Solo rpgs?

[Kenway]

Besides the typical Tunnels & Trolls/ Fighting Fantasy/Choose Your Adventure "solo" adventures, are there any real solo rpgs?

[Zak Arntson]

Well, I wrote Fungeon to be GM-less, and Mike Holmes took it one step further and played the thing solo!

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

I just spent way too much time hunting for Jack Spencer's posts about solo RPG design. They led to some great discussions, and I'd really like to re-read them.

Anyone help me out? Links please. Those threads would be a good foundation for this discussion.

Best,
Ron

[jrs]

A quick and dirty search brought up these two threads:

idea...
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=314

Feedback on an idea...
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=892

Julie

[Kenway]

Okay, I just read the posts. (Man, I was almost overwhelmed by nostalgia!)
 To prevent this thread from drifting, I just want to state up front that I'm thinking about solo rpgs that *aren't* like the typical Choose Your Own Adventure stuff.  The topic of Nethack was also interesting, and I've played many randomly created dungeons using the tables from the 1st ed. AD&D DMG.

 But in truth, I was kind of thinking of something like Inspectres that could be run solo in combination with Whimsy cards.  Or something like that.

[Uncle Dark]

How would solo role playing differ from writing a story?  Would it simply be a manner of using whimsy cards (or something like them) to dictate plot twists?  When, or would, something close to standard RPG mechanics come into play?

Hurm.  Could one use a Once Upon a Time deck for GMing a solo session, letting the story elements come up through the deck at random?  Draw "the princess" and that means your charcter encounters an NPC who is a princess, draw "a fight happens" and your character is attacked?

Lon

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I think the thing to keep in mind is that solo RPGs, at least to my mind anyway, are not RPGs. One of the vital aspects of an RPG is the social aspect. That play occurs with other players involved. Solos, then, take some of the elements of an RPG and, well, make a game out of it. I suppose you may disagree with this, but I personally find this distinction helpful.

Most solo RPGs I've happened upon have been T&T/Fighting Fantasy-like. Either that or like the random dungeon chart in the DMG (Warhammerquest). While I would be interested in seeing something that works differently, I'm no where near as interested as when I first posted those threads.

Side note: funny how solo RPGs keep coming up, isn't it? Seems like every couple months someone either reads the description of a solo gaming in Dicing With Dragons or arrives at similar conclusions on their own. I guess Final Fantasy doesn't have that end as sewn up as some may think.

[James]

Hurm.  Could one use a Once Upon a Time deck for GMing a solo session, letting the story elements come up through the deck at random?  Draw "the princess" and that means your charcter encounters an NPC who is a princess, draw "a fight happens" and your character is attacked?

Hey, that's actually a pretty cool idea.  Maybe I'll try that some afternoon when it's quiet and I'm all alone with my thoughts....

[unodiablo]

Chainsaw Warrior was an old Games Workshop solo-game, but it's more of a board game than a 'real' RPG. The same could be said for SPI's old DeathMaze and Citadel of Blood games... Kinda like RPG's, but more like a 1-3 player / no GM dungeon-hack.

I haven't read it yet, but I picked up the Ghost Dog RPG at GenCon (for $4!) because I recall people saying it has good one GM / one Player advice, and it's designed to support that style of play... And one of my semi-interested occasional-gamer pals LOVES Ghost Dog.

Sean

[efindel]

Like some of the other folks who have participated in these threads, I like to collect solo gamebooks when I run across them (which isn't often these days, but oh well...).  I don't have any particular series I collect, though -- instead, I like to get lots of ones from different series.  In doing that, I've come across a few interesting things that I'd like to share:

I've got a Middle-Earth Quest gamebook, "Night of the Nazgul".  From what I understand, it's a rarity, since the Tolkein estate pulled permission for it and ordered the copies that remained in stock destroyed.  It has a couple of interesting features.

First off, it's got a hexmap.  You start at one point on the map.  Each hex has a letter and number, which corresponds to a paragraph in the first section of the book.  When you enter a hex, you turn to the paragraph for it and read it.  Your actions there might have you turn to a paragraph in the second section, which is where the subscenarios in the hexes are located.  This might be considered one way to break out of the "flowchart"... you're moving around a map.  In truth, it's another kind of flowchart where you just have six choices, but it feels different as a player.

Secondly, it has time.  Many (most?) of the paragraphs start off with an amount of time.  The player is supposed to keep track of how much time has gone by for the character since he/she started the game.  Many areas have different paragraphs for you to turn to depending on what time it is.  Recovery from fatigue is also linked to time, and the game has a time limit -- if you can't make it to Bree within a certain amount of time, the Nazgul will find you.

Another book I have is Wizards & Warriors, which is a set of solo scenarios for the old High Fantasy RPG.  All of the scenarios in it have a set of letters across the bottom of the character sheet.  At certain points, you might be told something like "circle the A on your character sheet".  Later on, you might come across a paragraph like, "If the A on your character sheet is circled, go to 483.  If it's not, go to 221."  Conceptually, this isn't any different from things like "if you've made friends with so-and-so, go to 483", but it does mean that someone coming to this point without having accomplished whatever marks off A won't know what has to be done to mark off A.  Further, it makes it somewhat easier to have multiple conditions that can cause something.

One of them is a mystery scenario, which also has a couple of nice things in it.  Like "Night of the Nazgul", it uses a map, but this one isn't a hex map.  It's a more-or-less conceptual map of a city, showing streets as lines, with drawings of major buildings and the paragraph number to go to when you go to that building beside each one.  I found this to be a lot easier to manage than the old, "You're at the intersection of Bat Street and Cat Street.  If you go north, turn to 143..." style of getting around.  It especially makes sense since your character is supposed to have lived in the city in the adventure for some time, so it should be easy for you to get around.  (Once you're at a building, where you go often depends on what events you have had happen, as described above.)

The second thing that scenario does is ask the player to choose a birthstone for his/her character at the start.  In various places in the game, you'll be told to go to different paragraphs depending on what your birthstone is... and, most importantly, who the murderer is depends on what birthstone you chose... and that also varies what clues you need to solve the mystery successfully.  Thus, you can play the game to the finish multiple times and still have it be different.

In one of the prior threads, someone mentioned that a continuing character is part of what makes a game a role-playing game.  I'd agree with that, and also note that being able to make up your own character makes a game more of an RPG, for me.  With that in mind, the games where you have choice in creating your character, like Sorcery! and the T&T games, seem more RPG-like to me than games where you can't pick a character.


A thought that occurs to me is that one could borrow concepts from Pendragon and from Wizards & Warriors to put in more of a roleplaying aspect -- have the player rate his/her character on personality aspects.  Then, have among the things that the player checks off be indicators about what a character chose.  Since these are just in a list with other general indicators, the player won't know for sure what they mean until he/she gets to the end, or by looking ahead.  Then, at the end, you can use those in some way -- reward the player for playing "in character", or punish for not doing so, or maybe even just adjust the character's numbers towards the way the player behaved.  The last might actually be the most interesting -- since there's no reward or punishment, there's no temptation to cheat, but it gives the player feedback on "how well" he/she was roleplaying the chosen characteristics by the game designer's standards.

(Having just gotten Clinton's Paladin recently, the idea also crosses with the mechanics of it in my mind... could use the checks to give light side/dark side points or some equivalent for a game.)

Another idea which comes to mind is a mega-branching game.  Series of gamebooks, like the Lone Wolf and Sorcery! ones, traditionally follow a narrow-wide-narrow path -- there may be a lot of routes through the book, but at the end, you're either dead or going on to the next book.  Imagine a series of gamebooks where there are multiple possible exits, taking you to different books in the series.  As a commercial venture, it wouldn't make too much sense (you'd rather have people buy all the books instead of just some of them), but for an online game or a free game, it could be an interesting twist.

--Travis

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Hello, Travis

I've probably said most of these things in the previous threads, but they may bear repeating.

The first and most important thing to keep in mind when designing a solo game is that it will be played by someone by themselves. This means that the more complicated or cumbersome it is, the more likely they are to get bored with it. And the more pieces it requires, the less likely it is to be played. I mean you could play Warhammer solitaire style, but only the most die-hard fan of the game is going to want to set up all of those miniatures and terrain pieces for simply their own enjoyment. I mean, I've stopped playing Warhammer with other people because I hate setting it up and putting it away. Why would I do all of that just by myself (and this applies to Warhammer Quest as well)

I have been working on a dungeon card game on and off for a while. At first I had several decks: Dungeon, Monster, Treasure, Equipment, etc. but then I realized that it would be no fun to keep track of all of those different decks, shuffling them all, etc. So now it's all one deck. Less set up time = more time actually playing.

Now, my experience with solo game books showed that the AD&D solos were better suited for solo play that many of the others. Most others (not all but most) were just very, very rules-lite RPGs or at least the combat system thereof.

Look at Fighting Fantasy, for example. First the PC rolls with the monster defending then the monster rolls with the PC defending. That's technically four dice rolls for one set of back & forth I-hit-him, he-hit-me-back. Most other solos I've encounters are very much like this. some more streamlined, others more bulky but in the same vein.

The AD&D Solo Gamebooks AKA Super Endless Quests handled combat a different way. You were given a target number. If you made this roll, you turned to the passage where you were given a brief passage that described how the battle went. You won, of course, but it was never simply You hit him, then he hit you back. Then you him him again but he missed. Then you missed, etc. You see?

But the AD&D SGs weren't perfect. It kept a hit point counter which seemed more a holdover from the other design philosophy. I think that it should've boiled down to a single roll, based on whatever character stats were appropriate, I guess, with several passages to turn to, some where you win, others where you lose but always something that keeps things moving.

Which is my next point. WHen playing a game by yourself the most useless instruction is "You are dead. Close the book." I once play Naked Doom for the Tunnels & Trolls RPG. T&T is famous for burtal solos. Naked Doom starts with your character under arrest and being sent into the Naked Doom, a dungeon of sorts under the city where they send their criminals. They strip you down naked and you must find you way out of the dungeon which is indeed populated with nasty monsters. The brutal thing about it is that at the very begining, you must run down a corridor while the guard shoot arrows at you. This is how it starts! Two Luck rolls right at the begining! And since you're without armor, a hit is likely to be fatal! Especially since the arrows are poisoned to boot! I died maybe three times in that corridor in Naked Doom before I gave up trying. I think the third time I cheated and went to the next passage only to die there as well.

This is something to carefully balance in a solo game. Death means game over in solo play. This might be the idea, but instant and damned likely death in the first passage can be more frustrating than fun. In any case, if play can this brief, then creating a new charachter should probably be just as fast. It's kind of stupid when it took longer to roll up the character than it took to get him killed.

Or such is my experience with solos, anyway. YMMV

[Eric J.]

Though this is on the line of off-topic, I was just wondering: Jack, would you then consider computer RPGs not RPGs?  I am not saying that I don't dissagree, but I like to be clear on semantics for future reference.

As I am new to RPGs, I have never gotten close to solo-RPGing, except for computer games.  I don't think that I could ever try a solo RPG because of this.  I recently downloaded an excellent RPG from the Abandon Keep.  It's called ADOM.  It's an acronym for something, but I'm not shure what.  It uses an excellent little RPG system that resembles D&D in a big way and supports AISCI graphics (I know I spelled that wrong),  I became hooked on the game because it combines choose your own adventure aspects in character creation and features a VERY advanced Roge style of play.  I am saying this in the interest of providing my alternative to the hard-core solo playing that Jack spoke of.  You keep the game options but you don't have the setup nor math.  I am interested in the negative aspects of this that are.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Well, I think I said something similar in Thomas Denmark's What is a Roleplaying Game? thread, but my thoughts on the matter are this:

I consider CRPGs to be a different animal from RPGs, much as I consider Solo RPGs (SRPGs?) to be a different animal from RPGs. You see, I think the social aspect is one of the defining traits of what an RPG is, and since SRPGs lack this, they deserve to be considered on their own merits. CRPGs OTOH have at their disposal a fairly powerful tool, the computer, and like having children, it changes everything.

Interesting that you bring this up since CRPGs are no doubt one of the major reasons for the decline of SRPGs these days. Heck, I once contacted the Fighting Fantasy Steve Jackson once on the subject and he believed that CRPGs have pretty much replaced SRPGs. Shortly after that, his company broke with that Black & White computer game, so I guess he put all of his marbles in that basket.

Even I have several CRPGs for my PS1 not to mention Zelda, dear sweet Zelda, a personal fav. So I like many of these games, but boy am I sick of the random battles. Ick.

That said, a CRPG simply takes some elements of an RPG, mostly combat and such, and makes in into a game by the strictest definition of the word.

But then, so do SRPGs. I guess to make a good SRPGs you need to find something a SRPG can do that a CRPG can't....yet.

[Eric J.]

Well... There is the element of object manipulation, if it can be considered.  I couldn't play monopoly on the computer.