So I bit the bullet and bought this rule system off of drivethruRPG. I was primarily only interested in the Game Master Emulator, since it seems to be the most oft recommended resource for solo play, but the difference in price for the full game system was only $2 so I figured I'd by the full version and hopefully get some extra value.
One thing I want to do is incorporate more role playing and randomness into my solo sessions. Making decisions for my characters based on metagame knowledge lead to boring play. The Mythic technique is to write down a simple yes/no question then roll a d100 to determine the answer, so the technique I'll have to learn is to write down the large, broad questions my characters would make in some situation, then break that down into simple yes/no ones. Hopefully this will result in a more unique, personal campaign as I will not be just running through text in a book but crafting the setting itself as I go along with dice rolls and table lookups.
I also downloaded the 4AD PDF for solo play, but that seems to be geared more for dungeon crawling than role playing, and I have yet to see a compelling reason to use any resource beyond the Dungeon Master Guide for random dungeon crawling.
The technique I intend to use for dungeon crawl encounters is to craft the encounter AFTER I've encountered it. This would simulate my character's not knowing what they've run into, as I slowly calculate CR's, look up monsters in the Monster Manual, and roll dice to determine number, statistics, and combat tactics
Another thing I need to keep in mind is recording time. The 1e Dungeon Master Guide (hereafter referred to as the holy gospel of D&D) greatly stresses the need to record time used by the Player Characters, and the published modules and 5e rulebooks mention it non trivially, and the 4AD guide gives a simple method for planning it out. This method is to begin the adventuring day at a certain time and keep track of every activity that passes and how much time it takes by hour. This idea seems very interesting to me and would ground my character's adventure, even though it would lead to more bookkeeping on my end.
UPDATE: well Mythic has a lot less charts than I expected, and nothing that guides social interaction, but oh well, at least the Fate chart could be useful. There's two ways of resolving actions in Mythic, to either guess the probability of an event occuring and then mapping that against the scene's "chaos factor", or by taking the relative strength of a character's ability and measuring that against the relative difficulty rank of the task. However since I'm using the D&D system for all my statistics, I can use d20 difficulty class and ability checks instead of Mythic's resistance system.
Also, the 1e DMG proves its usefulness yet again by mentioning exactly
how often to check for encounters during overland adventures, modified
by terrain type, and also the distance the encounter is from the party.
Both of these directives were lacking in my solo play and forced me to
wing it, which meant I did them in a manner that was most favorable to
my party. This information is missing from both the 5th edition DMG and the Storm King's Thunder adventure module, and so I
greatly appreciate having more concrete rules for encounter frequency
and distance.
The 'missing ingredient' of the Mythic system was, for me, how to pose a "dramatic question". I guess this concept is familiar to literary and liberal arts types, but I had never heard of it before. Basically, its a statement of the protagonist's current objective in a scene phrased as a yes/no question. Now it all makes sense, why the Mythic system came with blank sheets for scenes, NPCs, and resolutions. I guess it really is a creative writing exercise. In order to adapt this for play, I would simply have to set up a scene (DM-type activity) and then state my party's objectives (player type activity) and then use the Mythic tables to resolve the outcome.
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