Playing games takes time. Solo Play with RPGs and other tabletop can shave some of the time in principle, but in practice there are all sorts of ways that the sharing can dramatically increase time.
Perhaps the most shocking, yet expected, twist of solo roleplaying is how much time people spend time sharing it. *Points vigorously at this very blog*
The "shocking" comes from the fact that it is a hobby largely predicated on the notion that you make your own rules, your own time, and play for your own specific enjoyment removed from the needs/cares of others.
The "expected" is simply because roleplaying as a hobby grew out of the shared experience and I would be surprised if a majority of solo players did not first engage with the hobby in some sort of social context [possibly excluding those primarily or entirely through gamebooks, etc].
It is also expected because a lot of us learn about solo playing from watching other people solo play. We found a Youtube channel. Or a blog. Maybe we had heard of solo play outside this, or naturally stumbled into it, but is very common for some one to go "How to Mythic?" and then spend hours watching some one narrating a ranger tripping over rocks.
This fact does cause some odd wrinkles for gamers like me, and I figured I'd try and work out some ideas while possibly giving some practical advice.
Traditional Time Sink in RPGs
For the classic RPG, especially prior to the virtual tabletop boon brought about by COVID, you tended to spend a lot of time at a roleplaying session:
- You had something like 3-8+ hours of the actual play, of which some was actually play and a lot was Derrick telling you about what happened at school.
- The {Game- | Dungeon- | Lore- | etc-} {-Master | -Teller | -Keeper | -etc} would spend a similar, sometimes greater, amount of time preparing the adventure for the session.
- Folks have to buy, download, print out, and otherwise gather the books and other source materials.
- All the time spent painting miniatures, printing maps, and personalizing character sheets [Derrick is a doodler].
- The time spent getting to the venue for everyone involved, generally being everyone but whichever person's house you were at...
- Time spent buying snacks. Not those snacks, though, Derrick can't stand the smell of those snacks.
- Time spent reading rulebooks (hah!) or watching extended media to get inspiration.
- Time spent during bio-breaks and eating cookies after a session, etc.
- All the time communicating scheduling or rules lawyering between sessions.
- Having to move everything last minute because now Derrick can't meet unless we can shove everything to his house.
Derrick.
In other words, a 3-8 hour session was more like a 6-16 hour session, all told.
Virtual/Online play reduced some of the time, but even then setting aside 4 hours of your Saturday night likely involves at least 6 hours of blocked off time for a lot of us to get ready and all that.
Presumed Time Sink in Solo Roleplaying
In principle, solo roleplaying "fixes" some of this lost time. You schedule when you want and sessions can be more variable in length. Unless you live in a very noisy apartment with a big family (etc), you probably don't have to spend time going anywhere just to play. Debriefing and bio-breaks are down to your own schedule or possibly non-existent for shorter sessions.
You can buy as many snacks as you want or just whatever you have in your junk food drawer.
Absolutely none of Derrick's shenanigans.
This is an idealized take, though. In reality, solo roleplaying has quite a few snags: "What the heck does 65 Take 44 Leadership mean in this context?" as you stare into space for 10 straight minutes.
And stuff like gathering the books, painting miniatures, reading over the rules: all that is still there. At least early on in the campaign.
Though as you go on, you realize you can just wing a whole lot of things.
Increased Time Sink Due to Sharing Our Play
What if you want to share those sessions with others, though? What does that start to look like? What sort of time sink starts to eat back into the hobby? Not all of these apply, but here are some considerations:
- Time spent upkeeping or participating on a blog or Discord server or Substack or Youtube channel type medium so you can actually share them.
- Time spent formatting stuff in a way that is at least passably readable or watchable. It is not unusual to spend as much time editing/formatting the session as actually playing it.
- Time spent rereading | rewatching previous stuff to make sure your formatting is identical [this gets easier over time, for sure].
- More time spent going a step further to make it enjoyable for your audience and, assuming you care about such things, to make your content something people want to keep reading | enjoying over all the other solo play channels | blogs | threads out there.
- Time spent making art or at least finding it. Maps. Character arts. Other incidental art. Add in music. Adding flair.
- (Hopefully) time spent citing and documenting any art used so you are not stealing someone else's content.
- (Probably) time spent organizing the sessions in a way that it is easy to find them again.
- (Definitely) increased time spent checking the rules and such since the public nature of the sharing means more people are there to get judgy when it goes wrong.
- Time spent engaging with the audience if there are comments or other feedback methods.
- (Likely, if you care to try and become a content creator,) time spent building up a brand, promoting your stuff, and sharing it.
- (If you go for it) all the time spent actually engaging with the back-end of monetization and Patreons and the like.
Just sitting down to play for yourself and without sharing means you can grab a couple of books, a couple pieces of scratch paper, a pencil, a couple of oracles, a couple pieces of documentation {map, character sheet, etc} and a couple of dice and go until you are tired of playing it.
When you want to share it, then you have to figure out ways to share those character sheets, to format those notes, to upload the maps, and to convey the session log. It can range anywhere from fairly raw notes to fairly developed fiction (possibly without actual gameplay notes) and whichever side you take there will be people who would prefer the other.
Assuming you are actually monetizing anything, you likely need camera angles and branding and background music and all that.
My Personal Experience
When I first started getting into more or less "true solo roleplaying," my notes were scattered nonsense that did the job for the session but often did not even really do a great job of being readable by me. At the time, every foray was kind of a brief-exploration-in-haste sort of deal, largely backed by products all about forming the session for you in some way.
By the time I started integrating Mythic and was getting into the campaign that became Ick + Humb, I had improved my notes to being largely readable to myself. As they developed over the next few months, they were still heavily subject to the vagaries of my own moods. Sometimes with dialogue, sometimes not. Sometimes with a map, sometimes with only a faint hint of wayfinding. Sometimes with dice rolls recorded precisely, sometimes with only a couple of words to sum up the results.
It worked, but there were times I was getting frustrated because looking up notes later would take some effort. At the same time, it was also frustrating because the more notes I took the more time I was spent creating the artifact versus playing.
I learned to love the creation of the artifact. Truly love it. I was not yet ready for it at that moment, though.
Eventually, a somewhat paradoxical thing occurred. I wanted to melt down the artifact to the basics: just dice rolls and a few key words. A few phrases instead of paragraphs. This was the very basis of The Bloody Hands campaign. A game I could play with a couple of sheets of sources, notes that I could type on my phone in Google Keep, and just a couple of oracles (a dice and card app on my phone at one point).
Only, with such a relatively bare document as the early playnotes, I started to become interested in a new layer to the artifact: the recap. Essentially, because I had such scant notes I took the leap towards making a blog where I could expand upon my notes, sometimes days after I had played the session and relatively irregularly.
And that worked for me, broadly, at least for a while. I would play external to the blog but then would switch gears to try and tell a story out of the notes. Fill in gaps, that kind of thing.
Only, every once in a while, I would try and play more "in the blog." Meaning the blog was both the primary note-taking and note-sharing device. I started having asides where I would spend a little bit of time building up some of the elements of the scene before playing it so I had some assumptions baked in. I played at different ways of sharing dice and oracle results. I would have posts with lots of text followed by posts with purposefully restrained amount of text.
I would go back and forth between posts. Sometimes frustrated by the artifact-making, sometimes distraught at the lack of connection to my story by cutting out the artifact-making. The "Doug Notes" at the bottom was full of strange apologies (to whom?!) and apologetics about whichever style I was playing at that exact moment. Full of frustrations...
...until The GLOW effectively changed everything. It was the first concentrated effort to build up a format that was relatively audience-readable combined with very Doug-readable and it began to blend dice rolls, prep, and other elements directly into the flow of the piece.
After that, the blog became the de facto note-keeping of my entire solo play hobby.
By the time The Four Generals showed up, there are distinct photo/art styles per campaign, a series of HTML elements that have been standardized, different writing styles, an a lot of documentation in a predictable manner. All written out more or less live as I play, with only minor amounts of editing needed after the effect.
AND YET, this past week, I took a break from that and with De Havikmannen went almost back to the very roots of my early blog days and pre-blog format. Only with art and characters and notes more baked in, and with more readable writing.
WHY? Is this a victory for the anti-creative-writing critics of solo play? Nah.
My "standard style" posts kick absolute ass. Characters like Eustace Delmont and Johnny Blue are more developed than most characters I've had in traditional tabletop games. I absolutely adore my standard style posts with all the complex rules, extra art, writing tricks, and all that.
The real reason is simply this: solo roleplaying, even shared solo roleplaying, offers an almost unprecedented opportunity in the hobby for meet you where you are at on a session-per-session basis.
In other words, I am doing it because I can do it and still manage to write something that is in potential enjoyable to others while remaining absolutely a blast to play.
Oh, and because it saves a lot of time. Sometimes needing 2-3 hours to play out a couple of scenes is not where I am at and I need something else to fill in those moments. I'm not quite there right this second, for instance.
The equivalent to 1 hour spent playing De Havikmannen would take at least 2 hours for The GLOW. Heck, maybe 3 hours. My standard posts regularly take 5-6 hours, total.
It's a number of factors from reduced art, reduced complexity of art, a simpler writing style, and much less "post-processing" [pun? sure...I think so].
It also has the bonus of having a quicker, more immediate interaction with my own headspace leading to much more immediate style gameplay. The longer stuff sometimes takes time to untangle very complex mysteries. The quicker style I'm trying back out is much more about "Say something, then hope it makes sense at the end" and it works.
Hopefully.
The balance I am working on is still feeling engaged with my own content without dwelling upon it.
Advice about Handling the Time Sink of Shared Solo Play
Here are a few pieces of advice based on my own journey/exploration about handling the time sinks of sharing your solo play. These are not necessarily applicable if you are all-in on wanting to build up a brand/franchise and make money from it. That's a whole other beast and I hope you find something that works for you.
Start by Playing by Yourself
Before you click "share," just spend a few sessions (I'd say at least a dozen, but it depends) playing with no intent on sharing anything. Get absolutely used to actually playing the game and find a flavor of note-taking that works for you.
I suspect, but have nothing like data to back this up, that because it is relatively common to come into solo play based on seeing other people engage with solo playing then it is at least semi-frequent that people get into the hobby thinking in terms of sharing their experiences from the start.
"Influencer" is a major career aspiration, and that's across the board.
Bounce Around Different Styles of Sharing
Try out different styles in that stage and even as you start sharing stuff.
Add things in, take things away. There's no right way to engage with solo play, but there is something like a few right ways to share engaging content.
Play at finding the balance that does the latter but gives you some freedom of the former.
Try to develop at lease a couple of different structures so you can have different amounts of overhead.
Two-Weeks of Content as Backlog
Before you start sharing, consider building up about two weeks of backlog.
Why? Because having that buffer makes it a bit easier to to take time and have variable days.
Map Out the Time Spent on Various [non-game] Tasks
As you are making art and syncing background music or uploading documents, keep rough track of how much time you are spending doing these non-game tasks.
If you find yourself running out of time-space to actually get things done, ask yourself which of these tasks you could cut-down or cut-out to hit your time goals.
Make Things You Enjoy to Read/Watch
When you get into the frustrations of making content to share with the world, the very first — and for a lot of us, the absolutely only true — concern is whether or not we enjoy it.
The more time you spent modifying your content for the [presumed] enjoyment of others, the more time you will "lose" from the rawness of your creation.
This does backfire in cases where we have some grand vision that is pretty complicated, but the more you stay in the zone the easier it is to pump out more content to enjoy.
Templates, Templates, Templates
Finally, as you work out the elements of these other pieces of advice, start building up templates for your posts/etc. Being able to copy-and-paste in elements or fill out forms and hit "submit" will cut a lot of the fiddly out.