I like the system in Mythic quite a lot, but it's quite involved and can take you out of whatever game it is you're playing. Some people don't like this.
Parts Per Million publishes, seemingly, a million Solo RP supplements for a million different games. (I got their Solitude supplement for Chivalry & Sorcery because I wanted to solo that.) Their approach is to design an oracle that builds on the core mechanisms of the underlying game system, so in the case of Chivalry& Sorcery their yes/no oracle is built up on the "Skillskape" (sic) system so that your oracular questions are resolved the same way as the other mechanisms of the game. Their "complex questions" oracle is multiple-d100 generated word prompts you can use to inspire inspiration, by way of comparison. There are four columns headed "Chivalry, Piety, Sorcery, and The World" and each of those has 100 words under it. You roll d100 and read the four words attached to that number, or you roll four d100 and read each one separately.
In comparing the two, for yes/no questions they are rougly the same in terms of outcomes with Solitude just feeling more like it "fits" with the underlying game system.
Mythic's approach to complex questions is a bit "twenty questions". Instead of asking "what's in the box?" you ask "is there a weapon in the box?" (no) "are there potions in the box?" (no) "is there writing implements in the box?" (no) "are there body parts in the box?" (yes). In practice I've found that a bit tedious and tend to shy away from the Mythic oracle for those kinds of things.
The Solitude approach would be to roll d100 four times on four columns (if it's not so important maybe only once reading across the columns) to get words you try to interpret for your improv. "What's in the box?" "Chivalry: venerable (84), Piety: demons (58), Sorcery: wield (4), The World: drought (8)" From here, depending on how events have transpired, and the nature of your world setting, you might say that the ancient (venerable) box contains sorcerous materials that let you control (wield) demons (duh) that when unleashed can bring drought upon the land. Or perhaps that the box held the thing that was binding the demons and by opening it you've unleashed them. Or whatever else "venerable/demons/wield/drought" bring up to mind. The weak point of this approach is that it has the same criticism of using Mythic in yes/no questions: it draws you out of the game system you're using. That being said, an easy fix to this is to pre-roll the words each session. Roll a handful of words from each column before you start a session and cross off words as you use them. That way you're not pulled out of the moment with die rolling that doesn't match. You get the benefit of a word-based complex oracle without the fiddling around and table-flipping that you'd otherwise get using them extemporaneously.
So which would I recommend?
I love Mythic ... but not as a solo game. I use it as a cap system or (increasingly) a standalone system for GM-free RP in groups. For solo RP I've found the Parts Per Million approach to oracles more satisfying and in my journaled C&S game I follow Solitude's approach (with some added 已经 stuff for the Hell of it because I can; I chiefly use that as an oracle for NPC motivations and the like).
Your relationship with your significant other. Some monsters don't look monstrous. They can use charms and wiles to steal your girl/boy/otherfriend from you if you don't pay up.
And the die uses the old form of 5: 伍
Only works from 1-3. 4 has 5 strokes (6 lines), for example.
They're just bog standard six-siders, honest!
These are wooden. Obsessive lunatic that I am, I actually rolled them a thousand times and checked that they were sufficiently random for play. I have an all-metal set in my shopping cart ready to buy when I get the urge.
Why is it so hard for people to read the blurb on the right?:
This community is for meaningful discussions of tabletop/pen & paper RPGs
Do not submit video game content unless the game is based on a tabletop RPG property and is newsworthy.
Off-Topic: Book trade, Boardgames, wargames, video games are generally off-topic.
(Emphasis entirely mine.)
From way back in the days, Valley of the Pharaohs. While not my first game that attempted to be historically accurate (that honour falls to Chivalry & Sorcery) it was the first such game I found that not only tried to be historically accurate but also supplied loads of supporting material for it. (This was more important pre-Internet than it is now because it was both time-consuming and hard to find good, solid historical information that was usable in play.)
But I could never interest anybody in playing it.
These are not, strictly speaking, gaming dice, but I make use of them in gaming for in-character purposes (and sometimes when I face idea blocks as a GM: using them to foster ideas like I might use a tarot deck).
These dice are a hold-over from Tibetan shaman practice incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I have three sets of them:
A wooden set that has the Tibetan symbols writ large and in small beside each their Chinese translation.
A brass set that has just the Tibetan symbols. (I later coloured in the symbols so that it was easier to distinguish first and second.)
A "literal gem dice" set: one in "egg yolk opal" (literal translation), and the other in yellow jade.
These dice will look unusual to people who have a preconceived notion of how the Yijing (I-Ching) are consulted. The ways most people know of are the "yarrow stalk" technique, the "three coins" technique, and, if especially familiar from afar, perhaps the "bamboo strip" technique. But there are many ways that the Yijing are consulted that have developed over the millenia. In addition to the aforementioned techniques there's also tiles (similar to the bamboo strips) and my examples here: dice.
I have two sets of these dice:
A wooden set that has the Yijing hexagrams written by name, not by the six broken/whole line sets that people outside of China are most familiar with.
An all-metal set ("bronze", but not really made of bronze, just coated with a bronze layer) that is again done by hexagram name.
In both cases and extra six-sided die is used to determine the "moving line" of the hexagram. (Yarrow stalk and coin methods can have zero to six moving lines. Dice methods will have one always. Slip and tile methods will never have any.)
They're called Arch'd4¹ and can be found in various online venues if your local purveyor won't stock them.
¹Link is representative. I'm not recommending this particular site because I can't buy from any western source.
I have a combination dice tower, dice try and dice storage system that I would fight tooth and nail to keep.
I like those fine (and have a set), but I kinda view them as "cheating" when you have numbers repeating to get a lower number of sides. I'm always impressed by how clever people can be in designing these things. 😉
Taking a break from literal gem dice to show off the best d4s ever made. Not only are these not caltrops waiting to pierce slippered feet at night when a stray one happens to be right where you're stepping in a rapid trip to the bathroom after a night of drinking way too much tea while playing RPGs, they also roll much better.
Whoever invented these is a genius.
The d4 is a special kind of petrified wood. The numbered d6 is (sintered) turquoise. The d8 is a cats eye. The blue d10 is lapis lazuli. The red d10 (tens) is red sandstone with gold flecks. The d12 is opal. The d20 is malachite. The funky d12 with astrological symbols is blue sandstone with gold fleck. The really funky d6 (a Tibetan "Mo" divination die) is yellow jade.
I bought them off of Taobao (like … pretty much everything I've bought in the past decade or so 🙃). You can probably find them on AliExpress as well, I would guess.
Sadly I could not find a way to take a photo that shows just how glorious these dice look in actual use. (I'm not exactly a professional photographer.) These are a set of gaming dice cut from dichroic prisms. This makes them sparkle in unusual ways and colours that makes them unique of all the dice I own. They're instant eye-grabbers on the table.
I always liked Kahuna. Quick to set up. Easy to explain even to casual gamers. Has a lot more depth than it appears at first glance.
If you want to go with the classics, the only form of Chess I enjoy is Xiangqi. It's a faster-moving and more dynamic game than International Chess, but if you're good at the latter the skills, after you get past a few little "gotchas", transfer well to this. Related (very distantly: it's more closely related to Stratego in that it inherits from the same parent) is Junqi, though you'll want to play the refereed version (either a human referee or the various mechanical/electronic referee systems out there) for the most enjoyment.
For card games, well in traditional cards there's (literally) hundreds of choices, perhaps thousands. For commercial card games I really liked the Star Realms series of games when I got them.
This is the second full set of the many, many, (idiotically) many dice I’ve ever owned that is made from semi-precious stones. These literal gem dice are cut from unakite, essentially a highly decorative form of granite.
This is my absolute favourite set of dice of the many, many, (idiotically) many dice I've ever owned. These are literal gem dice, in that they are cut from actual bloodstone (a semi-precious stone). For complicated reasons (that begin with Judas Priest) bloodstone is my favourite gemstone so finding dice cut from it was a transformative experience for me.
This is true iff you think that having the ability to interact with mechanically means you must interact with it mechanically.
I've played coherent games with flexible, (almost) universally-applicable core mechanisms since the 1980s. This is not a thing that is new to D20. D&D3 didn't invent having coherent, flexible, universally-applicable core mechanisms. Weirdly enough we didn't at any point devolve into just interacting with the mechanics of a game because, well, we understood what the point of the game was and just appreciated having a way to adjudicate things neutrally when we needed it.
So first error: assuming that because you can adjudicate almost everything with dice you must.
Now let me strip the rose glasses from this and give other alternative outcomes that I have actually seen in those sainted "Aulde Skhoole" days:
And so on. Because, get this, DMs are human too and sometimes have brain farts where ideas belong and stupid things happen. Having rules that offer guidelines, even if you don't actually roll for a situation (more on this later), can lessen those brain farts and increase reasonable outcomes.
I have, as I've said, been playing with (non-D&D) systems that have consistent, universal game mechanisms since the 1980s. I have never, not even once had any but the newest, greenest, most inexperienced players of any game do what he says is normal here. (And new, green, inexperienced players do stupid things in any system, OSR or modern!)
Here's a more common outcome in my experience. (YMMV naturally, and if it does, I'm so sorry you have terrible fellow players surrounding you!)
OK, let's break down the GM actions by things I have seen once again.
And, naturally, if it turns out that this situation is critical for some reason, I've also seen:
See how in the first case that's almost identical to the so-called "Old School" case, and how in that first case having all the tools to do the roll helped make the decision without, you know, the actual roll? See how in the second and third the ability to do task rolls on anything gets some nuance in the RP, even though the actual persuasion attempt wasn't rolled out?
See how, in a case where it might be needed, the persuasion attempt could actually be rolled out in a way that is understood by everybody around the table instead of some poorly-thought-out ad-hoc thing?
So just to repeat this theme here: the fact that you can roll for almost any situation doesn't mean you should or will.
I guess I'm insane, because having read to the end the only thing that I think needs to die in a fire is OSR grognards who denigrate other styles of play. Who preach BadWrongFun™ because people are having fun with something other than the games they wear such deeply rose-tinted glasses for.