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| Looking for answers... by Joe Todd Stanton |
So last time I made the Knave character of Wot the Angry Wombat. In the meantime I've been hunting around for an OSR-y module I could run through to test out Knave and MGE (Mythic GM Emulator). The lovely folks over at the OSR Discord also pointed me at a couple of nice modules. The winner for me was the Tower of the Stargazer because of the beautiful terse-key.. that and it was dirt cheap at RPGNow.
This leads to Wot going to explore a wizards tower.
Yep, Wot's going to need some companions in stupidity for their little jaunt. Thankfully I found another tool for Knave - a Knavish generator. Thanks to this I have been able to make 3 more knavish vagabonds in a matter of seconds! So let's meet the party!
Yes, I think reading Wind in the Willows to my daughter is having an effect on me :)
So around here I started to get a few problems. I am not 100% sure where the problem was, but I suspect I was trying to use the MGE in a way not intended for it. Basically the MGE inserts some directed randomness into any narrative you are creating. It acts like a fancy magic-8-ball by answering yes/no questions and every now and again throwing a curve ball into the proceedings.
The play through i started was actually quite fun.
The problem was that it felt like the MGE was "fighting" against the module. I kept getting results of extra scenes and new NPCs appearing. It was a fun, but the quartet of characters actually never got inside the tower! They headed back to town to deal with the fallout of finding a dead master-thief outside the tower (who happened to be a rival of one of the characters!) There was a thieves-guild and a contest in the sewers for the rank of new "master thief".
But, this has nothing to do with the tower of the stargazer. <sigh>
I think that the situation I had wasn't really a player in search of a GM, but rather I was trying to GM a module and needed the characters to be puppeted in some pseudo-random way. The MGE doesn't do that - it tries to take control of the narrative and creates interesting scenes that build on what has happened... So the random entry of the dead thief happening to be the "rival" snowballed into an entirely different direction!
But, I did a little google-fu and asked in a few discord channels for some assistance, and finally got pointed in a new direction of a Player Emulator by Katamoiran RPGs. It is a cute little randomiser that does some of the same things that the MGE does, but it doesn't try to touch the world, but only gives some direction to the "players" behavior. It has a few cute "meta tags" like the player is on the phone and not paying attention, or a player trying to be overly dramatic and making self-sacrificing and self-suffering characters..
But... it might do the job better than the MGE! I guess I might see over the week till new years!
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So around here I started to get a few problems. I am not 100% sure where the problem was, but I suspect I was trying to use the MGE in a way not intended for it. Basically the MGE inserts some directed randomness into any narrative you are creating. It acts like a fancy magic-8-ball by answering yes/no questions and every now and again throwing a curve ball into the proceedings.
The play through i started was actually quite fun.
The problem was that it felt like the MGE was "fighting" against the module. I kept getting results of extra scenes and new NPCs appearing. It was a fun, but the quartet of characters actually never got inside the tower! They headed back to town to deal with the fallout of finding a dead master-thief outside the tower (who happened to be a rival of one of the characters!) There was a thieves-guild and a contest in the sewers for the rank of new "master thief".
But, this has nothing to do with the tower of the stargazer. <sigh>
I think that the situation I had wasn't really a player in search of a GM, but rather I was trying to GM a module and needed the characters to be puppeted in some pseudo-random way. The MGE doesn't do that - it tries to take control of the narrative and creates interesting scenes that build on what has happened... So the random entry of the dead thief happening to be the "rival" snowballed into an entirely different direction!
But, I did a little google-fu and asked in a few discord channels for some assistance, and finally got pointed in a new direction of a Player Emulator by Katamoiran RPGs. It is a cute little randomiser that does some of the same things that the MGE does, but it doesn't try to touch the world, but only gives some direction to the "players" behavior. It has a few cute "meta tags" like the player is on the phone and not paying attention, or a player trying to be overly dramatic and making self-sacrificing and self-suffering characters..
But... it might do the job better than the MGE! I guess I might see over the week till new years!
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