I recently moved away from my last gaming group and don't know any local players yet, other than my spouse. I had spent a lot of time and energy GMing the campaign we just ended, and I wanted to relax a little and play myself without any prep. My spouse and I had tried out the Mythic GM Emulator with Genesys a couple years back, so we dusted it off and used it to run a Star Wars session with just the two of us, using a couple of the NPCs from our recent campaign, characters who had had a lot of screen time, so much so that they already had full character sheets drawn up.

The scenario was a Rebel operative working with a former Imperial officer to scout Outer Rim planets that could potentially be used for Rebel bases. We found that the GM Emulator worked really well with the FFG rules. We have a firm understanding of how to set difficulty levels for checks and when to apply boost and setback dice, so there were no problems there. We have the adversary decks and recently picked up Allies and Adversaries, so spur-of-the-moment NPC creation was also covered. The Environmental Set Pieces document was also enormously helpful. Mainly, we only needed the GM Emulator to help shape the plot and introduce random twists to it.

I was pleasantly surprised with how well it all worked. I suppose it helped a lot that we were playing in a campaign world we both already knew very well. Not only did we produce a coherent story, but we even had a pretty good character arc for the Rebel operative. Additionally, it gave us an opportunity to try out a new way of approaching chase scenes, based on some house rules for fight nights.

I have been intending to work on prepping some modules for when we get our next group game going, and based on this experience, I'm inclined to try two experiments in the future. 1) Use the GM emulator while plotting ahead of time to direct the flow of the story or behind-the-scenes NPC events when I get writer's block. 2) Tap into the GM emulator at the table occasionally when my players do something I have no immediate idea how to respond to.

In case anyone is interested in seeing how it was done, I'm including a link to both the play-through notes for the three sessions and the narrative write-up of the adventure, which we dubbed "Resh Hour" because both characters have names starting with 7... I mean, R, and there was a bit of a buddy-cop thing going on.

Really nice to share, and very much interesting !

I was wondering if the Mythic emulator was really necessary. Since SW dice hold the Yes/No & But/And mechanics by themselves wouldn't it be possible to design a GM emulator only based on the SW/Genesys system ?

3 hours ago, LaGouache said:

I was wondering if the Mythic emulator was really necessary. Since SW dice hold the Yes/No & But/And mechanics by themselves wouldn't it be possible to design a GM emulator only based on the SW/Genesys system ?

Mythic is the only GME with which I am familiar, so that is why we used it. I suppose one could come up with something specifically for FFG, but I'm not sure how it would really need to be different. The FFG dice are an amazingly powerful narrative tool, in my opinion, and I love the Yes/No & But/And opportunities they provide for players to inform where the story goes. Perhaps one way of playing without a GM would be to imbue them with more decision-making power, but I don't know how I would implement that without the game seeming much more like everyone doing "let's pretend" all together like back on the playground in grade school. Mythic already took care of that for me.

One of the things I really love as a GM is setting up a mystery for my players to solve. I know what the NPCs have already done, and the players come across the evidence and try to reconstruct the scene. That is the sort of thing that I find hard to replicate if you are just making up what happens as you go along. Where the GME came in really handy was throwing curveballs at us, making events happen when we weren't anticipating them, and then we had to fold that into the on going narrative in a way that made sense. Another place where it really helped was Perception checks. Out of all the checks you can make in the game, that one most relies on the GM having details to give you when you succeed. We leaned on the GME really heavily for that, asking it questions when our characters were supposed to have noticed something important.