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Sure, especially in a card game like MtG, there are intentionally bad cards/options. But do you really think Paizo is and has been making intentionally bad feats for pf2? With how often they cite the importance of page space?No, they have not. Their idea of apples V orange trading is notoriously abnormal in a lot of ways, but it's genuine.
I think they're often doing a thing where some designer comes up with a cool idea for an ability , someone says it's too OP, so they water down the feat. Repeat several times until you get something trash.
You can see this most clearly in abilities that would be really cool and on concept if they didn't have like one line of "no actually it doesn't do cool thing", you can really tell that last line wasn't in the original draft and somebody got it into their heads that it was necessary for balance (occasionally it actually is). The problem is twofold, bad estimations of what's necessary for balance, and perhaps more damming a willingness to print the now concept-killed ability.
A great example of this is Exsanginate from the Sanguimancer dedication. The whole point of the archetype is drawing power from blood kinda like a vampire, and this feat gives you temp hitpoints as an action after dealing slashing/piercing from a successful close range attack.
Ok, that makes sense, you take their blood and absorb it's power. This gives you temp hp. Great mechanics for a Sanguimancer. Until you read the last line: "Exsanguinate works only against active foes who are able to act and aren’t restrained."
Like, what the f~%+? I draw power from blood but it doesn't work if I crit succeeded a grapple beforehand? It's obvious they were trying to prevent you from using boblin the goblin's cowering form as a bloodbag after you've won the fight, but in doing so they have obliterated the concept of the archetype, and for a meaningless balance gain - half level in temp hp is really not much, equivalent or worse than a false life scroll at all levels. A player going into fights with half level in temp hp as a result of a 6th level feat simply isn't a big deal, or a deal at all really. They have failed both in judging what's a balance problem that needs a restriction, and in printing an ability restricted to the point of actively harming the concept.
For another example look at ghost oil. "The oil has no effect when applied to another creature's weapon". But why? Would it somehow be unbalanced to apply ghost oil to an ally's weapon for them, or one of the small handful of creatures in the game where you could hypothetically under controlled laboratory conditions crit-disarm them, and applying the oil would be better than just picking up the weapon and putting it in your bag/spare sheath, because they can teleport the weapon back to them. I don't understand. It's a magic oil, by what mechanism does it cease to function when applied to my ally's weapon instead of my own. Who decided we needed this restriction.
There's plenty more examples but I think I've said my piece.
or some reason you can't put it on an ally's weapon for them, you can only apply it
To talk a bit more about power tiers, based on discussions with others, I feel there are essentially four major tiers of power, each with its own tone of adventure that can be told:
So rather than level up from one power level to another, the GM could simply choose the tier for the party and the adventure, so that the party's abilities, the monsters, and the general challenges could fit the general tone: a grounded-tier party might have the Fighter use a useful fighting technique they've developed over the course of mercenary work and the Wizard could use the basic magic they know to hurl a nearby small object at a foe, but at epic tier that Wizard would be calling down meteors from space while the Fighter could cleave monsters the size of a skyscraper from stem to stern in a single slice.
And similarly, one could also apply this principle of modularity to phases of play, such that combat, exploration, downtime, but also subsystems such as chases, study, or circus performance, plus other currently-underdeveloped aspects such as travel could all be made a little more self-contained, with characters having a power budget assigned to each. Not only could this allow niche non-combat skill feats to shine better, since they wouldn't compete with feats for combat, it would also allow classes to have unique abilities at every turn: the swift and terrain-savvy Ranger ought to explore differently from the magic-aware Wizard, who would similarly explore differently from the Alchemist going around picking reagents and concocting brews, and that ought to reflect itself via more bespoke abilities. Decoupling these aspects of adventuring could also help simplify characters even if they do get lots of abilities: if a character has something like 5 abilities for combat, and the same amount for exploration, travel, downtime, and some other subsystem like studying each time, they'd have the simplicity of being able to choose from 5 abilities each time while having 25 in total.
When combining these principles, I feel it could also make it easier to mix-and-match game components based on the story a GM wants to tell, as well as define access: if a GM wants to tell a grittier story where subsisting in the wild is important, they could include travel at a grounded power tier, but if they want to take an epic-tier adventure instead where teleportation is common and subsistence is trivially easy for superpowered characters, they would likely not need to include that module. By that same virtue, long-range teleportation could simply be an epic-level power. A class like the Exemplar would likely be easy to include in epic- and mythic-tier adventures, if not also heroic-tier, and you could simply exclude them from grounded-tier adventures due to their theme instead of giving an all-purpose rare trait. For APs, this could make it easy to write exactly the kind of tone and power level intended for the story (including transitions to different power levels as needed), and for GMs, it could become much easier to pick and choose the bits of gameplay you'd want to include as part of your story, as well as potentially include new modules if you want to include a special element (e.g. competitive basket-weaving for a cozy fantasy interlude).
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Is this how the game is already set up?
There are some areas of flexibility around what kinds of narrative abilities fit in each tier, but spells like teleportation (and long distance movement) are not really accessible to players before the level 10-20 "epic" tier that you are talking about.
I can see the appeal of wanting to make sure each class has a set number of out of combat related abilities that line up better with the various out of combat encounter subsystems that exist but there are some serious issues with trying to do that, even if I agree strongly that the game has a problem where those subsystems were clearly not developed enough at the playtesting phase for things like skill feats to interact cleanly and clearly with them.
The issues with over formalizing out of combat abilities:
1. Unlike combat, the same kind of narrative out-of-combat challenge might be played out in 2 or 3 different ways in any given adventure in PF2. A complex environmental challenge like crossing through a lava-filled cavern, might play out in a combat encounter pace, where many of the threats are treated like simple or complex hazards that uses battle maps and 3 action turns to resolve; or it might be a victory point-based skill challenge; or it might end up resolving with almost no checks at all if the party has access to resources or ideas that the GM decides are suitable enough to just bypass, like the party all can teleport or the ability to fly fast enough to just take some minor damage in the crossing.
2. The existing way that the game gives characters out of combat abilities is primarily skills, but there are lots of spells that address these modes of play as well. PF2 is much better than past games at not letting as many types of out-of-combat challenges be completely bypassed by a single spell, but it certainly still happens and that is where the narrative expectations of different levels of play really enters this conversation. It is entirely possible for 20th level characters to have no default ability to fly, for example, but would be bad adventure design to build encounters for 20th level characters that present no challenge to characters who can fly, because, minimally, a level 20th party should be capable of getting the ability for the whole party to fly with less than a percent of their character's material wealth, if not by other means.
These two issues combine together to create a pretty big problem with trying to formalize how out-of-combat power can be formalized.
Skill feats for example, really only consistently handle the game at combat encounter-mode pace. There are some exceptions, for down-time activities in particular, but the inconsistency of whether challenges will be presented in combat encounter or victory point encounter mode means either every feat/ability would have to have a formal explanation for how to handle both, and that is a pretty Herculean task/overhaul of these systems, especially as there will pretty quickly come a point in the game where the power tier of the game has moved past the skill/skill feats relevance to the types of challenges being faced. For example, high level skill feats for climbing related challenges are a waste of page space, when the items and magic to bypass those challenges are trivially available by mid levels. This is not something that many adventures have necessarily handled well, and is complicated by the reality that challenges in adventures don't always line up to the expected tiers of play at the levels they are happening...but at the same time, it is only a problem for out of combat encounters to become trivialized by characters with the right abilities/items/spells prepared if the tension and excitement of the campaign was riding of these encounters being narrative focal points of the adventure. As much as Mount Doom is built up as the pinnacle location of the Lord of the Rings, and its dangers foreshadowed through out the story, we largely bypass most of the environmental hazards it presents as background narrative by the time the scene set there happens. There was more important parts of the story to focus on by that point, which will often be the case in RPG adventures as well, although RPGs have to also contend with fitting a certain amount of XP into each step of the story so it is not uncommon to have adventures set aside front and center stage time to challenges that would be montaged over in a film or skipped in exposition in a novel.
This is kind of the difficulty, but also the artistry of adventure writing and GMing. You have to keep things interesting but you can't move things along so fast, and only focus on the main plot points of the adventure, that players get no time learning the ropes of their characters growing powers, develop a relationship to the game's setting, or the opportunity to gain enough experience with their characters to be at the right level to face the next plot essential event.
All of this is true of combat encounters as well, but there generally is more patience for extraneous combat encounters than for extraneous out-of-combat encounters. This might be a product of PF2 game mechanics, but it is definitely also a product of long running game expectations that predate PF2's existence.
All of this might just be to say that the game needs a lot of flexibility around how out of combat encounters can be handled because not every cliff face needs to be scaled at a pace of 5 to 10ft of vertical movement per check. It also could be interesting to consider having more ways to streamline down combat encounters into VP subsystems that can more quickly determine resource expenditure and rewards than having to fight out every combat encounter, but that is something that is kind of already happening and also something that might require a new edition before it could be formalized in a manner where almost any combat encounter could be resolved that way.
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Is this how the game is already set up?
Given that teleport may not exist even in level 20 games as a result of being uncommon spell, and how you yourself have outlined a great deal many ways in which 2e is poorly-suited to deliver the kind of gameplay I'm asking for, I'd say the answer is a pretty definite "no". For that matter, the Exemplar is similarly not necessarily available in Mythic play as a result of being rare, and more broadly the game's rarity system, extremely useful as it is, doesn't really cover the finer-grained use cases mentioned here.
All of this might just be to say that the game needs a lot of flexibility around how out of combat encounters can be handled because not every cliff face needs to be scaled at a pace of 5 to 10ft of vertical movement per check. It also could be interesting to consider having more ways to streamline down combat encounters into VP subsystems that can more quickly determine resource expenditure and rewards than having to fight out every combat encounter, but that is something that is kind of already happening and also something that might require a new edition before it could be formalized in a manner where almost any combat encounter could be resolved that way.
That I think is the beauty of modular design. As you point out, PF2e is too tightly-coupled, its out-of-combat gameplay fleshed out too little, and its character balance too lopsided outside of combat for it to really deliver the kind of fleshed-out and highly customizable play being discussed here, but a modular system could allow each of those out-of-game components to be given exactly what it needs to work. In fact, if any module could be plugged in or out, that would allow multiple possible modules for the same bit of gameplay, so if you want your combat to be more streamlined you can, and you could similarly have exploration modes that cater to people who like or dislike attrition.
Just as an example of how this can be done differently, there's this system called Tresspasser that applies a variant of PF2e's action system to exploration an downtime, allowing characters to make meaningful decisions even then. It specifically avoids getting bogged down in excessive detail, but nonetheless fleshes out its different systems in a way that ensures there's gameplay at every phase.
I mean, I don't think anything this drastic is ever likely to happen for 2e, but I wouldn't put it past 3e or some other future edition. Paizo I think did a fantastic job advancing Pathfinder's design from 1e and making the game leagues more modular, so the above would be a comparatively smaller jump. I also do think Mythic failed in large part because it tried to insert itself in a game that lacked the structure to accommodate it: it failed to set a new tier of power because it could only layer itself onto our existing leveling curve, which was designed to achieve the same thing, and it failed to make Mythic characters feel special because its options were ultimately balanced around the same standard and power level as everything else. Had it been allowed to exist as its own thing, with its own standard of balance, it could have really shined.
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I mean, I don't think anything this drastic is ever likely to happen for 2e, but I wouldn't put it past 3e or some other future edition. Paizo I think did a fantastic job advancing Pathfinder's design from 1e and making the game leagues more modular, so the above would be a comparatively smaller jump. I also do think Mythic failed in large part because it tried to insert itself in a game that lacked the structure to accommodate it: it failed to set a new tier of power because it could only layer itself onto our existing leveling curve, which was designed to achieve the same thing, and it failed to make Mythic characters feel special because its options were ultimately balanced around the same standard and power level as everything else. Had it been allowed to exist as its own thing, with its own standard of balance, it could have really shined.
Note that Mythic was always intended to be available from low levels, as opposed to Epic, which was 21+.
The idea was to tell different stories than those of everyday's adventurers.
Note that Mythic was always intended to be available from low levels, as opposed to Epic, which was 21+.
The idea was to tell different stories than those of everyday's adventurers.
Right, and therein lies the problem: you're not everyday adventurers to begin with. At level 1, you're already above-average, and at high levels you can already do things lower-level "everyday adventurers" can't do. You're already special, and you already become more special as you level up. Mythic doesn't really add to that, and the powers it offers generally lack the narrative scope to tell the kind of grander stories it suggests. If the premise right from the start was that your characters and their actions had far-reaching narrative consequences and were balanced differently from the norm, then it would likely have had a better chance of delivering its intended fantasy.
I kinda think the main mechanical core of mythic acting as a way to overturn the already strained success/fail roll math was a very misguided idea.
I understand that it is a word count short way to implement something like that, but imo it just interacts with too many things (renders other considerations irrelevant) to ever work right. It feels bad to have all the normal investments become temporarily irrelevant, and even screws up the notion of niche protection. It's genuinely a thing where the once-per-session odd skill check can be cheesed via existing mythic roll, and I'm kinda baffled that was allowed, though at least the severity of that fades as levels go up.
More to the point; the current mythic rules means that most of the time, "being mythic" means essentially nothing, until a brief moment of mythic power where it's the most important thing in system.
It is also horribly crippled by how this mechanic has to work in reverse; foes suddenly "being mythic" is a complete show-stopper that screws with your basic roll math.
The mythic defenses being so asymmetrical, where foes "being mythic" means something completely different than when PCs "are mythic" is, and was, an extremely misguided idea from the start. I don't care that it is a reference to ancient stories where foes are impervious to the heroes normal methods; I'm willing to say it was a "f#+!ing stupid" level of bad idea to put into a game system that pretends to be PC-foe symmetrical.
If you are a junior professional game designer, and your articulated reason for a mechanic is "because that's how it was in the epic ballads" you would get verbally slapped across the face for suggesting it. That's not legit game design, you don't work backwards because you think "wouldn't it be cool, though?"
It might be fine when brainstorming to see if there's a coincidental mechanical justification to explore random fancies like that, but that's not how you communicate your idea to other devs; that "justification" never leaves the brainstorm.
But if you're some senior dev giving orders from on high, everyone else has to silently yank out their hair and try to make it not suck as much as they can. At high-seniority workplaces, juniors are not allowed to dissent with the base idea like the should be able to. So you get this fundamentally broken foundation that makes mythic screw with and halt normal gameplay instead of being a subsystem that enhances it.
(and even brakes previous design bible tenets to do so, such as PC-foe symmetry)
I cannot stress enough how the reveal behind why mythic defenses were designed like that just nukes my confidence in Paizo on the whole. The actual mechanic sucking is not the key detail that bothers me. It is that the "why" behind this design is completely divorced from the existing system; that it was wholly poofed out of thin air for the sake of what amounts to a literary reference.
That's the exact opposite of "good praxis" for design.
If a dev post talking about making mythic had instead claimed they wanted to present the PCs with a show-stopping mechanical roadblock in the form of those save upgrades, and then they labored to make that fun, this mini-rant section would not exist. It just would be a bad outcome of a normal design process.
I cannot stress enough how wacko-nuts it is for the mechanic's genesis, the point of it's existence, to have been a reference to Homer et al ancient stories.
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This problem of mythic being completely irrelevant most of the time is directly the result of Paizo wanting mythic to both be extremely powerful in the moment, but not have it outright break the game balance in totality.
The only way to do that is to have very resource limited and brief moments of those super-high power spikes.
Which is how you get mythic points not adding a new resource, but instead burning the one "system safety" that player need to hold onto to avoid bullsh.t deaths, their hero points.
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If they instead designed mythic power to not be as in-the-moment game changing, it could have given mythic PCs more long-term powers to better alter their "base feel" compared to traditional PCs.
Even without rebuilding their idea from the ground up, it's easy to do a thought experiment for alternative version that is closer to that "slower burn" ideal.
If you were to theoretically take a nerf pass across the existing mythic powers, you could then turn up the frequency of how often it is okay for PCs to be popping those mythic points. As such, you can change that mechanic to no longer compete with hero points, and have it work more like FP.
My proposal is to give a starting, time-recharging pool of 1 Mythic Point, but have additional slots explicitly for MP that is only generated via deeds aligning with your PC's mythic archetype (with it's own separate cap of ~2 from that recharging 1 base MP).
If you give all a base *re*charging 1MP, it further allows you to differentiate how mythics can charge & bank those extra MP. The goal being to make these charge events much more common to better engage them with that mythic sub system, while ensuring that no "specialist adventuring day" prevents PCs from "being mythic." Even during a diplomacy day, every PC should be able to feel mythic.
A combat specialist can charge 1/3 MP per crit Strike, a charismatic type can charge 1 MP per non-combat social outcome shift, plus 1/3 for each crit Demoralize, etc.
But it's super important to avoid uniform "+1MP" like the current version, because that just doesn't have the granularity needed to support different playstyles.
There's just no way to balance different means of generating MP if every charge event has to be "+1" like that.
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Right, and therein lies the problem: you're not everyday adventurers to begin with. At level 1, you're already above-average, and at high levels you can already do things lower-level "everyday adventurers" can't do. You're already special, and you already become more special as you level up. Mythic doesn't really add to that, and the powers it offers generally lack the narrative scope to tell the kind of grander stories it suggests. If the premise right from the start was that your characters and their actions had far-reaching narrative consequences and were balanced differently from the norm, then it would likely have had a better chance of delivering its intended fantasy.Note that Mythic was always intended to be available from low levels, as opposed to Epic, which was 21+.
The idea was to tell different stories than those of everyday's adventurers.
By "Everyday adventurers", I mean non-Mythic ones, but these go from level 1 to level 20 already.
The crux is how do you tell a Mythic story that will be different from that of high-level "Everyday adventurers" without gating it behind higher-level than 20th, aka Epic?
By "Everyday adventurers", I mean non-Mythic ones, but these go from level 1 to level 20 already.
Okay, so what then is the crucial difference between mythic and non-mythic adventurers? What, in your opinion, is the difference between a mythic story, and a non-mythic story as told in PF2e?
The crux is how do you tell a Mythic story that will be different from that of high-level "Everyday adventurers" without gating it behind higher-level than 20th, aka Epic?
That is indeed the question. That is why I think power level ought to be a dial for the GM to tune easily in accordance with the story they want to tell, rather than something based on level. Mythic could have perhaps succeeded at what it aimed for if it allowed adventurers to progress past level 20, but on top of the many complications arising from raising the level cap, it would also have made those kinds of adventures extremely inaccessible. Even levels 11-20 are a threshold far fewer players reach than levels 1-10, which also impacts the popularity of the adventures that can take place at that kind of power level.
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I definitely agree that mythic resilience and resistance was not a very good way to do monsters, just as mythic abilities themselves I think were limited. I also fully agree with you that simply making things bigger, whether it's covering larger distances or affecting wider areas, could have easily gone a long way towards putting everything on a grander scale. I think ultimately the point of Mythic is at odds with PF2e keeping to a single and fairly consistent standard of balance, as it's difficult to feel extraordinary when you're still balanced along similar lines as "ordinary" creatures of the same level.
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I kinda think the main mechanical core of mythic acting as a way to overturn the already strained success/fail roll math was a very misguided idea.
I understand that it is a word count short way to implement something like that, but imo it just interacts with too many things (renders other considerations irrelevant) to ever work right. It feels bad to have all the normal investments become temporarily irrelevant, and even screws up the notion of niche protection. It's genuinely a thing where the once-per-session odd skill check can be cheesed via existing mythic roll, and I'm kinda baffled that was allowed, though at least the severity of that fades as levels go up.
Me too. I especially hate it with things like rituals, where we went from "you must be legendary in Religion to even attempt this ritual" to "well you attended Sarenrae 101 and you're mythic, so whatever, you're exactly as good at it as someone who is legendary in Religion ."
It warps the entire skill system in ridiculous ways, and then has that bizarre inverse scaling where the benefit from it goes down the better you are at the thing you're trying to do.
... and Rewrite Fate is even worse, since that's just "oh Bob was untrained in Athletics when he attempted that jump, but he spent a mythic point and is now suddenly Hercules for exactly 6 seconds."
Like, Mythic letting characters do things they couldn't normally do is fine, since that's kind of the point. But it strains verisimilitude beyond all reason that a characters skill and training is totally irrelevant because they spent a mythic point.
If they instead designed mythic power to not be as in-the-moment game changing, it could have given mythic PCs more long-term powers to better alter their "base feel" compared to traditional PCs.
Yeah that's kind of what I expected them to do. Like if your Calling skills give you a +2 "Mythic" typed bonus, you're better at them than anyone else of equivalent skill all the time, rather than "you're a normal character until you're suddenly temporarily godlike at it".
The actual spending of mythic points can let you do special abilities and powers and such. It shouldn't touch Proficiency at all IMO.
A GM also shouldn't be required to design adventures so that PCs can constantly regain mythic power otherwise they're just mundane PCs.
It'd be a challenge to design a good mythic system, but I think they massively missed the mark on this one.
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Mythic just being flat bonuses over equally leveled characters is just making the characters higher level for that task, nothing else. I am glad that they didn't take a "more numbers" approach to Mythic.
PF1 Mythic was the end of my table playing pathfinder until 2nd edition came out. We really, really wanted it to be good and played through the first 3 books of Wrath of the Righteous before it became clear that what mythic did was exacerbate all of the existing problems with 1st edition into a completely unplayable mess. Mythic can't just mean "higher level challenge." PF2 is already really good for simulating that kind of power difference. You just use higher or lower level opponents depending on who is supposed to feel awesomely powerful.
Mythic needed to not be "You are awesomely powerful," at least not with raw numbers. It needed to be "you interact differently with the world."
I actually think the mythic defenses work really well for that, as long as they applied very carefully and mythic creatures still have some form of glaring vulnerability. It seems like James Jacobs and the adventure writing team understand this, so I anticipate the official mythic APs to be well balanced around creature's mythic abilities and nature. For introducing new narrative changing systems (like Mythic) it kinda feels like the base rules have to come out, and then, like 2 years later, the GM focused book that will help guide GMs using that system should come out that can incorporate that system. I know that it would be best to just be able to play test the rules for a really long time before launching them, but casual gamers are not going to be a part of those play tests, so many usability and complexity issues would probably be hard to assess.
I still have such a bad taste of PF1 mythic in my mouth that I have been hesitant to get too far into the PF2 mythic rules in play, but my table will probably run the Revenge of the Runelords AP eventually, way too late to be of any use in thinking through how well the new mythic rules allowed the creative team to tell a different kind of story than they would have been able to tell otherwise. I think it is really cool and bold of the adventure path team to tackle the most core pathfinder story to test those rules (especially jumping in at high level) around. Like the Rune Lords are supposed to be the kind of wizards who other wizards will never live up to being, but that doesn't specifically mean cast more powerful spells or regular spells more powerfully (ie: just be higher level than possible). I am very interested to see how it turns out.
I feel mythic play and the expectations for it are going to be inherently at odds with gameplay at other power levels: to take just one example, a Magus being able to combine their weapon attack with a jolt of lightning or a burst of flame is a big deal at level 1, but if one were to take the class to an extreme of power that you'd expect from mythic play, I'd say you could expect the class's Spellstrike to be able to cleave a mountain in half or do something similarly over-the-top. The Magus who just spent their turn magically making their weapon hotter doesn't really sit in the same realm of balance as the Magus who just split a mountain into two mountains, and so those two forms of the same class ought to be defined along different balancing standards. Although you could use the same fundamentals of the action system and degrees of success, your actions are going to be spent doing far more impactful things that a lower-powered version of the same character should simply not be able to achieve.
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I definitely feel that mythic would work better as a special form of archetype that can key off of assumed class features, but is mostly about new or mythically modified abilities, and *not* about "big number."
My whole reaction to learning pf2's mythic was an up-down rollercoaster because they got it half-right with mythic callings and mythic feats, but ho-damn does that "mythic proficiency" just shred the notion of "mythic balance"
How many low level "spend a mythic point" feats can compete with Rewrite Fate? Limiting that MP-spend action to a narrow list of compatible rolls does nothing to reduce the vertical power of that ability. It only reduces how frequently the player will have the option to invoke it. This is the worst kind of "balance" lmao.
"Oh no, you cannot Rewrite Fate to re-Strike the foe. But you can use it to mythic re-Grapple them."
Seriously, if the actual "Rewrite Fate" action were to be outright deleted, that alone would do a whole lot to help the existing shitshow that is mythic balance. That "super reroll after failing" is an ABSURDLY high power floor to compare against.
When you look at the big list on AoN, and can see how there are great mythic feat actions, while there are also other mythic actions that require the spend of 1MP, and are arguably worse than 0 MP abilities, it's just aggravating.
It just means that MP spending actions are dead on arrival, and players will avoid them like the plague while using Rewrite Fate.
At the VERY best, each PC will pick a single solitary "MP action" because the resource of MP is just that stupid scarce.
Grabbing multiple MP spend feats is akin to grabbing more and more focus spells after you are at the FP cap. And everyone starts with a narrowly usable, but crazy strong focus spell at baseline
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Mythic just being flat bonuses over equally leveled characters is just making the characters higher level for that task, nothing else. I am glad that they didn't take a "more numbers" approach to Mythic.
Except they did because that's what Mythic Proficiency does. They just did it in a weird, occasionally on way, where it does nothing most of the time but then occasionally suddenly gives you a +8 if you're trained, and scales that down the better you are at the thing.
The numbers are still there, they're just usually off until they turn on for completely out of whack bonuses at low level (and at things you're bad at).
PF1 Mythic was the end of my table playing pathfinder until 2nd edition came out. We really, really wanted it to be good and played through the first 3 books of Wrath of the Righteous before it became clear that what mythic did was exacerbate all of the existing problems with 1st edition into a completely unplayable mess. Mythic can't just mean "higher level challenge." PF2 is already really good for simulating that kind of power difference. You just use higher or lower level opponents depending on who is supposed to feel awesomely powerful.
PF1 mythic was a mess to GM, for sure. But it was also pretty fun as long as you kept the tier level in line. Going to high tier basically broke PF1 even more than it already was. I GM'd it and while I'd never do it again because its so difficult to make work, the campaign was a blast.
PF2 mythic forgot the fun in a lot of ways.
[quiote]Mythic needed to not be "You are awesomely powerful," at least not with raw numbers. It needed to be "you interact differently with the world."
I don't think they succeed at that either, for the most part, since the most typical thing a mythic character is doing, especially at low level, is rerolls.
I actually think the mythic defenses work really well for that, as long as they applied very carefully and mythic creatures still have some form of glaring vulnerability. It seems like James Jacobs and the adventure writing team understand this, so I anticipate the official mythic APs to be well balanced around creature's mythic abilities and nature.
I really don't agree with this. Mythic Resistance does literally nothing to most mythic PCs (and if it's a mythic campaign, you're probably a mythic PC). If you're a Fighter, this mythic defense doesn't exist. It only really hits animal companions, eidolons, and classes like Kineticist. While a GM can house rule all three of those, the fact that we've talked about one of these and we're already in house rule territory is a bad sign.
You can't use Mythic Resilience as War of Immortals tells you to because it's such a bad time for casters if you do. James pointed out that they're avoiding it in Revenge of the Runelords, which is good, but it doesn't say much for the WoI mythic rules that it's necessary to do that.
Mythic Defense is just anti-fun, since crits are fun and against the strongest creatures already hard to get.
Mythic Immunity is irrelevant to PC casters, and for PC martials will force a GM to make sure they have mythic weapons because it's an absolute hard counter if they don't. So it won't exist for them either, because the options are "you ignore this" or "you can't deal damage". Poor, poor animal companions are hit by this again and require another house rule to be able to attack.
That's kind of the problem with these defenses. They tend to be very binary: they either don't exist for you, or they're severely punishing without much you can do about it.
For introducing new narrative changing systems (like Mythic) it kinda feels like the base rules have to come out, and then, like 2 years later, the GM focused book that will help guide GMs using that system should come out that can incorporate that system. I know that it would be best to just be able to play test the rules for a really long time before launching them, but casual gamers are not going to be a part of those play tests, so many usability and complexity issues would probably be hard to assess.
No playtest can catch everything, but some of this stuff would have been caught extremely quickly. Like some of the stuff I'm bringing up was noticed within hours of WoI coming out.
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I wrote a longer comment but my chrome tab closed (lol) so I'll make it brief;
I feel mythic should have simpler. Mythic as it was in PF1e was never going to work in PF2e but for some reason Paizo still took its basic framework and dumbed it down for PF2e. I think mythic would be much better in PF2e if we didn't have mythic callings or mythic feats (at least not the mythic feats we ended up getting); at baseline mythic would only be mythic points (which would work exactly like hero points. Not replacing them if possible) and the free archetype-like extra feats to take mythic archetypes (with mythic archetypes going from 2nd to 20th level instead of from 12th to 20th, with some of the better mythic feats becoming feats in these archetypes). Mythic proficiency wouldn't be a baseline feature of being mythic but rather a high level feat/s and it would be permanent.
Thinking more about the modes of play in relationship to all this, I think for PF3, we need to do away with “encounter” mode and just call it “Combat.” Encounters are things that need to be able to happen in all three modes of play at different paces and when encounters become synonymous with combat, it turns all abilities characters have into nails. Combat nails.
I also think that, for a new edition of the game, that skills for use in combat be split off from skill use in other modes. Not necessarily as the skills themselves, like the athletics number could be used for either, but skill feats really need to pick a lane and having something like “talents” for combat skill feats, and skill feats for exploration and down time skill use would eliminate the issue of combat skill feats being inherently better and of having exploration encounters where there is no obvious way to apply a skill feats that should be useful.
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No playtest can catch everything, but some of this stuff would have been caught extremely quickly. Like some of the stuff I'm bringing up was noticed within hours of WoI coming out.
To be honest, it is much worse than that.
The very first mythic calling I checked out is Sage's Calling.
You’re already an archive of knowledge, but you’re driven to learn more with an unquenchable passion that might never be sated. When you attempt to Recall Knowledge, you can spend a Mythic Point to attempt the check at mythic proficiency. The first time each day that you critically succeed on a Recall Knowledge check against an enemy creature, you regain a Mythic Point.
At its base, this text is pretty jank. There is no contextuality to the MP regen clause, so it seems that if you pop 1MP to use the mythic-RK, you can also regain +1MP from that same roll.
That alone is just clumsy design, not a deal breaker in any way. But then we remember Rewrite Fate.
Trigger You roll a skill check or saving throw and don’t like the result.
Destiny, fate, or some other force bends around you as your mythic power swells, manifesting in a flash of light or visible surge of energy emanating from your body as you cast aside the chains of fate. You expend a Mythic Point and reroll the check or save with mythic proficiency, taking the new result.
So there is literally NEVER a situation in which you want to use your mythic calling's special MP spend, because Rewrite Fate is just superior. You don't even have to fail the roll to enable R.Fate, lol. Holy shit.
The "less embarrassing" option as to how tf did this design get published is that the person writing the mythic callings did not know that Rewrite Fate was going to be added by another dev.
That would still imo be well into the "not a professional product" degree of wtf, but it's a possibility. It would be even worse for Paizo's image if a single author wrote both, and somehow didn't notice. That would just demonstrate a degree of mechanical blindness that's not fit for the job.
It is *extremely* rare to be able to say that there is outright zero apples V orange benefit between two abilities like this; Rewrite Fate is a 100% superior apple.
Delaying my post a bit to double-check others again, and this issue is not exclusive to Sage. Every single Calling's MP spend is a skill roll rendered an obvious trap option by Rewrite Fate. There is one single Calling where there is a genuine "orange" to the Calling's re-roll that Rewrite Fate does not have.
[...]When you attempt to Disarm, Reposition, or Shove an opponent, you can spend a Mythic Point to make the check at mythic proficiency. You can attempt these maneuvers against a creature of any size when performing them at mythic proficiency. [...]
This gives a unique perk to this MP spend, but its design is not that of a side-grade, because it's not actually a "this for that" trade in any way. It's a binary enabler. If the foe is too large to attempt the maneuver normally, then they can do the Guardian's MP spend instead. Rewrite Fate is still 100% superior, but Guardian's is usable when the vanilla is not.
_______
Yall, how tf did this get published. This whole subsystem looks more broken and unprofessional every time I take another peek.
Yall, how tf did this get published. This whole subsystem looks more broken and unprofessional every time I take another peek.
I sadly think this is becoming the norm for optional rules and archetypes. If we get, say, 5 archetypes in a book 4 of them are likely going to be bad and the one that's good likely has glaring issues somewhere too. With very few exceptions, optional rules were never good in PF2e. Even popular ones like free archetype have problems like archetypes that don't begin until 4th or higher level and archetypes that skip some levels forcing you to not dip out from them until way later.
Another thing we've found mythic suffers from is the same thing PF2 suffers from: an overabundance of actions that aren't worth using.
Mythic adds more action options, but they aren't better than what you already have. So you keep using what you have and ignore the mythic options.
As we've played more, we tend to look for more passive options to add to the character that don't require actions because most characters already have optimal action sequences that make additional options seem unnecessary. They aren't even situational, just inferior options to your already existing action options.
So you get pushed into the good ones like the attack roll or save options. You have so few mythic points that having all these options doesn't much matter as the fuel to use those options are focused on the optimal mythic options.
So you end up with a lot of stuff written on your character that doesn't do much.
I guess it can add some fun RP for some groups. The mythic options are like so many other options where 2 or 3 options are the best and will get used while you end up with 10 options, most of them filler on your character.
Thinking more about the modes of play in relationship to all this, I think for PF3, we need to do away with “encounter” mode and just call it “Combat.” Encounters are things that need to be able to happen in all three modes of play at different paces and when encounters become synonymous with combat, it turns all abilities characters have into nails. Combat nails.
I also think that, for a new edition of the game, that skills for use in combat be split off from skill use in other modes. Not necessarily as the skills themselves, like the athletics number could be used for either, but skill feats really need to pick a lane and having something like “talents” for combat skill feats, and skill feats for exploration and down time skill use would eliminate the issue of combat skill feats being inherently better and of having exploration encounters where there is no obvious way to apply a skill feats that should be useful.
I agree on both counts! We already have social encounters in PF2e, but very little to support those, and I agree it would be more helpful to call combat by its actual name and treat non-combat encounters as their own thing, if only so that they can be catered to a bit better. I'm very happy with combat being so fleshed-out, but I'd like other modes to be fleshed out a lot more too, as I think there's a lot of interesting gameplay to be had from tactically deep exploration, travel, and so on.
For this same reason, I'd like any sort of feats and general mechanics to be separated by mode, so that becoming better at combat doesn't mean sacrificing your ability to explore and vice versa. Put together, this would genuinely allow for a much more modular game: if something like travel were a self-contained module that you could plug in and out of your game, along with all of its associated character options, then adding it to a game would allow characters to build around travel on equal footing, and removing it from gameplay wouldn't impact the balance of those characters in other aspects. It would also help satisfy people looking for rules-light versions of those elements too: if people don't want rules for running things like exploration, social encounters, or even combat, they could just get rid of those modules at their table and still have fully-realized characters for what game components they choose to use.
I also feel this kind of approach could help answer the question of how classes handle certain challenges in a manner that's truly unique to their class. Although some classes do have feats or spells made for exploration, classes like the Barbarian have no specific exploration feats. All they have are their skills, which means Barbarians tend to explore in the same way as any other Athletics user. If each class had a separate track of feats for exploration, that would invite the design of exploration-specific feats for the Barbarian along with many other classes, allowing them to make more unique contributions without eating into their combat power budget.
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Thinking more about the modes of play in relationship to all this, I think for PF3, we need to do away with “encounter” mode and just call it “Combat.” Encounters are things that need to be able to happen in all three modes of play at different paces and when encounters become synonymous with combat, it turns all abilities characters have into nails. Combat nails.
I also think that, for a new edition of the game, that skills for use in combat be split off from skill use in other modes. Not necessarily as the skills themselves, like the athletics number could be used for either, but skill feats really need to pick a lane and having something like “talents” for combat skill feats, and skill feats for exploration and down time skill use would eliminate the issue of combat skill feats being inherently better and of having exploration encounters where there is no obvious way to apply a skill feats that should be useful.
I agree on both counts! We already have social encounters in PF2e, but very little to support those, and I agree it would be more helpful to call combat by its actual name and treat non-combat encounters as their own thing, if only so that they can be catered to a bit better. I'm very happy with combat being so fleshed-out, but I'd like other modes to be fleshed out a lot more too, as I think there's a lot of interesting gameplay to be had from tactically deep exploration, travel, and so on.
For this same reason, I'd like any sort of feats and general mechanics to be separated by mode, so that becoming better at combat doesn't mean sacrificing your ability to explore and vice versa. Put together, this would genuinely allow for a much more modular game: if something like travel were a self-contained module that you could plug in and out of your game, along with all of its associated character options, then adding it to a game would allow characters to build around travel on equal footing, and removing it from gameplay wouldn't impact the balance of those...
Those modes of play don't need additional options. Run them narratively. There is depth in roll-play versus roleplay. It leads to a game of too many rolls and too much failure chance when narrative depth would add more to the interactions.
Yeah, I don't think we need more rules for non-combat stuff. If you make the rules for non-combat stuff too deep then it stops being a roleplaying game and it becomes a rollplaying game, plus I think its easier to make bad rules for non-combat stuff because no table does them the same.
As I said before, I would rather prefer if the total bulk of the rules existed only for the combat side of the system and left the rest up to the GM. Keep skills as a way to represent expertise in a certain area and set DCs but otherwise allow players and GMs to roleplay scenes without the boundaries of dumb rules.
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That alone is just clumsy design, not a deal breaker in any way. But then we remember Rewrite Fate.
So there is literally NEVER a situation in which you want to use your mythic calling's special MP spend, because Rewrite Fate is just superior. You don't even have to fail the roll to enable R.Fate, lol. Holy shit.Trigger You roll a skill check or saving throw and don’t like the result.
Destiny, fate, or some other force bends around you as your mythic power swells, manifesting in a flash of light or visible surge of energy emanating from your body as you cast aside the chains of fate. You expend a Mythic Point and reroll the check or save with mythic proficiency, taking the new result.
I touched on that in my comment, yeah, with the mention at how most of what you're doing with mythic points is rerolls. That's Rewrite Fate, and 100% agree that it's totally out of whack.
You don't need to fail, you don't need it to be one of your calling's mythic things... you don't even need to be trained in the skill. You can try athletics untrained, fail, and go "k I'll reroll and now my proficiency modifier is better than the Fighter that has actually invested 3 skill boosts into this." It's bonkers.
That's the part that I hate the most: it warps the game by having cases where your character's training and proficiency is irrelevant to the outcome. Rewrite Fate takes a character that knows literally nothing about a skill and temporarily makes them among the greatest on Golarian at it.
Multiple levels of proficiency and how going from trained to expert/master/legendary actually matters is something PF2 does really well. Mythic going "well sure you don't know anything about Arcana, but you spent a mythic point so now you know everything about it for the duration of this action" is... I don't even know what word to use for what it is. But I sure don't like it.
And how Rewrite Fate makes the Calling mythic skill options (and feats that let you roll with mythic in some case) obsolete is also a huge problem. You're right: there's no reason to spent the mythic point up front when you can just choose to do it if the first roll fails.
(speculation on WoI development)
I don't really know what happened, but considering it came out during the time of remaster related compression/extra work and the quality issues we saw due to that, I'm guessing it was a lack of time. It certainly doesn't appear to have been playtested very well. It does seem like multiple authors were involved, because something like Mythic Strike only makes sense if either multiple people were writing it, or one person ran out of time.
Spend a Mythic Point and then Strike a creature with a weapon you’re wielding or an unarmed attack you have available. This Strike is made at mythic proficiency, and the weapon or unarmed attack counts as a mythic weapon for the purposes of overcoming mythic resistance or mythic immunity.
It's a mythic feat, so you're already a mythic character if you're taking it... which means that the last part about mythic resistance does nothing. Mythic creatures already bypass mythic resistance. So the only way that text does anything is if a non-mythic creature gets this or mythic resistance doesn't work the way the book says it does. That suggests it was changed late in development and this wasn't updated, which would fit a compressed schedule. (I'm also pretty sure that's what happened to Remaster Oracle in regards to the spell slots/repertoire contradictions.)
It also has the inverse-scaling issues inherent to mythic proficiency: when you get this feat using it is for most martials a +6 (+4 for Fighter/Gunslinger)... but three levels later it's gone down to +4 (+2 for Fighter/Gunslinger).
Having things that actively get worse because your character is getting better at stuff just doesn't feel right.
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Those modes of play don't need additional options. Run them narratively. There is depth in roll-play versus roleplay. It leads to a game of too many rolls and too much failure chance when narrative depth would add more to the interactions.
Yeah, I don't think we need more rules for non-combat stuff. If you make the rules for non-combat stuff too deep then it stops being a roleplaying game and it becomes a rollplaying game, plus I think its easier to make bad rules for non-combat stuff because no table does them the same.
You've both missed the point. A modular system like the one being discussed means neither of you would need to care about non-combat rules at all if that is not of interest at your table. You could simply ignore the non-combat modules, and would end up needing to read far fewer rules in total, so this would be of benefit to you.
However, it also means that I and anyone interested in non-combat rules would be able to access those, and so in a way that imposes nothing upon either of you. In fact, this kind of modular design means you could have multiple different modules for the same kind of gameplay and they'd all be able to coexist, so tables preferring one mode of exploration over another for instance would be able to plug in the ruleset that works best for them. In fact, this could even apply to combat, so players looking to run it in much less strict detail than what's currently proposed would be able to find an alternative, for example. Everybody wins.
Those modes of play don't need additional options. Run them narratively. There is depth in roll-play versus roleplay. It leads to a game of too many rolls and too much failure chance when narrative depth would add more to the interactions.
GMs and players really need to be more willing to do this. I'm doing "the big influence" in SoT right now and my players have a bad habit of going "I don't have the exact thing for this so I won't try", even though they have ideas for how to improvise.
This is a perfect area of the game for improvising, though! Narrative and RP scenes get too bogged down in rules when there's tons of mechanics. The best games for these kinds of stories are rules light ones specifically because the rules don't get in the way.
PF2 can do these scenes pretty well when folks let it, instead of trying to add more rules to a situation that needs fewer rules and more willingness to be spontaneous. I get that it can be jarring for someone to go from "combat has very detailed rules" to "social encounters expect you to be flexible and improvise as there's very few rules", but social encounters don't benefit from more rules.
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To add on to Teridax’s point about modularity, these systems already exist in game and many people ignore them because nothing that one would think connects to them does. If your AP has an influence encounter and you have streetwise, can you make society check in place of a diplomacy? Will the GM use the same DC? Will it be easier? Harder? There is no real guidance for how to do this except maybe give a small circumstance bonus to checks where skill feats could be applicable, but that is putting a lot on GMs to arbitrate, and a lot of “useless” skill feats (useless because they do things like make influence checks take less time…in situations where time constraints are almost never relevant), would be much better built around non-combat encounter modes of play and pacing.
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As far as just “roleplaying instead of roll play,” what is fun to role play really changes from table to table, and some players don’t have the training in the skills that their characters would have in handling other types of encounters, just like almost no players have the combat training skills to role play combat, so they mostly rely on dice rolls and descriptions within the rule book to narrate what happens.
This very often results in one or two charismatic players handling all of the “roleplay” encounters while other players just sit quietly and watch, or get forced into interacting in ways that end up complicating g everything for the whole party. There is definitely a reason newer APs include a lot more subsystems for out of combat encounters than they used to, and they continue to do it because they get good feedback about it.
At the same time, the skill feats system was something pretty new, that didn’t get play tested in nearly the same robust way as the combat system, with the exception of skill feats that play over into combat. I don’t remember the playtest really pushing things like the influence system or the research system, and if it did include any of that, it was pretty one off compared to the number of combat encounters. It makes sense that the development of combat came first, but now, between PF2 and SF2 there is room for a lot of growth in making these non-combat encounters more dynamic and fun, and less worthy of just skipping with a single dice roll.
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Another thing we've found mythic suffers from is the same thing PF2 suffers from: an overabundance of actions that aren't worth using.
Applies to more than just actions I think. Nothing has quite sucked away my general interest in new releases like the knowledge that only 10% of new options will be worth using.
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Another thing we've found mythic suffers from is the same thing PF2 suffers from: an overabundance of actions that aren't worth using.Applies to more than just actions I think. Nothing has quite sucked away my general interest in new releases like the knowledge that only 10% of new options will be worth using.
You gotta love when a new book drops and the first item you see isn’t just the normal fixed DC garbage, but also has an item bonus to some specific skill action under some specific condition that will maybe come up once in the one level before you’d get a real item bonus to that skill anyways.
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You've both missed the point. A modular system like the one being discussed means neither of you would need to care about non-combat rules at all if that is not of interest at your table. You could simply ignore the non-combat modules, and would end up needing to read far fewer rules in total, so this would be of benefit to you.
Like Unicore said, I feel the system already is modular because there's tables that ignore certain rules and tables that play the system RAW. IMO a system that sells itself as modular ends up being like D&D 5e where all rules are optional rules and all optional rules are whack because they weren't designed taking into account the exisance of the other rules, and if you want to argue about that then someone will tell you "They weren't made to be used together" or "If you don't like one then don't use it" and you won't be able to argue otherwise. Its IMO a big excuse for lazy devs to not make coherent and cohesive system.
I also don't think books printing multiple versions of rules of, for example, exploration also isn't that good of an idea as you think it is when its very likely out of all the reprints of each type of rule most people will likely use the one considered "best" because the others are going to likely be plainly worse. As I said before, I think we can agree that optional rules in PF2e are in a weird spot because they usually fail to achieve what they want to do, either because they were poorly thought (automatic bonus progression, proficiency without level, gradual ability boosts) or because Paizo didn't want to go that far (alternative ability scores). Now take imagine if Paizo or whatever company isn't presurred to make rules that work the first time because "We can reprint a new version later". Most rules will end up with the quality of variant rules, or much worse, with the quality of the AP-specific subsystems which almost always are bad (though luckly some can be mostly ignored).
As far as just “roleplaying instead of roll play,” what is fun to role play really changes from table to table, and some players don’t have the training in the skills that their characters would have in handling other types of encounters, just like almost no players have the combat training skills to role play combat, so they mostly rely on dice rolls and descriptions within the rule book to narrate what happens.
I totally agree, and that's why I still would want skills to exist because they work as options for those players that don't want to engage in roleplay too deeply or just don't feel like it in a particular situation. What I don't think we need is spending exactly 1 minute of conversation to Make an Impression because rules just happen to require exactly 1 minute to make the check and then make a second check to make a Request when I feel most people will most likely set a DC based on the target's level and difficulty and then ask the player to just roll a single Diplomacy check. I feel this is better for both the people that want to roleplay a scene because the GM can reduce the DC based on the player's performance or ignore the check altogether and the people that want to just roll their skill need to only do it once.
That's also why I don't like skill feats that don't directly interact with combat either, because they take basic actions that a player could or should be able to do out from the gate and gate them behind a feat tax. For example, why do I need a feat like Criminal Connections to talk with someone from the criminal underworld if my character, based on their backstory, comes from said criminal underworld? The same with feats like Sign Language. Paizo is all for inclusion which I think its great, but why if someone wants to RP as a deaf character you need to tax the whole party into becoming training in Society and taking this feat?
I feel most GMs are going to ignore these feats in these situations, which leads me to ask, why do they exist in the first place? Even in the case of a campaign where someone that isn't from the criminal underworld but wants to enter the criminal underworld I wouldn't just allow it if the player came to me saying "I took this feat so you should allow me" if they never showed interest or made something during the campaign for the criminal underworld to notice them.
But once again, I'm probably the biggest hater of skill feats here so I'm probably in the minority.
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As far as just “roleplaying instead of roll play,” what is fun to role play really changes from table to table, and some players don’t have the training in the skills that their characters would have in handling other types of encounters, just like almost no players have the combat training skills to role play combat, so they mostly rely on dice rolls and descriptions within the rule book to narrate what happens.
This very often results in one or two charismatic players handling all of the “roleplay” encounters while other players just sit quietly and watch, or get forced into interacting in ways that end up complicating g everything for the whole party. There is definitely a reason newer APs include a lot more subsystems for out of combat encounters than they used to, and they continue to do it because they get good feedback about it.
At the same time, the skill feats system was something pretty new, that didn’t get play tested in nearly the same robust way as the combat system, with the exception of skill feats that play over into combat. I don’t remember the playtest really pushing things like the influence system or the research system, and if it did include any of that, it was pretty one off compared to the number of combat encounters. It makes sense that the development of combat came first, but now, between PF2 and SF2 there is room for a lot of growth in making these non-combat encounters more dynamic and fun, and less worthy of just skipping with a single dice roll.
These games used to encourage and teach role-playing. It was a chance to play some character and not be yourself for a while. A chance to think and develop some social skills by stepping outside of yourself in an environment with a bunch of other odd folks that like a strange niche hobby that enjoyed this type of interaction. To reduce it all to rolls in a game full of rolls takes away the RP in the RPG.
Why not let a game engine do it all in a video game or play a board game where it is all rolls?
I know plenty of folks start off not enjoying the role-play part. I've always been the kind of DM that coaxes role-playing out of people that might not usually do it. I don't expect Oscar winning acting or anything, but some thought put into who that character is and what they would do in a given situation. Then I coax out the role-play.
I've always found it enjoyable when someone who is shy or socially awkward steps out of their comfort zone in an environment of friends where they know they won't be ridiculed or attacked to at least try to do some role-play character development. I work to make it fun for them.
A big part of the joy of this odd hobby is that it isn't a simple game of rolling dice, but a fantasy game that let's you inhabit a character that you will never be in real life in a story like what you've read in books or seen in movies. You get to be that heroic or anti-hero character and interact with a world that feels real. I don't how real a world feels if it all devolves into rolling.
The game is flexible. I get it. Some groups just want to roll and move on to combat. I don't enjoy that type of game. The analytical part of my brain enjoys building strong characters using the rules. The artistic part would not enjoy these games if it is was all combat. I'd stick with video games or board games. I have to have that narrative element with players that want to play characters and develop the imagination and be part of a fantasy story.
I feel too much codification of non-combat elements leads to too much rolling replacing role-playing and narrative elements. Combat is heavily focused on rules and rolling. If you push non-combat in this direction, you end up rolling for everything.
I much prefer if they started using guidelines that showed GMs how to develop narrative interactions to solve problems rather than rolls. Yo can combine the too as most often do, but a rule asking for a roll should never, ever trump a player coming up with some great RP. To me those are the moments that differentiate an RPG from other types of games.
It really seems both of you would rather skill feats be separated out into combat effective ones and ones designed for other modes of play, because then you could easily direct your players away from all the out of combat feats across the board, but still have skill feats that do interesting things in combat. Like it is fine if you would completely ignore the out of combat side of things. I get that you worry that the developers would spend more time developing out of combat skill feats if they were separate categories, but they already are designing those, they are just grouped in with all the other skill feats and it is recreating the problem that prevented anyone from taking g skill affecting feats in PF1, and why skill feats exist in PF2 in the first place: to not compete with combat resources.
It really seems both of you would rather skill feats be separated out into combat effective ones and ones designed for other modes of play, because then you could easily direct your players away from all the out of combat feats across the board, but still have skill feats that do interesting things in combat. Like it is fine if you would completely ignore the out of combat side of things. I get that you worry that the developers would spend more time developing out of combat skill feats if they were separate categories, but they already are designing those, they are just grouped in with all the other skill feats and it is recreating the problem that prevented anyone from taking g skill affecting feats in PF1, and why skill feats exist in PF2 in the first place: to not compete with combat resources.
I mean, yes, but I actually don't really use skill feats either way so I'm not actually bothered by it.
I'm actually curious to see if PF3e will be its own beast entirely or its going to be a more polished version of PF2e. I really hope its the latter since I feel PF2e is like a few tweaks away from being the perfect system for the tastes of my table. Skill feats are certainly the biggest problem I have with the system, and even then, the solution I implemented to "fix" them pretty much solved all the problems I had with them, but I still would like for the out of combat side of the system to get a second pass.
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I feel like the only meaningful benefit of PF3E being a more polished version of the current product would be possible backwards compatibility.
I'd prefer a more drastic shift. We have PF2E; if I want to play it, I already can. It's more than a complete product, at this point, and has several fairly iconic APs attached to it (such as abomination vaults and season of ghosts, the latter of which polls as one of the best APs the company has ever released). There's enough PF2E content for me to run games for a few years as it stands.
I also think that since a lot of the driving forces behind 2E's system design have left the company, it may well make sense to take a different tack with them gone. It's an extremely opinionated design. I'm unsure whoever paizo assigns or brings on to develop 3E will want to carry the system ethos and design forward.
Personally, I also feel like PF2E is a fairly rigid framework where coloring outside the lines, even a tiny bit, can stick out like a sore thumb. And we've seen how detrimental that can be time and time again in the reaction to new material. The balance-heavy ethos draws in a crowd that's fairly picky about how different classes and options stack up against each other; a single option out of whack really starts to dominate the discussion. (Think about how exemplar dedication was such a topic on its book's release.) If I were paizo, I don't know if I'd want to make another system where I'd have to keep such a tight eye on the content of every single splatbook to keep those more vocal parts of the playerbase from being annoyed—especially not with paizo's release schedule. The game just demands a high level of system mastery from its content designers to avoid breaking things, and a high level of QA on its products (from people with good system mastery!) to catch slipups. And I don't know if that's a good place to be, marketwise. It's more attention to detail, and more system fluency, than I think people expect from any market competitor. It's a good differentiator if you can keep it up—but it inherently draws a fickle audience. You're punished if your quality goes down, even if it's still better than your competitors. There's an incentive to move away from the PF2E formula.
I understand wanting "the perfect version" of something you already like, but after seeing god knows how many tabletop and video games get iterated on for this many years, I've just accepted the perfect version of a thing doesn't exist and you're better off being grateful for what you've got. Something novel and interesting is usually more enjoyable than a really polished version of an experience you've already had, anyways, once you've had said experience enough.
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It really seems both of you would rather skill feats be separated out into combat effective ones and ones designed for other modes of play, because then you could easily direct your players away from all the out of combat feats across the board, but still have skill feats that do interesting things in combat. Like it is fine if you would completely ignore the out of combat side of things. I get that you worry that the developers would spend more time developing out of combat skill feats if they were separate categories, but they already are designing those, they are just grouped in with all the other skill feats and it is recreating the problem that prevented anyone from taking g skill affecting feats in PF1, and why skill feats exist in PF2 in the first place: to not compete with combat resources.
To be honest with you, yes.
A lot of the feats don't work anyway. You have something like Quick Coercion that takes a round when Coercion is only usable in Exploration mode. So what does the action cost do anyway?
Something like Coercion or Diplomacy work when the DM decides they work regardless of the mode. The skill feats only slightly alter this and only if you're keeping careful track of time for something like making Gather Information faster, which rarely comes up.
All of this stuff is better handled with the DM using the narrative to decide how it works in conjunction with the players rather than trying to create these skill feats that don't really do much to improve the out of combat role-play unless the DM decides there is some time constraint that might make something useful.
It seems players and DMs can work with loose guidelines to make out of combat RP fun and interesting. The skill feats add stuff that almost forces a DM to find ways to make them useful. After a while, even the player stops asking because it doesn't do much but make the DM create artificial uses for the out of combat skill feats that don't flow naturally with the narrative.
I totally agree, and that's why I still would want skills to exist because they work as options for those players that don't want to engage in roleplay too deeply or just don't feel like it in a particular situation. What I don't think we need is spending exactly 1 minute of conversation to Make an Impression because rules just happen to require exactly 1 minute to make the check and then make a second check to make a Request when I feel most people will most likely set a DC based on the target's level and difficulty and then ask the player to just roll a single Diplomacy check. I feel this is better for both the people that want to roleplay a scene because the GM can reduce the DC based on the player's performance or ignore the check altogether and the people that want to just roll their skill need to only do it once.
Yeah this is a good example. We need a skill that functions like Diplomacy broadly to reflect a character's ability to do this, but we don't need specific actions to make someone willing to listen to you and then another specific action to ask for something in the same conversation.
I think the way most folks would run that is "this is one conversation so it's one check." I know that's how I do it, because this is either an RP scene (if the players want to RP the conversation), or a narrative scene (if they don't). One roll keeps things flowing either way vs multiple rolls to advance the conversation. The flow of this scene is way more important to me than the mechanical considerations of specific actions within it, and letting it be freeform breeds creativity. Like the player who wanted to impress an NPC in Spore War by using alchemy and his background to do a surprise fireworks display, indoors, including the risk of explosion. (Could have gone horribly wrong, but a 19 on the dice happened and it was a moment of awesome for the player. Mechanically supported? Not at all, but it was a great scene.)
And if you do want it to be multiple checks for the whole conversation, the victory point system is well suited to something like this. The conversation flows, you get X checks during it, and how well the group does determines what happens with your request. That is a very flexible subsystem and works perfectly for this type of thing, and doesn't require specific actions at all. It handles wherever this scene goes.
That's also why I don't like skill feats that don't directly interact with combat either, because they take basic actions that a player could or should be able to do out from the gate and gate them behind a feat tax. For example, why do I need a feat like Criminal Connections to talk with someone from the criminal underworld if my character, based on their backstory, comes from said criminal underworld? The same with feats like Sign Language. Paizo is all for inclusion which I think its great, but why if someone wants to RP as a deaf character you need to tax the whole party into becoming training in Society and taking this feat?
Sign language is a bit of a difficult one because having it in the whole party is an advantage in cases where you want to communicate quietly or without others being able to understand what you're communicating. I can see why they don't want everyone to just have that, but in a situation with a deaf PC I'd probably just handwave it. IMO though it should be considered a language rather than a feat.
I feel most GMs are going to ignore these feats in these situations, which leads me to ask, why do they exist in the first place? Even in the case of a campaign where someone that isn't from the criminal underworld but wants to enter the criminal underworld I wouldn't just allow it if the player came to me saying "I took this feat so you should allow me" if they never showed interest or made something during the campaign for the criminal underworld to notice them.
Definitely true for some of these. Things like Group Impression annoy me since am I supposed to not let a high level hero address a crowd and try to win them over if they don't have that feat? That's an iconic moment for the character in the campaign in a lot of cases and feels like something they should just be able to do. I generally don't gatekeep things behind those but instead give a bonus to a PC that does have it to denote that they're better at it in some way, which is strictly a house rule but works for my group.
But I think the issue here is less with the concept and more with some of the feats themselves just being too mundane. Shameless Request for an example is much more appropriate for a feat, IMO, since it represents a PC's ability to do something much more unusual: asking far too much of someone and getting away with it without reputational damage. While you could do that with a check with a higher DC to represent that situation, the feat says "hey I'm actually special at this and can get away with it."
That's just a situation where now that we have years of experience in the system, we have a better idea of which skill feats are fun and which feel like feat taxes for basic things.
I don't really think they need to be hived off into seperate buckets between combat and non-combat, because there are a lot of things that actually matter that aren't combat applicable but can swing an encounter (social encounters are a thing!), but also because some players actively want to invest in that and just don't need the combat help. Like my Oracle already has so many things that they can do in combat, that more combat skill feats aren't going to be of much use (until Unified Theory, anyway), but as both the party face AND a troublemaker, Shameless Request was something I was very excited to get. I've actually used it in Spore War with delightful narrative outcomes and it's been a perfect fit for the character.
Removing that flexibility in place of making me take a combat oriented feat I don't particularly want isn't making the game better. But I don't think you're as alone in it as you think. You're just on the more extreme end of it. I like skill feats and I also think that some of them should just be things you can do rather than feats.
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The balance-heavy ethos draws in a crowd that's fairly picky about how different classes and options stack up against each other; a single option out of whack really starts to dominate the discussion.
I'm really confused as to why you think this is some special feature of PF2. Like I can't really think of any crunch heavy, splatbook based tabletop where people don't talk about new options in a power sense if they're really out of line one way or another. It would be really bizarre if people didn't. The only TTRPGs where this doesn't feature prominently are ones that aren't mechanics forward and/or don't rely on splatbooks (and even then you'll still find mechanically minded discussions on stuff, just less).
If I were paizo, I don't know if I'd want to make another system where I'd have to keep such a tight eye on the content of every single splatbook to keep those more vocal parts of the playerbase from being annoyed
.. I also don't really get the suggestion that quality assurance is primarily an issue of staving off angry fanboys. Do you think there isn't any inherent value in trying to deliver a well written product?
.. I'm also not even sure if the idea lines up with reality. Paizo gets dinged in community circles arguably even more often for being too conservative in its design choices, not too out there... Paizo products also come out with a lot of editing mistakes that sometimes get corrected very slowly. Not that they're releasing bad products, but it doesn't really suggest there's some intense hypervigilance in QA and editing that's being implied here.
Teridax I'm not ready the wall of text between your OP and here. But let me say this, the points you make in your OP are already fixed in other game systems. I suggest you use them.
Just like I see people trying to convert DnD into Daggerheart ALL THE TIME, which blows my mind. I say to them if it's DND they want, then play DND or PF2e, but don't try to make DH the same game they just left, because it isn't.
I'll say that RPG systems are toolsets. And the different toolsets do different things, just like the many tools in a toolbox. When you try to use one of these rule systems/toolsets to hammer a nail when it was designed to screw a screw, you are going to overwork yourself and be disappointed in the results.
PF2E is an amazing game system for what it is designed to do, in fact, I'd say one of the best I've seen. That being said, I'm certain there are game systems out there that fix the complaints with the leveled and tiered system of play. I'd suggest looking into some Free League or PbtA-inspired game systems, which I really think provide the tools you are looking for.
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The ability for the GM to handwave any encounter into a single die roll is always a tool in the GM’s tool kit that can be helpful (even for combat encounters!) but it is also something that can hit the players hard, especially when it feels arbitrary and like it is undermining choices the players made to be prepared for those kinds of encounters. It is important players learn what things a GM tends to ignore/handwave/house rule around before committing resources to it.
I already talked about how many of the out of combat feats fail because they are not designed around the kind of situations in which players would actually use them, but a huge part of that is that because no skill feats are designed to work around social encounters, chases, races, research, infiltrations or investigations. They are instead designed around specific actions/activities that have turned out not to be the way most GMs (and adventure writers) handle those skills in the kinds of tense moments we break out into encounter mode around. When the game was being developed, those skill activities were imagined to be a bigger part of the game than the adventure writers have ended up using and that is a big part of why out of combat skill feat options keep missing the mark.
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I already talked about how many of the out of combat feats fail because they are not designed around the kind of situations in which players would actually use them, but a huge part of that is that because no skill feats are designed to work around social encounters, chases, races, research, infiltrations or investigations. They are instead designed around specific actions/activities that have turned out not to be the way most GMs (and adventure writers) handle those skills in the kinds of tense moments we break out into encounter mode around. When the game was being developed, those skill activities were imagined to be a bigger part of the game than the adventure writers have ended up using and that is a big part of why out of combat skill feat options keep missing the mark.
I agree non-combat skill feats would be much better if they weren't designed around a specific action. For example, if Hobnobber wasn't designed around the Gather Information action, it could be arguably used in checks to Make an Impression or Request if you needed to make those while gathering information.
I also think one of the worst feelings you can have while playing PF2e is when you have a feat like Versatile Performance and you have to make a check that doesn't include Make an Impression, Demoralize, or Impersonate but otherwise uses other actions from Diplomacy, Intimidation, or Deception skills. I mean, c'mon, clearly the intention behind Versatile Performance is to allow bards to use Performance (which otherwise its easily one of the most useless skills) instead of any of the other Charisma-based skills, and that's how I usually see GMs handle this feat in actual play, but if you have a GM that wants to use the feat RAW then the feat is actually useless because you can't even Gather Information, make Requests, Coerce, or Lie which are arguably the most useful actions for these skills.
More versatile uses for skill feats IMO would solve a ton of the problems I have with them.
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I already talked about how many of the out of combat feats fail because they are not designed around the kind of situations in which players would actually use them, but a huge part of that is that because no skill feats are designed to work around social encounters, chases, races, research, infiltrations or investigations. They are instead designed around specific actions/activities that have turned out not to be the way most GMs (and adventure writers) handle those skills in the kinds of tense moments we break out into encounter mode around. When the game was being developed, those skill activities were imagined to be a bigger part of the game than the adventure writers have ended up using and that is a big part of why out of combat skill feat options keep missing the mark.I agree non-combat skill feats would be much better if they weren't designed around a specific action. For example, if Hobnobber wasn't designed around the Gather Information action, it could be arguably used in checks to Make an Impression or Request if you needed to make those while gathering information.
I also think one of the worst feelings you can have while playing PF2e is when you have a feat like Versatile Performance and you have to make a check that doesn't include Make an Impression, Demoralize, or Impersonate but otherwise uses other actions from Diplomacy, Intimidation, or Deception skills. I mean, c'mon, clearly the intention behind Versatile Performance is to allow bards to use Performance (which otherwise its easily one of the most useless skills) instead of any of the other Charisma-based skills, and that's how I usually see GMs handle this feat in actual play, but if you have a GM that wants to use the feat RAW then the feat is actually useless because you can't even Gather Information, make Requests, Coerce, or Lie which are arguably the most useful actions for these skills.
More versatile uses for skill feats IMO would solve a ton of the problems I have with them.
Performance is very far from being one of the most useless skills for Bards.
No reason to boost it even more for them.
Now, for builds where it does not have a mechanical impact, it is indeed a skill where you do not want to spend your precious skill proficiency raises.
I didnd't say it was a useless skill for bards. In fact, its the only class that I think would ever want to ever use it (besides those that take it for flavor ofc). I said it was a useless skill. Period. Arguably more useless than Survival which is the one most people mention being the worst skill.
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I had some time to think about what mythic means. War of Immortals is mostly about the Godsrain rather than Mythic, but pages 72 to 75 are titled, "What is Mythic?"
What is Mythic?
In Pathfinder, all PCs are figures of heroic stature, able to fight monsters and face down dangers that would overwhelm an average person. You could be a human farmer who takes up the sword to fend off marauding xulgaths as you begin your journey towards becoming a legendary warrior. You could be a newly-accepted acolyte of Nethys who repels bandits with your first casting of force barrage before starting your path towards becoming a powerful and renowned wizard. While such stories are far from mundane and may encapsulate high fantasy themes, they still fall short of being truly mythic.Mythic adventures take their inspiration from stories and legends that are drawn from folktales and storytelling traditions around the world. These tales
use wordplay and rarefied prose to convey moral lessons and tell stories that often defy logic. Mythic heroes and villains, even at lower levels of play, possess fantastical powers that are unbound by physics, and their ability to impact the narrative of the game world is often much more profound than is typical for a PC or NPC.Mythic adventures use a combination of mechanics, tone, and changes to the narrative expectations of the game to create a truly spectacular experience.
Narrative
The ability to directly affect, and in some instances even control, the narrative of the game world is one of the key signifiers of a mythic character. Many mythic abilities speak to this, such as the decree feats of the prophesied monarch mythic destiny (page 135), which have both an immediate mechanical effect and long-term effect that dictates changes within the environment of the game world, affecting the moods, prosperity, and outlooks of NPCs over a wide area.A mythic campaign is one in which the players and GM work together much more closely to shape their shared story than might otherwise be the case. The players have an increased responsibility to work with the GM and each other to make sure the shared stories of their characters combine into a cohesive whole, while the GM must release some of their control over the game world to the players and their PCs, as the very nature of the world is shaped and changed by the players’ actions.
Mythic Destinies
Mythic characters are assumed to have great tasks and challenges they will inevitably face, culminating in their mythic destiny (Chapter 4 Paths to Immortality, page 102). While characters won’t gain a mythic destiny until they choose a destiny feat at 12th level, it can be helpful for both the players and GM to start considering what the characters’ destinies might be earlier in the campaign. ...
Mythic figures of ancient legend include Gilgamesh, Hercules, Odysseus, Sun Wukong, Sinbad, Jesus of Nazareth, Roland, King Arthur, and Baba Yaga. Folktales of the United States, known as Tall Tales, provide Paul Bunyan, Windwagon Smith, Pecos Bill, and Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed is an interesting case because he is based on a well-documented person, John Chapman. Mythic people do not have to be 20th-level powerful. Instead, they inspire stories to grow around them after the fact. And as {b]War of Immortals[/b] said, "These tales ... tell stories that often defy logic. Mythic heroes and villains, even at lower levels of play, possess fantastical powers that are unbound by physics, .." I remember a tall tale that Paul Bunyan once harnessed his giant blue ox Babe to a wavy logging road and pulled it straight ("He also used Babe to pull the kinks out of the crooked logging roads").
Players CANNOT defy game physics in Pathfinder because those are defined by the game rules. Pathfinder can add new mythic rules, but they simply become the new physics. Thus, we have instructions about the players and GM working together "to shape their shared story." They will be playing the metagame above the campaign to make the campaign mythic.
Mythic in folklore is not about power level. Johnny Appleseed can be modeled as a 2nd-level cleric or druid (John Chapman was a missionary) with Farmsteader background. Windwagon Smith could be a 2nd-level Inventor with Deckhand or Sailor background. Paul Bunyan was a giant rather than human and he would need more levels in ranger to gain Babe the Blue Ox as mature megafauna, but that is all that is necessary. Rather than power, the tall tales exemplify Johnny Appleseed as a pioneer, Windwagon Smith as a migrant, and Paul Bunyan as a lumberjack.
My players take control of the narrative often and our campaigns end up more mythic than the adventure path as written. In Tide of Honer in my Jade Regent campaign, they decided not to lead a rebellion against the Jade Regent. They had the true heir to the throne in the party and Minkai had such strong traditions that if they revealed her heritage they would have to give her the throne. The difficulty was getting her accepted without her enemies assassinating her, so the party became folk heroes getting the approval of the common people and making secret alliances with the honest governors rather than fighting the innocent soldiers of Minkai. In my Iron Gods campaign the players wanted to play with the alien high technology in Numeria, so they became technological crafters adopting secret identities for self-protection. Yet when they would have fought their way through the mile-long crashed spaceship Divinity in The Divinity Drive, they instead got hired by the villain Unity as repair crew for that spaceship and undermined Unity from the inside. In my current Strength of Thousands campaign, they stuck to the plot as written, but they asked me to emphasize their role as students rather than adventurers. Thus, the first two modules was about learning to be Magaambyan students, and the current 3rd module they are learning to associate with people as Magaambya mages. The reputation and traditions of the millenia-old Magaambya Academy are iconic to this campaign.
The most mythic of my campaigns was a mini-campaign based on the Free RPG Day modules A Fistful of Flowers and A Few Flowers More. The players played experienced 2nd-level leshies protecting their community. This was also my War of Immortals playtest campaign, Playtesting in A Fistful of Flowers with 7 Leshies, and we had a leshy animist and a leshy exemplar. I stopped chronicling the adventure after the playtest, but we continued for two more chapters, one at 4th level based on The Scarlet Pimpernel and one at 5th level based on The Seven Samurai. The Scarlet Pimpernel adventure was a little too railroady, because the Scarlet Pimpernel himself, a pimpernel leshy, made the plans, but the PCs took control of the Seven Samurai chapter and went beyond the plot in their dauntless protection of a small village. These leshies went beyond heroic into mythic, in both their dealings with ordinary people and their combat with dangerous foes.
My PF2-convernted Ironfang Invasion campaign was mostly heroic, with the PCs going up to 20th level so that their heroism was stupendously impressive. However, my players read the Lost Omens World Guide, learned that the canonical ending of Ironfang Invasion led to General Azaersi ruling Oprak, and did not like that the adventure path left thousands of villagers under Ironfang control as enslaved war captives. I tried many directions in trying to end slavery in Oprak. The direction that worked was mythic. The leshy sorcerer Gold-Flame Honeysuckle Vine had a backstory that she began as a honeysuckle vine awakened by a druid as his familiar. She remained intelligent after the druid died. After meeting the goddess Gendowyn, Honey wanted to become like the goddess. I invented rules for godhood (this was before War of Immortals was published) and Honey battled Hadredgash, the hobgoblins' god of tyranny and slavery, and defeated him to remove slavery from his domains. Amusingly, in the Remastered Divine Mysteries Hadregash no longer is a god of slavery.
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Pages 74 and 75 of War of Immortals are a section called "Telling A Mythic Story." The steps are Calling, Trials, The Final Approach, The Ordeal, and Immortality. Let me illustrate this with Johnny Appleseed. Most internet pages about him tell of the real man under the legend, but I want the legend here, such as the one at the USC Digital Folklore Archives.
The Calling: Working in an apple orchard, young Johnny Chapman heard the call of the frontier, packed light, and headed west to Licking River, Ohio. The call of the frontier is not specific to Johnny Appleseed, but it is well supported in the tales of the American Frontier. He brings apple seeds with him and plants an orchard.
Trials: Johnny Appleseed did not fight, but he did face challenges. He had to clear land for apple orchards. He sold most of his orchards and made others, so he had business dealings. He was on good relations with both the Native Americans and the U.S. settlers, and resolved disputes between them. One story is that he took shelter from a snowstorm in a gigantic hollow log and found a family of bears there, so he retreated safely.
The Final Approach and The Ordeal: These don't exist for Johnny Appleseed. His victory was that He planted apple orchards across several states and was said to be welcome in every home.
Immortality: Johhny Appleseed died of old age. His story lived on, becoming more legendary until scholars realized that the real story of John Chapman was just as interesting as the legend. His apple orchards are gone, because his variety of apple was best for alcoholic hard cider and banned during anti-alcohol Prohibition, but new apple orchards replaced them.
Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and most other tall-tales characters lacked The Ordeal. They had continuing adventures until they died. A mythic warrior could have a greatest battle of their life, but that is not necessarily at the end of their tale. For example, Odysseus fought in the Trojan War, but the Odyssey came afterwards. Odysseus's final confrontation against the suitors of his supposed-widow Penelope was a small battle rather than The Ordeal. We could view George Washington as a mythic hero in U.S. history, but he went on to become the first president well after the battles of the U.S. Revolutionary War.
The Final Approach and The Ordeal are more about Pathfinder campaigns than about mythic stories. So let me try this with a mythic player character from my campaigns, Gold-Flame Honeysuckle Vine.
The Calling: Gold-Flame Honeysuckle Vine joined my campaign at 6th level along with the catfolk monk Ren'zar-jo. I gave them a mission: they were escorting refugees from the destroyed town of Redburrow to the supposed safety of Fort Nunder (Honey grew up in the Fangwood Forest and knew the locations of the secret Chernasardo forts). The other PCs had just liberated Fort Nunder from enemy occupation, but an empty fort was a poor refuge. The party learned from the Redburrow refugees that an army of the Ironfang Legion was next going to conquer Radya's Hollow, the home village of the ranger in the party. This gave the party a new mission: stop the conquest of Radya's Hollw. Honey and Ren joined the party for this mission.
Trials: The rest of the Ironfang Invasion adventure path.
The Final Approach: In the last module, Vault of the Onyx Citadel, the party had traveled to the Elemental Plane of Earth where the Ironfang command was based in the Onyx Citadel, tapping the geomantic power of the region to open mystic gates to move their armies. Honey had already met gods, Gendowyn and Alseta, and had expressed interest in godhood. On the way to the citadel the party fought an Immortal Ichor, a creature that grew out of the shed blood a dead evil deity. After their victory Grandmother Spider appeared and told Honey that to start on the path to godhood, she could absorb divine essence from the Immortal Ichor. She did so, and Honey retrained to the first of the godhood feats that I had invented.
The Ordeal: In the assault on the Onyx Citadel Azlowe, greater barghest warpriest of Hadregash, cast Avatar to directly tap the power of his god. Instead, Azlowe disappeared and a real avatar of Hadregash appeared. Hadregash wanted to destroy Honey before she achieved immortality. The 19th-level party fought the 23rd-level avatar and won.
Immortality: The party leveled up to 20th level, and Honey gained a feat and retrained others for a total of 4 godhood feats to become a very minor immortal god in the new Fangwood pantheon. In my next campaign based on the leshy adventure A Fistful of Flowers, many of those leshies worshipped Honey.
Now, let's try to apply the Mythic Callings to these pre-War of Immortals mythic characters. Johnny Appleseed could have the Demagogue's Calling because he once prevented a battle with words, but he is more suited for a Pioneer's Calling. Honey could have the Caretaker's Calling, because she was the party healer, but she was quite bloodthirsty in battle. She became the god of familiars and subordinates not a god of healing.
Not only are the selections of Mythic Callings too few to fit our sample mythic characters, their benefits don't fit the mythology. The Paizo developers wrote them to fit combat. But the mythic aspects of the characters are seldom about combat. Even with a warrior like Hercules, his famous Twelve Labors had killing in only three labors. He also had to capture and bring back several beasts, but one of the labors was cleaning the Augean stables in a single day (he rerouted a river for this labor).
Thus, I imagine Mythic Callings build around the pace of mythic stories rather than the pace of combat.
Pioneer's Calling
Uncommon, Calling, Mythic
You seek the frontier, lands to explore and tame. Whenever you Make an Impression in a place new to you, if you offer a heartfelt gift, such as a product of your labors, you can make the check with mythic proficiency. Growing crops also uses mythic proficiency.
Minion's Calling
Uncommon, Calling, Mythic
You serve others of your free will. You can Aid without a preliminary action to prepare. Select a skill or lore specialty. When you become expert in that skill or lore, you may select an additional skill or lore, and repeat this whenever you become master and legendary in the original skill or lore. Whenever you use one of those skills or lores in an activity that takes at least one minute and helps another person, you make the check with mythic proficiency.