Thirdly, and perhaps the most difficult change I was planning on making, making the gap between mythic creatures and normal creatures feel "real". Currently, if you are a mythic fighter, there really isnt any difference between fighting a normal bear or a mythic bear. At worst, it will just feel like an "elite" version of the same creature. I was going give mythic creatures resistance to all damage from non-mythic creatures, including player characters. I was also going to go through existing feats and grant them more power when used against non-mythic creatures.
Isn't that pretty much already the case, when it comes to damage? Mythic Resistence gives mythic creatures resistance to damage from non-mythic sources. The reason why that doesn't feel any different is that most(*) mythic PCs will simply bypass it without effort, and non-mythic PCs are very rarely fighting mythic creatures.
Another challenge with mythic right now is how characters and creatures don't really feel mythic except when using mythic abilities (or mythic proficiency, which has its own problems due to inverse scaling). Making mythic abilities do more against non-mythic things won't really address that, since you'll still spend most of the time in a game night not really being mythic.
If it were up too me, I would have given mythic creatures more passive, always on bonuses, so that you're being mythic all the time. Like, the PF1 mythic creature ability that put it in initiative twice? A bear with that is WAY scarier than a normal bear right out of the gate.
A numeric bonus is less interesting but probably also pretty effective here, like if mythic creatures just have a flat +2 to all proficiencies all the time, they're automatically better than non-mythic equivalents and a mythic bear will be more dangerous than a non-mythic bear even before you give it any mythic abilities. Trouble with that is that because it's baked in it doesn't feel as interesting, and fighting nonmythic on-level encounters will be substantially easier than it was before. But if "the PCs feel strong against nonmythic enemies" it'll do the job.
(*) The ones that can't tend to feel very lousy in that situation because there's just nothing they can do about it. Ditto if anything has triple Mythic Resilience, since that's pretty much just a "go home, this won't be fun" thing for spellcasters.
A concept that I was considering when thinking about what Mythic 'could' mean was to borrow in part the old half/feat traits concepts a little in line with backgrounds, but in mind, not entirely original backgrounds, but was thinking in terms of a 'mythic' background.
A big part of that 'background' would be 'STORY' based. Are you mythic because your blood lineage takes you back to a deity somewhere in your ancestors, and that is playing out in you? Say you are somehow a descendant of PHarasma or one of her servants. That would link you back to some death and rebirth storylines.
Now, you have an encounter where the players are going to come across some undead. The GM looks at the list of 'cards' with the various links the players have chosen. They review the list, and pick on or two players and their backgrounds that 'make sense' to get linked.
The creatures in the encounter are given a resistance/regeneration ability due to their mythic connection to death. This regeneration will make them particularly problematic for most non-mythic creatures. But the weakness gets defined in story by the GM. The GM notifies the player whom is associated with Pharasma, as well as the player whose divine choice links them somehow to Sarenrae. The GM notifies the Pharasmite character that any opponent whom harms them, becomes adjacent to them during the enemies turn will find their link severed for at least one turn (unless it can re reactivated, which the enemies might hold an object that could reactivate it). The Sarenite player is told a somewhat similar thing, that if they strike or damage any creature it will lose the ability for at least 1 turn. (adjacency not mattering as much for that one) But say neither of those players were playing, the GM could have decided to have a player who's nature was granted by the God of War (Gorrum or some other) and so they had enough Might to break their regeneration connection. The GM picks out who plays the potential keys for each encounter.
Now a couple players have a special role they can play in said encounter. The other players help facilitate the fight and take the enemies down. The idea being, the GM will use 'story cards' picking other players to enable key elements of future encounters to be countered, with the idea that each player should get a chance to be the key in at least one of the encounters.
In this, you play a part because of who you are, not so much of a, this gives you some big bonus. Instead it means you are a bit special in this circumstance as a baseline. It is more about the story, and people playing some important roles here and there than basing it on who get the higher Rolls during the battle. Instead the players are encouraged to support one another to play out these roles to get to the end.
So having a Resistance to damage being done, or a combination of that and fast regen for damage taken are both options for a mythic perk a set of enemies might have in a particular encounter. You could even instead have an enemy be weak against a particular foe. This might be particularly good to spread out, if you had multiple foes, have it become apparent that particular foes might be 'weak' to particular ones of the PCs. And the enemies won't target the foes they are weak to, instead going for others. That way you have the combat potentially have people chasing people trying to damage the right target while avoiding the wrong one.
Other options might involve some scenes where getting there, an important piece of information gets shared with the particular player due to their mythic link. Or upon getting to such a place, they get granted a special mythic power for the remainder of the adventure to help in future encounters.
I would be good to understand what the player values, as far as their contribution to the game. If they like being a big part of the combats, you don't want to choose their player to be the one to reveal the major plot point at the altar. But a player who prefers being the scholar, and loves giving boosts the the party will love to be the one whom is the key to learning how to exploit the weakness of the several encounters opponents.
It isn't necessarily as systematic as a ladder of items, but it is an 'approach' making these 'mythic' encounters have a non-normal mechanic surrounding the encounter, and having the players learn what it is as they get in it, or prior to the encounter. In some cases, for really hard ones, maybe the players might not learn the nature of the additional rule element until they are in the encounter and they fight their was to the 'altar' in the center first.
It is all a matter of, what will your player ENJOY doing in the encounter.
If you do do that, my suggestion would be to make a card for each player, and write down their origin and spheres of influence related to their Mythic nature. Then spread out the cards, and have your list of encounters. Put the cards out to select a person for each encounter. They would be your primary. Then you might look at encounters and identify that some might need a backup key player for it. Make sure everyone gets be be key at least once and make sure you aren't reusing the same person all the time for the others.
You might even use their backgrounds to make one player 'weak' or the target of your mythic opponents. Maybe this party can't bear the presence of a mythic support of Pharasma and will focus on trying to take them down. (and might even impart a condition that some of these evil actors might cause that player to be supernaturally Weak 5 to their attacks) This weakness might be able to be mitigated by the actions of one of the other members of the party.
Again, it is all about weaving all the players into the plot of the story.
They do with Mythic Resistance, but I was wanting to make that just a standard ability for all mythic creatures. I was also wanting player characters to also gain that sort of resistance as well.
I see. You'll probably need to come up with something different for Mythic Resilience, then. That one is significantly stronger and constantly running into it will get old since it'll always require figuring out which spells won't work against every enemy and avoiding them (and avoid triple Mythic Resilience like the plague).
I think the reason that problem exists is most mythic Feats are "active" instead of "passive". I was going to add some abilities that you just have, instead of needing to spend mythic Points to access.
Yes, agreed.
I would disagree with the second part. For a simple example, an ability that i was thinking up for the Gravelord gives a player character a fear aura. But, creatures that aren't Mythic have an inverse-incapacitation effect, meaning an encounter with non-mythic creatures will always result in them being frightened of you for at least one round.
That's a neat ability, though quite powerful. Course that should be the point, probably. One of the things PF1 Mythic did better is making players feel really strong. PF2 doesn't really do that until certain destinies which have abilities that are way above the others.
(Like, PF1 Mythic isn't even remotely balanced, but it does a good job of making players feel really strong. PF2 Mythic also isn't remotely balanced but doesn't deliver the fantasy nearly as well on a consistent basis.)
Definitely agree with this. I want them to feel like unstoppable wrecking machines against "normal" enemies, until they meet someone on their level.
Well a flat +2 to all proficiencies as "mythic proficiency" would certainly do that, without the swinginess that the current mythic proficiency gives at low level where it's an absurdly huge bonus that gradually shrinks.
Personally, I think the Mythic Resilience was a bad idea. It's reminiscent of 5e's Legendary Resistance, and just feels bad as a caster (or worse, a DC based character like a Poisoner Alchemist who doesn't even get Legendary proficiency). But, following the original idea, I would probably also make it standard for all mythic characters. I'm not sure exactly what to do with that, but honestly I was thinking of removing it and just giving creatures interesting abilities instead.
Agreed. If you want magic resistant creatures, there's already ways to do it like a bonus to saves or defenses against some kind of spells.
I think I may implement that. It's probably the simplest and least broken way to do it.
Would you keep it at +2 for the entirety of Mythic play, or do you think it should scale based off of Mythic Rank? Like, Rank 1 it's a +1, but at rank 10 it's a +4/+5?
I'd leave it the same, personally. "If you're Mythic, everything you are at least trained proficiency in gets a +2 Mythic bonus." Done. This makes Mythic creatures (PC and NPC) better than non-mythic creatures immediately without really altering the rest of the math, and it's very easy to implement since it just works across the board with no special considerations for NPCs.
If you're going to make mythic ranks a core part of the mythic rules again, then using those would also work where it's +1 per 3 ranks or something like that.
I'm leery about giving +5 to anything because the bonus is so huge that it effectively overshadows everything else and means there's little point in even running a fight against a nonmythic creature unless it massively outlevels the PCs. If the Fighter is critting on an 8 on the dice, then there isn't exactly much jeopardy.
If you gave players a flat +2, what would you do in place of the Mythic Callings? Would they just be a set of Edicts and Anathema, and a way to regain Mythic Points?
I don't really know, TBH. My honest preference here is to ditch the current mythic point restore system entirely and go with "you regain mythic points at 1/hour of real world play time (but not during an encounter)". Mythic characters get to use mythic power because it's just a core part of their power, without having to go out of their way to do something to get it back. This also works in dungeon crawls with tons of encounters per in-game day and hexploration where there might be 1 encounter per in-game day. Maybe tweak the starting number or the other ways to get them back if that feels like too much, but IMO mythic characters should get to use mythic points regularly rather than treat them like a hard to recover resource.
Callings then become archetypes that give you a core set of mythic abilities but don't require you to go out of your way to do something just to get back mythic power. Like the mythic artisan going to try to find some item to repair just so they can get a crit success to get back a mythic point is silly.