Hey kid - you wanna play a solo roleplaying game?

[darchildre]

khronos_keeper asked me about solo rpgs in the comments to my last post about my solo D&D game and my reply spiraled wildly out of control, so now it’s a whole (ridiculously long) post of its own.


So. I love playing table top rpgs. But there can be a lot of barriers to finding and playing a game with other people, and there are a lot of advantages to playing solo. My games are always tailored exactly to my preferences. I can play whenever I want for as long as I want, without navigating someone else’s schedule. I don’t ever have to deal with That One Guy who’s decided that his job is to be as obnoxious as possible and annoy everyone else at the table. Et cetera.

I’d been interested in the idea of solo gaming for a long time, but only started really getting into it in 2020, for Obvious Reasons. Now it’s become one of my favorite hobbies. I still love collaborative gaming, but solo gaming has a special place in my heart, so I’d like to give people a little primer on some good ways to get started.

What to Play

There’s, basically, three ways to play rpgs solo. First, you can play a game designed from the beginning to accommodate solo play. There are a surprising number of them out there - you can find a lot on itch.io or drivethrurpg.com. In my experience, there are two basic types of designed-for-solo games.

The first is journaling rpgs. These are games where you roll dice (or use some other kind of randomizing element, like a deck of cards) to generate writing prompts and, essentially, keep an in-character journal. A lot of these tend to be, as you’d imagine, quiet and introspective games, though there are versions of this that try to involve more tension*. My favorite journaling game I’ve played is Journey, but there are a bunch of good ones out there. I also like Alone Among the Stars and The Adventurer, and I hear really good things about Thousand Year Old Vampire.

The second kind of designed-for-solo game is the more traditional kind of rpg - you have a character sheet, you’ve got stats, your character has adventures. The game is just designed so that you don’t need a GM. There are fewer of these than there are journaling rpgs, so I’m basically just going to talk about Ironsworn, because that is the one I know and love.

Oh my god, you guys, I love Ironsworn so much. It - and the follow up, Starforged, which is Ironsworn but better and in space** - are probably my favorite rpgs I’ve ever played. Character creation is easy and can be done in five minutes, no math required. Enemies and npcs don’t have numerical stats, so you’re free to create them on the fly as they come up in play. The process of playing is so smooth and easy, and the book walks you through how to use its oracle tables to generate the story as you go. It is a beautiful piece of work. The default setting (Norse-flavored low-magic fantasy) is fun, but it’s extremely easy to use Ironsworn in basically any setting you want - I’ve seen hacks for Star Wars Ironsworn, cyberpunk Ironsworn, Weird West Ironsworn, etc. My current game is set in 1930’s Universal Horror Film land and I barely had to adjust the game at all. It’s great. The pdf version is free on the website, so you can try it without spending any money. If you like the game and do want to spend money, the Delve supplement is totally worth it. Please play Ironsworn.


The second way to play solo rpgs is with gamebooks. Gamebooks are generally written as modules for a particular game - most of the ones I’m familiar with are written for D&D 5e - and are basically, Choose Your Own Adventure books with dice and a character sheet. You make a character, and read the through the book, rolling when prompted. Your rolls and other decisions you make determine what part of the text you read next. Sometimes they also come with maps for combat encounters.

I will admit, I’m not a huge fan of gamebook-style play. It’s probably the method that requires the least work, since all of the GM-side tasks are handled by the text, but it doesn’t have the flexibility to allow for the kind of character stuff that I enjoy. However, it’s a legit way to play solo, and if you think you’d enjoy it, you should totally check it out. I’ve seen The Death Knight’s Squire and its sequels recommended highly, as well as Eight Petals Argent. I think there are also a lot of gamebooks put out for Tunnels and Trolls? I haven’t played any of them.

You should be aware that if you come across someone talking about a solo module for D&D, it is pretty much always going to be gamebook style.


The third way to play solo is by playing a game designed for collaborative play by yourself. I’ve mostly done this with D&D 5e, so that’s what I’m going to talk about, but the basic principles should work with a lot of collaborative GM-led rpgs. To make this work, you need a GM emulator - a way of simulating a GM by rolling dice.

The role of a GM emulator is to answer questions you have about the game world and introduce randomness to the story. There are a lot of GM emulators out there and they vary in complexity. I hear a lot of good things about Mythic but I have to admit that I have skimmed the book and found it really confusing, so I don’t use it. (I like a lot of other products by the same designer, though, which I’ll talk about later, so I should probably give it another chance.) I mostly use this***, which is an emulator I made for myself as a refinement of the Tiny Solitary Soldier system. MUNE and the One Page Solo Engine are also good, relatively simple options.

Most of these emulators work along basically the same lines: you narrate what your character is doing until you reach a point where you would need more information. You then ask a question about the thing you need more information about, and roll. The tables in your emulator answer the question, you interpret that answer, and continue playing until the next question. Most emulators also have a mechanism for adding new and unexpected twists to whatever’s happening.

Playing D&D solo requires a good bit more prep work than the other methods above, since D&D is so heavy on stats and encounter balance. I’ll generally use some of the tools I’ll mention further on to build the skeleton of an adventure before I play, sketching out vague outlines of places/people my characters might encounter and making lists of monsters that are appropriate to their level and the location. This means that I often end up knowing more than my characters do, but the randomness added by the GM emulator means that I can still be surprised.



How to Play

Something that frustrated me when I first started getting into solo games was the lack of details as to exactly how people were doing it. Of course, that’s because the great thing about solo gaming is that you do it the way that works best for you - no one else’s preferences matter. But, in case you are like me and like concrete examples, I’m going to talk a little about the details of how I play. I’m also going to talk specifically about the tools and methods I use to adjust D&D 5e for solo play, since D&D is Extremely Popular and is thus the game I play that people are probably most familiar with.

So, these are my preferences: I like to play with physical dice (because I love having pretty dice) and a paper character sheet. However, I often play at a small table that doesn’t allow for maps or minis, so I play Theater of the Mind style when it comes to combat. I generally narrate aloud as I go but I like to record my games (so that I remember details of the storyline later) and also I enjoy writing longhand with my fountain pens, so I take notes while I play. I usually have a separate notebook for each game, because I buy too many notebooks, so I might as well use them. My games tend to be episodic - self contained adventures that are connected by periods of downtime. This allows me to put down a certain game between adventures and pick it up seamlessly later.

It took me some trial and error to work out all of that. I’ve tried playing with maps and minis and discovered that I felt cramped and it didn’t do a lot for me. I recorded my first solo D&D in a google doc and realized that the infinite space led to me trying to write it up like it was a novel and then I’d get bogged down tweaking my writing style. It’s okay to try playing one way, discover it doesn’t work, and then try something else.

Here’s how I mechanically adjust D&D for solo play:

• I always have 2 PCs. This is both for encounter balance purposes and so that I can have character interactions, because even in a solo game, I want the roleplay aspect.
  
  
• My PCs get the maximum possible hit points every time they level, rather than rolling. They also get the maximum possible benefit from any healing effects, like potions, rolling hitdice during a short rest, or healing magic.
  
  
• I build encounters as though I were building them for a standard party one level below my characters. So if my 2 PCs are level 5, they’re going to be fighting monsters that are CR4 or below.
  
  
• Enemies do the average damage listed in the Monster Manual, rather than rolling, and cannot crit.
  
  
• I am, personally, not interested in my characters dying, so they don’t. Reaching 0 HP has narrative consequences - I can always find something interestingly awful to happen to my characters - but dying is boring.
  
  
• When I roll a d20 in combat (and sometimes in other situations), I also roll an extra d6. If that die comes up a 6, I add a twist to the narrative. If I otherwise succeeded at whatever I was rolling to do, the twist is in my character’s favor. If I failed, the twist goes against my character somehow.
  

These adjustments were mostly synthesized from The Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and DM Yourself, which are both excellent resources for playing solo D&D. They also contain a lot of other really useful information and ideas. Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox has a lot of really useful tables for generating dungeons or other environments - the city generator in Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox 2 is amazing. And DM Yourself has a lot of useful tips on how to play D&D modules solo, which is great if you want to play through Curse of Strahd but don’t currently have a gaming group. (You can also find a lot of good info about adjusting games for solo play in the r/solo_roleplaying subreddit.)


My current adventure has gone like this: My spooky warlock and his paladin buddy are in the city of Mossgarde. (I’ve used the city generator mentioned above to create some tables of things they might find there.) I decide that they’re going to explore the city, so I use the street-by-street generator in the Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox 2 and my GM emulator to see what they encounter. They run into someone who’s had some kind of weird monster incursion in their basement, so my boys offer to investigate. This looks like a dungeon crawl to me, so I pause and decide what the theme of this underground tunnel system is going to be.

I like to build a dungeon crawl around what I think of as a signature enemy - this is the main enemy type that’s going to be found in this location. Then I can build out with related monsters and hazards, and flavor the environment around them. My PCs are currently level 3, which means that the signature enemy - who will likely be the capstone encounter of the dungeon - shouldn’t be higher than a CR2. I google CR2 monsters and am drawn to the Vegepygmy Chief, because they are mold people and that’s amazing. So now I have an underground tunnel system full of mold people. I can also include dangerous fungus and mold-based hazards - maybe a few oozes, to continue the vaguely uncomfortable slimy feel. That sounds extremely cool.

At this point, I have a list of enemies and hazards that my PCs could encounter that I think would be fun. But I don’t want to map the dungeon ahead of time - I want to be surprised. So I make a location table (using a tool I’ll talk about later) that will allow me to randomly generate the tunnel system as I go. I then roll on that table to set up the entrance to the tunnels and continue play from there.


As you can see, playing D&D solo means that I’m in a hybrid GM-player role most of the time, and that I have a good bit of knowledge that my characters don’t. I enjoy doing the kind of dungeon planning I talk about above - I’m very excited about the vegepygmies - but if you hate that sort of thing, there are ways around it. The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox has tables of monsters listed by CR and environment, for example, so you could randomly generate your monster encounters rather than planning them ahead of time. The level of prep required depends on your preferences.


A Few Other Useful Tools

These are the two resources I probably use the most when planning and playing solo rpgs. They’re both by the creator of Mythic and are the reason I keeping thinking I should give Mythic another look.

The Adventure Crafter allows you to generate an outline of your adventure, by rolling on a big table of different story tropes. There are a bunch of ways you can use this, but I’ll generally roll a Turning Point (a collection of 5 story tropes, with associated characters and plotlines) and let that shape the direction the story moves. Then I’ll play till I feel I’ve exhausted those story tropes and roll a new Turning Point. This keeps me from getting stuck on the question of what happens next in the story, without completely prescribing events. I find it really useful.

The Location Crafter is a method for randomly generating a location as your characters explore it. You make lists of locations, encounters, and objects that your characters might find, and then make them into a table you can roll on. This mixes up all the elements you listed and allows you to be surprised. There’s also a mechanism for making sure that you don’t run into the really cool stuff in the first chamber of your dungeon (or whatever) so that you can still have a feeling of narrative build. The instructions have you include random elements that aren’t in your original list for further surprise possibilities. I also always try to include one item - usually some kind of evocative phrase - that I don’t know what it means. That gives me something completely unexpected to discover through play.


Tips for Solo Play

Okay, this is the section where I talk about a few ideas I’ve had or read about that have helped me figure out how to make solo play work best for me:

• A solo game is entirely yours. It is a space to play without taking anyone else’s preferences into account. All of my games are extremely indulgent in one way or another - maybe they’re basically fanfic, or I’ve decided that all of the worldbuilding is based entirely on Stuff I Think Is Extremely Rad, or they frequently get interrupted by me daydreaming about the romance between the two PCs. If it’s something you’d enjoy but would feel weird about doing in a game with other people, stick it in a solo campaign.
  
  
• Relatedly, there shouldn’t be anything in a solo game that you don’t enjoy. If there’s some part of the game you’re playing that you find boring, skip that bit.
  
  
• A game session can be as long as you want. Sometimes I play for several hours. Sometimes I play for 15 minutes before deciding that I'm done for now. Both are good.
  
  
• If the rules don’t work for you, change them. Everyone gets to have house rules.
  
  
• Cheat if you want to. One of the things I love about Starforged is that it is codified in the rules that if you roll something and absolutely hate it, you can reroll with no penalties. Do that. If you rolled something and it’s boring or depressing or you just want something else to happen, reroll. Or better yet, just decide that the thing you want to happen does. It’s not like you’re getting a grade.
  
  
• Sometimes, the most interesting thing that can happen is that your characters fail.
  
  
• Take advantage of your natural human pattern-finding tendencies. If something shows up more than once and you start thinking, "Maybe those things are related" - let them be related. This can make it seem like you solved a mystery or discovered a secret, even though what really happened is that you coincidentally rolled the same thing twice. I have more than once yelled "Holy shit!" at my dice and felt like I had a major revelation because humans love finding patterns in random events.
  
  
• Lean into whatever mechanism you have for adding twists. Let them reveal secrets or change the narrative in bonkers ways. If your game takes a sharp left turn because you rolled something weird, that’s probably going to turn out to be awesome.
  
  
• When I have a game I'm invested in, I do a lot of what I think of as "passive play". For me, this means all the thinking I do about the game that doesn't involve sitting down and rolling dice. It might be coming up with worldbuilding details or character backstories; it might be replaying through a scene I worked out the mechanical details of with the dice and fleshing out the rp aspects; it might be deciding what happens in the downtime between adventures. This both lets me to continue playing when I don't have the opportunity to actually get out my dice and notebook and also can reinvigorate an adventure that's started to feel stale.

This got so absurdly long, oh my god, I’m so sorry. I hope that some of you maybe find it useful and consider trying some solo games. If you have any questions or are confused about anything, please feel free to ask - clearly I am more that happy to ramble for endless pages about solo rpgs. 8P









*There’s a whole family of journaling games under the Wretched & Alone umbrella that are apparently very tense - I haven’t played any of those because they require a jenga tower and I don’t have one.

**Starforged isn’t out yet, but you can still pledge as a late backer on Kickstarter and get access to the nearly completed and totally playable preview version. It’s extremely good.

***The secret fourth way of playing solo rpgs is to play using nothing but the GM emulator. This is the other thing I do with my own emulator and it works pretty well for an easy, play-anywhere, rules-light game.

Comments

[khronos_keeper]

This is so good! This is so so good! Thank you SO much for writing up this whole thing, I am actually now really excited about setting up a solo game or two. Your passion for this is really infectious, but also it makes it way less daunting and a lot more fun. (Also the fact that you play with The Math Rocks gives me a reason to buy some of my own haha.)

I'm gonna keep this up and re-read it a few more times to decide where I wanna start but I'm happy to have found something to try on a down day or a weekend. :) Thank you so much again!

[darchildre]

Hurrah! I'm so glad you found this helpful - I really enjoyed writing it. I hope you have a great time with your own games.

And you should definitely buy some dice. Everyone needs dice. (I recently bought myself a new set that have tiny ducks inside them and they make me absurdly happy every time I think about them.)

[sixbeforelunch]

This is awesome! I somehow missed it when you posted it back in February but then I saw your most recent post about solo RPG playing and I clicked on your rpg tag because I was curious about the idea and I found it. I'm so glad I did. I've always been curious about playing table top RPGs, but there is no one in my meatspace social group that is the least but interested and I don't have the time or energy to seek out a game group. I've always thought it would be fun to play alone, but I never had any idea how. So this is a fantastic guide.

Question: how does one get Starforged? It sounds like a good way for me to get an idea if Solo RPGs work for me, but it looks like the Kickstarter has ended. I'm assuming I just have to wait now for it to go on sale?

[darchildre]

Hooray! I hope this guide is helpful for you.

Unfortunately, it looks like you have fallen into the small gap between being able to be a late Kickstarter backer and the actual release of Starforged. But! From what the creator has said, it looks like the digital edition will like be out this month, or early next month, so it shouldn't be too long a wait. In the mean time, I would recommend taking a look at Ironsworn, since the mechanics are pretty similar and the pdf is free.

[darchildre]

A month later and the digital version of Starforged is now available for purchase!

[sixbeforelunch]

Ooo, thank you! I have been looking over the Ironsworn stuff and it seems cool but I've always gravitated more toward space stories, so I think Starforged will work better for me.

I need to get some dice...