GURPS Dungeon Fantasy with Mythic Roleplaying as the GM

[InfinitePudding]

My friend and I want to play some Dungeon Fantasy together just the two of us. We both own the basic set, he owns Dungeon Fantasy, and I own Mythic Roleplaying. Neither of us really have any experience GMing and we would really rather both play PCs and Mythic allows you to run other RPGs with no GM.

I want to know, from folks who have experience with Mythic and GURPS how simple it is to generate baddies for us to plow through? I was told that for many games when running them with Mythic it's not necessary to have fully statted out baddies, but just their important stats and skills. I had the idea of using the fate chart in Mythic to ask if a NPC was stronger than average or not and then stating the NPC in the pertinent areas.

How would you guys go about doing this? And I'll be the one doing the heavy lifting for our game and I haven't really learned the ins and outs of the system. Is there a good tutorial video or something I can watch that gives examples?

[Harald387]

Originally Posted by West_Winds

My friend and I want to play some Dungeon Fantasy together just the two of us. We both own the basic set, he owns Dungeon Fantasy, and I own Mythic Roleplaying. Neither of us really have any experience GMing and we would really rather both play PCs and Mythic allows you to run other RPGs with no GM.

I want to know, from folks who have experience with Mythic and GURPS how simple it is to generate baddies for us to plow through? I was told that for many games when running them with Mythic it's not necessary to have fully statted out baddies, but just their important stats and skills. I had the idea of using the fate chart in Mythic to ask if a NPC was stronger than average or not and then stating the NPC in the pertinent areas.

How would you guys go about doing this? And I'll be the one doing the heavy lifting for our game and I haven't really learned the ins and outs of the system. Is there a good tutorial video or something I can watch that gives examples?

The Dungeon Fantasy: Monsters series has a ton of worked-up monsters along with some Really Quite Good examples of how to build your own.

GURPS Character Assistant makes it a lot easier to create monsters (and everything else) and has an export option for a basic-statistics monster sheet.

[InfinitePudding]

Cool. :) Thanks for the info.

[Gigermann]

The online group I play with did an experiment with Mythic+GURPS once, an Infinite Worlds bit from a recurring series of one-shots, and it turned out pretty well. The baddies in this case were PCs from a different campaign, so they were already statted. I will say, though, that it took us half the session to really get the hang of the Mythic system, and would probably go more smoothly in the future.

[InfinitePudding]

That's good to know Gigerman. I'm already pretty familiar with Mythic itself, I've used it's stand alone RPG rules quite a bit. I haven't used it with another game yet though and I hadn't seen anyone else talk about using it with GURPS. I think GURPS might take a lot of prep and Mythic is designed for very little prep and I was worried that that may be hard to reconcile together.

I'll grab Monsters 1 and 2 though so we have less prep to do and that should help :)

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by West_Winds

I was told that for many games when running them with Mythic it's not necessary to have fully statted out baddies, but just their important stats and skills.

This is the case with GURPS too - it doesn't matter if that orc is a skilled Blacksmith (or Potter, or Accountant), if the only interaction you're having with him is swordplay.

You'll need to know the 4 core stats, Basic Speed, Move, and Dodge. You might be interested in one or more of the other secondary statistics (extra HP, poor Will) - but you can say they're at the default if you're in a rush or have no opinions.

You need to know he has an Axe, a Medium Shield, and a Mail Hauberk, he has a skill of 12 with the axe and with the shield, and does 2d+1 cut when swinging the axe. You don't really need to know how he got a skill of 12 in the axe, how many points it cost, whatever.

You might be interested in some other traits, usually Advantages but metatraits and disadvantages can be well-defining too. It doesn't matter how much those traits cost if you're just making throwaway goons. Also, if expressing traits as description, eg: "Orcs can see in the dark" is good enough for both of you, don't sweat what game rule trait that might be. Write it down, play your game.

I do suggest that if it's something that seems like you might have questions about how it works in play, that you look up an actual trait and make some notes about how it will work - it saves time mid game. If the giant spider spits sticky webbing, it's worth taking a minute to read up Binding attacks and scribbling down that this spider has a ST 12 Binding with skill 15.
Either make a note of the page and know you'll be looking it up in game, or copy down enough details that you feel you can run it without popping open books. Your preference. But read it over at least once.

[Bruno]

By the way, a good place to start when making up stuff (or picking pre-made monsters) is to look at your own characters stats.

A conservative place to start while you get familiar is to pick things with stats like your own characters, but a point or two lower if there's as many of them as you. The more monsters in the encounter, the lower their scores should be.

You can always handwave your characters back from the dead if you have an oopsie (or make brand new ones), but if you don't like doing that, it's easier to start easy and work your way up to hard.

[Joe]

Since you're explicitly looking for a way to play GURPS Dungeon Fantasy collaboratively, without a GM...

... I'm afraid I can't resist pointing you to my site (see my sig!), which is devoted pretty much entirely to exactly this topic. Sorry to be a self-promoter! But it's all free stuff, just sitting there on the web, and it sounds as if you and your buddy might enjoy it.

(Basically it's a big system of tables for playing GURPS Fantasy/Dungeon Fantasy without a GM. A bit like Mythic, but much more detailed, and specifically for GURPS. It ought to solve a few problems for you, if you're interested.)

[Gigermann]

I've found it isn't really necessary to stat out NPCs fully if you understand some basic assumptions: 10=average Attribute level; 12=Trained; 14=Expert; 16=Master; etc. It's definitely not necessary to deal with point levels of NPCs—point levels tell you nothing about combat capabilities, and are only useful when creating PCs and keeping them consistent with each other.

The last time I ran, I didn't stat out any NPCs. I may not ever again, unless there's a good reason to.

[InfinitePudding]

Wow, thanks for all the feedback everyone. And Joe, I'll take a look at your resources for sure, I wouldn't call it self promoting since it pertains specifically to what I am asking about. At any rate I do appreciate the link :)

I guess the other big hurdle I am having is with the way I play Mythic itself. I like to keep detailed records of everything that happens in game and so I type out all the questions to the Fate Chart and the results of it the way one would write a story.

The problem is, when my friend played Mythic together a couple of times like this he became a tad frustrated with the way I was taking time to do that. So I need to come up with a way to record a lot of info with only a few lines of text. I thought of recording our Skype call, but my Computer is currently have trouble with sound so that's not an option till I can afford to have it fixed.

I am thinking I'll just have to keep the info down to what fate questions were asked, the results and leave out the dialouge and mechanics and number crunching. He suggested roleplaying out the scene using the fate questions then after the scene was over, recording what happened in a summary.

I'm not sure which sounds to be a better option.