Thoughts on or experiences with Mythic Adventures?

[EisenKreutzer]

Mythic Adventures is one of the newest additions to the Pathfinder library, and I bought the book thinking it might be good for an Exalted-type game, or just to inject a little bit more awesomeness into Pathfinder. I've been slowly reading it for the past few months, and I like what I'm reading so far. But I'm not totally convinced on it, and definitely not confident enough in it to actually run a game with it.

So, whats the Playgrounds take on Mythic Adventures? Does it have a place in the Pathfinder GMs arsenal of tricks, or is it simply a wasted book with half-baked ideas that don't work as intended?

What are your thoughts and experiences with Mythic Adventures in Pathfinder.

[ScubaGoomba]

I'm also really interested in this and this thread is, more or less, what I just came here to post! I've looked through the SRD and it seems really intriguing, but I'm not sure how it plays out.

[Talya]

There's a handbook on it, somewhere. I love the idea and hope to see it in use in a campaign soon.

[deuxhero]

Another PF thing that favors casters over martials, despite not really needing to.

Archmage can pull any spell he wants to out of his as... pointy hat as soon as he is mythic. One of Champion's best tier 1 ability is... getting half of combat reflexes and a bonus on AoOs.

Also has a bizzare love of swift actions, which martial classes already have abilities that expend.

[Roadie]

Another PF thing that favors casters over martials, despite not really needing to.

Archmage can pull any spell he wants to out of his as... pointy hat as soon as he is mythic. One of Champion's best tier 1 ability is... getting half of combat reflexes and a bonus on AoOs.

Also has a bizzare love of swift actions, which martial classes already have abilities that expend.

I think the sharpest comparison is to look at the best tier 6 abilities for archmage and champion.

For Archmage, it's Sanctum, which gives you a persistent mage's magnificent mansion (with some free unseen servants) you can access anytime you want by spending 1 minute in concentration, and with a door that's "invisible and impermeable" to any creatures you don't specifically allow in. Your familiar can also "enter or leave the sanctum from any square adjacent to you" at will as a full-round action.

For Champion, it's Shatter Spells, which gives you... greater dispel magic, except only at touch range, and you have to spend mythic power to use it (and at tier 6 that's 15/day total to be spread between all abilities that use it).

[Kudaku]

I was really excited to try this out until I realized casters get an intentional better Paragon Surge effect at Mythic Tier 1. Then that excitement kind of died down.

[Keneth]

Mythic rules are fun, but they exacerbate the problems of the system. It shouldn't really be surprising to anyone anymore though; Paizo knows jack **** about balance.

That said, the rules are made so that you don't have to run a fully mythic campaign. I mostly use the mythic rules for my NPCs and enemies. It's a wonderful way to give the enemies (or allies) some flair.

Plus, the rules allow you control the progress of players characters. You can make it easier for mundanes to progress in mythic ranks to make the whole thing a little more balanced.

Not to mention all the possibilities with mythic items and spells. Fighter lagging behind all the flying wizards and druids? Give them mythic fly as a spell-like ability. Make an adventure out of it.

In short, mythic campaigns are meh. If everything is mythic, then nothing has really changed. But standard campaigns with some mythic campaigns can be great.

[AuraTwilight]

It's everything about 3.5's Epic Levels except without the excuses they had for being so terribad.

[Sayt]

While there is a large amount of love for casters in Mythic adventures, as a mostly-martial player, the Champion does get some things which make me cry and cry and cry for joy, mostlt the 3rd teir Fleet Warrior, which basically gives you a free move before or action a full attack, and the also third tier Precision, which is basically "Iterative attack penalties? What are those?" (More precisely, all of your iterative attacks get +5 to hit per time you take the ability, up to your normal bab)

Does Mythic Acventures have nice stuff for martials? Yes. Does it have nicer things for casters? Yes. Is this also true all way through 3.5 and Pathfinder? Yeeeah.

[W3bDragon]

Another PF thing that favors casters over martials, despite not really needing to.

I'm not sure why that's relevant. The core book does that already in spades. I really don't think its fair to dismiss a supplement because it doesn't solve a fundamental problem with the system.

As for Mythic Adventures, my group were early adopters. We bought the PDF just as it came out and ordered a hard copy as well. We've recently finished running a mythic campaign, which went down really well with the group, and dabbled with mythic in another.

My impressions of mythic adventures is that it is an interesting take on 3.5's epic levels. If viewed as a replacement for the 3.5 epic rules, its decent. I like that its very easy to use. Pretty much all the mythic abilities are straightforward by the epic level handbook's standards, without being boring. I like that the mythic powers improve your current abilities instead of overshadowing them. However, the real standout in the mythic rules is its ability to be used with low level characters.

The Mythic campaign we ran started with the PCs being 1st level and 1st tier mythic. It ended with them around 7th level and 3rd tier mythic. It was very interesting DMing a group of low level PCs with mythic abilities. It wasn't game breaking (much), but it definitely changed what challenges they can and can't take on. With proper use of mythic abilities, the PCs were able to scrape wins from encounters that would probably overwhelm most (but not all) groups of their level. It just gave them that extra bit of leeway to recover from bad tactics, or to attempt encounters that otherwise would normally be very dangerous.

Although we liked the book, my group feels that we shouldn't overuse it. As such we're reserving using the Mythic rules for exceptional campaigns, PCs, and NPCs.

tl,dr: Simple, yet interesting abilities. Separation from class levels allows for interesting low level mythic play.

[NightbringerGGZ]

So my real-life experience with Mythic Adventures is that every other GM I know either avoids is completely or cherry picks a couple of things from the book to apply to particularly tough enemies. Nobody seems to want to run a game with it.

Casters are favored heavily in MA. They gain further power where it isn't needed and are given tools that make it even easier to break a game. Mundane classes get either static bonuses (quite a few of which were feats in 3.5), dozens of ways of gaining 1 extra attack from a Swift Action, or new ways to spend Swift Actions that are highly situational. On top of that, the Mythic Classes don't even really support all of the Core and Base classes that have already been released, and quite a few of the new Base classes coming in the ACG aren't really supported either.

So in short, it's a concept that was initially interesting and exciting that fell short once the actual rules and mechanics were revealed. This could probably be improved if Paizo would release some soft-cover supplements to go along with Mythic rules but I haven't seen anything other than the Mythic Adventure Paths in the works.

[Kudaku]

I'm not sure why that's relevant. The core book does that already in spades. I really don't think its fair to dismiss a supplement because it doesn't solve a fundamental problem with the system.

I wasn't expecting the book to solve the martial/caster disparity, but... Wild Arcana, a 1st tier archmage path feature, takes Schrodinger's Wizard from theorycraft to reality AND opens it up to spontaneous spellcasters to boot.

They legitimized and improved on Paragon Surge cheese and made it a level 1 feature.

[Talya]

I wasn't expecting the book to solve the martial/caster disparity, but... Wild Arcana, a 1st tier archmage path feature, takes Schrodinger's Wizard from theorycraft to reality AND opens it up to spontaneous spellcasters to boot.

They legitimized and improved on Paragon Surge cheese and made it a level 1 feature.

With highly limited daily uses, and at the cost of leaving you defenseless because you've spent all your mythic points.

Let's not pretend melee don't get nice things here, either. They just get nice things that are typically straightforwardly melee. If you're playing mythic, the melee-type basically becomes the uber-charger insta-gib build...without needing to charge.

[Kudaku]

With highly limited daily uses, and at the cost of leaving you defenseless because you've spent all your mythic points.

Five times a day on tier 1 (or more with items, feats, higher tier etc) doesn't exactly strike me as highly limited for "pick any spell on your spell list that you could theoretically cast - now you can cast it" as a swift action, but sure - you do have to use mythic power.


Let's not pretend melee don't get nice things here, either. They just get nice things that are typically straightforwardly melee. If you're playing mythic, the melee-type basically becomes the uber-charger insta-gib build...without needing to charge.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying martial classes don't get nice things in Mythic- they do. I just find it frustrating that the gateway feature for spellcasters is "five times per day you can use Paragon Surge on crack" and the gateway feature for the champion is "five times per day you can now full attack AND move your speed".

I was originally looking to add low mythic tiers to my game because I like the idea of the rules system and I think some some of the options Mythic offers martial classes are very cool, but granting a spellcaster a single tier in Archmage or Hierophant completely turns the game on its head for me.

All that said, I haven't actually played with the Mythic rules so I can't say for sure what the disparity is actually like - just guess based on what I'm reading in the rules set. I probably wouldn't mind Mythic so much if Wild Arcana and Inspired Spell were higher level path abilities instead of "the startoff point".

[Keneth]

At the risk of being called out on the Oberoni fallacy, if a GM finds Wild Arcana and Inspired Spell too strong, he should just move them to to a higher tier. It's an optional ruleset anyway, setting some ground rules prior to its use shouldn't bother anyone.

[3WhiteFox3]

At the risk of being called out on the Oberoni fallacy, if a GM finds Wild Arcana and Inspired Spell too strong, he should just move them to to a higher tier. It's an optional ruleset anyway, setting some ground rules prior to its use shouldn't bother anyone.

I keep hemming and hawing over whether or not to add Mythic Tiers to my game, but only for Tiers 3 - 5. The lower tiered characters would also advance in Mythic Rank faster. I'd like to, but I'd have to get my players on board with it, and we just started a new campaign, so I don't want to add anything in the middle. They are also not very optimized (except for one of them, but he's pretty predictable and I can usually manage his character) they also probably wouldn't understand what I meant if I started talking about tiers or balance (most of them still think that Bards are so OP or that Monks do crazy damage and that they don't need magic items).

Another concern is that even just one Rank for the Tier 3s might be too much. A Bard/Inquisitor/Magus that takes Archmage still gets access to Wild Arcana/Inspired Spell, and even beyond that there are other options which would make the Tier 3s extremely potent. Anyway, moving Wild Arcana or Inspired Spell to another tier would mean having to make up a replacement for it, as it's something you get for free at first level instead of a Path Ability. Also, Arcane Surge and Recalled Blessing are also extremely potent as well, primarily thanks to getting a total of +6 metamagic for free (Persistent Spell and Quicken Spell) atop rolling twice for caster level checks.

That's just the free ability at level one, not actual Path Abilities. Some of which are extremely potent.