In the Secrets of the Weird Wizard in the Bestiary, there are some rough breakdowns of what a monster is, how they’re listed, and how the challenge system works. After typing a lot of these up, I saw some patterns emerge.
How I got here… So, this going to be a stretch of connections, but hang with me. Looking at the DIFFICULTY number, knowing that Rob Schwalb worked on older versions of the most known role-playing game, I equated DIFFICULTY with LEVEL, because some where higher that PCs and did more damage.
Let’s start with what a Unified Resolution Mechanic is, then we’ll get into why I think a few types of resolution mechanics make more sense to me. A Unified Resolution Mechanic is where you use a single die type and a single type of roll to resolve all sorts of actions in a game you may be playing. This could be a 1d20 or even 2d6, 3d6, or 1d100. Generally, you would set a difficulty, and then roll your dice and add a modifier based upon the type of action, and set a difficulty target based upon the action.
Overview This idea came to me after reading Mythic Bastionland and trying to parse Dungeon World Fronts so I could build fun wilderness exploration adventures. One of my players said they did not like random encounters and wanted to focus on “the story” while traveling. Thinking about how I’ve ran wilderness travel and random encounters for other groups, I revisited Mythic Bastionland and Dungeon World.
In Mythic Bastionland the game’s focus is resolving Myths by encountering Omens when rolled on an encounter table.
Overview I finally went through and created a Rolemaster character from scratch by reading the book and not using the ERA or having someone else help me do it. Here’s what I learned.
I’m going to try to provide bullet point lists and page references with parts of the sheet I did. Hopefully this will be helpful.
I find Rolemaster to be a supremely rewarding role-playing game because you literally can do anything you want, given time and resources poured into skills.
For a while, I had many people tell me to try using the Cyclic Dungeon Generation method as found and detailed on itch.io by Sersa Victory. For a while, I would read the document and get confused on how to envision the end result or how the dungeon worked. What I am going to show is not the BE ALL END ALL method, as this probably work differently for other people.
Overview This is an attempt to explain how I’m using “polyhedral frames” as I’ve been calling them to prepare adventure locations, battle maps, and space sectors and what not. This is not an original concept, but I took the “Site Preparation” from Mythic Bastionland and expand upon it a bit to give more variation and feel for various locations. In Mythic Bastionland, Chris shows how to use a “Hex” to build a Site, or anything to be explored.
Overview I was thinking on this after discussing it with some people who don’t want to play certain games like Genesys or even Powered by the Apocalypse. Why? I can only guess at it. However, I also wanted to think on how to allowing people to continue playing with their standard binary pass-fail results, but enable those who want to negotiate or barter their rolls so they can do cool stuff narratively.
Overview At the beginning of 2023, Sean McCoy put out a challenge that each day, creators create a room of a dungeon a day that builds into mega dungeon of sorts. Then keep all of this in a journal for future use. This was called Dungeon23 for 2023. It’s a practice of patience and making sure to stick with something.
I want to propose a challenge for 2024 called Solo24.
Sometimes I just wanna play a role-playing game at a restaurant while waiting for food or when at the office. With the availability of 2d6 in most stores or board games, or the power of a mobile device, dice are easy to come by. I recently read and played World of Dungeons and FIST after re-reading Dungeon World and struggling with Ironsworn initially. I had to learn how to GM, be a player, then realize the kinds of games I liked while soloing.
My D6 Oracle Table Overview This is a simple oracle table that is admidtely using the values from Ironsworn, and the The No-Prep Gamemaster by Dicegeeks. It should be fairly simple. I use this during my live sessions to cut down on the amount of cross-referencing of tables and other things. Mythic Game Master Emulator’s Fate Chart is great for solo games or prep sessions.
The Oracle dice: 1d6 Oracle Scenario 1 Nope Worse Case 2 Almost Certain Really Bad 3 Likely Bad 4 50/50 Okay 5 Unlikely Good 6 Small Chance Best Case A roll of 1 on the Oracle table is always a NOPE.