Nothing’s written down, but I’d be happy to show them off. My private RPs are low-stakes adventures with ridiculous characters. My current headgame is about a stupid goblin thief pursuing a cat for the jewel on its collar and accidentally crashing an engagement party. I call it “Snickers the Goblin spies a shiny”.
It kinda depends for me. I have some I wouldn’t mind, I think they were decent fun bits of fiction, but others… Some are just “This was fun, completely non-serious” that I’d really want to clean up into a more coherent narrative, and others have involved some deeper personal exploration.
It is one approach, and goes back to a long time ago with choose your own adventure books.
There are other, less on rails approaches, where you play an RPG and replace what usually would be GM decisions by random tables (concrete and inspirational) and mechanics that introduce complications and challenges.
I like the system in Mythic quite a lot, but it’s quite involved and can take you out of whatever game it is you’re playing. Some people don’t like this.
https://linktr.ee/PartsPerMillion publishes, seemingly, a million Solo RP supplements for a million different games. (I got their https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/337840/solitude supplement for Chivalry & Sorcery because I wanted to solo that.) Their approach is to design an oracle that builds on the core mechanisms of the underlying game system, so in the case of Chivalry& Sorcery their yes/no oracle is built up on the “Skillskape” (sic) system so that your oracular questions are resolved the same way as the other mechanisms of the game. Their “complex questions” oracle is multiple-d100 generated word prompts you can use to inspire inspiration, by way of comparison. There are four columns headed “Chivalry, Piety, Sorcery, and The World” and each of those has 100 words under it. You roll d100 and read the four words attached to that number, or you roll four d100 and read each one separately.
In comparing the two, for yes/no questions they are rougly the same in terms of outcomes with Solitude just feeling more like it “fits” with the underlying game system.
Mythic’s approach to complex questions is a bit “twenty questions”. Instead of asking “what’s in the box?” you ask “is there a weapon in the box?” (no) “are there potions in the box?” (no) “is there writing implements in the box?” (no) “are there body parts in the box?” (yes). In practice I’ve found that a bit tedious and tend to shy away from the Mythic oracle for those kinds of things.
The Solitude approach would be to roll d100 four times on four columns (if it’s not so important maybe only once reading across the columns) to get words you try to interpret for your improv. “What’s in the box?” “Chivalry: venerable (84), Piety: demons (58), Sorcery: wield (4), The World: drought (8)” From here, depending on how events have transpired, and the nature of your world setting, you might say that the ancient (venerable) box contains sorcerous materials that let you control (wield) demons (duh) that when unleashed can bring drought upon the land. Or perhaps that the box held the thing that was binding the demons and by opening it you’ve unleashed them. Or whatever else “venerable/demons/wield/drought” bring up to mind. The weak point of this approach is that it has the same criticism of using Mythic in yes/no questions: it draws you out of the game system you’re using. That being said, an easy fix to this is to pre-roll the words each session. Roll a handful of words from each column before you start a session and cross off words as you use them. That way you’re not pulled out of the moment with die rolling that doesn’t match. You get the benefit of a word-based complex oracle without the fiddling around and table-flipping that you’d otherwise get using them extemporaneously.
So which would I recommend?
I love Mythic … but not as a solo game. I use it as a cap system or (increasingly) a standalone system for GM-free RP in groups. For solo RP I’ve found the Parts Per Million approach to oracles more satisfying and in my journaled C&S game I follow Solitude’s approach (with some added 已经 stuff for the Hell of it because I can; I chiefly use that as an oracle for NPC motivations and the like).
They rely on the tables on the pages, 166, 167, 188, 190, and 192.
There are new random tables for mental state of an NPC, mystery direction, keywords, clues,
Some good table that could have been in the core rule book with vaesen sorted by clues, misdeed, and environment.
A lot of examples of journal entries
I think I like it. I didn’t read in details.
There are kind of three parts or type of content in it: how to move forward with the mystery with oracle tables when support is needed, how to write a journal and examples, how to make sense of the clues to understand which vaesen is around.
I like the vibe, the layout, and the narrators voice. Some comments/questions.
You define “p100” but don’t explain that you will need other dice (or random generation).e.g. Astrologer says it “adds P5 charges” but doesn’t tell you what P5 means.
The weapons table introduced short/medium/long range (I assume!) But those ranges don’t seem to matter in the combat section. “AP”, “2H”, and “MR” aren’t defined. I am guessing Armor Points, Two handed, and Melee/Ranged.
What is the maximum charge capacity of Glass Stars? How do they gain levels, or is it the player who is gaining levels somehow?
The Rubine star can heal deep wounds. Which are those?
Only using the tens place of scores for combat suggests to me that switching to a d10 system instead of d100 may simplify the rules and play without losing much.
Overall I think it’s pretty cool. It needs more detail to make a playable game out of it, I think, or some editing and rules redesign to keep it a two-pager.
Excellent feedback, it’s incredible how much falls through the cracks without proper playtesting and dilligent proofreading. It’s clear I’ll need to find a balance that allows for rules and flavor to mix this way.
Here are my thought processes for your questions, which I will clarify and fix in the next passthrough:
In my head, defining “p” as polyhedral seemed sufficient to let the player know they need a d100, which can be used as a d10 or d5, but that definitely needs clarification.
Your assumptions are all correct, which is what I was hoping for the player to do, but that’s not very rules friendly! I struggled on this page to fit what I needed and will have to retool this… Along with armor which is very barebones. This part was definitely rushed to page.
The maximum charges should be determined on find, and the astrologer can increase that maximum. I’ll have to make that clear. The player gains levels, and is only mentioned once in the class section. I need to add a caveat that 90 is the maximum for each ability score.
Oops. Another blunder there.
I like the 100 system for the granularity, as you are working to build up a particular skill to advance to the next “tier”, but I’ll have to see how it fares in play.
Thank you so much again, the two hours of work really show in these mistakes and I’ll need to correct them.
Thank you! I had to make a lot of concessions, and I notice a few errors because I’m so used to the rules speaking to the player, but it was fun. Quite weird however. Some things I want to add is a map, a character sheet, a few common enemies, treasure, and maybe a table of goals/quests that get harder depending on your average ability score.
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