Endless Realities - what am I missing?

[HAximand]

I just finished running my second session of this AP and experienced what I can only describe as the worst encounter I have ever seen in a Piazo product. For context, I've run or played through all of Age of Ashes, Extinction Curse, and Sky King's Tomb, among other smaller adventures.

I'm talking about the Endless Realities mythic hazard in the very first chapter. Let's start with how you can disable the hazard: you need to have Legendary Thievery or Arcana or a 7th-rank Dispel Magic, all of which are impossible for a 12th-level party to have. Certain Mythic callings or feats might have made the checks possible, but none of my players happened to have an ability to roll with Mythic proficiency on either of those skills. And even if they did, the party was quite low on Mythic points by the time the encounter started.

But this hazard is destructible, I hear you saying! Yes, this is true. The hazard has 90 Hit Points for each of the four realities, and destroying all four seems to be the only reasonable way of moving on for many parties. Except that with its AC of 39, the party martials have a 25% chance of hitting it on their first attack, and with its Hardness of 20, they each have a median hit damage of zero except for the barbarian with a whopping 8. To top it off, the hazard can regain 20 HP each round, so after two full rounds of whaling on it, the party had dealt zero net damage.

The only saving grace is that each time a PC crits on a save against it, its DC's and hardness are reduced by 2. The DC's don't matter since the PC's didn't meet the required proficiencies anyway. Reducing its hardness will sloooowly allow the PC's to start dealing damage, but as I said, this effect still wasn't enough to deal net positive damage in two rounds. Combined with the ridiculous AC, 360 total HP, and 20 regen each round, there was no way the party was going to meaningfully win; the best outcome was to tough it out until the hardness reached zero and the encounter ended on its own.

My players clearly weren't having fun, so I explained that the Hardness was decreasing with each crit success, and if they got to ten crit saves, the Hardness would reach 0 and the entire trap would be disabled. At this point one player said "in that case can we just take 40d6 damage and say we won?" That was when I realized just how un-fun the entire thing was and decided to move on, pretending the whole thing never happened.

Did I miss something? Was this encounter supposed to be winnable?

[dharkus]

the arcana doesn't req leg prof, doing dmg to hazards is always impractical, that's not unique to this hazard - i let a PC without leg thievery spend a mythic as if they've rolled and auto-failed, then used rewrite fate, but skipped the 1st roll, they only rolled once though, cause you can seemingly only disable 1 reality per round and they were last, 1 person had arcana - it was very hard & 1 person went down, but they did it! the arcana person used a few mythic probably to re-roll too - it's a mythic hazard, and not the only in the AP...

[HAximand]

dharkus wrote:

the arcana doesn't req leg prof, doing dmg to hazards is always impractical, that's not unique to this hazard - i let a PC without leg thievery spend a mythic as if they've rolled and auto-failed, then used rewrite fate, but skipped the 1st roll, they only rolled once though, cause you can seemingly only disable 1 reality per round and they were last, 1 person had arcana - it was very hard & 1 person went down, but they did it! the arcana person used a few mythic probably to re-roll too - it's a mythic hazard, and not the only in the AP...

That's a good point, I had missed that the Arcana check didn't require legendary proficiency. I had just noticed that its DC was even higher than the Thievery and thought it had to be a typo that there was no proficiency requirement at all. Still, the DC is 41 and the highest Arcana bonus in the party was +18 so it wasn't even feasible until the DC's had been reduced several times.

I understand that it's mythic and this party was particularly unfit for its challenges, but the actual solution to the encounter reduced to "wait until we crit on our saves at least 5 times, then wait until we get lucky on 4 Arcana checks that we can only make once per round." After working out the probabilities, my party still would have just waited on 10 crit saves instead of ever succeeding the 4 Arcana checks.

A much better suited party (read: a party with good Arcana) could have succeeded sooner, but it still boils down to waiting on lucky rolls. That's anti-fun encounter design where the players have no method of meaningfully engaging with the content.

[James Jacobs]

We can't predict all of any one party's capabilities the way a single GM can, which is an element all published adventures have to lean on the GM for. It's not "anti fun" to include chances for a common skill like Arcana to shine, but it IS anti-fun to keep that as-is in a party that, due to choices made during character creation, mean that no one in the party is any good at Arcana.

That said...

Spoiler:

...Endless Realities IS a mythic hazard, and more than that, a particularly potent one that counts as a mythic deed for overcoming it. It's meant to be really tough, and one that most parties, I expect, will be spending most/all of thier Mythic Points to overcome (which is why it fully recharges Mythic Points to max upon overcoming it).

That all said, if a GM sees the players aren't having fun, that's always a good time to hit "pause" on play and chat with the party, and perhaps just handwave things if needed to keep on playing. And since...

Spoiler:

...this is one of the first really mythic challenges to face the party in this Adventure Path, it's also maybe a good time to chat with the players about not being too timid about spending mythic points and leaning into their mythic nature and abilities, which should absolutely include you as the GM assuring the players that there will be PLENTY of chances to regain those points during play. A mythic adventure requires this, more than a regular adventure requires hero points, so the GM should always lean toward the overly-generous side of things when handing out mythic points. They're one way you as the GM can manage the challenge flow of things.

In a case like this, where the players aren't having fun, you can for example just outright tell the players "this is a mythic challenge and you should lean into spending those points, and for this challenge I'll let you fully recharge those points at the end of each round so you can get a feel for how mythic encounters play" for example.

The point of a mythic adventure is to let the players lean even further into the power fantasy of essentially playing superheroes in a way that they feel like if they weren't mythic their PCs would have never succeeded... while at the same time balancing things so that it doesn't feel equally impossible for mythic PCs to succeed. Increasing and throttling the flow of mythic points handed out to players is one way you can adjust these things.

[Desril]

Other points have been covered but I also have to point out that you're just wrong about the dispel too. It's a 7th rank effect for counteract purposes. That doesn't need a 7th rank Dispel. It needs a success on a 6th rank or a critical success on 4th or 5th rank.

[HAximand]

James Jacobs wrote:

It's not "anti fun" to include chances for a common skill like Arcana to shine, but it IS anti-fun to keep that as-is in a party that, due to choices made during character creation, mean that no one in the party is any good at Arcana.

Yes, of course, I could and should have understood the hazard better on first reading and thought more carefully before running it as-is. But this reads a lot like blaming the reader for an overly specific encounter design. I mean, if the design is going to be that hard for some parties, it warrants at least a comment from the writer suggesting possible changes. That's not an unusual ask from an AP.

James Jacobs wrote:

...this is one of the first really mythic challenges to face the party in this Adventure Path, it's also maybe a good time to chat with the players about not being too timid about spending mythic points and leaning into their mythic nature and abilities, which should absolutely include you as the GM assuring the players that there will be PLENTY of chances to regain those points during play.

I said in my post that the players were low on Mythic points before this encounter started. The reason they were low on Mythic points is that I, as the GM, did exactly what you're suggesting and encouraged spending them as they will be regained frequently. When in reality, it turned out that they would have been better off saving most of them for the upcoming Mythic encounter.

James Jacobs wrote:

The point of a mythic adventure is to let the players lean even further into the power fantasy of essentially playing superheroes...

This is exactly my problem, though. Even if we replace my experience with a party well-suited to the hazard, the problem with the encounter is that the players have nothing to do. No recourse, no engagement with the mechanics of the hazard, just wait for crit saves and then four good disable checks. Yes obviously I can reward creative things they come up with, yes of course they might just happen to have a feat for this, but the encounter as written doesn't "let the players feel like superheroes." It lets them feel like gamblers. Gamblers who lose every time.

[HAximand]

Desril wrote:

It's a 7th rank effect for counteract purposes. That doesn't need a 7th rank Dispel. It needs a success on a 6th rank or a critical success on 4th or 5th rank.

That's a great point, I was wrong about that. I'll also point that out to my players, I think they'll be relieved to realize they could have used all of their prepared 6th-rank Dispel Magics and had a 15% success chance with each to dispel one fourth of the trap.

[Media Rez]

Okay so I'm not really sure what you're expecting from this? If you just want to complain about the Hazard and be snarky about any responses, feels like there's better things to do with your time. Sounds like it was a Hazard that tripped up your group and resulted in an unfun session, which happens.

[HAximand]

I was hoping to hear that I had completely misunderstood the encounter, or at least that someone else had had a similar experience. What I got was a few rules corrections that didn't address the problems or change the encounter in the slightest, as well as the creative director of Paizo saying "well why didn't you just change it." I guess it's egg on my face for expecting an AP to be fun without changes.

[HAximand]

I do apologize for any rudeness. I don't meant to be ungrateful for people who took the time to read and respond. It's just a bit frustrating when you bring up an issue to feel like the responses make tangential corrections without addressing the issue itself.

[James Jacobs]

I certainly wasn't trying to be snarky in my response; sorry if it came across that way. One thing that I've encountered a lot in my decades of doing this is the perception among many players and GM is, believe it or not, that it's not allowed to "change the rules" of the adventure to fit their play style, so over those years I've just sort of fallen into the trap of mentioning that a GM can always adjust things from what is presented in the adventure text.

[Jessica Redekop]

I hope I can make this suggestion without being misunderstood, but if there's no one in the group you're running for with Arcana, I think you'll have a better experience making a decision now of a substitution you'll allow when the AP calls for Arcana checks.

Maybe that means allowing Occultism whenever you see Arcana, or maybe that means allowing a check with the skill for any of the four magic traditions. This is an adventure path where your enemy is a powerful and ancient wizard specialized in an ancient arcane magic, though. Many checks throughout the AP are likely to be Arcana checks as you move forward fighting wizards, learning about your wizard enemies, and overcome challenges orchestrated by this ancient wizard villain.

Maybe using Arcana to learn about wizard magic was too specific a choice for an adventure path to make, maybe not. I just hope I can suggest "let them use a different skill" without needing to weigh in on that or without coming across like I'm admonishing you. I truly don't mean to. I just want to communicate that the Arcana skill will probably come up again, given the nature of the AP, and that you can prepare now for how you'll handle it in the future.

[HAximand]

Thanks for the thoughts, Jessica. You're right, of course, the theming of the AP is necessarily arcane. It was even pointed out in the player's guide as Arcana was one of four "strongly recommended" skills. The main reason we didn't notice it was a hole is that we were coming out of Sky King's Tomb and 3 of the 5 players chose to keep those characters, so we didn't have a full session zero where we usually check for these kinds of things.

I'll definitely allow for some alternative checks (usually with increased DC's) and also let them move some proficiency boosts around if they so choose.

[Virellius]

Just as an addition as a Forever GM, I'd argue that 'No one in my party in the campaign about legendary wizards of immense power has a good idea what Arcana is' was perhaps not a great starting point.

It would be like running Blood Lords with a party completely oblivious to the undead. At some point, you really do need to take responsibility for helping tailor your party to the campaign and vice-versa. It's our job as GMs to take the framework and adjust it for our groups. Not everything runs exactly as we need right out of the box.

I see you mentioned you came into this from another AP; probably would have been a good idea on your part to read the player's guide and read through the AP to prepare for this. A cursory glance of the hazards would have queued you into this early and with your entire campaigns' worth of knowledge of your party already perhaps you could have changed the skill requirements before running the hazard? Respectfully, of course.