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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yair" data-source="post: 2807090" data-attributes="member: 10913">Mythic Heroes is a 20 page pdf that presents a way to fit your player characters into the roles of the classic archetypes of literature, providing bonuses based on action points based on and encouraging their chosen archetypical role. As an introduction it provides a complete action point system, and as an aftermath a system of skill and combat challenges to allow you to better utilize these buffed-up roll results.There are seven mythic archetypes presented in the text: the Hero, Shadow, Mentor, Oracle, Trickster, Maiden, and Fated. Each is presented with a few paragraphs explaining the role, and a table of 20 Mythic Levels. When you raise a character level you rise in Mythic Level as well, and on each Mythic Level you gain one mythic ability. The mythic abilities are the core mechanical concept here, they usually allow you to use action points in ways appropriate for your archetype. For example, the Hero can spend an action point to increase his damage sat level Hero Mythic Level 4, the Mentor can give another an action point to use at Mentor Mythic Level 3, and so on.The addition of mythic abilities will make your characters stronger, but I’m not sure by how much. The text suggests that the addition of all the suggested rules is about on par with the power-up supplied by magic items (and, indeed, suggests replacing magic items with this system). Some abilities certainly seem powerful (like the addition of 1/2 your Hero Mythic Level to any ability score at level 10, for several rounds), while others seem subpar (like the capstone ability of the Maiden, allowing her to restore to life any one ally who died in the last round at the cost of her own life - very weak compared to true resurrection available at level 17!).The text is written for the Grim Tales system, which may account for some of these power discrepancies. It says “This book can be adopted by any GM running a d20 campaign”, and indeed most issues seem trivial (the “Use Unknown Device” skill instead of Use Magic Device, and so on), but I am not sure if adopting it whole cloth to a D&D campaign is straightforward. Some roles and abilities seem to be underpowered compared to the others for a D&D game (of course, I didn’t playtest it, this is just my impression). At least one change to the D&D system is also implied by the rules: critical hits need to be confirmed by spending an action point, and the system adds critical successes and failures to both attack and skill use.The action point system presented allows one to spend actions points to perform various things:  improve a d20 roll (adding an action dice to it), activate a per day ability, emulate a feat, bypass damage reduction, improve your AC, confirm a critical hit, or heal after combat. There are several options presented including variant ways of gaining action points, an “exploding dice” mechanic when using them, and scaling the action dice by character level.The system also presents two interesting concepts: shadowed and doubled action dice. When a dice is shadowed, you roll two dice and pick the highest. When it is doubled, you roll two dice and add them together. Many of the mythic abilities allow you to shadow or double (or both!) action dice under certain circumstances. The product ends with a section of skill and combat challenges (which I understand is taken from Iron Heroes). It provides some interesting options for using skills, allowing you to take penalties to the roll in return for perks. There are some universal ones like Fast Completion (allowing you to speed up the skill use), and some specific (like not losing you Dex to AC while climbing). The options seem very interesting, although the presentation could be a bit more consistent (they switch between penalties to the roll and increases to the DC without any reasoning I could see). Combat challenges are also presented, allowing you to similarly modify your attack or defense. These are essentially combat options in addition to the standard ones. For example, can fight defensively to and take +1 to your AC per -2 to your attack, or reduce your opponent’s movement on the next round by 5 feet by taking a -2 to your attack roll. Both the combat and skill challenges allow you to do things you couldn’t otherwise by the rules, often these are things I would expect a feat for. Their addition is therefore definitely a power-up. This section also contains rules for critical success (which you must spend an action point to activate) and failure (which the DM awards you an action point to activate) on a natural 20 or 1 on a skill or attack roll. Each skill description has notes on critical success and failure, and general rules are provided. Tying these things to action points is strange, I leave its effect as an exercise to the reader.Overall, Mythic Heroes provides a substantial power-up to the characters, but a power-up deeply suffused with the mythic archetypes and adorned with evocative and varied use of skills and attacks. If you’re willing to suck up the power increase I think these rules can greatly enhance the game, but they do come at the cost of managing another “level” system, remembering lots of new options, and carrying the load of an action point system on your mind. I am also not certain how adoptable it is for a straight D&D game.I was not sure if this was a 5- or 4-star product. It’s certainly good, but upon reflection I think the rules are not balanced enough or thought out to fit with a D&D game (again, this is without playtesting) to merit a 5. It’s definitely a high 4, though, especially if you’re interested in the challenge and action point system (which are great regardless of the mythic hero stuff). For a Grim Tales game, I suspect it is a 5 - but it's published as adoptable for any d20 campaign, which strongly implies D&D, and I graded it as such.Note: This product has the following OGC designation: “Open Content consists of game mechanics only”. That's it.If you are one of the few who care about such things, you might want to avoid this rather vague declaration.</blockquote>

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