While sitting around a table laden with food, drink, and surrounded by loved ones as the year wanes, you think: “This has been a year of journey, self-discovery, wonder, and best of all, gaming.” You’ve learned many things about your chosen game. Many things you’ve learned were about yourself, too.

You sit at a crossroads of tabletop role playing surrounded by a family that may or may not understand your tastes. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has always been your go-to game. Lost in thoughts, you miss a question about what you’ve been up to lately?

“Huh? Oh, uh… I’ve been researching different Tabletop Role-Playing Games for work,” you answer. The family member who asked blinks in confusion. “Just searching other games to play with friends. That’s all.” You smile at the awkward reply and move on with your meal.

This is about how my Thanksgiving went, among other more boring conversations about life, kids, and work. I, by far, have one of the coolest jobs I can think of as a writer. Heyo, I’m Kat and over the course of 2024, I’ve explored the wonders of Mythras and explaining how it’s changed my perspective of D&D and role-playing games.

You see, until I stumbled across the name The Design Mechanism, I had no understanding or knowledge of them or the system that they built. So I’ve been learning it alongside those of you who’ve followed the blog thus far. Let’s talk a little about The Design Mechanism’s system, Mythras, before I explain my opinion on it after this year.

Let’s Talk Mythras

“Pull up a chair, my friend. Here’s a hot cup of mulled wine just for you.”

Too much? It is a roleplaying game after all. 12. Many a person has come to me with talk of D100 systems versus D20 systems. D6 systems like Traveller. D10 like Vampire The Masquerade. It’s all about us rolling dice and enjoying ourselves around a table. That’s what Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) are designed for. However, some TTRPGs are far better designed than others.

D&D has always provoked debate, ranging from high praise to damning reviews, depending on the generation and edition. I learned to play in 3.5e, skipped 4e and became a GM for 5e 2014 for the last decade. Coming from D20 systems prior to that, Monte Cook’s: World of Darkness and Star Wars: Saga Edition, D100 systems, like Mythras, were foreign to me.

Mythras opened up a whole new world of back-and-forth game play within a TTRPG that I had never experienced. Character Creation alone is more in depth to help craft the characters and create a connection between player and character. You explore where and how the character grew up; you learn about the culture that influences the character. What they may have learned about themselves through their passions or their preferred combat style. You discover the types of magic they encountered and their reasons for starting their adventures.

I’m not saying that other systems don’t have something similar, but Mythras is the first that I’ve come across that offers this much assistance in building and connecting to your character. D&D 2014 helped you build your background with aid from traits, flaws, and bond tables, but they nixed those in the 2024 version. Thinking of other differences between D&D and Mythras, skills are a major point of discussion. D&D provides a small base of skills while Mythras’s list is easily three times the size and arguably includes things like your combat style, your passions, magical disciplines, along with boating, riding, and the like. You may not like extensive skill lists, but Mythras skills offer flexibility, and it is this flexibility that helps players and GMs create unique and interesting scenarios. The same flexibility also lends itself to the back and forth of combat. While combat in any game can (and often does) take the longest time to resolve, there are plenty of players who get bored or automatically shift their focus when it’s not their turn. Mythras helps mitigate that danger through the concept of Action Points and Special Effects.

Much like using bonus actions or a held action in D&D, you’re able to defend, fight back, or any number of things while being attacked by using an Action Point (if you have them available). This sequence creates what I like to call a dance between the players and GM. Then there’s the resolution to the end of the session that rounds out differently between systems, too. Let me touch on leveling between the systems as the last piece to this overview.

As a GM in D&D, it’s easy to just say level up and not think about anything beyond who needs help to do so. It’s never been an aspect of ‘how do the characters improve themselves?’ At least, not in my case. In our D&D games, I found that my players were more interested in their new spells or abilities that came with levelling up, instead of the ‘how’ they were attained. There were certain requirements I would list, much like a character had to explain how they learned their second class if they chose to multiclass, but that was about it.

Mythras threw a huge wrench in my works by removing the ‘ease’ of levels. It was by far one of the more perplexing concepts of the system. Gone are levels with their rewards, and in come nuanced improvements of skills. Gone were escalating Hit Points, replaced with characters growing in diverse areas that weren’t geared towards combat, buffs, or magic. The flexibility of story crafting is now given agency to the players more than, here are your new spells and abilities. Choose wisely. Instead, you, as your character, are granted experience rolls to be able to improve your skills, including Passions if you wish, and thus create a more rounded, organic character, that grows with the telling.

While there are always good ways and bad ways of doing things like this, each choice the player makes to improve their character creates their own unique situation down the line, since not all abilities improve in the same way. There’s also a much greater time elapse and reason for the characters to narrate their own improvements. Say you have Bran, a swordsman of the party, wishing to improve his skills with his axes instead of his main weapon. His player can spend one experience roll to have his combat skill improve, another to improve his Evade, but then possibly use a third to improve his Influence or Perception, thereby increasing his chances of talking his way out of a fight, or spotting a potential ambush.

I’m not saying you can’t have this in D&D. I’ve had several players narrate that out when they intended to change weapons, but there are many like I mentioned above that are just looking to find their next Fireball. Thinking on that, let me explain another reason I like Mythras over D&D.

Realism Over Steamrolling

While you’ll always have a blast being able to sneeze on monsters and have them keel over dead, doesn’t it get boring if you ALWAYS do it? On the GM side, I feel the same way. I throw the encounters together, carefully plotting them out for story or random situations and go, “okay. This time… this time they won’t–oh… nope, they sneezed again, and everything fell over.” It’s downright frustrating at times. As is the lack of required tactics and fear of failure. With that said, I never run it as a GM versus Players game. It’s called collaborative storytelling for a reason.

Very rarely in D&D are there consequences for failures, like losing a limb or a concussion that takes a person out of play. Unless they are under a spell that they failed to save from. You have to chop down that massive health pool, be it monster or player. This is an aspect over the last year that I have highlighted in almost every blog.

Mythras adds an element of realism that you just don’t get in D&D. There’s a real sense that your character won’t make it out of some situations. And simple situations at that. My first experience playing Mythras, my character fell off a roof and wound up with head trauma bad enough that I almost didn’t make it. In D&D, you’d have hit points taken from fall damage, that’s it. That brings me to game balancing.

A lot of TTRPGs focus on combat. I mean, who doesn’t like to smash the bad guys and get their real life rage out on fictional monsters? D&D is no exception to this. D&D highlights and capitalizes on this concept in my opinion. Mythras, however, gives you a lot of spells, abilities, and skills that are used specifically outside of combat. It incentivizes role playing more than just speaking. You can aid in farming, fishing, dancing in a court, or inspiring a small group of soldiers. While you can do these things given the opportunity in any TTRPG, you rarely find skills beyond performance or survival in D&D. I’ve had many a player argue about which skills they could use for certain situations. Mythras gave me the tools to make my points stick.

Speaking of dancing, let me explain a bit more about what I mean by the dance between players and GM. I know I mentioned it for combat specifically above. It’s because I’m referring to Action Points. Action Points are a number of points you have available to take actions throughout combat. It means that you, as the GM, are able to keep your players engaged and even more invested in combat. There has always been a reference to certain combat styles being a dance across the field. Action Points literally create this dance in the TTRPG setting. You are able to see the flow of combat instead of the stagnant. Oh, you miss or, okay, you hit, roll for damage.

Instead, your player readies themself for the threat of combat, pulling their shield up to defend as the monster swings a set of deadly claws at their face. Both monster and player have therefore spent an Action Point to accomplish this action within the same span of time. The monster attacks and the player defends, and the dance of combat begins. This whole concept leads into Mythras being a creator’s playground.

How To Structure A Game

While world building itself is a task taking thousands of hours and rules, the TTRPG systems that you use grant you further rules to incorporate or work around. Within D&D, there are many of these rules. Many of these structures are in place and that may be because it’s had so many hands on it through the half century. We’ve seen this game defined, redefined, and blown to pieces just to be reformed in other ways.

One fact still remains, D&D is a rigid D20 system. Its rules can be flexible to the GM’s preferences, but if you stick to the rules as written, you’re able to create mystical combinations of the same base concepts for every character. This is where those who prefer modules, pre-made adventures, and rigid structure gain their boon. You may be that person. That is perfectly fine and I appreciate that thought process. I truly believe it is a functional state of gameplay and have learned over the years that the phrase, “when in doubt, reference the rules” is my go to default.

However, I am a storyteller. I learned to be a storyteller from games like Monte Cook’s: World of Darkness as it was my first game as a GM. I learned to create a story around the rigid D20 systems like D&D, then moved into the other games and did the same. Mythras changes that structure and allows for the flexibility for the creator, for the storyteller like myself, while offering some base rules to work around.

A good word that’s tossed around for video games is sandbox. Mythras is like the sandbox of the TTRPG world. This means that creators and storytellers, like myself, who prefer loose structures thrive when working with it. This also means that for those of us who’ve been so engrained in D&D can feel overwhelmed when looking at how loose the structure is.

When you first read through the Mythras Core Rulebook, you find that there are a lot of ideas and options for players but even more you’ll notice the statements, talk to your GM or don’t be afraid to make your own. I can’t stress enough how much this made my mind screech since as ‘simple’ as the system was to understand, there were so many variables that relied on the GM’s creativity or opinions that I was at a loss.

After a year working with the system, though, it has inspired me to run around the sandbox and create the towers of my own eventual destruction. 12. I say that with the love of my players behind me. As any good GM will do, I’ve asked for their help and balanced what they’ve thrown at me with the help of the Mythras rules in mind.

2024 With Mythras

Overall, the experience with Mythras and The Design Mechanism has opened my creative mind for the better. It truly is a creator’s playground and has so many possibilities as demonstrated by the sheer volume of settings that they have available. Each has the Mythras flare with their own unique perspective and use of Mythras Core Rules. That’s the flexibility of the system.

For those of you who are interested in learning more, I would recommend looking through Mythras Imperative for a way to dip your toes into this system. If there are those of you who are looking for a holiday gift for that special GM looking to spice up their games, I’d recommend getting Mythras for them. I know that’s what I’m looking for under my tree this year. I can’t wait to see what comes down The Design Mechanism’s pipeline next year.

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