The Fearless DM

The hurricane (or tropical storm, or whatever it was that his us this weekend) did not affect where I lived too badly, but it did keep us indoors. I spent the weekend catching up on Doctor Who (I plan on attempting to watch the surviving episodes of the entire series to date) And I also decided to look at some gaming stuff, including a collection of the Fasa Doctor Who RPG and some sourcebooks I had discovered.

While I was digging around, I had the urge to try a few things out- but (because of the storm) just by myself. So I got out a pdf of the Mythic GM Emulator.

I have no idea what the Mythic game system is like, but the GM emulator is standalone, and available by PDF. It’s kind of a clever tool for coming up with adventures using a scene-by-scene method, and using yes-no questions to flesh out the scene details. Then once you have the scene set up, you can switch back to your game system of choice to play the scene out. 

The most important thing about the GM Emulator that I can tell you is this: It won’t work without input or come up with details completely on it’s own. It can come up with some twists and what it calls “interrupt scenes” (and uses a pair of tables to come up with elements for the scene you can interpret however you like). The Yes-No question dynamic sounds simplistic, but it really does focus your creativity and decision-making. So for example- we could brainstorm for a while for a great opening scene, listing things we might want to have, but once you boil it down to yes or no, the scenes come together very quickly.

The reason this method works: brainstorming is usually a technique where details are made possible but no decisions are made. So we could brainstorm using the traditional whiteboarding technique for hours and not really build anything, but maybe have a ton of possibilities. In the Mythic emulator- each detail is decided upon (or thrown out) immediately upon consideration, and so you tend to lead one detail into another.

As an example: if we were to create a scene right now and you came up with the question “is it raining?” then we have to immediately decide one way or the other, detail is set. Let’s say the answer is yes. Then the next question, “Are the PCs in danger?” and if the answer is yes again, then we can immediately start thinking about a scene where it’s dangerous and raining. Your next brainstorm question might be “are the characters on a ship?” or “is the real danger from a creature?” and after a (short) while you’ve got a scene.  You can ask any number of questions this way but you are encouraged to ask the big picture type questions, and not try to game the system by deliberately adding in details like “is there a vorpal sword at my feet?..” or whatever. You can’t really replace the GM in a game, but you can spread the responsibility around- the trick is to actually accept that responsibility.

The yes/no percentage swings back and forth - it only starts at 50/50.. as chaos rises, the percentage of “yes” results on the fate chart rises as well. If you roll doubles, then there’s a twist or an interrupt scene that takes place (and you roll on a new set of tables where it chooses some elements that should be highlighted in the new scene).

The Mythic emulator also has some useful advice for building scenes in a game in “cinematic mode” (and an interesting definition of cinematic)- which seems to involve also setting up some scenes that take place where the PCs aren’t present. PCs are encouraged to keep track of a list of NPCs and plot threads (who will be pulled into these interstitial and interrupt scenes) as well as keep track of a chaos rating (between 1 and 9) that affects the fate (yes-no) chart.

So anyhow, I had a good time messing around with this- using the closest available system (Gamma World, which I had just rescued from my car). I made a character —always fun on a rainy afternoon— and then decided he was on the move somewhere, solo. I had to invent a couple of NPCs (something Mythic suggests)- so I came up with an intelligent pet beetle, an arch enemy, and a former rescuer for my mutant. I came up with a scene with the arch enemy, excavating a dangerous war-machine.. and established details like “he’s got an army of enslaved robots” and a mobile lab, and a sniveling porker assistant named Hamhock, as well as other details. This led to a scene where my mutant ran across the operation by chance and spent some time surveilling the operation, disabled one of the guard-robots.. and tried to infiltrate a mobile-lab to find out what was really going on.

I didn’t go much further than that, but I thought it was a pretty neat meta-system. Highly recommend checking it out.