Ep 10 - On Refereeing

Awesome.

And before you started running Mythic Bastionland, did you have like a preferred play style? Would it be OSR? Do you come more from a story game background?

I came up through Powered by the Apocalypse and then Blades in the Dark.

But looking back on how I ran things, it aligns a lot more with how I approach Mythic Bastionline now because I was always looking for ways to not prepare anything and just react to what players were doing.

I didn't have words like, what is the name of the...

Principia.

Apocrypha.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That guiding principle of portray a world, react to player agency, do that stuff.

It feels like that was kind of my natural fit.

I just didn't know it at the time.

I thought it was like, oh, I'm improvising.

Well, I asked the same question on the Discord a while back.

What did you mainly run before you came to Mythic Bastionland? And most people, they had already different experiences.

Like William is saying, Shadow Dark and what was the other one? It's more the OSR.

I want to say Paranoia is probably like traditional game, 5e is traditional.

And that seems to be the experience of most referees, that they have like a diverse background of experiences.

My question to you guys is, Did you change the way you run Mythic Bastionland based on your prior experiences? In other words, do you have like core principles that you follow regardless of the game? Or would you say when I run, I don't know, an Ozark game, it will all be problem solving and fiction first.

And if I run a Neo Threat game, it will all be about the story and character development.

When I was running other games, there was always a bit of tension because I guess I'd have a natural inclination to more OSR style of games.

I just, similar to Jesse, I didn't have the vocabulary for it.

I didn't know about the blogosphere and all that stuff.

But I was, for a while, leaning towards high player agency, high information kind of games.

And when I landed with Mythic Bastion and it just felt like this is answering a lot of the questions that I had and it's it's implemented them in a way that's like really smooth and it like the whole game is built with those principles in mind it's not so much that i bring other stuff into mythic passion land but it's like Mythic Bastion Land is the stuff that I was trying to seek out.

Yeah, similarly, I think Mythic Bastion Land gave me terminology and a process that I didn't have before.