision damage bonus work fine without grumbles, but nonsense like us getting crit for 90 damage by someone that turns out was using a Level 3 +1 weapon just feels like crap. There's no real way to sugar-coat that.
The fact that they carried and dropped runed weapons, but that the weapons are magically arbitrarily super-duper powerful in their hands, while downgrading when dropped, just feels anti-player.
Iirc, Abomb Vlts even used a clever "cheat" that worked with their devils. The hell-made weapons had pseudo-runes via hell magic / power that didn't work for mortals, nor have sell value. That was all the dev effort it took, but players really do need some excuse/reason why the rules are not applying.