|
I've never played a traditional solo game before, but I have read through CYOA books and I do own Ironsworn. However, I have played some solo type games before. The only one I really have experience with is How to Host A Dungeon, which is a generative game that creates a side view dungeon and its history. I'm not sure if this is the version I played: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/299497/How-to-Host-a-Dungeon-2nd-Edition I suppose HtHAD would be considered a journaling-type game. Fighting Fantasy, of which went off into a separate fork from the "Choose your own adventure" brand, has its own RPG system now, TROIKA: https://www.troikarpg.com/ - not sure if it includes solo play details though. When I have played solo games it is mostly a board game on Tabletop Simulator or VASSAL, of which the most I've played is the Mage Knight Board Game. I do own it in person but it's crazy to set up for a solo game and I live in a shared space, so I usually don't have the table space to set something up for an unlimited amount of time. Generally speaking, I think the appeal of solo RPGs specifically must be the same kind of thing as the old CYOA books. People may not necessarily want to socially engage or want to do something on their own time away from electronics, so something that allows for some meditative escapism and thinking through the eyes of a character with random chance involved via the oracles mentioned in the OP can be potentially exciting. The main thing that solo RPGs have is that there is a unique experience playing a solitaire type game. Some, like How to Host A Dungeon, generate a finished product when you're at the end of it that you can go on to use in another game (see also: The Quiet Year, which I think can be played solo?). Because you don't need to interact with other people, the information in your head and the way you communicate with yourself is generally perfect, and the uncertainty lies within the oracles in the game itself to keep things just spicy enough. Also, because you don't involve other people, logistically a solo game makes a lot of sense. You play at your own pace anywhere that you have access to your materials. There doesn't need to be a dedicated space and time for it (though there could be), so you could play while in bed, at a vacation spot, in a power outage, while you're sick, if it's 3 in the morning and everybody's asleep, for five minutes at a time if that's all you have. I'm not really clear on how or where people really generate and share play reports other than in Let's Play or here in TG - I know that there was a long series of Let's Play posts regarding Sommerlund and the Kai, which I believe is related to the Lone Wolf series of CYOA books. I don't know if that's still stored anywhere or buried in the archives though. I would view the act of playing a solo game and sharing it to be two discrete activities - you can abandon a solo game at any time and nobody save the player will feel anything regarding it unless you were sharing updates on a regular basis. You could start an infinite amount of these games as well without worrying too much about the content. I would also say from a design side there are challenges in keeping the game replayable or driving enough to warrant continued play. CYOA books have a finite interpretation set so you need to keep playing them in a serial sense, but technically nothing stops you from just skipping all the way to the end or changing what your outcomes are either. There might be some fun in doing so, or maybe there is a certain sense of duty to stay bound to the rules framework. In either case, since there are finite options, there ought be enough options to suit the player base from the designer side. If I was going to design something in this space I'd probably do something that has very basic prompts and allows for branching through randomness and use it as more of a story/ideas engine than a game to level up and get powerful in. I don't particularly care too much about the leveling treadmill in video game RPGs or even Mage Knight these days but I'd probably go back and play another round of How to Host A Dungeon again since I know that I'd get some interesting results to continue to use afterwards. Games that generate artifacts as part of their play are neat, solo or no.
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 22:21
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 12:27 |
|
|
I guess the question I'd have is, what do you want to see out of a solo game versus a game you play with others? The componentry tends to clue in on the type of game you'll end up with. In terms of oracles, the parent component is "randomized discovery", so the solo player doesn't necessarily know what is going to happen, though perhaps they can make preparations. "High availability" does not seem to factor into solo game components very much and happens more as a consequence of what games people play solo. Games which prominently feature the player improvising and writing things down rather than resolving tasks seem to be what is being referred to as "journaling games", correct? As in, you are really just committing to a randomized writing prompt with the "randomized discovery" portion missing as well as a lack of "task resolution". Something like that? That is, if the majority of what you do in a solo RPG is writing to prompts with minimal dice rolling and what not, then it is a journaling game. That would make How to Host A Dungeon a visual journaling game, as would the Quiet Year, perhaps. I'm curious for the purposes of this thread since part of firming up things to design for this specific category that isn't just another solo boardgame like Mage Knight feels important to define. Maybe "solo RPG" is just another phrase that does not have a well-defined space like how calling everything created by "artisan" be it bread, a chair, salad fork, sharpening a penicl, whatever no longer has any real meaning. That might also clue in what SkyeAuroline's looking for, which is "a solo RPG that features randomized discovery, task resolution, a sense of cohesion and continuity...and Stuff"?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2021 01:47
|
|
|
I don't think it's impossible. However, if your concern is to model interactions with "the group", there ought be a delineation between the "in character" and "out of character" group. You could absolutely have a solo RPG where you are attempting to go through it and it is being influenced through the mechanics on a meta level and a narrative level. An example would be, your character is your classic party leader, and must cat herd a player type who is somewhat distracted all the time, but their character is a powerful wazzard. Perhaps there can be something there where you get mad at the player and try to smooth that out, which means you're managing meta social relationships out of the game as well as inside of the game? I don't think it's necessarily bad to start up an OP without an idea of where you're going FWIW, this is an interesting headspace to be in, as mentioned. I think it's a good way to get the ball rolling in what this kind of thing might look like. Are there any solo RPGs which deal more with interpersonal relationships than they do with procedural task resolution? I imagine that context switching might cause this to get somewhat rough but looking to board games for inspiration as well as more narrative forward story games are good beds for inspiration on these kinds of topics. Then again, if the idea is "find a cool game for SkyeAuroline or others to play by themselves", finding out what those games might look like would be very helpful indeed. It's very likely, based on the sense that I get, this kind of game does not exist yet. I think for me a solo RPG would have to be something that has the following components: - Randomized challenges that follow a cohesive arc of some sort - Interpersonal, dramatic decisions, as well as procedural challenges to put a character to the test - An evolving artifact which charts the journey of the player, physical or digital (map, journal, drawings, whatever) - Unexpected outcomes based on procedural generation that follow the fiction I envision something like a classic journey with something at stake that is a mix of material and conceptual, similar to the journey of the Ringbearer in Lord of the Rings. While that journey has a material goal (throw a piece of jewelry into a thing to prevent a big existential threat) it also has the subtext of the journey and loss of innocence and never truly being able to return to the way things were before. In that story, you could model the journey, the interactions and choices, as well as the betrayals and procedural stuff. I'd totally want to have something like some kind of mental state matrix that influences the way you want things to go and the way you say them, but represents a certain loss of control that leads to more interesting situations. With something like this you can do resource management (material and conceptual resources, like 'food', but also 'fear' or 'innocence') with some kind of objective in mind. Maybe the objective itself is actually optional - perhaps something about a journey of a retired hero who goes out to explore the world for one last ride. Along the way, they meet people, save some people, don't save other people, and fail to save even more people for a melancholy progression until they're ready to lay down their blade and armor for the final time. Task and procedural mechanics could be adapted from almost any system that throws dice. The resource management portion I think ought to be pulled from a boardgame or some such, and provide details on the variety which one encounters in this kind of game. There was a discussion elsewhere of cards being used as play aids - cards which represent the direction a narrative is taking or a meta-narrative is modifying could be particularly interesting here. There would then need to be at least three major components to help with this: - Player character sheet of some kind that has resources which can fluctuate and determine player agency - Dramatic deck of people with a similar kind of layered matrix, though they might be hidden and randomized in some way - Procedural deck of challenges big and small that fit the specific theme you're going for I wonder if maybe instead of a solo RPG you actually could do a "journal-exchanging" RPG in this way. One person structures the narrative for the other, and every game turn, they exchange their resolution notes but they are 'playing' the GM for the other using a framework noted above? I dunno, threads are for ideas that may or may not have sea legs, so maybe that's one of them!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2021 08:14
|
|
|
Ooh, semantical usage of the word "play". Well, I mean play in a broader game context is just being able to experiment and do something for a recreational thing, so if we treat "play" in a very stringent way which is "the interaction for mostly fun of a group of systems which may or may not have a physical component but always has one or more conceptual components" then yeah, Raph Koster it up with A Theory of Fun. I think if you're intending for a solo RPG to be a thing which emulates a multiplayer RPG, the important thing is to figure out how to provide an appropriate surrogate for the other players, and to look at the things which work well in board games, video games, and elsewhere to help clue into it. I would call How to Host A Dungeon great fun but it does mostly just follow die result after die result and there is no character sheet. Perhaps you need a book of oracles sufficiently large, like in Tales of Arabian Nights, which present all manner of odd challenges that can have different outcomes based on the character you're playing. Then again, it all rolls back up to who is defining what a solo RPG is, since if it's not a board game, but it's more something something than just a journaling thing, then what's that space supposed to look like, or what would make it interesting to look like?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2021 08:32
|
|
|
I finally got around to picking up a fee solo journaling games but I suspect I may need to build a bit of a ritual habit for playing them. I reviewed my old notes in the thread and part of it is these days I am usually short on time or have used a lot of my journaling and gaming energy reflecting and running stuff for other people. In the holiday stretch around here I suspect that I will have a little more bandwidth to try out stuff like Jason Morningstar’s “Skeletons” and Thousand Year Old Vampire, which is surprisingly expensive but lovingly printed and bound. Worth the price of admission.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2023 07:11
|
|