So you've been playing Pathfinder (the first edition, not the second, which I have never even had a chance to play) and someone, probably some of your players are enthusiastic about bringing in the Mythic Pathfinder rules for even cooler stuff!
Don't do it.
Due warning: I have not read this article over even once, and I wrote it in a single stream of consciousness while aggravated by various painful minor health issues. I do not pretend it is an exhaustive examination of the Mythic rules, but on the plus side, it is long and shouty. I love my players and my exasperation at certain behaviours Mythic has exacerbated does not reflect on them.
We brought in Mythic a year or so ago after a couple of suggestions from players, partly because of the relatively slow pace of levelling. That is to say, it'd been seven years and they were about 14th level. Since we were far from dealing with the overarching quest and they could already destroy most opposition with relative ease, I felt that was OK, but I had Mythic explained to me and it doesn't strictly increase power in the same way as more levels does, so I agreed.
I should mention I had never played with Mythic, and some of the players had. So I blame them.
It's been a couple of years now and I would say it was the wrong choice. Now, to be fair, we are playing Mythic Pathfinder in which all the PCs are undead, and that's important. Being undead already gives them a ton of advantages, which I'll discuss another time. But even on its own merit, Mythic not only breaks the power balance even harder but also complicates things in several unhelpful ways.
Power
The power-breaking thing is acknowledged, and enjoyed by many people. It's intentional: Mythic says it's intended to create adventures that go down in legend and replicate legendary feats. "A skilled fighter might impact the history of a region, but a mythic champion can change its fate, and his every move is chronicled and recorded."
But wait. Why are we taking this at their own word?
This is Pathfinder, a game in which a high-level fighter can crush an army. Low-level enemies can only harm them with critical hits, and the fighter will have an array of powerful magical items that let them deal with all kinds of obstacles that would otherwise cause them problems. Moreover, a fighter PC (and it's PCs the Mythic rules are talking about) will have magic-wielding companions and as a group they are significantly more powerful than the governance of most canonical major cities. The sentence is true only for a specific sense of "skilled", which means "6th-10th level".
Given the way most Pathfinder adventures work, "impact the history of a region" is also nonsense. Most PCs are gallivanting around continents by the middle levels, and if they're following a published adventure path, they're eliminating historic threats long thought dormant, overthrowing city governments, and eventually ending threats to entire nations or the whole world.
None of this really support the argument for Mythic to exist.
Fundamentally, Mythic is about giving PCs more power and more abilities at lower levels, which primarily serves to cap the maximum level of spells they can cast. And that is a useful thing to do, because high-level spells and the high-level class abilities that mimic spells are probably the main threat to the pretence of balance, but let's be honest about it.
Mythic absolutely makes PCs more powerful. They get more hit points, and more leeway between unconsciousness and death (this, at least, is a good thing). They can retrospectively change failed rolls into successes by adding dice, which very few other abilities do - in a game where the PCs tend to have a significant advantage, any ability that lets them cancel the odd important failure makes a big difference.* They can virtually guarantee saving against everything and hitting with their most powerful abilities.
* I know this because one of the PCs has diligently collected as many abilities as possible that will negate monster critical hits and force them to reroll successful saves against the party's major abilities and allow the PCs to reroll their very rare natural 1s on an important saving throw. Since it's trivial for the PCs to target the most dangerous opposition at all times, it's very rare for them to survive long enough to use more than one or two of their more potent abilities that pose a serious threat to the party, it was already statistically unlikely for them to overcome the PCs' defences, and even these can now almost always be negated.
Mythic also bestows extra feats and special abilities, and boy, those abilities. Even at the first level of mythic power, these are things like "as a swift action (so no attacks of opportunity) move your full speed and make an attack at your maximum bonus that ignores damage reduction", allowing a martial character to cross the battlefield without any enemies being able to intercept them, make a deadly attack, and then use their actual turn to make a full attack. It costs a point of their limited mythic power, but you don't have many combats in a day and you only really need to do this once to eliminate the enemy's primary spellcaster or support character in the first round.
Narrowing Options
Other abilities remove normal countermeasures. Bards can take an ability that means their performance continues to bolster allies, regardless of if they have any way to perceive you or if you are able to act in any way. Since most bardic performance boosts have no stated range, this mechanically means that you can petrify a bard and place them in an impenetrable orb of silence behind twenty feet of solid rock, and arguably even five hundred miles away on another plane of existence, but the party still receives the bonuses. Another bard ability my party chose makes the benefits apply to all saving throws instead of just against fear, which means the party now effectively gets +4 to every important roll they make (attacks, damage, saves) at all times which cannot be prevented except by actually killing the PC. A +4 to all saving throws is the equivalent of about eight levels in terms of the opposition who are statistically likely to overcome them.
With a normal bard, trying to negate the singing is a standard counter. You cast a silence spell, or impose a condition that stops them singing for a moment, briefly debuffing the party and giving you an opportunity to strike while they are weaker. It's party of the tactical combat aspect that many players enjoy. But if you can't stop them, the bard is simply a number-increasing machine, and the tactical depth is reduced.
Melee warriors are less effective when they need to move, so keeping them at a distance is a useful countermeasure - unless they take the ability to move and then make a full attack, whenever they want, for free. This also boosts the effectiveness of what is already the most effective martial option, the two-weapon fighter with several extra attacks, at the expense of those designed for mobility or for single big hits (since the game is full of static bonuses that apply to every attack, having seven attacks that each get +25 damage is straightforwardly superior to three attacks that get +30 damage, even if the seven are nominally less accurate - attack rolls also get boosted, fixed miss chances are the main cause of misses and more attacks are the best countermeasure to them, and the rare defensive abilities that deflect attacks impact big hits far more than multi-attacks).
Spellcasters get options like "You can cast any spell available to your class", which is frankly insane. For prepared spellcasters, it eliminates one of the main balancing mechanisms, which is that a perfect spell for a situation exists but you didn't prepare it. It also means wizards et al. can cast spells they have never had an opportunity to learn. It eliminates the main drawback of spontaneous spellcasters, who have a very limited list of known spells. Yes, using these requires spending mythic power, but that's a new resources that you get specifically to power these abilities! Concentration checks also help to keep spellcasters in check, though at higher levels most sources are irrelevant apart from "damage them during spellcasting" and "stand next to them with big axe" - but there's a nice big obvious "automatically succeed at concentration checks" mythic ability to rule that out, and always applies without spending mythic power.
There are quite a number of thematic and less-powerful options, but crucially, these are thematic and less-powerful, so very few people take them. They take the pragmatic, useful abilities they will remember that grant an immunity or increase a number. This is true of every type of ability, from feats to magic items to spells, and certainly of mythic powers. "Can open a lock as a move action" or "pickpocket several creatures in a handful of seconds" are lovely thematic abilities for tricksters and won't break anything, but why would you learn those when you could learn to mind-control golems or cast spells undetectably? Why would a warrior ever pass up the option to move at full speed and also make all their attacks without any drawback?
The problem is that every time the game lets PCs become immune to something, whether it's a source of damage or a type of problem or a countermeasure to their own abilities, it narrows the set of tools the GM can use to offer interesting challenges. Many classes and spells and magic items already provide ways to ignore certain problems, and adding mythic to that makes the problem worse. If the GM continues to use those ignorable challenges (out of a sense of verisimilitude or to make the PCs' abilities feel meaningful), the actual challenge the PCs face is limited and dull for many players. If the GM doesn't, there is less variety in the game, and it becomes easier for players to adapt their characters to the type of challenges they will still face, which ends up making the problem even worse!
Complicating Things
The other issue with mythic is that it complicates things for the GM, who already has enough to do.
In the normal run of things, the GM can somewhat rely on a steady trickle of threats to whittle down PC resources. If they spend their big spells early in the day, they'll have fewer to use later. We're all familiar with the 5-minute adventuring day and the reluctance of players to rely on less-powerful abilities, but at least in theory there's some pressure and the possibility of interrupting their rest or making them too late if they do decide to rest up.
But 3rd-tier mythic characters can rest for one hour and spend a point of mythic power (roughly 1/8th of their supply) to regain their entire daily resources. There isn't even a limit to how often they can do this. They can handle eight times as many fights in a day as a normal PC of their level if they get any downtime, and most of the time, the PCs are in control of the pace.
Yes, this makes things easier, but it also means the GM is required to create more and harder fights for them and that is a huge investment of time in a game this complex.
As a GM in a Pathfinder campaign, I'm resigned to the fact that I spend hours preparing for every single combat encounter, both planning it and physically setting it up in the VTT we use because we live in different cities. I don't particularly enjoy that fact. Sometimes it's interesting to come up with something cool, but there is a hell of a lot of trawling lists and making sure things have the right number of abilities and giving them equipment, even when it's just looking up the pre-selected things in the VTT menu and dragging them onto an NPC. It is virtually impossible to quickly set up a fight for even mid-level characters, let alone to run it quickly. The absolute last thing any Pathfinder game needs is a situation where more fights are needed to pose any degree of meaningful challenge to the PCs.
And let's talk about interactions. Complex interactions between different abilities create the richness of Pathfinder and also the complexity that make it time-consuming to run and often require a lot of discussion to resolve exactly how things work. I cannot help feeling that adding yet another layer of ability types - mythic powers, mythic feats, mythic spells - simply makes that worse. It's another set of abilities the PCs have that the GM needs to look up and bear in mind while trying to plan sessions. It's another set of abilities the players will forget about, then remember a turn later when it turns out they should have been immune to something, or automatically teleported to the assassin's grandmother's house when he turned invisible, or taken less damage from something, or actually none of those spiders should have had a saving throw in the first place. Since NPCs and monsters can also be mythic, and the game strongly recommends incorporating this for the more serious challenges for a mythic campaign, it's also yet another layer of stuff the GM should be planning for when creating their NPCs and monsters and another layer of stuff for the GM to completely forget about when trying to actually run the damn combat with twenty different creatures they only set eyes on for the first time yesterday and will never play as again.
Spellcasters having limited spell selections forces them to find different approaches to a problem or waste time preparing. But the abilities almost every spellcaster will take eliminates that limitation, allowing them to cast the perfect niche spell to deal with an esoteric situation. Many of these spells even have lowered levels to account for the fact that they're only situationally useful and are a suboptimal choice to learn or prepare. For one thing, this means the party can quickly overcome what should have been challenging situations by trawling through the spell list, eliminating interesting gameplay. For another, out of character, this means the players spend even more time trawling through their entire spell list than they are already prone to, and that is astonishingly boring. Pathfinder is already bogged down by decision paralysis and the sheer time it takes to get through a fight, especially at higher levels. Opening up the entire spell list of a class has meant that every single round, my spellcaster players are poring over their lists for the one spell that will end the fight or completely neutralise the unusual tactic I'm attempting, or disable this specific type of monster. In their own turns, they're still unsure and discussing various options and taking ages to make decisions. Worse, much worse, they are constantly distracted from what else is going on and from the actual roleplay with other characters, which is the main point of playing the game.
I'm tired.
Mythic is Unnecessary
What it says on the tin.
Mythic Adventures: "Being mythic means possessing a degree of might unusual even in a fantasy world. Scenes turn more dramatic, the enemies are more lethal, and the consequences of the heroes’ actions make a far-ranging impact. Being mythic means invoking a sense of wonder and awe even in those already accustomed to the strange and unusual... The vistas are more dramatic, featuring flying islands and keeps that float in raging volcanoes. The colors are brighter, the sounds are more mysterious, and all of the other stimuli are sharper and more vibrant. Where the non-mythic hero would encounter a crumbling keep filled with familiar monsters, a mythic hero faces a towering citadel that builds itself from the bones of would-be invaders and is inhabited by cruel and malign creatures of nearly god-like power... Enhanced abilities allow mythic characters to take on threats beyond the reach of those without such power. They can face with ease foes both powerful and numerous... Mythic heroes are set apart from their contemporaries, capable of amazing feats of courage in the face of overwhelming odds.... Unlike normal characters, those with mythic power have greater ties to the world around them and a greater place in legend."
You don't need any extra stuff to play a game of incredible power. Have you even seen the Pathfinder rules? Mid-level PCs can crush low-level characters into the dirt. A 5th-level wizard can make a living as a tyrannosaurus hunter (seriously, I ran the numbers). You can punch a golem made of iron to death with your bare hands and not even slightly graze your knuckles. Any fighter can kill things indefinitely without rest or developing crippling RSI. High-ish level PCs teleport around the world blowing up castles full of the undead and one-shotting century-old dragons and are richer than kings. PCs drink a blacksmith's annual profits in potion to recover from a slight bruise slightly faster. Pathfinder is a game of superheroes, very much in the modern Marvel film sense. Your average player character spends most of their time hovering six inches off the ground and invisible. After the first few levels, being massively outnumbered is simply routine and fighting something supposedly 2-3 CR higher than you is a typical day's work. The poor old manticore is a CR 5 encounter, for crying out loud, and that's an actual monster of legend.
And what is with this more dramatic vistas stuff? Are there GMs out there who haven't been dropping flying islands and volcano lairs into their campaigns? You don't have galleons made from bones and forests with sentient shadows powered by the spite of a cursed druid impaled through a living tree?
Cruel and malign creatures of nearly god-like power describes roughly 60% of the monster manuals. It's evil outsiders for days in there, let alone all the sinister fey and monstrous humanoids and very slightly different varieties of evil dragon. Because most of the game was developed as D&D in the days of low levels, most of the classic legendary critters have surprisingly low CRs so the PCs can actually kill them; the things that are actual threats are mostly varieties of Yet Another Demon With A Slightly Different Shtick, CR 16 or Hey It's Another Miscellaneous Blob, CR 14 or of course, Tentacles!!! CR 18, interspersed with completely made-up monsters which are sometimes kind of cool but are frankly more science fiction than fantasy.
None of the stuff in here will make a game feel more mythic. Only roleplaying can do that. The game is already calibrated around fantasy-skinned superheroes battling legendary monsters with contemptuous ease and fighting through entire armies, one-shotting the archlich Woebegone by invisibly teleporting into his lair while he's in the toilet and disintegrating him, and being more skilled at everything than the people who have done only that thing for their entire eighty years on Golarion because heroes get skill points and Int-boosting items and spells that give +level to skill rolls and master architects don't.
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