Mythras Core vs. Mythras Imperative

 Last week our Mythras session ended with more confusion on certain rules, and a need to brainstorm solutions. Some clarity came from the Mythras reddit, but overall the group (and myself especially) were frustrated at interpreting some of the book's rules. 

While researching in anticipation of the Wednesday night game, I discovered an important fact: Mythras Imperative, the latest edition, had all our answers fairly clearly spelled out. In fact, I dare say it had all the clarifications and errata we needed, right there. Does Blind Opponent work that way? Can you use an improvement point on a skill more than once at the end of the session? When you heal up, are you still considered to have a serious wound if you go above 0 HP? etc. etc. 

Sometimes its not a case that the Mythras Imperative book is clarifying something, too. Rather, its more concise approach makes the information needed a bit easier to locate. It is, by virtue of its more focused design, easier to navigate. I hope there is a plan to eventually re-write and refocus Mythras Core, which I have found could benefit a lot from a cleaner, more precise presentation on many rules. 

A great example of how this could be done is to look at Open Quest, and compare, say, how Open Quest defines spirit combat. While OQ is designed to be a more streamlined and easier version of the same game system, it does so in many cases less by simplification and more by simply structuring the rules in a clear and unambiguous fashion. As a result, spirit combat in OQ is fairly simple to understand, while spirit combat in Mythras, though far more elaborate in presentation, is not necessarily any more complicated....it just feels that way as the core mechanical conceits are embedded in a lot of expository discussion text. That text is absolutely fine, but partitioning the mechanical process in a way that clearly states it rather than obscuring it within the more interesting (but less mechanically useful) discussion text would be a better approach for clarity's sake, and for making the rules useful as a reference. 

So for the Wednesday night game we shall be relying on Mythras Imperative to answer all rules questions except those explicitly not covered in the book. I am still going to show off Open  Quest and suggest that maybe it would be a better fit for the group, though. I personally find that the granularity of the Mythras specials system is hampering in play, and slows down narrative coherence. Unlike other systems where this is a similar issue (Pathfinder skill feats, cough), where I can mitigate or ignore such system elements, it is really hard to ignore the Mythras specials system as its core to the game's combat mechanics. Advice from other Mythras players and GMs I know has been that most people eventually just gravitate to the obvious ones: bypass armor, max damage, called shots, impale and leave it at that. Though, with that said, I am sure that if you play long enough this all gets to be old hat eventually. We'll see.