How I Play Solo

     Hi all! Welcome back to my blog!

    I wanted to talk about playing solo with TTRPGs. Mostly, how exactly I play them.

    I always start with lore first. Well, not by writing a whole novel, but getting the gist of what I want my world to look like, sound like, feel like. I usually do this by listening to some music, spinning around in a computer chair for a few hours, and writing some notes here and there on my phone, laptop, or notebook. Then when I have a general idea of what my world looks like and how I want to interact with it, I decide on which game system I want to emulate. Sometimes, just sometimes, I start the other way around and decide on the game system first and then make the lore for the world. That was how I played Fabula Ultima. But normally, world comes first.

    So anyway, I pick a game system at this point that will allow me to interact with my world in the best way. For example, I played the heck out of Four Against Darkness in a generic fantasy world for a long time. But I've always had the idea that I wanted to live in the world of Goliath, a fantasy world that I invented when I was twelve that's lived rent-free in my mind for almost twenty years now. In this case it's kind of cheating because I already had the entire world memorized in my mind, down to the smallest of customs and holidays my Goliath characters celebrated.

    Goliath has multiple "tribes" or types of humanoids in its world. I turned each tribe into its own unique class via inspiration from Four Against Darkness and its classes. I also decided on using the combat system from Four Against Darkness, with a few homebrew rules of my own.

    Then I created Items. Now my games have different categories of items: Basic Treasure, Scrolls, Potions, Common Items, Uncommon Items, Rare Items, and Special Weapons and Armor. I designed all of these for Goliath (save for the Basic Treasure items, I was inspired by Perils & Princesses to use those in all my later games). The items had to fit in with the structure of my world. They had to matter to my world and be able to impact it in some way. I wasn't just going to throw a torch in there for no reason. If there's torches in my world, it's because there are dark places there and you need a torch. Or hey, maybe you need to set something on fire. Torches have lots of uses.

    Next I create the basic locations you can travel to in the game's world. I jot down a few ideas for cities, landscapes, mountains, rivers, what have you, and then I get on Inkarnate or get a sketchbook and make a map of the world. This process usually continues in between all of the other world-making processes, and sometimes even after I feel like I'm done with the world I'll come up with another location that seems interesting and add it to the map.

    I then create the monsters and characters that populate that world and give them a small description, as well as stats that match the game's combat system.

    After that, the hardest part: Random Events. I make d100 lists for Wilderness, Dungeon, and Urban events. That's right, every time I play a new game, I make up almost 300 events that can happen in that world based on where you are. I did it for Goliath, I did it for Perils & Princesses, I did it for Fabula Ultima, and I did it for Colossus, a game I'm currently working on. There's definitely some spillage from one game to the next. Not all of these events are totally unique, but most of them are and most of them fit perfectly into the worlds I've created.

    As a side note, I've tried using hexmaps and so far I haven't been successful in what I want to do with overland travel. To get from point A to point B on my maps I just look at the distance between the two points and estimate how many days it would take for my party to travel there. It's not a perfect system, not nearly as accurate as hexes, but it's served me well so far.

    My Wilderness Table looks like this:

Roll for Weather from the Weather Table (1 Sunny, 2 Cloudy, 3 Rainy, 4 Stormy-lose a day of travel)

1-4 Landmark

5-9 Event Table

10-11 Monster

12 Hard Monster

Treasure Table if fought a monster

Camp Activity

Roll for Wandering Monsters (1-8 no, 1-9 yes)

    Then repeat for each day of travel until you reach your destination. I'll have more details about camp activities in a later blog post.

    Moving on, for dungeons, no matter what game I've played so far except for Ker Nethalas, I use the map-making activity from Four Against Darkness to make my dungeons. Basically, my dungeons work like this:

Draw Room

1-5 Roll on Event Table

6 Torch Goes Out

7 Trap

8-11 Monster

12 Boss or Leader

If you defeated a monster or boss, roll on Treasure Table

    Then you just move on to the next room and repeat the steps. I've added a little more flavor to my dungeons recently with Colossus by adding a table to check to see if a door is unlocked, locked, or trapped. Also I added a room search table:

1-4 Find a Clue

5 Torch goes out

6-7 Find a Treasure (roll on treasure table)

8 Trigger a Trap

9-11 Wandering Monsters Attack

12 Don't Find Anything

    In case you were wondering, Clues are meta-currency you can spend in dungeons: 1 Clue reveals a secret passageway, 3 Clues reveals the location of the boss or leader, and 5 Clues reveals a treasure chest. Treasure Chests in my games always contain three rolls on the treasure table.

    So that's dungeons and overland travel. Settlements have been the places where more story beats take place and quests are given, but I've added some things in my new game Colossus that makes traveling to cities a bit more eventful and makes it easier to figure out your next steps. I'll detail that in a later blog post, along with more information about Colossus in general.

    When I first play a new system, I make a small five room dungeon and sprinkle a few monsters and traps here and there so I can test out the combat system and skill checks systems. You'll see that once I start posting my actual gameplay that this dungeon isn't about story, it's just a test to see if I like the mechanics. Once I get out of that dungeon and have a better feel for the game, the world opens up, and I can start enjoying all of these tables and events and monsters that I've made.

    And that's basically how I've played all the rpgs I've played solo so far. You're more than welcome to try some of this out in your own games, or adjust it however you like.