Solo Play? Easy or Complex?

What you want out of a solo play game will drive your game choice.

Do you want an easy experience where you can run a party of a dozen characters, or multiple parties of 4-6 characters, with an entire entourage of dozens of characters to follow? Then I would stay away from D&D 5E and most medium-to-high complexity games, and stick with simple games such as Shadowdark or Old School Essentials.

If all you care about is an occasional "dungeon run" and "seeing what the random charts cook up," then don't waste your time with games that require extensive preparation or character design to play. Games like D&D 5E, Pathfinder 1e or 2E, and many others require pages-long character sheets on PDF. I've tried playing these, but I'd hate to print out reams of paper to play without needing a computer nearby. They are not worth the time or waste of paper to play without computers, and some of these are just better with a group.

Other alternatives are Free League's games, which often come with excellent solo-play rules, charts, and enhanced character creation, so solo characters are far more survivable and capable. Many of these are amazing boxed games, and they cover so many genres that you could have a lifetime of fun playing solo and seeing what happens next.

Dragonbane is another Free League game that has excellent solo play rules and fits into the fantasy genre. The monsters in this game attack on random charts, so playing without a referee is no problem. If you have a choice between a game not written for solo play and one that is designed to support it, you are missing out if you choose to ignore these.

The Walking Dead game has solo play rules. Many of these games are more abstract and narrative-style games, where you are not doing tactical combat on a map, but more doing theater of the mind and "seeing what happens next" via the game's charts or solo campaigns.

Forbidden Lands is an excellent hex-crawl fantasy game that can be played solo. You have a wealth of options with Free League, beyond the obvious group games like Alien or Blade Runner, where a referee is needed to run monsters or present mysteries. Survival, exploration, and fantasy games are better for solo play.

When I play solo, I love tactical combat on hex-grids, with 1-second turns where every moment matters. These are almost wargame-style battles for me, where every little choice matters, and every heartbeat could be life or death. GURPS provides excellent, detailed, and to-the-point character designs, along with a combat system that scales from simple to exceptional levels of depth and detail. Everything matters: the armor on your body, along with your encumbrance relative to your strength, weapon length, the types of attacks you make, and the damage type of your weapon. Skills matter. Personality profiles matter. Everything is your character, and everything matters.

Granted, this is a level of detail too deep for many, but I love the tactical wargame side of the hobby, and all this is great for me. This lets me drill down and enjoy the deep tactical combat, without having too much abstracted away, and the game being more about broad strokes rather than detailed hand-to-hand combat by the second. I want the latter, so my needs will help me pick the proper game rules.

And your needs will be different, too! What you enjoy will determine the best game for you. Knowing what is out there and how they support solo play will also go a long way in helping you make a good decision.

Dear Diary...the Journal as Inspiration

It's been three days since I set out from the capital, and I can't believe how quickly the countryside is changing. I've seen fields and forests that seem to go on forever. And the road! It's a straight shot north, with few turns or detours. The people who made this must have had a lot of patience and time on their hands.

The weather has been fair, and I've had a chance to enjoy the scenery. There's been a surprising amount of wildlife too: deer, rabbits, and even a bear once.

Last night, I stopped at an inn in a little town called Farras. The food was delicious, and the locals were friendly. One farmer told me he had spotted a band of orcs roaming nearby. I thanked him for the warning and made sure my sword was ready.

He told me the roads north of here became increasingly dangerous, and not to travel alone...

Buy yourself one of those blank journals or composition notebooks, and keep a character diary. When you play solo, you need that motivation, a record of "what happened," and that stream of consciousness that makes a character's story compelling and worth following up on. Yes, this takes a little more work, but if we are playing solo to create a compelling story, what better way to do it than keeping a diary or journal, and writing in "in character?"

But, I can hear you say, what if my character gets killed two pages in? You are making me waste an entire notebook on one character! This can get expensive!

Here is the solution. If you don't want to just "start a new diary" in there, do this. Make the next character "find this diary or journal" in the game, and have access to all the information inside of it. Have them continue their diary from where the previous one left off, and explore ways to utilize that information to help the new character navigate the world.

If that new character dies, start another and have the journal serve as the "in-game legacy" of this entire arc. Perhaps this is a magic book that always survives, and somehow keeps people with heroic (or evil) tendencies finding the book and continuing the story. Yes, this opens up one of your arcs to be an evil arc. When the villain meets their fate, the good character who finds the book can use that information to destroy the evil character's creations, right their wrongs, and try to make things right.

Keep that journal as the constant in your play, and use that writer inside you to write the story in character! Put dreams and fears in there, wonder about things, and ponder what is out there. Record adventures, create small dungeon and wilderness maps of what they explored, and try to include as much "adventure information" as possible in this book.

If the character loses an NPC, grieve there and include the location of the burial site. Hide a treasure since you can't carry it home? Make a treasure map here! Make a list of the people in town the character spoke to, and what they think about them. Do they seem trustworthy? If a wilderness map has a fresh water source or safe camping spot, make a note of that! If you find a camp of orcs, make that a note too! If a thief character scouts out a wealthy merchant's house, sketch a map in character here, and it does not have to be complete, just what the character was able to see. The maps could be wrong or missing information, too. If your next character finds a map or discovers a clue, it should be in this book!

This way, the previous character's death is less significant, and it only adds to the story for the next one. The following tale always builds upon what came before.

It is like life.

What happens when you reach the end of the book?

This is a magic book, you know. Something special may happen. The character who writes the last entry of the final page, on the ending line, gets a wish.

Any wish at all.

Bring back the best character from the previous entries, and live happily ever after with them? This is your story. You get to write the ending.

And then, you get to start a new journal...

GURPS as a Solo Game

One of my best solo games is GURPS. This is one set of rules to learn, but it handles any setting, any era, and any point in history I would ever want to role-play in. If I see a movie or TV show and want to play that in a game, it is so easy to create a few characters and dive in. The source-book support for these settings is equally amazing, with books for almost any historical subject, genre, and game you could ever want more detail on.

I played a GURPS Miami Vice style game set in the 1980s and Miami with just the basic set and the GURPS: Cops book for a few police procedures and bits of information.

There is so much great detail on police procedures and cases in the COPS book! For this genre of role-playing, and in any system, this book is an amazing resource.

There is also a SWAT book if you are more into busting drug labs, shootouts, and the more combat-oriented genre play in this setting. If you wanted to play just a tactical team, this is another great book to pick up. I would watch an episode of the TV show for inspiration, come up with a scenario to play, and GURPS took care of the rest.

Maybe we have a bank robbery gone bad, hostages taken, and the characters play a negotiator and the tactical team surrounding the building, and the scenario is to diffuse the situation while the mayor just wants to give the robbers what they want to avoid an incident. Maybe this is a raid on a drug lab in the swamp, and the team needs to neutralize the guards to let the let the narc team in to make the bust. If you were less into the detective side, and more into the action side, there are still plenty of things to do inspired by the TV show (and the music).

Why I like GURPS over other role-playing games is the advantage and disadvantage system. If I give my characters a "mental weakness" that requires a self-control roll, that is in the rules, and my character can have a drinking or gambling problem they need to constantly struggle against. This is great for solo play, since I can setup a realistic character with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses to struggle against, and the game is helping me make those choices and tells me how the character should react.

If a cop character "fired at a kid playing Laser Tag" then he may have a roll he needs to fight against when shooting his weapon at an uncertain target. This can be created in GURPS and gives the character a few more points during character creation, and also defines the dice roll when that situation comes up.

This is great, interesting, Hollywood-level scriptwriter character stuff, and the sort of detail I need to play a cinematic character effectively while playing solo. Other games do not give me these tools, but GURPS does.

GURPS is one of the best solo games on the market, and worth your time to grab a copy of and learn. 

Why Play Solo?

If I had others to play with, I would. This is sort of the classic problem of platforms that treat users as single entities instead of a community. Sure, I am on Roll20! I should be having fun!

What do any of these platforms do to bring us together?

Most of them do nothing, focusing on digital sales to single users rather than saying "the first problem we have to solve" is the one of creating a social network that brings players together. None of these platforms address the underlying cause.

Also, we are in an age of massive social strife where games are not escapist entertainment anymore. Every side is trying to "stake out space" in gaming to support "their side" and "deny others the space" as some sort of "grab land" tactic in an outside fight. I will play alone to stay away from other people's politics and advocacy. Some people have elevated this to the point of becoming terrible, horrible, angry people.

When your life has been reduced to screaming into your phone in your car, you need to look in a mirror and ask yourself why. Likely, you are hurting your "cause" more than you are helping it. I don't doubt some of these videos are made to attack the same side they supposedly support, as they look that bad.

I will stay away from entire games since the game has been captured by one side or another. It is never about the game, it is all about holding worthless "digital ground" for some an external fight to deny access to others.

This is not gaming. 

It is a sad reality to live in. I miss the 1980s so much. My whole group was outcast middle-school rejects, and we had an African-American kid, a gay kid in a track suit, an Indian kid, one with Rubik's Cube stickers on his Rush shirt, and a motley crew of losers and nerds. Nobody wanted us, but D&D did.

These days, D&D is in its 1990s aging pop-star phase and begging everyone to like them again, leaning far too hard on nostalgia, and it is just sad. I love you, but not like this. Leave me with my good memories, please. I don't even want the fantasy genre anymore, not how it exists currently, it feels damaging to people's mental health.

I would rather play a game where I can lose any character at any time and just accept the outcome, rather than build undying, invincible, pet characters that become alternate identities and make my life feel lesser in comparison. Identity marketing is incredibly toxic and hurts your sense of self-worth.

Super-heroic fantasy has been subsumed by marketing and Wall Street. It is a like a pyramid sales scheme, fluffing your ego and dipping too hard into escapism to get you buying more and locked into subscription services. 

Even Daggerheart realizes character death is an important story element and needs to be reflected in a game that simulates adventure fiction and narrative arcs. While it is still a superheroic game, it is far more mature and grounded than D&D. Shadowdark has a wonderful attitude about character death and loss. It just happens, and you lose your "playing piece." Then, you create a new one.

I can't play D&D solo. It is pointless. It is turn-after-turn of repetitive combat, far too many rests, and an every increasing power level that leaves me bored. All of 5E has this problem.

Also, I enjoy games other people ignore. I find fun in other places, and love to explore worlds and universes that are far more developed and filled with lore and history than anything in the mainstream. I like that freedom to play a game and just "live in it" for a while. Not to create a "better me" but it is like watching a movie and experiencing another place and time for a while.

But I also play to experience what has come before. I pull in classic fantasy books and comics from the 1950s to the 1970s rekindle my imagination. I want things that inspired the genre before the genre, with no second (or later) generation sources. It is hard to do this with modern games, and many people just don't see the point of going back to classic horror comics and finding inspiration there for a game.

I build my games around my strongest sources of inspiration.

I play solo as a part of my hobby, not of gaming, but of self-discovery and a life devoted to learning and expanding my mind. My gaming is not a reflection of me, it is an outwards look into the larger world, through the eyes of the past and looking forward. 

Mythic Game Master Emulator 2

I have not used the second edition as much as I have the first with Mythic, and my oracle dice have been doing more of my work for me than the percentage chart in this system. if there is a twist, plot change, or other event, I will just roll the oracle dice for it.

I need to force myself to use this more and get back into it, but overall it is still a solid book and system. Like solo play, you need to find out what works for you. Sometimes you can get by with less, other times, you need help and inspiration, which this book (and the first edition), provide well.

A lot of games come with solo rules now! Part of why my use fell off is that I have been using those systems to see how they are. Mythic was far ahead of its time. 

Even though I have been using this sparingly, this is still one of the best solo-play systems on the market, and still a standard to this day. Highly recommended, and I am looking forward to getting back into the swing of things with this book soon.

Yes, No, Maybe Dice

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAC0OD4

This is another set of oracle dice I have, a fun: yes, no, and maybe set. If I have a question that could go either way, or be somewhere in the middle, then I pick up one of these and roll it.

Do I have rules to use with these or my yes/no dice? I really don't need them, all I need to use these are a question. And I don't have to use them all the time, only when I need a random answer to something I am unsure of.

Don't let the dice control your game, or sit there rolling them again and again! That is not solo play. I am a big fan of solo play being "guided play" where you are using your mind and coming up with logical "what happens next" situations, and then only using the dice when you want uncertainty.

We're Still Here!

We are still around, and I merged this into my master blog site lists and update schedule. I love solo play, and most all the games on my blog list I will solo play and enjoy immensely. More soon, and the tools have evolved and changed. Still, my trusty yes/no oracle dice are going strong and serving me well.