Here’s a very light example of what I did with it last week. I was looking at the Star Trek RPG from Last Unicorn, and it has a nice Starship Maneuver table that breaks down into 7 possible maneuvers. Stuff like; Climb/Dive 1 Altitude, or Hard Turn Port/Starboard, and the like. It’s gives “to hit” numbers for the maneuvers, so it’s pretty easy to figure the odds and just say, “I’m climbing 1 altitude, did I make it?”…and then roll my piloting skill rank against the odds of “making it” on the Fate chart.

Figuring the odds is the tricky part if I want to stay “true” to the Star Trek rules, so I’ve been using a little program I found here, http://www.fnordistan.com/smallroller.html , that shows odds for just about any dice combo I can imagine.

I actually have the Star Trek chart fully done with “Botches” and “Bingos” as well as Yes’s and No’s defined.

So far, I’ve converted several tables that way for various games. i don’t usually do the whole table though. After the Star Trek one, I learned to do just enough of the odds calculations to be able to “scale” and “rank” things in Mythic terms. I do just a couple sample questions to populate a row or column of my new resolution table, and then as questions come up during play, I fill in the rest of the table right before the roll on the Fate Chart.

Right now, using Mythic, my husband and I are playing a very old FASA game he never got to play, “Behind Enemy Lines”, and’ I’m converting all the tables to Mythic. The trick is the odds, and the *question* that makes us look up a chart. It all flows pretty easy after that.

I think Tom Pidgeon, the author of Mythic, is a genius. But I’m just a weird gamer wife, stuck in bed with nothing else to do…so I’m probably not the best judge. LOL (~:

In addition to the sample resolution tables in the book, it would be neat if the Mythic folks provided more online — that’d make an excellent freebie.

If they really have some cool process that helps make these decisions, they should tout that. Instead, all that seems to be touted is this “fate table” which just sounds like a probability table based on two opposing ratings. Nothing really stellar there.

Looking at a description of Universalis, there perhaps isn’t a lot more, but it at least tells a bit more about the play. The Getting Started page gives a little more of an idea of what play might be like.

Here is some excertpts from Dogs in the Vinyard. Perhaps not quite as clear an idea of what play is like but there are some intriquing examples of conflicts. Also a nice section talking about how the conscience of the character is entirely up to the player.

Both the Universalis site and the Dogs in the Vinyard site provide some game writeups. While these aren’t always great at exposing play, they at least give an idea. The sample towns for Dogs in the Vinyard will give a lot of ideas about what situations look like in the game.

Of course I didn’t buy Dogs in the Vinyard until people were constantly raving about it, and Chris Chinn made some comments that suggested it might be a good read while working on Troll Slayer. I bought Universalis on reccomendation from a friend, but haven’t tried it yet, but from a read of the book, I can see how well it explains how to do certain procedures in the game. In fact, the greatest strength of both of these games is how well they lay out the procedures of the game.

Frank

It’d be interesting to stack up against Universalis and DitV, but I don’t have either of them.

I guess if I was to look at it, I’d be measuring it against Dogs in the Vinyard and perhaps Universalis. In fact, I think it would take a hard look at it in comparison to Universalis because in some ways it sounds like it has some of the same aims, though it’s more player plays a character centric than Universalis is.

Frank

As far as bypass-type questions, there’re a couple of sections that address that. One specifically mentions questions like, “Do I find a vorpal sword at my feet,” while another deals with workable “big questions” by treating them as bundles of smaller questions.

As I mentioned in the review, this game requires a group of like-minded players — there’s a level of buy-in required, and it includes not asking “Can I become king”-type questions.

Frank

Dotan: I can see how that wouldn’t be completely clear — I spent so much concentrated time with the game that I think I got proximity blindness.

I’ve added a bit to the middle to clarify what set’s Mythic‘s resolution system apart — thanks for bringing it up!

So that you don’t have to search for it, here’s the new material, along with the first sentence that it follows:

Then you roll percentile dice and see if you succeeded. In Mythic, a success means your question gets a “yes” answer — as in, “Yes, you climbed the wall.”

That’s true whether the question was “Can I climb that wall” or “Is the door guarded?” Even a big question like “Is there a castle at the top of the hill?” gets answered the same way — the GM (or, if you’re playing without a GM, the group as a whole) assigns a difficulty, and you roll on the fate chart.

In other words, Mythic‘s core element — the fate chart — is both a unified resolution mechanic (in that every task in the game, from skill checks to combat to social interactions, can be resolved using the chart), it’s also the engine that drives the structure of your adventures.

Instead of having an adventure written up that specifies what happens next (to a greater or lesser degree), what kinds of questions the players ask, and how they are answered, moves the game forward.

That’s where the improv element that is so central to Mythic comes in, and the game provides lots of guidance about how to phrase questions, how to deal with bundles of questions (multiple actions) and other situations that might crop up.

Thanks for the review! It’s really appreciated!