Solo Adventure
It’s been a while since we checked in on Alchemist and Abercrombie. It’s good to see that they’re getting along a bit better these days. Of course, when you’re literally the same person, it’s hard to stay mad for long. Welcome to the Zen of solo wargaming.
While it’s no secret that I love squad-based tactical play with RPG elements, it never occurred to me to give solo gaming a shot. That changed when my wargaming buddies decided to branch out and try some new systems.
I’m a relative newcomer to this corner of the hobby, so I can’t claim to be an authority here. But from an outsider’s perspective, it had always truck me as bizarre. My conception of GAMING writ large had always been about social and collaborative experiences. That’s so core to my own hobby practices that (judgy elitist alert) I’d always considered those lone wolf weirdos modding game systems to accommodate single-player experiences to be missing the point. Then, just a few weeks ago, I encountered Five Parsecs From Home.
The experience is all about randomly-generated sci-fi crews, emergent narrative, and a simple antagonist AI. Finding out that my procedurally generated starship of misfits were half rich artists and half local bumpkins gave rise to all manner of fantastic narrative moments. I could picture these snobby Core System jerks rolling up to some backwater planet to paint its “rustic charm” in watercolor. They’d hire a couple of local hillbilly alien guides, the local guides would try to swindle them for all they’re worth, and Bob’s your uncle we’ve got an Odd Couple premise for galaxy-spanning sci-fi hijinks.
While the story you tell yourself is fun to discover, it’s the random tables that give fuel to the imagination. All those d100 tropes and items and character backgrounds make for an elaborate tapestry of intersecting story beats. And while I was none too pleased to find my captain eaten by Starship Trooper bugs while trying to heist her senior project back from the Alpha Centauri Academy of Arts, it was all manner of fun to imagine who steps in to fill that power gap.
Extensive note-taking and between-session bookkeeping compliment a streamlined series of random missions, and the result falls somewhere between Firefly and Farscape. In short, it was a novel gaming experience, and one that I’d have missed if my buddies hadn’t convinced me to put aside my preconceptions.
And so, for today’s discussion, what do you say we talk about this slightly esoteric corner of GAMING? Have you ever tried a solo game? What was the system, and how was the experience? Tell us all about your own one-hero-versus-the-world gaming sessions down in the comments!
ARE YOU A ROLL20 ADDICT? Are you tired of googling endlessly for the perfect tokens? Then have we got a Patreon tier for you! As a card-carrying Familiar, you’ll receive a weekly downloadable Roll20 Token to use in your own online games, as well as access to all of our previously posted Tokens. It’s like your own personal NPC codex!
It’s been a long while since I did any solo gaming. I think I still have a bunch of splatbooks meant to help facilitate this sort of play stashed somewhere on my hard drive. I even made a simple script for it so that I could write logs, make dice rolls and generate random prompts all in the same window (that one’s probably gone, though). It’s definitely different than traditional gaming, more like writing or daydreaming with dice rolls and structure, but it was fun none the less. My go to system was, oddly enough, Fate, with some custom additions based on various “GM emulators” I found. It works surprisingly well, provided you don’t expect the same kind of experience as “regular” Fate, and I appreciated simple rules that didn’t take me out of the flow of the game and ease of homebrewing on the spot.
They feel very like guided writing exercises to me. Since that’s my profession, I have trouble just letting loose and having fun with them.
What was fun about the minis based gameplay in 5 Parsecs was the moment it moment randomness of dice based combat. I could picture that wearing out it’s welcome after a bit, but the first couple sessions were a refreshing change of pace.
I love the Advanced Fighting Fantasy “choose your own adventure”-books, which are all about solo play. They’re good fun.
So is gaming in a group.
Just Fighting Fantasy for those ones, the Advanced one is the one intended for group play, and is more like an actual RPG ruleset just using their system
But yeah, I loved those as a kid, plus Grail Quest, Way of the Tiger, Lone Wolf.. .. so many good gamebooks as a kid
Whoops, force of habit. ^^; You’re right: just Fighting Fantasy.
I have a fondness for all those 1980s products that marketed themselves with, “…In which YOU are the hero!”
The only CYOA I recall actually ‘playing’ was some CYOA versions of Disney animated movies. They were… rather disturbing in their ‘bad endings’.
Other CYOA which fit the fantasy theme more I mostly read ‘Let’s Play’ threads of, or watched live plays of on LRR’s Dice Friends. ‘Gnomes – 0, Dragons – 100’ is particularly amusing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HOiVCKmVis
Well now I need to hear about the bad endings. What horrible fates did you suffer?
Some of them are generic ‘the villain catches/corners/captures you, fade to black’ kind of stuff. A more unusual one is ‘you get baleful polymorph’d into a tree and are trapped forever’.
Oof. Fate worse than death stuff always freaks me out. Reminds me of the end of that one ep from the live action Cowboy Bebop. Becoming trees DID NOT look fun.
Check out a game called ‘Dungeon Robber’, it’s pretty much a automated/computerized version of a CYOA flowchart, that allowed DMs to ‘randomly generate’ a dungeon on the fly. It’s very random/difficult but gets the experiece across rather well!
http://blogofholding.com/dungeonrobber/
I’m intrigued that CYOA is so much the baseline for this. Because the experience I’m talking about is a lot closed to tactical minis than branching narrative.
What about board games where you ‘develop’ the map, like Gloomhollow, castle Ravenloft, etc…
You mean the tile-based Ravenloft game? Yeah, I could see that being a workable single-player thing. It isn’t polished for that experience, but it would fit well if you wanted to use it as a basis.
I think the best game I’ve played solo would be Warhammer Quest, which is more on the board gamey side of things, though it does have some downtimey rpgy rules as well and blah
But yeah, while it’s designed to be played in a group, you can do everything solo for sure and just manage the party all yourself
How is it as a prolonged campaign? Did it stay fun start to finish, or did it get a bit samey after a while?
Only when I’m learning new game, boardgamea, war games, rpgs, etc.. Good way get the hang on rules and ways to play before introducing others to it. And in case of RPGs I can indulge the inner sadistic devil and go full on with the slaying of characters. First time I did it for Warhammer Fantasy, cheated a bit on creation and made myself a band of four knights errant, and proceeded to play Monthy Python and holy grail, though I did replace the bunny with Bretonnian Tryffel hound, vefore dying the thing killed one and turned another into eunuch. And let’s say I’ve been extra cautious of the system ever since.
“If I can kill me, I KNOW that a GM can kill me!” 😛
I grew up with CYOA books, so when Dungeon Magazine #12 from 1988 included a solo adventure, “Scepter of the Underworld” by James Jacobs, I was keen to give it a go. It had good replayability with different PCs, and decades later I’ve even reworked the dungeon for team play in different game editions.
I remember buying some large CYOA-style books that came with D6s in the 90s, but I didn’t cotton to the rules system and I took the dice and consigned the books to a box somewhere.
For Christmas, my wife bought me Into the Dungeon by Harri Conner. I read/played it, enjoyed it, then ran it for our son as a single-player dungeon. (He was determined to grind for the best possible ending.)
Is it worth going through Enter the Dungeon? Ive heard nothing but good things.
Cost/Amusement equation = Definitely.
It was a delightful diversion during the holidays, and then it became a quick use-as-designed module for small play. It’s not Game of Thrones, but then it’s not all fluffy bunnies and easy solutions, either. My son loved how certain situational choices rewarded or punished certain game play (naiveté, murder-hobo, incuriousness, or excessive curiosity). A fun read/play.
Call of Cthulhu has their great “Alone Against…” Series of solitaire adventures. They run on Basic Roleplaying like the main game, but using the CYOA style to seni-automate the mechanics. They’ve got five or so campaigns, at this point. I recommend “Alone Against the Flames” to start with. It’s free on Chaosium’s site and was partially created as a tutorial for Seventh Edition. https://www.chaosium.com/solo-call-of-cthulhu/
Well that’s extremely cool. One of the great unexpected pleasures of writing this comic is discovering how much the image of “what RPGs look like” changes between group, individuals, and contexts.
Thanks for the recommendation!
I have never done this in a pen and paper system, but making up your own story in response to seemingly random stimuli is a lot of the fun of Dwarf Fortress. So I guess I have sort of done this.
Dwarf fortress is very much in the wheelhouse.
Fun story: I wound up sharing a taxi with the Dwarf Fortress guy on route to the Foundations of Digital Games conference a few years back. He was our keynote that year, and it was great fun to hear the “drunken cats” story from the man himself.
I started actively playing because it was a group activity. I am scared of trying solo 🙁
https://images.app.goo.gl/ffpnq8YshtnTJhQ86
Yeah 🙂
By the way i already tried boys and i like them too but trying solo playing is a different thing 🙂
The closest I’ve gotten to a solo game was just me DMing for one player.
It went well until it didn’t; turns out balancing for 1 is kinda difficult and eventually they’re gonna die to SOMETHING, and then that death is also a TPK.
Gotta give ’em a cohort or two. Evex Xena had whatsername.
I’ve never played solo, but it might be the only time I can play my twin characters. Maybe I’ll give it a try at some point. Play my family party and see what happens.
Finally, a use for the big binder o’ characters!
First I have to finish building the Half-Elf Slayer and Elf Arcanist. Then the party will complete. Human Cavalier, Drow Cleric, Half-Drow Monk, Orc Bard, and Half-Orc Inquisitor finish out the rest.
Then I can move on to the NEXT family party – Aasimar Witch, Undine Rogue, Fletchling Barbarian, Tiefling Skald, Sylph Oracle, Ifrit Ranger, and Oread Shaman. (I might change the specific race/class pairings but those are what I’m going with for that group.)
Who’s the party and who’s the anti-party?
I suppose the first group would be the party and the second group is the anti-party.
The first group’s backstory was just a human guy that managed to seduce a human, orc, drow, and elf and have kids with them. And those kids’ older siblings.
The second group was a bit more detailed. A cult tried to resurrect a demon by a blood sacrifice. But the ones sacrificed had to be different species but all related. So they had a guy be possessed by various spirits before doing the do. The kids managed to escape into the wilderness.
Oh wait. I decided not to go with Slayer. I decided to go with Investigator instead.
A few years back I found someone free solo adventure stuff for 5e (I think it might have just been Lost Mine of Phandelver, maybe a second thing that isn’t any of the other published modules too? It’s been so long I can’t recall).
This was neat because nobody was really going to be running that one PbP and while I don’t really love super low level play, it’s a lot more tolerable if I can quickly breeze through it instead of spending a month or more on it like I would have in pbp play.
After that I did a bit of my own “do it yourself on the fly” version with some of the 5e modules.
Given I was just winging it, it probably wasn’t as polished as something designed for that but I was able to craft a play experience I wouldn’t otherwise be able to have.
There was nobody to object to my customizing rules like making different magic items drop than the adventure says (to actually get items my PCs would want rather than the party the module randomly assumed you would use even though it’s entirely possible to run a four or five man game without two heavy armor sword users, a cleric, a barbarian, and one of something else that modules item drops seem to assume everyone is doing for no reason I can figure out) or other rules to play in a way I’d find enjoyable. (For example I was running a solo game of Out of the Abyss without the wild magic rules and a once a day summonable shopkeep.)
Also importantly this let me playtest out my homebrew classes…. a thing that takes kind of forever in pbp (especially when games die so often and so many take place just in the lower levels).
I think the most fun I had was solo running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and modifying the adventure to take *all* the paths that should be shorter adventure allows for. (I then tried taking the party from that game into Dungeon of the Mad Mage to very quickly realize I had absolutely made the right call in fully exploring Dragon Heist since DotMM is basically *just* a dungeon crawl with no story going on.)
Makes me wonder if there’s a market for solo play in 5e. I’m not sure exactly what that would look like, but I imagine basic enemy AI and a bit of the old CYOA style “turn to page 5 if you pick the lock.”