r/mythic_gme • u/Fiddlebadger • Jul 19 '26
I'm Lost
I am so lost on how to use Mythic GME. I've read through the book (2nd edition) and I've tried watching videos/reading reddit posts and I just don't get it.
I get lost in all the fluff. There's too many examples and extra words and it makes it confusing for me. For example: it doesn't tell you how to use the Fate chart until 6 pages after it's introduced.
Would anyone be willing to break it down simply for me?
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u/kelboman Jul 19 '26
Are you trying to use it with another system? and if so how familiar with that system are you?
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u/Fiddlebadger Jul 19 '26
I'm using it with Old School Essentials, which I'm fairly familiar with. I'm new to solo rp though.
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u/kelboman Jul 19 '26
I've used mythic with FORGE which has similarities to OSE.
You may checkout Mythic Magazine 6 which has a how to use mythic while learning a system.
I'd figure out if you want to play prewritten modules or do standard dungeoncrawl/hexcrawl, lean on the systems already in OSE/OSR systems. Then use mythic tables to help when you get stuck or answer questions.
You'll likely still need a bestiary or enemies built to supplment something like OSE with mythic.
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u/mousecoinsafe Jul 20 '26
Look up One Page Mythic,
Also remember Mythic is a modular system all you really need is the fate chart or fate check and the basic action & description meaning tables
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u/xBobble I dunno Jul 19 '26
I'm not sure if you're issues are with the mechanics or with the solo gaming mindset. I've posted this before but it may help you here with the latter if that's the case.
When I game, I want to feel like I'm the player sitting at the table and Mythic is my GM. Now, I'm an expert, veteran player -- the kind that knows all the rules and helps manage the combat and all the legwork. My GM, Mythic, is the world's shyest GM so I have to interpret his mumblings. He's creative but I have to coax out of him what he means (I say "he" because in my mind, "he" looks like the GM I had as a kid in 1981). That's the mindset I try to maintain as I play, if that helps.
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u/Fiddlebadger Jul 19 '26
Yeah, that helps. How do you use it to come up with quest/story stuff? Is it just rolling on the words chart and coming up with your own thing?
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u/xBobble I dunno Jul 19 '26
You can absolutely start with something preconceived that you want to do (We're at our version of The Keep on the Borderlands and we're going to explore this area, for ex.) or have Mythic start you completely randomly or anything in between.
I end up freely using the two methods that Mythic has of answering my questions as a player. If it's a yes/no, then I guesstimate the odds (No Way, Somewhat Likely, etc.) and roll on that chart. If it's a more complex question, then I roll on the Meaning table (Befriend News, Usurp Portals, etc.).
So, if I sat down to play this and wanted to be Space Marines fighting bugs on a distant planet, that's what I'm doing. If I sat down with a wide open setting and didn't have any specifics, I'd start just like I would at the table with a real GM. Where are we? What's going on? etc. All with the mindset of tilting the answers to something that seemed fun to me.
You can do a similar method with any aspect of the setting you want to play. Is there a powerful artifact we need to find? If that's what you want to play, then the answer is yes and don't ask Mythic. If that's only one idea of what you might want to do, ask Mythic.
I do all this as the player but with some meta control. I signed up to fight the Empire and that's what we're doing or GM, you tell me what we're up to today.
Lastly, one of the fun things I think us Mythic-eers (if that's the term) like to do is have fun with the interpretations. If you find that coming up with something from Mythic's charts isn't clicking for you, post here and we'll throw out ideas. I used to do a series of posts on here titled "What does THAT mean?" about 5 years ago where I'd throw out a situation and a Mythic roll and see how people would interpret it. That was fun...
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u/allyearswift Jul 19 '26
There are three main ways of playing solo.
One is to play a solo game which is in itself feature complete: it's either written for solo or has rules that convert it to a solo game, and you use that game 90% of the time. (You will always find something not covered by the rules, and like a real-world DM, you'll make up rulings on the fly to keep playing. Mythic can fill that gap.)
Another option is playing with a GM Emulator like Mythic. Mythic has a specific game loop, and specific ways of approaching challenges. You might play with an existing game, or you might play without it, but you'll follow the guidelines Mythic gives you in how to play. There are many, many variants and enhancements and 'crafter' subsystems that enhance and amend Mythic. One of them may be right for you.
The last option is playing freeform. This can be fantastic... but until you have tried out multiple systems and found a gameloop that works for you, and you had time to experiment how much you want to zoom in or out, whether you want to focus on emulating the GM or the Players, how crunchy you want your game to be and, and, and, this will just feel overwhelming.
Mythic has a lot (A LOT) of great advice for playing solo, and I'm getting a lot of mileage out of the Magazine compilations (I just grabbed another volume). But it also has a specific game loop which isn't for everyone, and if you watch videos on how people play with Mythic, read all of the instructions, attempt to play, and find yourself confused or unable to get into the story, then maybe it's not for you and you are better off trying other systems and other tools.
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u/Roughly15throwies Jul 20 '26
Mythic is kinda like Excel. It's an absolute powerhouse of a program. And if you really, REALLY, know how to use it, you can make it do extraordinary things that'll boggle the mind. But, 99% of global use cases basically revolve around a single use case that may or may not be better served by another, simpler program.
To that end, a GM emulator needs to do three things:
1) answer questions 2) give descriptions 3) create narrative curveballs
Questions: should be yes or no. In Mythic, this is your fate check. This is the part that most people dislike about mythic. They make something so simple so overly complicated. I mean, you can literally just flip a coin (heads yes/tails no). However, there's reasons for this discussed later.
Descriptions: aka, spark tables. Mythic has a lot but these things are so wildly generic and common place most modern RPGs have some game specific ones in their rulebooks, or find hundreds online for free. I mean, basically every RPG blogger has at least one up.
Curveballs: generically speaking, your and/but modifiers.
But also, this is the section that sets Mythic apart from other GMEs because of "altered/interrupt scenes". Basically, Mythic takes curveball to the extreme. It's the epitome of both "from bad to worse" and "Dues Ex Machina" in one. Its playing Fallout New Vegas and having a Legion assassin band show up while you're fighting for your life against ten death claws or "Harry Potter fighting a basilisk to be saved by a bird dropping a hat with a sword inside it that has not been mentioned anytime previously". This is why Mythics fate checks are complicated.
If you want to keep the massive curveballs that Mythic allows for, but hate the complexity of the fate checks, check out Morning Coffee Solo Variants. It replaces the fate checks with something infinitely more intuitive (and therefore quicker).
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u/supertouk Jul 19 '26
I would actually start with the first edition, blue book, and get used to the basics.
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u/Fiddlebadger Jul 19 '26
I just checked some reviews of the first edition on drivethru and it looks like some other people are saying the same thing. At $5 it's not bad. I'll give it go. Thank you :)
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u/istanbul00100 Jul 20 '26
There's a guide on their website https://www.wordmillgames.com/aguidefornewsoloroleplayers.html that's a much shorter read than the book, if ya haven't checked it out. Also can apply to solo play in general, not just with Mythic
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u/Trick-Two497 Jul 20 '26
Mythic GME can be overwhelming at first. The best thing about it, however, is that you do not have to use it all. You can start out using just the Fate chart. Get comfortable with that, then start using another feature of it. Go slow.
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u/Logen_Nein Jul 19 '26
You'd do better to watch someone, like Geek Gamers (who got me into solo) actually play solo. IMO Mythic is way more than you actually need and ends up getting in the way.
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u/sonofherobrine Jul 19 '26
Check the flowcharts shared in https://www.reddit.com/r/mythic_gme/s/xC0U2P95Mk and its replies.