House Rules and Question Resolution

I broke my dungeoneering teeth on the Moldvay Basic set and that will be forever my favorite set of rules. That being said I think Labyrinth Lord is an improvement of the original classic with regards to layout. I am still hemming and hawing about whether or not to use the additional classes from the Advanced Edition rules, but for now I have decided to only use the 'basic' LL rules and the original classes (including race as class).

And as with every DM, I have a set of house rules which I have tacked on including healing and death rules, carousing and gambling, saves vs. energy drain and sleep, experience point bonuses, etc. At some point soon, I'll add a table covering these in more detail.

With regards to the solo play rules, I realized after a nice discussion with Alasdair on G+ that I probably need to elaborate a bit more on the question resolution system that I am using.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am using the Mythic GM Emulator for question resolution - but how does it work? Well, during solo play I am playing the characters and relying on Mythic to be the GM by answering yes/no questions to which I have ascribed a % likelihood of being a yes. Then I roll dice (d00) on the Fate Chart and based on the likelihood of a yes, I get either a yes, no, or an exceptional yes/no. The latter two require an interpretation on my part as to what additional implications the yes or no comes with.

There is also the possibility of a random event occurring if doubles are rolled on the d00.  The random event is determined first by rolling on the 'Focus' table, i.e. what is the target/subject of the new event. Then a roll is made on the Event Action and Event Subject tables to gain further insight. In the last play report there is a good example which I will try and elaborate on further so my thought process is a bit clearer.

So, the party was in the midst of a tough fight with the orks. I thought ok, perhaps now the party might consider retreating, although given that they still outnumbered the enemy, I said the likelihood was greater than 50% that they would stick and fight. The result on the d00 roll was a 44, indicating that they did in fact continue the fight AND the doubles meant a random event.

I rolled on the Focus Table and came up with 'PC Negative', i.e. something bad (relatively speaking) for the party. Then I rolled on the Event Action and Subject tables and came up with 'Attract a Project'. Now this gets to the heart of solo play….how to leverage the randomness and unexpected results from various tables by interpreting the output  given the context of the game. So after thinking a bit the best I could come up with was Loro leveraging the tight spot the party was in to grab a share of the loot. A 'negative' for the party, but one that made sense to me given where the action was at that specific moment.

I'm not following the process as laid out in the GM Emulator to the letter (for those that know the system, I'm still not sure about how best to incorporate the Chaos Rank), but I am employing interpretation 1.0 and it's fun so far.

I am considering using other question resolution systems, and I have no doubt that version 2.0 will come along soon!