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Originally Posted by The Fiendish Dr. Samsara
I got that. But I still don't get this emulation thing. The player thinks up questions and assigns probabilties and then, in essence, flips a (weighted) coin to see if it's true or not? I'm missing why you wouldn't just tell yourself a story and skip the game part at that rate.
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The mechanics of coming up with a question, and assigning odds, provides a system so you don't have to just make it up as you go along. This is one reason I came up with Mythic; most "storytelling" systems drove me nuts. You would have entire books that boiled down to one rule: whatever you want happens next.
Mythic's system of question/answer builds a crunchier mechanic around this concept, allowing chance to change things. It needs a foundation to work from, so it starts with your expectations about what is going to happen. You apply odds and roll dice, and the result of the roll determines if what you expect happens, or something else.
Everything branches off from there. If you think about it, it's really no different from playing a live game with a real GM. As a player, you have thoughts and expectations about what the adventure is about, what's going to happen next, what's in that room, who the bad guy really is, etc. Mythic just reverse engineers this process; instead of your expectations trying to guess what the GM is thinking, your exectations shape the game reality. But you might still be wrong, just like in a standard game.
Okay, that's a long-winded way of explaining it, I know. The essence of it is that you are only partially in control of what happens. Every time you ask a question there are 5 possible results. Those results propel the adventure until the next question, which pushes it further, and so on. Sometimes your expectations are correct, sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes they are really wrong.
Hope that helps (or just made it all murkier!)
Tom