General Discussion

[IsabellaRose]

2 hours ago, inkylore said:

i might try a solo one... if i can find one i can pirate from

I've been loving Mythic GM Emulator for solo play. It's provides a really nice pacing mechanism for random events or interrupt scenes where something changes the characters plans. It seems more like a book or movie than a typical dungeon crawl. When things are going well for the PC, they are more likely to continue to go well for a bit, sort of emulating a downtime period, or the setup, planning, or regrouping phases of a story. But then once things go sideways, they're increasingly more likely to continue going sideways, which gets into some great high pressure, fast-paced scenes driven by action and the oppositions' plans or interference. 

Plus the oracles have been pretty helpful, and when I'm at a loss for how to interpret one, I've been feeding the last thing that happened into AI and then telling it to provide possible next scenes using the oracle results as inspiration and I've been pleasantly surprised. 

[inkylore]

6 hours ago, IsabellaRose said:

Plus the oracles have been pretty helpful,

uh the oracle? whats the oracle?

[IsabellaRose]

32 minutes ago, inkylore said:

uh the oracle? whats the oracle?

In a solo RPG, an oracle is a tool (usually a table, but I've seen online generators as well) that provides answers to your questions about the game world, generates story elements, and creates content for improvisation, filling the role of a Dungeon Master (DM) in a traditional game. By rolling dice or drawing cards and interpreting the results, a player can get answers to yes/no questions, receive prompts for characters or locations, and generate plot hooks to keep the adventure moving forward.

An example from the solo game I'm currently playing:

The PC has amnesia and has been recovering in a small town, trying to find work without identification and social security number, and mostly relying on the kindness of a few locals who have sort of adopted her. Her amnesia was caused by trauma (nearly drowning in a flash flood) but before that, she was... someone. I hadn't decided if her background was more sci-fi, spy tech/espionage, supernatural, super hero, or... well, really anything. I just knew that there was something special about her and people would come looking if they thought she was alive. 

The way Mythic GM works, you figure out what would be the next most likely scene based on what has already happened, and then roll to see if that scene happens as expected, if there's an alteration (removing/changing a character, item, location, etc.) or if it's an interrupt scene (aka random encounter/event/etc.)

She was found by the shore of a river after a flash flood with no id, no phone, nothing but the clothes she was wearing, so my expected scenes were: 1. wake in hospital, 2. meet nurse, 3. meet doctor get diagnosis, 4. meet sheriff get questioned, 5. hang around until sheriff or doctor have news, 6. find out she can't be identified, 7. find out she can't be kept in the hospital, 8. be released on her own. Those things all happened as expected.

Based on the conversations and expectations I set, the next scene was her getting a bed for the night at the community center. BUT, I rolled the the scene would NOT be the expected scene, but be an "Altered Scene". On the Scene Adjustment Table, I rolled a 7, which meant I needed to roll for TWO adjustments. I rolled 5 (which says "Remove an Object" on the Scene adjustment table) and 3 (which says "Reduce/Remove an Activity" on the scene adjustment table). To figure out what object is being removed and what activity is being reduced or removed, I rolled once on the d100 Object Oracle Table and got 83 Soft. The I rolled on the d100 Location Oracle Table and got 81 Safe. So soft and safe are being removed. That was easy to interpret. The bed is not available, nor is the safety she assumed she'd find at the Community Center. It turns out the nurse was mistaken, and there are no beds available there- they only have beds there during a crisis or emergency. So now she has to figure out where else to go. She asks the community center employee for suggestions and gets a list of possible places to find a bed, one of which is the motel. She is told she might be able to work at the motel in exchange for lodging, so... off to the motel she goes.

So the oracles give you lists of words that you interpret (or if you really want to take your chances, you could put them in chatgpt or something) to tell you what NPCs do, what happens in a scene. Mythic has generic "action" and "description" tables, but it also has tables for Adventure Tone, Alien Species Descriptors, Animal Actions, Army Descriptors, Cavern Descriptors, Characters, Character Actions (Combat), Character Actions (General), Character Appearance, Character Background, Character Conversations, Character Descriptors, Character Identity, Character Motivations, Character Personality, Character Skills, Character Traits & Flaws, City Descriptors, Civilization Descriptors, Creature Abilities, Creature Descriptors, Cryptic Message, Curses, Domicile Descriptors, Dungeon Descriptors, Dungeon Traps... and that's just through the letter "D". It's very versatile, and you can lean into the oracles as much or as little as you like... after all, it's your game.