Renfield (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
darchildre) wrote2020-05-16 06:55 pm
darchildre) wrote2020-05-16 06:55 pm
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So, hey, I am playing solo D&D again. I'm really enjoying my online game with Katie and Sean, but it's also nice to have something that's a) entirely to my taste in all possible ways and b) I can pick up and play whenever I want, rather than worrying about scheduling.
The last time I did solo D&D, I was playing through official modules. This time, I'm doing an original story using a GM emulator, which is a fancy way of saying "I roll on a series of tables to randomly select story elements so that I can be surprised by what happens." I'm using The Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and finding that it works really well. It has the expected random encounter tables and tables to build dungeons and whatever, but it also has an oracle mechanic that's working really well for me. The oracle is a way to ask questions about the story or the environment and get potentially unexpected answers. So say my PC is trying to climb a tower. I can ask "Is there a ladder around?" and roll a d20. If I get a 1-6, the answer is no. If I get a 13-20, the answer is yes. And between that is "maybe", which is "yes and" and "no but". So I get a maybe and okay, there's not a ladder, but the tower has ivy on it that might hold my character's weight. And I can go from there.
It also has a nice thing where there's a table that's just 500 different verbs. So if I'm stuck on where to go next, I can roll on that, get a few words, and figure out how they relate to the story. That's how I started the adventure, in fact. I rolled for three words and got "dress", "seize", and "threaten". So I decided that my character had been hired to transport a valuable magical cloak to its new owner, got robbed and had the cloak stolen, and then had to retrieve it. Which eventually led to a dungeon crawl to stop a group of cultists from mass producing evil magic cloaks.
I may end up futzing with the combat balance a bit - the way the book deals with the fact that you are only running one or two PCs by using weaker monsters, so the hardest thing my level one character fought in today's game was 1 CR 1/4 creature. That's fine, and makes something like a giant fire beetle or something an actual threat, which is kinda cool, but I do want access to more interesting monsters faster. I could have started at a higher level, I suppose. Maybe next time. I am cutting the amount of XP I need to advance in half and I think I'll keep that going forward.
But anyway, it is super fun. I played for three hours this afternoon and had a blast.
The last time I did solo D&D, I was playing through official modules. This time, I'm doing an original story using a GM emulator, which is a fancy way of saying "I roll on a series of tables to randomly select story elements so that I can be surprised by what happens." I'm using The Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and finding that it works really well. It has the expected random encounter tables and tables to build dungeons and whatever, but it also has an oracle mechanic that's working really well for me. The oracle is a way to ask questions about the story or the environment and get potentially unexpected answers. So say my PC is trying to climb a tower. I can ask "Is there a ladder around?" and roll a d20. If I get a 1-6, the answer is no. If I get a 13-20, the answer is yes. And between that is "maybe", which is "yes and" and "no but". So I get a maybe and okay, there's not a ladder, but the tower has ivy on it that might hold my character's weight. And I can go from there.
It also has a nice thing where there's a table that's just 500 different verbs. So if I'm stuck on where to go next, I can roll on that, get a few words, and figure out how they relate to the story. That's how I started the adventure, in fact. I rolled for three words and got "dress", "seize", and "threaten". So I decided that my character had been hired to transport a valuable magical cloak to its new owner, got robbed and had the cloak stolen, and then had to retrieve it. Which eventually led to a dungeon crawl to stop a group of cultists from mass producing evil magic cloaks.
I may end up futzing with the combat balance a bit - the way the book deals with the fact that you are only running one or two PCs by using weaker monsters, so the hardest thing my level one character fought in today's game was 1 CR 1/4 creature. That's fine, and makes something like a giant fire beetle or something an actual threat, which is kinda cool, but I do want access to more interesting monsters faster. I could have started at a higher level, I suppose. Maybe next time. I am cutting the amount of XP I need to advance in half and I think I'll keep that going forward.
But anyway, it is super fun. I played for three hours this afternoon and had a blast.