Category: Other Posts

Reconsidering Fairness in Solo RPGS: the tl;dr version

When you are playing a solo RPG all the basic assumptions of fairness ultimately come down to your own sense of fun.

When in doubt, play to your solo “table” as you want the table to play to you: an empowering and interesting story where you get to make the decision about what those terms mean. Ask yourself what you would do if you were running this campaign for someone else, what might you do to make their story better. Then do that for yourself. Even if that means ignoring some rules or adding some details not covered in the book.

Spend all the time mapping if you want. All the time making potions. All the time flying a space ship. Or run a tight dungeon crawl without distraction. The game’s tempo is your tempo. A lot of action limits and time balance are mostly there to stop you from hogging the spotlight. You are the spotlight now.

There is no cheating in the classic sense because the primary issue of cheating in group play is about stealing joy and focus from other players.

Many group sessions involve talking out bad luck and offering chances to overcome it: a team takes a downed character to be healed, the GM gives clues to a deadly trap, an NPC gets inserted to help the characters. Group play often focuses on how to overcome conflict as a team. This can be difficult when it is just you so move away from the assumption that what is fair in one context must fair in another.

An RPG’s main goal as a set of rules and concepts is to enable roughly equal fun for everyone at the table and when you are the only one at the table then that changes the dynamic greatly. Metagaming becomes the norm. Spoiling the surprise is unavoidable. Retcons make more sense when character and player knowledge comes into play (do not believe? play a single journaling game).

You are never wasting your own time as long as you are having fun.

If you are not having fun, you can walk away and no one’s feelings will be hurt. Unless it hurts your feelings and then maybe ask what you need to bridge that gap and give it to yourself.

Solo play is about how to overcome conflict when you are running both sides of the table. This is a deeply divergent play style and can not be judged by classical concepts.

You should never be harsher on yourself than you would be to other players. Unless you want to be. It is a bonus, not a penalty, always. It is up to you.

In solo play you have the space to give yourself grace.

Do not sweat the small things. When in the moment, it can be ok to ignore rules or concepts that bog down your play. You are doing it alone and it is easy to wear yourself down having to mentally run back and forth. Let the rules inform your game, shape your game, but also step back when you need.

You get to decide your comfort line.

If you get it wrong, you can go back and change it or just say “oops” and roll with it.

Tweak the rules. Get creative with the oracles. That is often the point of having rules and oracles.

You have the only and all deciding vote about how strict the rules are for you and there is no inherent punishment if you change your mind, retcon, or do anything that might disrupt a multi-player game. Solo play is an empowering experience. You do not have to rely on other people to tell how to play. Not even me and I am writing this.

You can take all the loot. Unless the loot makes it boring, then throw it away.

You and your character are the star. All other rules to balance narrative weight mean nothing when all the narrative weight is yourself. It is up to you keep them in or forget them entirely.

Spark your own joy.

The Sparking of a Series

I started out wanting to type out a quick blog post talking about some of my personal thoughts on fairness in solo play RPGs and then as I kept going and writing more and more notes to address many philosophical and mechanical considerations I kept summing up the important take aways as kind of a “tl;dr” [too long; didn’t read] aphorism-style version that itself was starting to get quite long. That’s what you see above.

Then I realized that outside of that quick summary, I had kind of a lot to say about the topic and it might be good to give myself space to go into more details.

So this is the kick off of my Reconsidering Fairness series. Sort of…one of the first articles I posted to this blog was STEAL THIS RULE: “DEATH IS PRIMARILY A NARRATIVE CONCEIT” and in all reality that is very much so in the vein of the rest of this so I’ll tag that one in.

For those interested, the series will go on to talk about things like table balance with a single character, the loss of metagaming, the added stress that losing prep and downtime causes, campaign balance, reasons behind different types of fairness, similarities and differences, rules breaking vs homebrewing, and so forth.

However, for now, the important take away of all of that will these concepts above. That’s the heart. The rest will be fluff. Sometimes with math. Also…I’m going to complain about how poorly they treated thieves.

My Favorite Solo Play Tool: Random Realities (revelations for the roving raconteur) by Cezar Capacle

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-07-16

In Oracles and Tools, Solo Advice, Solo Review

Let’s say you are playing through your solo play campaign and you ask any of these questions:

What’s been spray painted on the walls?
What’s the innkeeper like?
What are they offering us to take up this quest?
Is it raining?
What time is it?
What is the first thing my character notices about the forest?
What’s a fun plot twist that is happening?

There are stacks of books and decks and dice and other oracles that can answer these questions. I know. I have roughly 6 shelf-feet of space taken up, at least, of books and card decks and story dice that I draw from from time to time (not including snippets from other non-pure oracle resources that also help a lot, such as Vaults of Vaarn for a lot of my stranger stories).

But then there is Random Realities: Revelations for the Rousing Raconteur by Cezar Capacle that does a lot of the work of that entire shelf in a relative tiny zine smaller than most in-flight catalogs. It is absolutely portable but it generates so many answers so quickly it is frankly a minor miracle to use it.

Look at the same page as provided on the Itch page:

As you can see, and to quote (again) the product page: “The idea is very simple: roll d66 (2d6, using one number as decimals and the other as units) to determine your page, and instantly access a unique combination of results from 60+ tables (the dice results are in the bottom right corner, along with a d4 and a d12 as well). Don’t feel like rolling dice every time? Simply flip the zine to a random page if you have a print copy, or click on the dice to go to another page.”

You can get weather conditions, a random direction, a time of day. You get eight symbols that can be used to add details based on your interpretation – the owl might strike you as “wise” or “night” or a literal owl. You get a straight oracle yes/no answer. You get a prompt for a dice/fate type check. Lots of pairs.

While you might wonder how it is a big deal to have these “66 realities” keep in mind that each page is built the same way. Let’s take another page from the book (and yes, I will randomly roll to see what pops up):

Do you see how genius this is? That 1,1 and that 4,6 allows the solo player to mix and match a large number of details. To go back to my previous list of questions and using just these two pages we might end up with something like…

What’s been spray painted on the walls? “The graffiti reads The Bug and the paint is made to look like flames coming out of the text…” [combining the beetle icon with the campfire icon]
What’s the innkeeper like? “Morador Seryn is a indifferent but respectful man. His unkempt beard frames a sad face, driven by some unspoken guilt he never shares…” [combining name prompts with other bits from the People fields and adding in some ideas]
What are they offering us to take up this quest? “A magic sword that allows the wielder to cast Knock once per day…” [combining the “weapon” rewards with the lock icon…]
Is it raining? “No, it is sunny day…” [just grabbing one of the weather icons
What time is it? “Afternoon…” [grabbing one of the clocks]
What is the first thing my character notices about the forest? “The air is hot and stuffy, here, and there is a definite silence, like everything is holding its breath and waiting for you to act…” [blending one detail prompt with a place: mood prompt]
What’s a fun plot twist that is happening? “Your mentor has been using you to try and get to the queen!” [combining the plot twist from one with the crown icon from another]

That’s just two pages. There are 36 of these pages. What’s better is that the prompts and symbols in one section can often map over as you see it. The event prompt under Exploration can be used to inform a quest or give backstory to a character as needed. The scene complication can be used in a variety of ways.

So much time was spent in my campaigns just trying to figure what table I wanted to roll on that some sessions were basically unexpected prep to figure out enough details that next time around I might able to play…until another big question came up and I had to do it, again.

“What symbol do the cultists use to represent their god…well, I guess I could use this table about generating a new religion and broadly go from there…or maybe I just look at the shirt my daughter is wearing and make it spookier… evil looking horses it is!”

You can roll between 1 and 4 times (2 times being my sweet spot), here, and answer, to some degree (often a good amount), nearly any question you might have. The twelve-sided die might be interpreted as room size and the four-sided die might be the number of exits, for instance with location/scene/exploration/symbols all adding in details. Factions might build off prompts in the People field (or one of the others).

You will have to bridge some gaps and play the terms off of each other so that they fit into your context and focus, but my experience with this zine is that it hits the vibe the vast majority of the time while leaving me enough room that I am not having to convert or adapt too broadly.

I am a librarian. I am well used to telling people, “some resources are good for broad questions, others are better for specific questions,” and that can be true for oracles as well. Some folks do not want to know “Midnight – Resistance” when trying to figure out, “What do I see looking down the hall?” I get that. There is likely a 1d100 Things You See Looking Down the Hall in a Mid Level Dark Fantasy Campaign that would tell you exactly what you see (give or take five minutes of looking up stats or having to retcon the fact that absolutely no goblins was one of your starting rules).

However, a well done oracle that gives me just enough paint and canvas to make any picture I want is invaluable to me. I don’t have to dig through 50+ PDFs or go through 19 zines or pull out three hardback volumes of random tables to try and answer a five second question. If I get to a question that I want something a little more pre-packaged or something a little more detailed: I still have those books and I will still use them. For all those questions where I just want a quick snapshot, just want a quick symbol, just need a few words to help me get from “I enter the edge of the forest” and “the stream flows gently down the slope,” then this book and its simple like 36 sets of quick words and phrases and symbols is amazing. Even the bigger questions get easier and easier to answer the more I use this book.

I have used it in all of the campaigns that I have played on this blog at least a little and plan to use it more and more.

What’s even better, buying a copy grants you a zip of all the pages as PNGs which makes it possible to add three or four to your phone for an afternoon play AND it comes with a spreadsheet with all the possible options for those who want to make a script to pull just a few details from the list. It is about as user friendly and as widely applicable as a solo player could ever want.

You know…besides those folk who like to keep much broader types of oracles in their pockets:

“Flip a coin, if it is heads then this means ‘fire, up, creativity, left, the taste of copper, growth’ and if its tails it means ‘water, down, acceptance, right, the stock market, pickles.'”

I love those folk.

Steal This Rule: “Death is primarily a narrative conceit”

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-07-01

In Design Philosophy, Reconsidering Fairness in Solo RPGs, Solo Musings, Steal This Rule

Imagine this: you have spent some time kicking off your solo campaign. A few sessions in, you have backstory and lore. You have an entire chart of threads and characters. You have a hexcrawl with a dozen notes. And then, your second level wizard springs a trap and you roll on a table and get poison. The effects say, “Make a saving throw or die.” And you roll a critical fail. What happens next?

It is a fascinating aspect of the tabletop sphere that out of all the many genre hobbies – comic books, movies, novels, videogames, etc – that really only tabletop games, including role-playing games, consider the death of characters (or, in the case of many board/card games: depletion of a life point type pool of the player) to be a primary driver of narrative tempo.

In books and movies, death is side story reserved for plot twists and big reveals and mostly impacting side characters and NPC types. In videogames, while you have a dedicated fanbase of hardcore runs, you still have restarts and save points and resurrection deals and campfires so that the vast majority of lost run are generally, cognitively, the start of a new one that is very similar to the old one, immediately with little pause.

In RPGs, including solo play ones, death is an outsized driver for the way we conceive of story beats. A side effect of RPGs being rooted as modular expansions to war-gaming means folks sometimes ask how a relatively deadly game like Shadowdark can be more deadly[Reddit]. and you find cases of people trying to nerf things like fudge/fate/hero/luck tokens or resurrection because, for a certain mindset, death justifies all the AC and the HP and the XP and the STR and the GP. Characters overcome death to face higher level death down the road. Time is a flat circle.

Searching Google/etc can bring back a host of articles about how to handle character death ranging from “get over it” to “maybe don’t kill off characters possibly”. It is so baked into the baseline assumption that people who come up with reasonable responses to how to handle it (see Dealing with Character Death [Youtube Video] and How to Handle Character Death in Dungeons and Dragons [DnDBeyond]) still have to dance around whether or not there should be some mitigation for the inevitability of 0HP (usually now some -XHP) in a way not unlike how we would talk about grieving and dying in the real world.

Yet, outside of RPGs, these discussions are almost nonsensical. Batman and all the various Robins have clocked up multiple deaths, each. Many fantasy novels have characters fail battles but the outcome is retreat, imprisonment, or some other safety rope tossed in by the author. These stories are not necessarily about trivializing loss but more finding a way to make 0HP a narrative increase rather than a cease.

In a recent response to a r/solo_roleplaying thread about lowering lethality to avoid character death, I wrote:

In a lot of novels, movies, and so forth the main character “dying” is usually just a phase: they wash up face down on a beach, they get rescued by a new ally, they get imprisoned/have to escape, or they wake up in a hospital with no good explanation how they got there.

For this look at Steal This Rule! I want players, especially but not just solo roleplayers, to consider this:

Death is primarily a narrative concept…

That is taken verbatim from many of the micro-setting/scenarios for Tricube Tales ([DriveThruRPG], link goes to the one I’ve been posting on this blog: “Guardians of the Shadow Frontier”). When I first read this, I merely nodded. As I’ve played more and more, I realized how it allows the players (including the GM) to regain a piece of power that roleplaying games have traditionally removed from them: to decide what 0HP means. A few bad dice rolls (especially at early levels), a particularly unfair trap, an oracle going a bit awry, or just a side-effect of players not really actualizing the world in the way that characters might: all can lead to a death that was completely unseen or unexpected a scene prior.

That’s partially why I am suggesting to players to go with…

0HP can mean the character is unable to act, not necessarily dead.

Rather than threating 0HP as perma-death, treat it as a temporary inability to drive the story forward. A 0HP character is knocked out, captured, lost, injured, retreating (painfully), or just generally unable to engage in elements like combat or controlled mobility for a time. 0HP means the character is “at the mercy” of the game world at large (and the enemies that caused the HP loss).

What this means can be a number of things. In a truly-Solo game (one character only) this might involve a time-out of sorts as they regain some HP. During that time, the world goes on without them. In a party style game, the 0HP character might be out until healing spells or items can revive them. At least until the Total Party Wipe occurs.

Whether captured by enemies, rescued by an ally (or a new character), or generally forced to wake up weak and alone on a dungeon floor, the total loss of HP does not end the story but offers up new avenues to add to their story.

0HP can be a narrative increase rather than a cease

Who rescues them? What does being captured mean? Are they tied up? Tossed in a cage? Left in a pile of rubble? How do they overcome washing up on shore? How do they survive on a hostile planet after being marooned from a crash? If 0HP is a loss of ability to engage in the narrative then what story beats can you use to return that ability to the character?

Death is still an option if it suits the current story.

And all that is not to get rid of death entirely. The character is not newly immortal. This is not about cheating death but about making the story rich and meaningful. There are times when it it is all said and done that that 0HP = narrative shift means that 0HP = death (at least for a time). This is not about making death impossible but about taking one of the three de facto assumptions of RPGs (random rolls, character abilities, HP/death) and saying we can do something different with it.

Note that besides Tricube Tales, Fate has had this aspect (PUN!) in their SRD for some time [Fate-SRD]. And I think it is time that we apply it to other games to try and tell the kinds of stories we like without feeling like we are cheating.

Unless you really like 0HD = permadeath and then, as always, you do you, Boo.