After a semi-recent watch of the semi-recent movie, Freaky Tales, I began to contemplate what such a format might look like in a solo rpg. Then I started working out how I might combine this with Jason Morningstar's Fiasco. The dream is to create a short solo campaign centered around a cast of related characters [at least thinly] where each POV is largely unique but with some degree of interweaving the plot. Possible for a future experiment on this blog.
Category: Solo Musings
After months, it is finally return to the world of the Bleak + Pearl. What changes will I make (both in story and gameplay) and what sort of expectations do I have bringing this back into a more traditional "Doug Alone" format?
tl;dr version
Over the months of adapting my playstyle to the blog, some of the "Dougness" of my playing got increasingly lost. This post talks about trying to reclaim that and establishes the four baseline techniques I use to communicate my sessions to folks through this blog:
- Play it in my normal style and then write up a recap (the original flavor)
- Try to play it in-line with each session being an hour-ish spent playing and writing a blog at the same time
- A fiction-first style of play where the mechanics are minimized and the focus is more on presentation and development of "chapters"
- A style of play that embraces different modes (Gamemaster, Player, Lore, Commentary) to give the different elements each a fair shake to build up mental gaps
In this post, I will look at those different elements and talk a bit why a return to #1 while retaining #4 (and some #3) is likely the best options for me.
It also has a longish example of the kind of roleplaying mistakes I like to make: building an entire session around lore and worldbuilding that never actually got used.
The Four Solo Play Techniques of This Blog
My usual playstyle for solo RPGs, at least before I started this blog earlier this year, tends to be a bit haphazard fitting my mood, location, time-available and some other elements. I tend to lean a bit more digital-notes rather than physical because my handwriting is crap and I toss so much text into the game-space that my hands start cramping but past that it can lean anywhere from "a stream of notes in a text document" to a bundle of (digital) character sheets, digital maps, Mythic tools, VLC Player set to stream something ambient, a stack of PDFs, a handful of physical books, and a set of physical dice.
One of my quirks is that no matter how much digital everything else gets, I tend to prefer physical dice unless it is just too inconvenient. It's a question of blame, you see. You can blame digital dice but you cannot properly build up a sense of resentment unless you have something physical at which to point and glare.
This is not exactly a post about my overall playstyle, though, but instead about something closely related. As I started posting just a portion and ended up posting the vast majority of solo play content to this blog, I realized that haphazard notes and shorthand scribbles would not make anyone, not even myself, happy. I began to develop a few different write-up styles which in turn deeply impacted my own playstyle.
Prep is play and play is prep, after all.
I thought it could be a good time to sit down and quantify the four different styles that developed around this blog (with links to some examples). This gives me something to point towards when I am trying to explain some different flavors.
Technique One: External Play with Recap and Notes
The original style used for this blog. Just play however I want to play with posts largely being just summations of that with some commentary and possibly links to actual supporting documents and notes.
The style here is to play as I normally play - digital files, pdfs, books, dice, notes - and then to type up a summary of what happened usually with some link (or embed) of maps and notes.
You can see it most in the earliest posts on the blogs initially. The first Bloody Hands episode - A Fragile Merger - has a link to an external document. The original Bleak + Pearl episodes - such as the Scarlet Minotaur playthroughs - had only a map with a few quick notes and then a lot longer recap trying to sum up some of the significant rolls and events.
After a couple of weeks posting like this, I kept thinking about how to actually turn the blog as a whole into a more interesting long term project and that led me to phasing that style out because I, like a lot of folks new to something, felt the need to copy other people and their advice and there were a handful of people saying that fewer mechanics and more fictionalized story was the way. Which is a shame because a lot of my talent in the solo-sphere is the way I dance around with rules and rulings and concepts and flow and ebb to let things develop a bit organically (a paragraph might be several encounters or a lot of details alternatively).
Eventually, I realized abandoning it entirely was a mistake that was trapping me into spending more time working on a blog than just playing and I brought it back for some campaigns. The Bloody Hands returned to this format with "The Late Returners" and by part 2 of that mini-arc, the idea occurred to me to go ahead and start posting the actual in-Doug-style type notes while prefacing it with a short recap. I really like that style. It gives me the freedom to both play in the vibe I tend to play and to have some mental space and time to go back and analyze, right up, and organize it. It maximizes my own particular solo play in both ways, without requiring a lot of external write-up.
However, in the arc between starting this way and then returning to a modified version of it, three other styles started being used and all three deeply altered my own workflow for solo roleplaying.
Technique Two: Blog-First Playing with Actual Play In-Line with the Blog
Trying to make posts that felt more like the standard style of such things, I started moving towards "in-line" play. I would fire up the blog editor and start typing. When I got to mechanics, I would put it in italics or have a footnote. As I wrapped up the post, I wrapped up the session (and vice versa)
This style involves typing into the blog directly as I play with mechanics set-aside but generally in-line with the rest of the post and the blog itself being the primary storage device of the session. The idea was to not slow down or hesitate but play as I wrote and write as I played. Mechanical notes start showing up at the bottom of the post (and sometimes in set-aside italics/bold-passages).
The earliest examples would be my playthrough/playtest of Sinister Semester X and then the fifth episode of The Bloody Hands (Biting the Hand that Feeds You). Both of these are definitely more in the older school of my posts and are written in a kind of quasi-summary style. A few patches of dialogue got worked in, some after-post edits showed up to blend early passages with later passages.
Around the first delve in the Monolith of the Cyclops in Bleak + Pearl, you start to seeing this style mature a bit more. Mechanics are more blended into dialogue and room descriptions. At the peak of posts (roughly one a day), this was the style the blog was based around.
However, it had two rough problems that are largely just a clash with own playstyle. The first, and primary one, was that mechanics tended to have been wrote up in a way that did not completely derail the flow of the fiction. My personal playstyle will sometimes involve writing up whole charts, maps, and details.
Any but the simplest of these things simply did not fit (see the bonus story at the end of this post to see exactly the kind of thing that would not fit in with the "in-line technique").
Each post was a session and each session was a post and I generally wanted each to be whole unit: one played in a smooth, complete sort of flow. It put me in a mindspace where I was having to constantly bounce back and forth from a fiction writer to a gamemaster (with a much smaller sprinkle of player and a much larger sprinkle of editor). This meant that posts started getting shorter since it was more mentally exhausting. It was not easy to keep a thread going and as soon as some sort of twist or heavy scene shift occurred I would often have to take a break so I could contemplate and build up a few expectations before starting again.
Things like scenes and threads starting getting muted because it was hard to tell exactly where one might end and another begin. I sometimes had to go back and rewrite earlier, even posted, sections because later developments would make these half-developed sections non-sensical.
The breaking point of that playstyle was the Bleak + Pearl fight with the garfolk and the meeting of the strange mushroom man.
Because of this, I developed another style to handle more OSR/event-heavy content. But first, the happy accident of me trying to Doug-up the in-line playstyle.
Technique Three: The Fiction-First Game
Around the time I was taking a three week break from SoloDark to try and figure out how to move from Technique 1 to Technique 2, I embarked on what was meant to be a fancy one-shot: Gareth Hendrix and the Bunker Bigfoot. While it remains something of a successful failure that got better, that series worked out a new style for me. It is a modified take on the second technique - in-line blog-first play - but it put fiction first.
For this style, game mechanics are minimal. Each scene tends to have only one or two rules and one or two oracles checks. Each chapter has between one and four scenes. The focus is on a more literary take with game mechanics being used to add plot twists, find out secrets, develop characters, and challenge me to take stories to places I did not expect.
Gareth and his barely novella length adventure was a major reason this entire blog kept going. During the time period I was getting deeply frustrated about finding my voice there was a series that was entirely my own voice. It involved personal photographs and personal stories woven into the narrative and was set in (though fictionalized) my home town.
I love that I did that. It was a risk I would not have taken without this blog.
That being said, there is a non-zero chance that the Eustace Delmont series might be the final time I try it for a while (I have long had an idea for a third part but I do not know). It can be frustrating. The Gareth storyline was kind of quick and punchy but trying to mature it into the Eustace one meant it takes a lot of time and a lot more external note taking.
There is also the slight glitch that it is the solo roleplaying equivalent of a walking sim. 90% of the flow is decided with my own brain as the primary oracle. There were major twists that I did not expect but in between these islands of dice rolls were great seas of short story workshop. Maybe I just need to keep working on it.
Going to the other end of the spectrum in the meantime...
Technique Four: The Gamemaster + Player Style
In essentially the same week, I was wrapping the last of the original Bloody Hands arcs (Sink or Swim part 3) and concluding the garfolk obstacle in Bleak + Pearl (Drying off just to Get Wet Again). Both in the then standard "Technique 2" style. I had struggled through both (the "Doug's Notes" for each talks about frustrations and switching things up while trying to put a positive spin on it). The honeymoon era of the blog was fading and I was slowly but surely getting stuck with a completely alien way to play solo games where a month long gap was suddenly noticeable.
Would I keep going? Would I just go back to my Google Docs and quick notes? I was not sure. However, I was becoming aware of two definitely truths:
(1) I realized that I worked best when I gave myself space to cook. I had to play with the ingredients, tweak the tastes. I would never be consistent with the ebb of flow of my playing. Sometimes I just wanted a fight with no real backstory and sometimes I wanted a backstory with no real fight. Sometimes I would spend hours crafting a town to never really visit it and sometimes I would spend around 10 seconds to make a town that would be the backbone of a campaign. I needed something that allowed for me to be me.
(2) I am not actually that good at what might be the kind of "standard" roleplaying set of tropes. I GM a lot of games and do a decent job. I play in some games and do a decent jobs. But when it is just me, the kind of old-standards just do not quite jive with the kind of stories I like to tell. I suck at being a being a murder hobo. I play at long and complex subplots. I like my dungeons to feel uniform and purposeful. I like my NPCs to sometimes have little details like "favorite food". Months might pass with the same story impact as days.
I started playing with making a more Doug-like playstyle in the next Bleak + Pearl post (On Waterfalls in the Dark, Painting the Past, and When Fighting Is Best Saved for Another Day). What if I take time to construct the rooms and encounters completely separate from the "play" (though of course such prep is play even if the more in-line version made it hard to spend much time with prep without "spoiling" it) and then took more time to figuring out how the puzzles worked before trying to figure out how I, from a different viewpoint, would solve it. I have a lot of experience with dancing around the meta-game and I was pretty sure I could pull it off.
This technique involves having two to four distinct phases of the game that each have their own methods. The first is the Gamemaster Phase which involves the construction of rooms, encounters, and scenarios using all the standard tools and a more relaxed flow that speeds up and slows down based on personal need and story requirements. Then there is the Player Phase that matches more the in-line phase but bounces off the stuff established by the Gamemaster with the post being in essentially "real time" with the play and writing flowing together. There are optional Lore Phases that are more like the Fiction-First Games of Technique 3 that are about pure world-building with a minimal amount of mechanics. Finally, there is a Commentary Phase to sum it up, figure what did and did not work, and to set-up expectations and ideas for the next session.
The breaks in between phases allow for natural mental rests. The Gamemaster and Lore phases give a chance for worldbuilding, zooming out, and changing up the cadence so that not everything has to feel evenly split. The Player Phases then can be varied, quick, and often kind of punchy. Sometimes the Player Phase challenges the Gamemaster Phase's assumptions. Sometimes elements in the Gamemaster Phase are not used in the Player Phase.
It works really well for me and is kind of the ultimate expression of my personal style, though is a bit more complicated than I need for all of my campaigns.
A Real Life Example of Why Technique 4 Is Needed for Solo Players Like Me
To show a variation of this from before I had my blog, let me tell you a story about my Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign near the end of the Barston Bakersfield arc.
I wanted a simple quest: a man along the side of the road has lost a valuable relic to some goblin bandits. Bog standard, right? Except I started out playing out what the jar was and who the man was. There was an entire session of backstory involving several moving pieces. He was a con-man who robbed old tombs. He had found the tomb of an ancient king and found, in this tomb, a relic that made anything inside seem valuable. People just had to have it. It was a perfect set-up for him. Toss in some rocks and sell people what they think is a jar full of gold. Later, they think they were robbed and he gets the jar back.
Along the way to town to set up such a con, he runs into some goblins. These are not bad people, per se, but they are extremely cranky because their home had been overrun by hobgoblins who considered the short, unlucky gobs to be worthy of all the jokes and the pranks. They basically stole what they thought was a worthless jar because they were wanting to be petty. Only the man who stole the jar has angered a fairly powerful guardian who is hunting him. Now, it is hunting the goblins. Said goblins have gone to a grove that was once a place of giants and are staying in essentially a small garden that looks like a massive walled structure, complete with giant bees.
This was going to be a set-up for a meta-story that had been going on since early in the campaign about people on the hunt for giants in the area. It was going to set-up some lore for the place. It was also going to establish a moral dilemma of the player trying to help thieving but not really bad goblins versus a righteous but murderous guardian. And there was a whole other place of power (the tomb) baked in for backstory.
After this story session I spent time thinking what the giant garden might mean. Figuring out what might happen with the goblins if any survived. Would they become regular NPCs? Allies? Enemies? Would the conman get caught? Would the guardian be a multi-session arc?
Only right as I was getting ready to play out the session where Barston meets this man and kicks off the whole thread I spent a couple of hours developing, a random event shows up. Barston's best friend needs help carrying out a task. It takes a couple of days then another event shows up that gets Barston tangled up with unraveling a conspiracy. This kicks off a big fight between guilds and establishes some important lore.
I never got to play the scenario with the goblins. I never got to meet the conman. I never got to fight the guardian. I never got to visit the giant garden.
I spent an entire worldbuilding session building up a lot of truths that never made it "to the table." Except they did (a side story involves a person who had to deal with the aftermath of the goblins fleeing into town while being hunted by the guardian). It is one of my favorite stories to tell because all of it is canon but all of it happened behind the scenes.
I love the vibe of consistent inconsistences and organic plot development. I love side stories. I love dumb twists. I ADORE fun NPCs. I love ad hoc mechanics. I love off-the-cuff worldbuilding. I love that I have found different ways to achieve this in the blog format.
It just means this blog needs to be my style of play rather than my style of play being a blog post. And I think I can do that.
Roleplaying games are a fascinating artifact that I hope survives for a long time. There are a lot of things that you can say about RPGs but I think the two I want to focus on right now are a pair of contradictory statements:
- Roleplaying games cut through the near infinite amount of abstraction presented by "real world" considerations by providing a framework that simulates a particular subset (usually combat and a few other adventurer subsystems).
- Roleplaying games are an abstraction of "real world" considerations and not necessarily meant to represent any sort of 1-for-1 aspects and instead provide an escapist avenue beyond specificity.
In other words, an RPG often takes an in-Universe reality and dissolves it to fluff text and a few abstract dice rolls and stats and then feeds this back into the in-Universe reality with the broad idea that anything outside this abstraction is in itself an abstraction.
I am personally writing this like a college essay, by the way, because I am not sure if there is a better way to explain it. Maybe we can go with this. This IS not a cat:
That is a set of just a few quick shapes thrown together in Google Draw in under five minutes that represents the kind of "landmarks" we might associate with a cat face: ears, whiskers, nose, mouth. It will not win any awards but at its core I think if I made that into an icon people might go "oh, that's a cat icon". It boils down the immense number of elements that go into an actual cat face (thousands of strands of fur, vast differences in eye color, whisker length, variations in bone and flesh structure, and so forth) into an abstraction that is in no way a cat face but which, in RPG terms, could be seen a rough "these elements" approach to describe a cat face in the way that STR, DEX, CON and so forth is a ludicrous way to describe a person but it also makes perfect sense in the context of RPGs.
This kind of thought is what I have been giving over to how I might want to run hexcrawls. There are a lot of different flavors of abstraction but roughly speaking you see something like to represent, say, a mountain range ending at a forest with an old ruin on one side and then a small hamlet on the other side.
It makes sense and in-Universe it can represent several sessions of fun. By several conventions, those hexes represent 5-mile or 6-mile constructions and each has one or so distinguishing features. There are arguments why this "6 mile" hex makes sense and in gameplay it is a good way to guarantee a certain story/plot-density. You can travel 2-3 hexes per day and so you get a few chunks of story per in-game day but you also get to travel some 100+ mile range to help things feel nice and epic.
The problem is, that's as nonsense as my cat face above. Give or take a few half miles, this is roughly a six mile real world hex of Monte Sano State Park nearish my house in Huntsville, AL as snipped (kind of hastily, from Google Maps.
In that 6 miles there is an entire state park. There are dozens of roads. Hundreds to thousands of houses. The park has dozens and dozens of miles of trails. There are shops and churches and schools. While this is, of course, a bit of a silly comparison because this is modern density it still shows that if you were take a dozen different parties and send them through that hex you have no reasonable reason to believe that any of them would ever crisscross. You can have entire towns and civilizations, there. Multiple dungeons could survive in that ecosystem. BUT, in that old school hex crawl, that would represent a single hex with a little mountain on it. And there are hex systems that consider 10- or 12-mile hexes to be the default.
Without triple checking math, the area inside such a hexagon should be roughly 30 square miles. For another modern comparison, that is more landmass than Manhattan. Or, to stick to something a bit more Outdoors Survival, you could roughly consider Yellowstone National Park to be something like 10 to 12ish hexes by 9 to 10ish hexes. While I don't disagree that someone could hike across the park in 3 or 4 days (good weather permitting) it still fails to capture the true size of such a place. The sheer amount of things even a relatively wild place might contain.
On the other hand, if you are mostly driving a story forward by key points then does it really matter that you are boiling it down roughly to six "hexagonal" directions around 6-mile segments and focusing only on one landmark per hex? Going back to the bullet list above, you basically get this compression
- A reasonable amount of distance to travel VS
- A reasonable amount of story to tell.
Most other considerations about hex size are non-sense in the way that a dungeon as presented by a classic RPG scenario is beautiful nonsense. There are a surprising lack of real world examples of 20'x30' trapped rooms with 20-floors down to make way for a lich. We can gleefully understand the hex-crawl as simply a way of saying "This is the size of the page I want to use to write my story."
What I am trying to work out is something that might emulate elements of a hex-crawl but also give the sort of flavor that a dungeon might when generated for solo play. As in, you have a certain density of movement but rather than it suddenly decompressing from 10' squares to 6 mile hexes it instead treats it roughly the same way as you might by gathering up certain "rooms" of varying sizes and shapes and they are connected by corridors and there are traps and hazards and occupants.
Something like how Advanced Fighting Fantasy (and many others) use with a dice drop method... (taken from page 135 of AFF 2nd Edition):
The idea would be the start there with a twist of rolling more dice and removing 1s (1 = a null space where no paths or nor significant objects exist).
- 2 = dead end
- 3 = a point along a path
- 4 = a fork where a path diverges/converges
- 5 = a crossroads of 3-4 paths
- 6 = an area off any path but which itself has significance.
I could shape that in a particular way by arranging things or the space to match my goal. A sheet of paper with an area drawn on it. Et cetera.
Then, for each path I roll a second d6 to determine path difficulty with something like 1-3 = no difficulty while 4-5 is some and 6 is notable.
Combine this with other methods to map out terrain shifts and significant points in more of a traditional hex map style system and end up with 2-3 "maps" that can be overlaid to create a story rich area that is variable as needed (long distances the relative scale shifts) and has the idea of being zoomed in and out (any given point can be looked at closer or the whole generated map can be part of a large map).
I'm the kind of person that usually (at least in my solo play sessions) likes to fling things out there and try to figure out what it means on the way down and this blog is sort of like an extension of that. It started as a place to post my "The Bloody Hands" Tricube Tales solo game while behind the scenes I was mostly focused on a couple of other campaigns, and then at least one of those campaigns, the SoloDark "The Bleak + The Pearl" has been added. It gave me the freedom of space to try out things (which lead to the completely new approach of gameplay that the Gareth Hendrix storyline let me try).
Still, each time I post I wonder not only "how can I change up how I'm playing" but "how can I change up how I'm writing about what I am playing".
On How the Changing Style of Writing Is Impacting My Own Playing
I think is pretty obvious how the blog's initial designation as a place where I wrote, for lack of a better word, pretty broad recaps about my sessions changed a good bit as I've tried to write out my sessions as more of an actual story and keep things a bit more interesting for whatever random folks stop by (and also for myself). This has ups and downs. The up is that I am more proud of my stories. It forces me to dive into the characters, to add in details, to think even when I might be just wanting a quick reason to roll 3d6. The down is that it takes longer to write and much longer to read. This has slightly changed how I play.
Around 4-6 hours of playing through "The Lost Citadel" became two blog posts: one + two. By comparison, the time since then has involved a lot more writing over actual rolling. So a post about a single group of encounters roughly as complex as the fight with the beastmen in The Lost Citadel becomes the backbone of two different blog posts: a different one + a different two.
There will likely be 10+ more sessions to deal with the rest of just that dungeon (assuming I do not go off on a massive tangent, again). While that has given me a lot more space to work out characters like Grusk and Tom (Tom's morality is a major part of the process, now) I know it makes the process more complex. Not just for me, but also for anyone else. 4-6 hours worth of play into two sessions will likely be 20+ hours of play and writing across a dozen plus posts.
The blog's primary focus is my own play for my own use and to expand my thought processes and ideas. I find that it helps me to be a solo player to have to stop and think about how other people might read and experience it. Explaining it to an audience, even a primarily imaginary one, helps me to better explain it to myself. BUT... I still want it to be entertaining and not just a slog of a creative writing experiment for others to wade through, though.
I will try and work on balancing both. In that above linked "a different two" (dealing with the conclusion of the fight with the gar folk in my SoloDark campaign) I compressed down about 15 minutes of behind the scene play into just a few lines. I'm not saying that's the solution but it's a solution for sure.
I did think about trying to play out a session in my short hand form with quicker beats and resolutions but I found that does not quite work because it makes the longer write up more artificial. I would spend a lot of time (and I appreciate the irony of what I am about to say) making up things. What I mean, though, is that if I play out a fight and then explore a few rooms and then come back after and try to fictionalize it I have to build in more than "they opened the door" and that means I need details and concepts and emotions and motivations and if those things were not there to begin with then it's an artificial skin on a skeleton.
My Favorite Thing from the Past Month
My favorite thing from the past month has been the finale where Gareth Hendrix ends up being less about a battle and more about fighting the good fight. Not only did he focus less on any particular conflict but he inverted the primary expectation of the whole mini-campaign. Well, I did. But I did it because it felt right for the character.
My Least Favorite Thing from the Past Month
I have already linked this twice already but my least favorite thing is the way I allowed myself to stall out when dealing with the conflict with the gar folk in "The Bleak + The Pearl". It actually took me several days and sort of derailed what was meant to be a few days off work to focus on some fun solo play projects because my brain kept trying to make it more complex and more moral-driven. That is not a bad thing in itself but these are fictional story points in a fiction that I am writing. I should have just set a limit for myself. Just summed it up a couple of rolls. A single complex question roll could possibly solved the whole thing. I'm sure it will end up being a much better campaign because of taking time to work with it but it sucks that it took so much energy out of my enjoyment.
Something I Would Like to Do in the Next Month
I think my biggest wishlist is for a game that brings in a bit more complexity with dice rolling and more excuses to use more tables and charts and tools but also decentralizes combat as the only good conflict. I have some ideas.
I also sort of want to play with Mythic, more, since the main campaigns have kind of not needed that level of tool and I miss having more complex threads and relationships.
Finally, it is time to get my Advanced Fighting Fantasy back on and as we approach the one year anniversary of that I am ready to dive back into that world.
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.
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.