Retrofitting Mythic into D&D

 I've tried a lot of solo systems, and I keep coming back to Mythic, because every other system just feels like a stripped down version of Mythic. Except the PbtA ones, I guess.

 Mythic doesn't really work with D&D, however, since Mythic assumes a cinematic approach to gaming and D&D assumes a simulationist one. In Mythic, game play is divided into a sequence of scenes, where scenes are chosen in respect to how they push the story forward, and do not have to play out in a linear order and all the unnecessary events in between are ignored. This doesn't really fit D&D's simulationist approach, which doesn't divide cleanly into discrete scenes and the "unnecessary" mechanics of the journey are in fact the greater part of the game. 

But I think that Mythic can be salvaged for use in old school D&D by hacking off the parts that work and repurposing them; specifically Threads, Lists, Events, and Chaos Factor.

Threads are basically the goals of your character, as an end goal like "killing the demon lord" or something on the side like "finding long-lost brother". Mythic has many tools for managing threads and manipulating them at unexpected times. Creating, following, and resolving threads adds a story-driven direction to the game.

Events are the meat and potatoes of the solo engine. Everything revolves around them and most of the solo game will be spent dealing with the consequences of an event. Use events in place of a random encounter. Perform the random encounter check as normal, and on a success turn to Mythic’s event generation rules and fit what happens. The Mythic GME constantly stresses that Events should be defined by the context of the game, and D&D provides the context, whether overland, in town or in the dungeon.

Lists and List Management are necessary paperwork for tracking and manipulating Threads and NPCs in your game. Only add “important” NPCs to the list, as in D&D you’ll probably be generating a lot. When a thread or event states to “Introduce NPC”, that would be one important to the story and should be built accordingly. The 1e DMG has a table of traits for random NPC generation, which I found to be more straightforward than the Mythic one, but has more limited options.

The Fate check is introduced in the Mythic GME as it’s most important mechanic, but I found it’s usefulness limited in old school D&D, as there are usually more concrete procedures for resolving in-game activities. Nevertheless, there are points where procedures or results are unknown, and it’s there that the Fate check comes into play. I recommend using the Fate check from Variations 2.

Most people who play solo don’t like to use Chaos Factor, but I do. I like the element of randomness and the unexpected that it provides. 

I have the Mythic cards, and generally I prefer them for tracking Chaos factor and Lists, but for events and the other checks I like to use Variations 2. 

Mythic GME and D&D

 I don’t think that Mythic is a good fit for D&D. D&D is a very simulationist game where you move distance by tens of feet and time in tens of minutes, while Mythic is a cinematic narrativist system where you focus only on the scenes that push forward the plot. I feel like the two systems are largely incompatible, and if you try to mix them you’ll be leaning on one to the exclusion of the other. For example, dungeon crawling with D&D doesn’t need Mythic for anything except maybe the Q&A Oracle, while Mythic’s structure doesn’t need D&D’s procedures for except maybe character creation and more detailed combat. 

From another anon who says things I totally agree with:

This is exactly why I've found it difficult to use Mythic when playing solo osr games (especially old-school D&D) because the game has a narrower focus on dungeon crawls and wilderness adventures. 

Enter a new room of the dungeon? Roll on tables to check for room type, size, content, number of exits, monsters, treasure, and other features. 
Run into an NPC? Roll to determine occupation, gender, personality, immediate desires, and quests.
Traveling through the wilderness? Subtract rations, roll for terrain type, roll for encounters, roll for discoveries, roll for miscellaneous events.

I keep Mythic on hand because it does some neat things with the random events and stuff, but I almost never even get a chance to use it because there are already straightforward procedures for 99% of the stuff you do in OD&D. The pacing of 'scenes' and 'chaos' doesn't even really work with room-by-room dungeon exploration anyway.

Solo OSR is boring

 The AD&D 1e DMG contains everything necessary to play the game solo. It is full of tables that can generate every aspect of the campaign, from the governmental form of a city down to the disposition of an individual NPC. However, it provides the barest guidelines on interacting with all that content, preferring to leave it to the discretion of the DM. A binary question-and-answer oracle could be used to fill in this gap. I find the term "GM emulator" to be a bit misleading, as they don't actually fulfill the function of the GM, which is to play the world in response.

  By the book, there's not a whole to do in OSR games beyond traveling into the unknown, encountering monsters or friendly NPCs, engaging in combat, and recovering loot to level up to recover more loot. They really do rely on the strength of the DM to make the game interesting.

When I play RPGs live, I play from the perspective of my character and focus from personal point of view. When I play solo, I feel more like an omnipresent narrator that watches other characters take action as I roll for them.

How to play solo D&D

The introduction of the 5th edition rules describe the basic gameplay loop of D&D:

1. The DM describes the environment.

2. The players describe what they want to do.

3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions.

We can rephrase this into technical jargon as:
1. Content generation
2. Player action
3. Action resolution

To determine how to play solo, we can examine all 3 steps individually and take into account the special considerations of each.

1. Content Generation

In a traditional live game this is the purview of the Dungeon Master, who creates the content of the campaign and expresses it to the players. Conveying the right amount of information is crucial, because if the players know too much then they will not be surprised or challenged, and if they know too little then they will be confused and unable to engage with the game properly. In a solo game, the player and the DM are the same person, so this makes separating the content of the game tricky.

The "Master of Adventures" section of the Dungeon Master's Guide is presented as a toolkit for creating adventures. Many of the options for creating an adventure are presented as tables, and those tables can be used to randomly generate content through the use of dice rolls. 

Randomly generating content through the use of dice rolls and table lookups is a natural method for OSR gamers. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide provides three appendices devoted to the random generation of dungeons and wilderness terrain, random determination of monster encounters, and a chapter on random determination of treasure. 

Randomly generating content provides an exciting level of the uncertainty for the solo gamer.

2. Player Action

This is where the actual fun of the game is. This is where the DM asks "What do you do?" Given the world elements, the NPCs, the environment and location your characters are in, your player characters can take their actions. Sometimes the elements of your scene are not clear, and that requires interpretation through a question and answer oracle, or through some guided inspiration like a Tarot deck, but this is where the solitaire gamer can put on their player hat and indulge in the fun.

This is the phase where you put everything together. You can now animate all that content that you previously generated by having your character(s) interact with it all. What happens when they interact with it? Why is it all there? How did it get there? Answering these questions can be useful prompts for writing your character's story.

3. Action Resolution

The 5e system provides a universal mechanic for action resolution, using a d20:

       1. Roll the die and add a modifier
       2. Apply circumstantial bonuses and penalties

       3. Compare the total to a target number

The thresholds for the target number (called Difficulty Classes or DC) are described in plain English, so this system can be used as-is for most in-game task resolution. For the solo gamer, simply determine what you think the DC of an action is, then roll the d20 and add modifiers to see if you succeed.

Most of the action resolution rules in 5e are split between player facing and DM facing rules. The chapters devoted to "Using Ability Scores", "Adventuring", and "Combat" are all technically player facing, while the DMG chapter "Running the game" is for the DM. Simple dice mechanics can be used to cover almost all types of results, and for the rest of the unknown results it is advisable to use some kind of oracle, such as the Mythic GME.

Most solo oracles are devoted to the Action Resolution stage of gameplay. The Mythic GME uses the Fate chart, while other oracles use simple yes or no resolution. A simple d20 roll can also be used as a "yes or no" oracle as well.

Once all success or failure results have been determined, the solitaire player can return to the Content Generation or Player Action stages of the game, to keep playing and continuing the loop.

These three steps cover the "how to play" section of solitaire role-playing, and to know "what to do", the player must adapt the "Three Pillars of Adventure" to solo play, which I discuss further in depth here: https://farooqsgaming.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-three-pillars-of-d-solo.html

D&D solo as a board game?

Just play Advanced Heroquest instead. It does everything that D&D does, but in a more solid system that’s not so heavily reliant on the GM, and has better tables for generating content.

The most frustrating part of playing D&D solo is handling room descriptions.  In purely random play the rooms are either completely bare, or you have to waste time rolling on a table to stock the room with non-gameable content. When playing with a module, it really depends if the room key is split out into player only read aloud text and DM only information, and how well both are written. Sometimes the player read aloud text does not have enough information to spur meaningful choices, and sometimes through no fault of the writer it’s just easy to glance at the GM description anyway. It feels easier to just read the whole text of a room key at once, but in doing so you won’t really be playing the game.

So to solve this problem I have this idea, to tie the game more closely to the board. Almost every module comes with an empty map with numbered keys. Instead of moving my characters abstractly through the dungeon, I’ll select an actual 10’x10’ area per character, move them to that location, and see if anything is there. This necessitates moving the characters through an actual space in the dungeon. Then I’ll flip over to the room key and see what is in the space around each character. If they tripped a wire or pit trap, fell into an ambush by a monster, or discovered treasure or secret door, all would be resolved after my characters first moved into the area ‘blind’.  If I do not look into the right area, or do not do the right procedure to find the hidden element in a square, then I miss it and lose the treasure, fall victim to a trap, or lose surprise to a monster ambush.

This is contrary to the way live RPGs are played and denies me information that I should “know” before entering an area, but on the other hand it is playable and keeps the fun of discovery for myself.

AD&D has more in depth rules for dungeon crawling than any other edition. The sections on movement and searching, lockpicking, and listening at and forcing open doors are the most helpful here. These procedures are tightly coupled with the time scale, so it’s important to keep an ‘adventuring clock’ to track rounds and turns, or a sheet to check them off as they go by. Accurate tracking of time allows the player to coordinate the characters’ actions in a standard way.

For random dungeon generation, this means not stocking the dungeon until after the player characters have moved through it. This incentivizes checking squares, because to do so otherwise puts me at maximum risk for falling for a trap or a monster ambush.

In the case of traps, if I choose a PC to check a square for traps, and if he hits the chance of triggering the trap, then he detects and avoids it and I can mark it on the square for all PCs to know. If I want the PC to do something else, like check for secret doors, and I roll that he gets hit by a trap, then he falls victim to it.

AD&D as a solo miniatures game

Just play Advanced Heroquest instead 

Solitaire D&D is a curious enigma. On the one hand, D&D is obviously a cooperative game for 3 or more players, one DM and at least two players. On the other hand, the early versions of D&D, and AD&D especially, were clearly tested solo. There is a wealth of content in the Dungeon Masters Guide for the solo gamer, buried deeply within its charts and tables and dice mechanics. The only thing the DMG does not provide is the story or plot of the game, but random dungeon crawling and wilderness travel does not require a story, and in fact in purist OSR circles random grid and hex encounters are considered the gold standard of play, and so is perfect for DM less play.

The first issue of The Strategic Review included a method for solitaire dungeon crawling and that method is copied and expanded in the first appendix of the DMG. Random dungeon generation, random generation of wilderness terrain and the attached random encounters and treasure rewards create all the content necessary for a game session. On top of that, the DMG has more tables for random town encounters, NPC generation, room contents, furnishing, unidentified potions and magic items, etc. All this random content may lead to weird and logically inconsistent results, and is sometimes frustrating for the solo player, but that is the result of lacking a dedicated DM.

The second best part of AD&D solitaire play is that nearly all the game systems have a dice mechanic attached. It's not the universal d20 system of 3.5 and 5e D&D, but it leads to more unique, context specific outcomes. To resolve the outcome of any action, a player simply has to pretend to be a DM for a moment and choose a proper mechanic and set of dice to roll, and let chance determine the outcome. Or not, and grant automatic success, no one will know, you're playing solo.  The amount of rules for the standard AD&D game is so vast, however, that it's possible to get through a whole game with just the given mechanics. This does restrict the kind of things you can do in the game however, and the really crazy imaginative out-of-the-box thinking that happens in regular group sessions doesn't really happen while following solo mechanics. Also in a live session the DM can determine success or failure without the need for dice, and generate content without needing tables.

The first time I played AD&D solo, I tried to stay close to "theater of the mind" style gameplay. Armed with nothing but character sheets, a notebook, graph paper, the rulebooks and some dice, I sat down to play the game, using the notebook as a journal and log. I did not really enjoy the experience, and it felt more like sitting down to do my taxes or take study notes rather than playing a game. Using miniatures and a battle map, however, greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the experience.  I now keep a large dry erase gridded battlemap as a general play space. On this map I keep small notes in the corner pertaining to the scenario I'm doing, and make ticks to mark off turns and rounds as an adventure clock. I keep miniatures in the marching formation and when it comes to the dungeon I only draw the rooms on the battle map in the event of an encounter or other situation that requires precise movement. Otherwise I draw the map of the dungeon on graph paper (the way a mapper in a live party should do), and only transfer the layout to my battle map in the event of an encounter. I then run the encounter as a tactical skirmish wargame, noting reaction checks and morale where appropriate, and then move on.

I like miniatures, I like visual maps, I like tactical wargaming, and I like writing quick notes on the board and erasing them rather than scratching everything out on notepaper. It made the game more visual and tactile for me, but it did result in more sprawl of game components. My character sheets, adventure clock, battlemap, miniatures, DM screen, notes and dice took up almost all of the dining room table to play. As a result, set up and teardown takes some time, and the components are not easily portable. And as I have young children, they cannot be left out for long. But these are the price to pay to play D&D on a personal, intermittent schedule.

While solitaire D&D play will never be as free wheeling and imaginative as a group session, it can approximate the fun and provide a unique experience in its own right, and the AD&D system provides a lot of content and mechanics to be used in service of this goal.

The Three Pillars of Adventure solo

The gameplay elements of 5th edition D&D are broken down into the "Three Pillars of Adventure". These are:
1. Combat
2. Exploration
3. Social Interaction

To have an enjoyable solitaire gaming experience, it is important to adapt these elements into a solitaire framework

Combat

Combat is the easiest pillar to perform solo. 

 D&D combat contains little to no hidden surprises and the dice system introduces a high degree of randomness, making this a perfect system to perform solo. The player only has to play both sides intelligently, and let the dice fall where they may (or not, you're playing solo, nobody cares if you fudge results). Any "surprise" variables such as monster special attacks or reinforcements can just be introduced through dice mechanics. 

 But D&D is more than just a skirmish level wargame, and if the game was only combat then it would get boring very quickly. To contextualize the combat there is dungeons and exploration.

Exploration

Exploration is possible to play solo with random generation of layouts and terrain and random encounter creation. A simple table of encounters and any number of procedural generators can be used to accomplish this task. But there are hidden elements in dungeon and wilderness exploration that need special consideration to not ruin the fun of surprise.

 Trap placements, secret doors and hidden treasures all exist as knowledge meant only for the DM, to be revealed to the players only through clever play and after taking the proper precautions. It is possible to emulate these elements through solo play, and with a little work it can feel almost as natural as learning about them from a DM.

The AD&D DMG has a great list of traps in Appendix A Table VII that are eminently usable solo, and OD&D Supplement I: Greyhawk devotes an entire chapter to them. The D&D board games use face-down trap tokens as hazards to PCs. Their placement is known but the effect is not, and generally they are placed at the edge of a tile, halting player progress. The player is then faced with a single chance to disarm them, or otherwise pass over them and suffer the damage.  Random event and encounter cards can also simulate the unpredictability of a dungeon crawl. Similar random events and hidden hazards can be adapted for wilderness play, making overland exploration a fun part of solo play as well.

Pregenerated dungeons can be used to play solo effectively, with a bit of work. For this method its ideal to have a Player's version of the dungeon map that only shows the basic layout, and a DM version that has all the traps and secret doors and treasures listed. It really depends on how well the dungeon keys are written, the kind that are best for solo play keep the player information in the top two paragraphs and the DM only or secret information below them. Modules that use a lot of boxed text are great for this method. To play through this method, first move through a dungeon room and make a note of everything you would do as a player - where you check for traps or treasure, what you decide to look for, how you decide to exit the room or listen for monsters. After making all your player decisions, then read the DM information in the room key and flip over to the DM map and note if any characters triggered a trap or found secret objects, and adjudicate victory or loss appropriately. 

Social Interaction

Social interaction is the pillar least adaptable to solitaire play. NPCs generally only do a few player-facing tasks: provide an opportunity for shopping, combat, help or hinder PCs, become followers, and provide rumors or push the story forward.

You can approximate NPC interactions by using reaction rolls and morale checks, but an important part of social interaction is learning rumors, finding out new information and hearing the story of the characters and the game world. All this information is meant to be the sole purview of the DM and can't easily be randomly generated.

  The Mythic Game Master Emulator uses event focus and event meaning tables to generate story content, and a worksheet of scenes and NPCs to determine the outcome of a story. Rory's Story Cubes or other methods of creative writing also fulfill this experience. The 5e DMG devotes an entire chapter to creating story quests and progressing through NPC motivations and plot twists, and fills it with tables for the explicit purpose of random generation. 

 Personally, I don't write out huge dialogue exchanges between PCs and NPCs. I generally determine the disposition of the NPCs, any applicable persuasion attempts by the PCs, and the results. If the PCs fail, then no new rumors are gained or resolved. But if you want to flex your creative writing muscles, this is the place to fill in the dialogue.

Using a premade adventure module can help fill out the story aspect of the game, but adventure modules are written entirely for a DM and generally don't separate the player facing information from DM-only information. Going across the wilderness travel or dungeon exploration part of an adventure module is definitely doable using the above mentioned procedures, but when it comes to the actual story you basically have to read it beforehand and are "on rails" throughout the entire experience. Personally, I find reading an adventure module to be catatonically dull, and I use solitaire procedures to work my way through a module in order to prep it for a live game.

Ironically, the more experience you have playing D&D with a live group, the better your solo play experience will be. D&D, the nerdiest game ever made, requires you to socialize.

Random "DM-less" dungeon crawl

Photos from a randomized dungeon crawl with my wife, using D&D Basic, Pathfinder flip tiles, and monster tokens from 4E essentials kit.

The dungeon layout was generated by shuffling and pulling out the tiles whenever a character token reached an open edge, room contents were stocked by using the D&D Basic random dice tables. I was able to play a PC cooperatively with my wife, as there was little to do in the way of traditional dungeon mastering. 

I got this idea from the D&D Adventure board game, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and it worked beautifully by jettisoning the trappings of the board game and using the full RPG rules. For a night of random hack and slash dungeon crawling, it was quite fun.

How to use D&D Adventure Board Games to play solo or cooperative D&D

Using a random dungeon generator to create a dungeon on the fly for solo play has existed as a tradition since the earliest days of the hobby, when E. Gary Gygax introduced it in the first issue of The Strategic Review. This initial random generator was intended for Original D&D with its 6 tiers of dungeon levels, and was later adapted and expanded into AD&D in the Dungeon Masters Guide. The solo recommendation from AD&D takes its cues from the wargaming hobby, since that too has a venerable tradition of solitaire play.

I tried using the AD&D random dungeon generator for solo play, but didn't much like the experience. It felt more like an exercise in accounting than in actually playing a game, in which I would roll some dice, look up a table, mark a room on my graph paper, roll some more dice to stock it, then roll some more dice to see if any of my characters take damage or not. I thought it was a great tool for creating and stocking a dungeon ahead of time for an actual game session, and it would lead to some unique and interesting layouts with some surprisingly devious monster and trap placements, but not one for creating a dungeon on the fly.  I think the real problem is that you have to switch "modes", between creating the dungeon and playing through it, and its much more fun to stick to just one operation.

The D&D Adventure system board games, on the other hand, are much more fun. They generate the dungeon by giving you a series of interlocking tiles, and each tile has icons representing the number of monsters, traps or treasure that appear on them. The tiles are shuffled in random order then placed face down, and as each player gets to the edge of the map, the next tile is placed on the unexplored edge to continue the dungeon. The tile itself will display how many monsters or traps to put on it, and the actual type is determined by drawing from a deck of monster cards or trap tokens.  It creates a sense of immediacy and doesn't interrupt the flow of the game by bogging it down in dice rolls and table lookups. Even though I realize its a more limited version of what was going on in those tables anyway, it makes for a much more enjoyable experience in which I can spend more time actually playing as a character.

Even though the system is limited, it provides all the necessary materials to expand the system into a full featured dungeon crawl, simply by injecting a few rules.  I like this chart from the D&D Basic Set for stocking a room's contents:

It's a lot simpler than the AD&D tables, and you don't need AD&D's room layout tables anyway. Simply roll on this chart for every new tile, and couple it with the wandering monster charts. It creates a simple, efficient dungeon crawl that doesn't require a gamemaster, and so can be played solo or cooperatively.

The D&D Adventure system board games use a stripped down version of D&D 4th edition rules, with PC powers and abilities being represented on cards. To play this using any other system, simply replace the characters with your own, and roll up your own character sheets and equipment, using the rules of your favorite RPG.

Random dungeon generation for solo play

Is almost exactly like homework. In fact, using dice for all content generation and action resolution requires you to write notes in a log to keep track of it all, an exercise that’s mechanically indistinguishable from doing actual paperwork. Playing D&D solo leans heavily on the “theater of the mind” play style, which necessitates the need to record everything. As a solo RPG player, you take on the role of the DM, player, and as many PCs and NPCs as exist in the game, and managing all that with pen and paper is tedious.  The bookkeeping killed solo RPG for me.

So I looked to board games, miniatures, map tiles, and any other tactile player aids I could use to eliminate the massive overhead of solo play, and more accurately emulate a live session of D&D, where nobody records anything but everyone is following along.

I accomplished this by limiting the scope of the game. Instead of the freewheeling open nature of a full RPG, I restricted it down to just dungeon crawling and hex crawling. The AD&D 1e rules are very comprehensive on the topic of dungeon crawling, and while its wilderness travel rules aren’t the best, they are extensively detailed. These rules can be supplemented and in cases replaced by the more elegant, streamlined rules from the BECMI sets.

Randomly generating an endless dungeon or wilderness becomes boring in short order, but the BECMI books have a crucial bit of advice that’s completely absent from the AD&D text, which is to first create a goal for players entering the dungeon. This is also an idea lifted from the D&D adventure system games - create a goal room, and add it to the random generator table. The point of the game then becomes to adventure until the goal room is reached.

The Basic rule book admonishes to choose a scenario first when creating a dungeon, but the 5e DMG has the most comprehensive list of options, and even tables for story content and plot twists that can occur during the game. These story game charts can add an extra dimension to the otherwise staid dungeon crawling.

And the easiest way to replace dice rolling on a table is to transfer the entries onto cards, then after drawing a card, replace it into the deck and reshuffle it.

A brief of different editions of D&D for solo

AD&D 1e is the best edition for solitaire play. It not only comes with a section on "Random dungeon generation for solo play", but with the Random Wilderness Generation table, it can also be used for solo wilderness exploration, and the many, many other charts can easily be adapted into random generators as well. This means you can randomly create whole towns, npcs in detail, encounters, and even new monsters and magic items. Using all this content generation with the random encounter chances, and the solo player can readily simulate the procedural creation and exploration of a roguelike videogame, such as the Diablo series.

AD&D 1e is a very rules-heavy game, and has many subsystems governing player actions, and many rules for resolving those actions. This makes adjudicating certain situations just a matter of following the guidance in the book, and whole games could be played without any external resources. Although, AD&D does place a lot of importance on the role of the Dungeon Master, but those situations that the book does not cover can be filled in with a GM emulator, such as the Mythic GME.  This, however, means that playing AD&D solo is excruciatingly slow, and requires a lot of bookkeeping.

D&D BECMI is very similar to AD&D but is much simplified. In fact, many of the rules and systems described in BECMI have a direct counterpart in AD&D, but with simpler mechanics.  What the BECMI rulebooks are missing, though, is a random method for creating a map or a dungeon, but they do suggest a procedural method for creating one, and then randomly stocking them with monsters, treasures and traps in the case of dungeons, or with random encounters in the wilderness. The Expert book also comes with maps of Threshold, Karameikos and the Known World, so maybe creating a custom map is unnecessary when the player can follow the adventuring rules to gallivant across the prebuilt setting.  The looser nature of the D&D rules means that the player is freer to pursue any imagined course of action, without consulting the rules, and without needing a die roll for everything.

5th Edition D&D is built upon the chassis of the d20 system, and as such has a universal system of conflict resolution, which the AD&D and OD&D systems lack. 5e's basic method for handling any situation is to assign it a "Challenge Rating", and then resolve success based on the roll of a d20, modified by ability and skill scores.  This makes the base system much easier to learn and run, and provides an elegant solution to any unknown situation. The 5e DMG also took cues from the 1e AD&D DMG, and contains charts and tables for random generation and stocking of content. The dungeon generation chart in particular is more balanced than its 1e counterpart. 5e is more story oriented than 1e, though, and as a result has a section devoted to generation of quests, NPC motivations, and plot twists. This could theoretically elevate the nature of the game from the procedural dungeon crawling focus of the earlier games to one more goal oriented, but I haven't actually tested it out.

5e is also an evolution upon 3e D&D, but is a lot lighter on the rules. An explicit design choice in 3e was to reduce the role of the DM from the adjudicator of all scenarios to a referee of the rules, and there were rules for many, many scenarios. The rules heavy nature of 3e makes it more workable to facilitate a game solo as there are a lot less unknowns. 3.5e and Pathfinder are still popular choices when it comes to tabletop roleplaying, but I've never played them.

Mythic Game Master Emulator Review

The Mythic Game Master Emulator provides three powerful tools that allow you to play tabletop roleplaying games without a GM: The Fate Chart, the Random Event tables, and the Adventure Sheet.

The Fate Chart is the core of the Mythic GME system and provides the basic foundation for play. It is a complicated yes/no system, a so-called "oracle", that is meant to handle any random question with an unexpected result that would normally be asked of a DM. The Fate chart provides the entirety of Mythic's task resolution system, and the outcome of every action should be posed as a yes/no question to be rolled for on the chart.  The Fate chart also acts as the main content generator for the system, and it is implied that worldbuilding tasks such as setting up the features of a setting, NPC encounters, and social situations can all be handled through it, though there is an admonishment in the book not to go overboard with dice rolls but use logic instead.

The Random Event Focus and Event Meaning tables are the only concrete tables in the book. They present a list of items that, when combined, must be interpreted to create a new event occurance in your game. The GME says to use these tables only on a double number dice roll, but they're also useful at any point  when you're unsure of what to do next in game. The Event Meaning tables are essentially just tools for guided inspiration in story telling, much the same as Rory's Story Cubes, or a Tarot Deck, or any other such tool that invites creative interpretation. The Event Focus chart is meant to give the Event Meanings a concrete effect in your game.

The Adventure Sheet is the framing device that holds the rest of the game together. Every game session, or every adventure, is meant to be a collection of scenes in which a dramatic conflict is posed and resolved. The worksheet itself contains entries for scene setups and resolutions, as well as places to list NPC actors and story threads. The story threads are also a unique idea that provide guidance to the flow and purpose of the game, as well as adding another element of unpredictability.

I found the Mythic RPG to be more useful as a creative writing tool rather than a fun game to play solo. In fact, when it comes to specifically playing solo, I found the experience of using the Mythic RPG to be more akin to doing English Literature homework with dice or doing my taxes instead of actually playing a game.

The greatest weakness of the Mythic RPG is that it tries to be completely generic. I understand that the goal is to allow the players to fit it into whatever setting or type of story they want, but as a result it loses concrete mechanics to actually support an individual fantasy. In fact, for any type of game you want to play, it is better to use a system with concrete mechanics and only use the Mythic GME to fill in the missing "gaps".

Its clear that the main appeal of the Mythic system is the GM Emulator. The instincts of the author were correct in first creating an RPG to show off the Emulation system, but then separating the Emulator out to be its own standalone system. The Mythic system is too abstract and generic to support actual play, unless layered on top of another RPG system.





The traditional role of a Game Master is to describe the environment to the players, and to narrate the results of their actions. Or, to restate in technical jargon, the GM provides content generation and action resolution.

The sea-change, breakthrough moment of the Mythic GME is in using the Fate chart for action resolution. Every action can be posed as a yes/no question and rolled for a result on the Fate chart. Every scene should begin with a question describing the dramatic conflict ("how do my player characters overcome this immediate challenge") and a series of answers rolled on the Fate chart can provide the resolution ("are they successful"). Once you separate the distinct tasks of content generation and action resolution from one another, the use of the Fate chart, Adventure Sheet and Event tables become more clear.

But the book itself does not do this. Instead, it confuses the issue by using the Fate chart for content generation and action resolution, and then admonishing the player not to go overboard with content focused questions.  A better solution would be to use the many random charts, terrain, events, and encounters that can be found in an RPG such as D&D or on online blogs for content generation.

The D&D Dungeon Master's Guide has appendices devoted to random generation of terrain, dungeon layout, wandering monster encounters, and even random generation of NPC personalities. The 5th Edition DMG also provides a chapter on random generation of quests, story, and plot twists, which can be used to buffer the Scene Setups worksheet.  D&D also provides a robust action resolution system, such as the d20 system.

OSR players are generally comfortable creating an entire world through random tables, and are happy to simply wander about this world in search of treasure and to fight monsters, but need a GM to supply concrete action resolution as the rules can be conflicting or incomplete and OSR gameplay stresses creative thinking and unpredictability in action. For this, the Fate chart is the most useful.

Modern D&D and 5e players have a universal system for action resolution and just need to provide an appropriate CR to modify their chance of success, and the thresholds are helpfully given in layman's English to make this determination easier, but they are generally floundering when it comes to a purpose for their game, as they are trained to seek "plot" and "narrative" as reasons to play. For them, the Adventure Sheet and the Event tables are the most useful.

In my own games, I found the Mythic GME of limited use. I could create a game world straight out of the random tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide and adventure through it, and I could use all the rest of that game's mechanics to resolve my successes. I only needed the Mythic GME to fill in the gaps of certain elements that weren't immediately obvious.  The Mythic system might have changed the way we see RPGs, and probably kicked off the whole solo RPG community, and its definitely worth the read to understand how, at a fundamental level, the tasks of a GM work and how they can be represented mechanically through dice rolls.

However, I will complain that this book is presented backwards. It shows you its most important mechanic first, the Fate Chart, followed by everything that's connected to it. This leaves you to puzzle out for yourself how to actually use all its mechanics. Instead, it should have presented the Adventure Sheet first, as its the first thing that you'd pull out for your game session, and explained it first before moving through the Randomness chapter, Event Tables and then Fate Chart, as that's generally how you would use them during actual play.

The Turn Sequence

I've been thinking a lot about this, how to incorporate by-the-book time tracking into my AD&D sessions.  Time is a very important element in the AD&D game, with almost every subsystem requiring or mentioning the passage of time as a factor in resolving an outcome, yet in actual play this element is almost completely ignored. Most parties either abandon it totally or consider the recording of time only randomly when it feels appropriate. The only situation where it gets any focus is during combat and initiative. The DMG itself admonishes, in all caps, to keep strict time records and I feel that a significant portion of the game's balance is bonded to the time system.

For this reason I have an experimental idea - to record the passage of turns first, and then adjudicate which actions can occur within it.

For example, within 1 turn a PC can either move up to his movement speed x10ft while exploring and mapping a dungeon, or search a 20ft by 20ft area for secret doors, or listen behind a door, or disarm a trap, etc.  If a PC wanted to do some of these things in combination, for example, moving up to half his total distance, approaching a door and listening for sounds behind it, then only his movement action can resolve on the first turn and he must wait in position before attempting to listen at the door on the next turn.

In a party situation, this would allow PCs to take separate individual actions and resolve their successes at the same time, at the end of the turn. For example one PC could check for traps, another might search a section of wall for a hidden door, another might try to force open a closed gate, etc.  Combat is always rounded up to the next full turn.

This feels more like a tactical game to me, where characters move into and hold a position before continuing on to the next turn.  A lot of concepts from tactical games have started to appeal to me as a method of playing D&D, such as moving and fighting in formation rather than as individuals.

The DMG has a guideline for searching a room, where if there is nothing in a room a single round check will make that obvious to the PCs, but otherwise a 20' by 20' area can be searched in one turn. With a little bit of math, we can extend this to a room of any size, and simply divide to find out how many turns are required, rounding up to the nearest full turn.

Obviously the main drive for this type of strict timekeeping is in running my solo games, but I feel that this could be used in live play as well. For a live situation, the DM can call out the turn and ask what the PCs decide to do during it.  I have no idea if players will take to such a procedure or if it will be quickly abandoned.

For live play, I like to hide dungeon areas that are outside the PCs line of sight. To incorporate this turn system, I would simply let my PCs walk into any area, revealing what they can see as they go, until they reach the limit of their movement distance per turn.  Of course in such a situation, ambushing the PCs with monsters becomes much easier.

There are tools to aid DMs in tracking time, such as the OSRIC turn tracker, but I assume that this method would make those tools mostly superfluous, except as reminders for torch burning times and monster checks.

Traps and Thieves solo

There is an oft-repeated ruling that every character has a 1-in-6 chance of detecting a trap in a 10'x10' area if they spend a turn searching for one. This ruling exists only in the Moldvay Basic set, and not in BECMI or AD&D. The closest I can find is in volume III of OD&D Underworld and Wilderness Adventures: "Traps are usually sprung by a roll of a 1 or a 2 when any character passes over or by them. Pits will open in the same manner".

 To me this means that there is a chance that the trap will be triggered, not that it will be found. Managing traps while playing solo is actually quite tricky, since it seems very silly to have your characters rush headlong into a trap you have placed yourself. However, using the guidance from OD&D, its possible to manage traps independently of DM/Player metaknowledge with a new procedure:

For every room that has a trap in it, if the players pass through the room, a trap will be sprung on a roll of 1 or 2 on a six-sided die.

This seems a fair method to me and saves me from either triggering every trap automatically when my characters move into it, or avoiding them all completely.  A Thief character can use his class skill to detect a trap beforehand and the Cleric could cast a Find Trap spell, while the Fighter and Magic-User would be the helpless victims of fate.  Unfortunately this method encourages "roll play" instead of "role play". Finding traps, deducing their nature and avoiding or overcoming them is one of the most inventive and engrossing parts of live D&D play, and that element is completely removed in solo play.  Unfortunately in this manner D&D turns from a game about ingenuity and imagination into one of probability and statistics.

A similar procedure exists in B2: Keep on the Borderlands for falling into a pit trap, where PCs in the front rank will fall in on a 1-2 on d6, and PCs in the second rank will fall in on a roll of 1.

The random dungeon generator in AD&D also provides options for pit traps and the like, but in that case pits are sprung on a chance of 3-6. Arrow traps and spear walls do instant damage, 1-3 per missile, while poison, gas, acid and the like force a saving throw. All of these traps, if not found by a Thief, would be sprung automatically, making AD&D more deadly than the earlier systems.

Perhaps a middle ground can be reached where after the trap is detected, overcoming it is an exercise in spending equipment and PC abilities to disable or avoid it.  The only other option would be to borrow D&D 4e/5e's "Perception" checks.

Locked chests are easier to handle. Depending on the size of the chest and the strength of its construction, a Fighter can force it open with either a Lift Gates or Bend Bars attempt. Magic-Users have an infamously easy "Knock" spell, and the Thief can use his class skill.

Difficulty Checks

UPDATE: I no longer like Difficulty Checks at all, and I never use them.

I like the 5th edition skill check system, despite the fact that it is the most hated feature of modern D&D to OSR circles. I liked them even back in 4th Edition, when they were part of the Skill Challenge encounter system, and in my 5e games I run skill challenges all the time.

Frankly, I find the d20 + ability modifier + proficiency bonus (optional) mechanic to be simple, elegant, and nearly universal for resolving undefined actions. It's a much better system than 2e's Non-weapon proficiency and 3e's skills. The 2e and 3e systems were actually very restrictive on characters who didn't choose the skill, as it meant that the player could not even attempt an action that they didn't have the skill for. The 5e system is very different, choosing a skill only applies an optional ability bonus, and anything else can be attempted simply by rolling a d20 and applying an appropriate attribute modifier. This actually frees player characters to attempt anything, and their chance of success is modified by their personal attributes.

I like this system so much I'm back porting it into my 1e game. This solves a lot of issues I have when resolving the outcome of player actions. Otherwise, I either have to give players a 100% chance of success solely dependent on their ability to convince me that their plan would work, or invent some contrived system involving percentile dice, or a chance out of 6, or something else complicated and obtuse. That sort of refereeing led to all the exceptional cases and disassociated mechanics that plague the 1e DMG.

The 5e difficulty check is the best iteration of the mechanic. The result of the modified roll is compared against a difficulty class table that is universal for player characters of all levels, and the referee only has to choose whether the difficulty of success is easy, moderate, hard, or nearly impossible. This is quick, simple, and usually able to reach the consensus of the players without argument.

But importantly, this is invaluable in solo play when there is no mechanic for solving a problem. The OSR technique for overcoming an unknown obstacle is to convince the dungeon master of your action's attempt, but this cannot be done solo. You either give yourself a 100% chance of success, or avoid the attempt entirely. A difficulty check now allows you to play solo and attempt anything, with the vague notion that your success or failure is fairly adjudicated by the dice and the makeup of your player character. That might be too modern of an attitude for OSR D&D, but it works too well to be dismissed out of hand.

And this whole thing was inspired by me asking the question "how do you open a lock without a thief in the party?"

and here's some answers I like: https://followmeanddie.com/2015/02/21/locks/
http://initiativeone.blogspot.com/2013/07/has-osr-mostly-embraced-thieves.html
https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2008/06/rules-cyclopedia-hacks-and-house-rules.html

Playing aids for AD&D

I started this journey to actually play AD&D by the book a few months ago now, and I'm still not at the point where I'm prepared enough to run a campaign, as in DM it myself and play with a character.

I've found the extra playing aids put out by TSR to be almost essential when running the game. I cannot imagine the arduousness of having to play straight out of the book.  I will link the playing aids I found to be the most helpful, and where possible I will link official or open license versions that are as close to the TSR originals as possible.

First off is Mad Irishman's AD&D Player Character Record replicas: http://www.mad-irishman.net/pub_dnd_1e.html#1e_adnd2   I found these to be invaluable in recording my players' accumulated information, as the days when all a PC's information could fit on an index card a la OD&D are over.  AD&D has too many conditional adjustments and statistic modifiers to keep track of.

Unfortunately Mad Irishman's PDFs only reproduce the actual sheet, and not the instructions. There is a lot of useful information in the instructions that would help fill in these sheets, information that should be in the PHB but isn't, and the only way to get it is to track down a copy of the original product.

Secondly the adventure record sheet, linked on the same page, which reproduces a lot of the information on the character sheet, but has a useful section on tracking turns or days.

The next absolutely essential aid is the DM screen, reproduced on Dragonsfoot: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/cs/index.shtml#22 .  After reading through the DMG I came to the conclusion that there was no way I was going to remember all those rules and exceptional cases myself, and I was ruminating on creating a "cheat sheet" for reference, but then I found half the work was done for me with the DM screen. While it is little more than just a collection of tables, some of them apply directly to the Character sheets with information that's not obvious from the book.

And Finally, the Dungeon Masters Adventure Log, for which I could not find a free legal copy online. Not the log itself, but the instructions to the log is what's valuable, as it collects a bunch of adventuring rules that were scattered throughout the DMG in a concise and readable layout.


The most valuable aids for me are ones that provide quick references to the rules and charts from the DMG and PHB. Using these aids has taken a lot of strain of preparing and organizing a play session of off the DM and make it possible to play without constantly flipping through the source books. These aids also provide an organized and structured way of describing the events and results of a session without defaulting to haphazard and unreliable loose paper notes.  Surprisingly, some of the information recorded on these sheets is not mentioned in the core books themselves, meaning there are some essential rules missing from the books.  I found that these aids greatly enhanced my experience in AD&D and I consider them to be as essential to game play as the source books.

T1: The Village of Hommlet solo

Reading through a premade module is so boring! And T1 is set up like a pure sandbox, so there is no apparent story beyond what you can glean from minor details and what naturally occurs during play.  It feels like it was designed for an experienced DM.

Reading through dry paragraphs of world details and short descriptions of NPCs and locations makes my eyes glaze over. I guess the only way to figure out what this module is about is to play it solo.

As soon as my four AD&D characters make it out of their first dungeon

Starting T1 solo with a party of 4 level 1 adventurers -
 - they begin by arriving at the town with their previous equipment
 - movement in town is the same as combat in a dungeon, so they are about to move 120 feet in a 1 minute round
 - they see houses and head to the Inn of the Welcome Wench 

Procedure for solo dungeon adventuring with AD&D

1. Random dungeon generation (Appendix in the Dungeon Masters Guide)

• Generate rooms from Table V 
• Generate room features
• Generate monsters, traps
• Determine treasure in room 
• Generate doors and exits
• Use graph paper for dungeon layout, and a dry erase battle map for miniatures combat 

2.  Player Characters begin exploring

• Record the beginning of each turn

3. Engage monsters

• Determine surprise (p. 61 COMBAT)
• Determine encounter distance (p.62 )
• Consider avoiding or parleying with monsters (p. 63)
• Consider pursuit and evasion of pursuit if detected (p. 67)
• Roll Initiative and begin combat procedures
•       Procedures from  Here
• Tally the total rounds of combat to determine time spent, rounding up to next whole turn

4. After encounter has been resolved or avoided, PCs explore room

• Use Movement and Searching procedures (p. 96)
• Roll checks to determine if PCs are aware of traps, hidden objects, items and secret doors
• Distribute treasure(s)
• Tally the total time spent in room search procedures

5. Move to next room

• Attempt listen at doors, lockpicking, door bashing
• Organize PCs in movement formation
• Move  through current room (all intra room movement is assumed to happen in one turn)*
• Exit room and go to new room

6. Repeat steps 1 - 5 for successive areas in the dungeon, until the party decides to escape or rest


*I've come to the determination that movement speed per room is largely irrelevant. The large distances a PC can cover in one turn (whether encumbered or not) makes it more convenient to assume that the PC is doing all sorts of little wandering around the room throughout the whole turn, and even moving from one end of the room to the other can all be managed within one turn. Only separate actions, such as detection of hidden features or picking locks, add extra time to what is spent in a room.

This is a house rule, but I consider it a 'soft' house rule since it doesn't contradict or override any existing rule, and preserves the structure of the original rules.  Also, AD&D is a game where the judgement of the DM is absolutely required in order to make the game run at all.

AD&D 1e Solo - Character Creation

So its been a while since I last broached the subject of solo play. In that time I've been rereading the AD&D Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, I must have read them dozens if not a hundred times already, in order to get a grip on the rules. AD&D is a very complex game and it expects you to have a solid knowledge of the rules before you even begin to set down and play. I don't know how teenagers in the 1980's did it, I assume they took whatever rules they remembered at the moment and decided to wing it for the rest. Nevertheless the goal of this exercise was to play AD&D as close to the book as possible, so it was important to have a very firm understanding of the game's rules before I ever put any characters through a dungeon.

There's a lot of elements in First Edition that I found more useful or better than modern editions. Firstly, that the Dungeon Master's Guide is presented as the 'core' rulebook while the Player's Handbook only really describes a character and the character's options. I found this very useful in actually playing the game as I only needed the DMG as a reference. In modern editions of D&D the core rules are presented in the PHB and the DMG is presented as 'extra' rules for setting up environments, adventures, dungeons and campaign elements. I found this to be more frustrating as I had to go back and forth between both PHB and DMG during the course of play to reference all the rules.

I also liked the First Edition's Character Sheets, though I was initially overwhelmed by the level of detail presented on them. Without them, and coming from a background in modern D&D, I would have otherwise only copied the base statistics of my character, items and equipment, and probably a couple of other optional details. This means that I would have spent a large amount of game time flipping back and forth between various tables to get the data I needed, so having entries for all of them on the character sheet itself was a welcome addition. Although when I started to create a standard Human Fighter, I noticed that a lot of those entries were being left blank, so its when I switched to a Dwarf character and started incorporating more complicated elements such as age, race and equipment adjustments such as shields and helms that I noticed my character sheet becoming more filled out.  I figure that to get the most use out of the sheet, you'd have to create an Unearthed Arcana version Paladin-Cavalier.

So the first character I decided to focus on was a Dwarf Fighter. In First Edition it seems that most players avoided playing as demi-human races in order to remain unrestricted by a level cap. I don't plan on my characters making it much farther than level one anyway, and as I mentioned earlier the more complicated character build ended up being the more interesting one as well. Otherwise, it seems like the best way to play a demi-human is to multiclass with them, but that would also slow their level advancement to a crawl by splitting experience gained in half between both classes. Perhaps it doesn't have as much of an effect in practice, but before I playtest it I couldn't really say.

And then there are the issues I have with First Edition AD&D, which I find is common among the internet where fans speak praise of the system and complain about it in equal measure. It's most evident in the writing style. I actually enjoy reading the published sourcebooks, they read more like books on philosophy or long winded erudite discussions of the system itself than a manual for play. Many passages are evocative of the style of play and truly immerse you in this new type of game that Gygax had created, but as actual, technical instruction it is an obscure, confusing mess.

AD&D Time and movement rules make no sense

and create wildly inconsistent timing issues while recording the adventure. Nevertheless, I think the best approach would be to not think about it to much, and just run the system as it is laid out, and see if it causes any tangible issues during a live session.

If anything it would probably mean that time spent traversing the dungeon would be trivially quick, while time spent in combat and traveling outdoors would be greatly magnified.

And apparently, this is why they make no sense: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2015/02/when-inch-is-not-inch-in-ad.html