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Thinker
2019-03-20, 08:03 AM
Tomorrow evening, a friend and I are going to try out gaming without a GM. A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across the Mythic RPG (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16173/Mythic-Role-Playing). It is a game that was designed to be played with easy improv and low GM prep. That works more or less like you would expect - the players want to know some detail and if the GM doesn't know the answer, an answer can be rolled that has to be interpreted based on the current fiction of the game. Throughout the book, it talked about how if you didn't really want a GM, you could use the rules to run a game without a GM. It sounded cool, but the mechanics of the rest of the actual game outside of GM prep didn't seem that good compared to other games I've played and I didn't feel like ripping out those mechanics that I found interesting. I thought it would just end there.

Then, I discovered that the publisher had released a version of the rules with the GM prep tools ripped out already, the Mythic Game Master Emulator (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/20798/Mythic-Game-Master-Emulator?it=1). It claims to work for any system with only a little tailoring. Well, now I was interested. It seemed to have the rules I had already read through and organized in a way that would facilitate GMless games. The game splits things out into the Fate Chart (the core GM resolution system), events, adventure, GM emulation, and world creation. There's also a companion book that came out later called Mythic Variations (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229391/Mythic-Variations-2) that adds to the above mechanics.

The Fate Chart is the core mechanic behind the system. It is used to ask uncontested questions - "Is it fair weather today?" or "Are there strange sounds coming from the marsh?" The questions should flow from the current fiction of the scene and should only really be relevant to the game being played. If the game is about vampire hunting, a question about strange people at the graveyard at night is valid, while a question about whether or not there's an Abrams Tank in the center of town probably wouldn't be. Since the players ask the questions, there is a bit of self-policing here - the game recommends asking no more than two questions about a topic in a single scene so you don't get a player asking, "Are there strange noises inside the mausoleum?" No. "Is there a scratching noise in the mausoleum?" No. "Can I see a zombie in the mausoleum?" No. After the question is decided on, the players decide as a group how likely the outcome would be and that determines the "yes/no" threshold of the d100 probability table. From there, the interpretation of the yes/no answer should follow the current logic of the fiction. The supplement adds functionality to the fate table for more than simple yes/no questions.

If that was all there was to the game, it wouldn't be that interesting. Anyone can make up a d100 probability chart. Where the rules seem to shine is their ability to create random events. On a double number on the fate chart roll (11, 22, 33, etc.), a random event can occur. This event can focus on something offscreen, npc actions, adventure goals, or the PC's. The rules help to determine how the event is related to the subject. For example, if the event roll was for a "PC positive event" and then came up with a meaning of "Disrupt" and subject of "Travel", might indicate that the player character who was waiting on a train goes off the rails just as it gets to the station. Like the fate roll, this is up to the players to interpret logically based on what is going on in the game currently. The game also suggests that if the players are finished with a scene and don't have any leads left, roll a random event to see what's going on next.

These rules seem to make up the majority of the GM-less mechanics with variations depending on context. It has been well-reviewed on DriveThruRPG so that gives me some hope. I plan to report back how our game session goes tomorrow night when we try to apply this to Scum and Villainy, a lightweight space opera game about outlaws in the stars.