Here is a question for those who use the excellent MiSo by Sophia Brandt and/or Bivius by lino pang aka Riccardo Fregi. These systems embody the philosophy I love: minimal crunchiness and high story value!
Bivius really is as simple as you can get: you make up two alternatives A/B and use a binary oracle to randomly choose one: lovely streamlined.
MiSo adds two bits that I find extremely attractive: (1) you can weight the two options differently (by giving a higher die to the most likely option); (2) there is the possibility of a tie, prompting you to come up with a compromise between A and B (challenging!). I am using MiSo to have some Minimal Solo Role-Playing connecting my skirmish games and it's great!
The subject I would like to discuss is this: both systems require you to define two options and to throw away one. But, as soon as I write something, I invariably grow fond of it. So I don't feel like throwing the 'dead' option away. MiSo suggests keeping the discarded option in store for the future, but I don't think it would work for me: I need as much “surprise” as possible; if I have a backlog of pre-canned options, truly new things are less likely to happen.
Has anyone else experienced the same? What do you suggest? I guess that a possibility (I haven't tried yet) could be to leave the two options rather abstract and only flesh out the winning one. Other ideas / thoughts / comments?
Thank you Sophia Brandt,
ReplyDeleteMiso is a good solo system, I'm glad that Bivius served as the main inspiration for Miso, also I have explicitly allowed the possibility to alter the rules to produce derivative games.
In Bivius there are no ties in options of Rule #7 (though you can make two very similar alternatives if you want) but there is a tie in the test/confrontation of Rule #5
I guess I am late to this party but the resolution system in the online storytelling game storium.com - Storium - the Online Storytelling Game has a strong or weak outcome for every obstacle. Check it out.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't make it work. Does it not support mobile?
ReplyDelete