DM Yourselves

DM Yourselves is the sequel to the Mithral best-seller DM Yourself, which gave you a rule system for playing published D&D 5e adventures, solo. This book extends those rules to allow you to play DM-less with more than one player, but also adds ways to get at the story – ways to help you start, ways to help you overcome blocks, ways to play with RPGs other than 5e, and ways of getting through the story faster with more immersion, more of the epic, cinematic set-pieces, and less dice rolling…

This book gives you a variety of systems and game mechanics to help with your solo and DM-less play. You may not use all of them, but you will find that many of them are useful even when you are DMing non-solo sessions!

Using the principles of the DM Yourselves system – Simplicity, Immersion, Narrative – this book includes:

Character Creation – Rules for balancing the adventure depending on the numbers of PCs and Sidekicks; Default Behaviours, Binding Decisions and Plot Armour for Wilderness and Urban adventures, and Gold and Equipment for PCs/Sidekicks starting at higher levels.

Play Solo or DM-less – How to play solo together, for when nobody wants to DM or bother with the prep; how to emulate your Sidekicks to give them a life of their own (and how to do the same for PCs and the entire party if you want to DM solo!); how to get started and overcome blocks; step-by-step guides and examples for the main DM Yourself game loop and AI combat, how to read adventures in non-5e format (and how to write adventures to aid DM-less play).

Experiments with Time and Space – Speeding up play with the Story Mode fast combat system (resolve any combat encounter in 3-5 rolls!); using montage, viewpoints, scenes and other film techniques.

Appendices – loads of extra stuff including a fully playable DM Yourself tutorial adventure; a recap of the original DM Yourself system; guides to soloing two of the most popular recent 5e campaigns; how to adapt DM Yourself to other systems (including OSR titles, Path/Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds), and several add-on and quick reference sheets.