One Week of Solo-Roleplay
A couple of weeks ago, I was able to have some space in my life that meant I could do a lot of solo-roleplaying (of the tabletop variety). There were three main reasons for this:
Curiosity - I had recently seen some social media group and video posts reflecting on time with solo-roleplaying and I wanted to give it a try.
Play test of my game - I had never actually been a player in my roleplaying game, RiftWalker. I had alwasys been the game master.
Enjoyment - Having some free time meant I wanted to do something that was not focused on screens. It also allowed me to focus on adventure writing through exploration.
Structures and Adventures
All up I went on nine different adventures. They ranged in theme to exploring known and unknown fictional worlds and environments, meeting NPCs, fighting creatures and more. In order to do this, I thought it was important to keep a simple play log. I wrote down each key encounter and the outcome of what mysterious characters did. The combats were tracked and I tried as much as possible to keep it like a light diary entry. During one adventure I kept a map, but I eventually thought it simply was not necessary for what I needed to do play.
I tried many different structures; dungeon crawls, hex crawls, hex flower engine (from Goblin’s Henchmen) one roll pages (from Worlds Without Number), and eventually came up with my own structure - the main engine was: A tracker travel sequence, 5 encounters and the final goal (boss, puzzle or treasure). I also ran small prewritten adventure modules.
The first solo mission!
Solo Tools
Tools and Sources
During play I used many different random tables and generators. They were used for inspiration, taken ideas and structures. I found that resources work best for a back up. If during the adventure, I find something creatively makes sense as an outcome of dice rolling or actions of the NPCs; I decided to go with that. These tools helped with pushing my mind to different scopes of imagination. The nature of them were of these included:
Hex and world map generators - overland
City and Town generators - urban
Encounter tables - all biomes and a variety of generes
Quest templates
Random monster and NPC lists and creation generators
Random treasure lists
Complications and Villans
Mental effects and other critical hits
Names, rumours and miscellaneous
Structural tools, tables, lists and images
Work, tables and generators were sourced from the following creators:
Sly Flourish: Helping Game Masters run great roleplaying games.
A system neutral hexcrawl for table top RPGs | Swordfish Islands
Sine Nomine Publishing (sine-nomine-publishing.myshopify.com)
Oracles
I utilised and tested a few different oracles for the sessions. Some successful and some not. I feel like this will still be a place of development for me. I want it to be detailed but not too cumbersome in design. Here were some Oracles I tried:
A simple d100: I would pick a likely percentage of something being successful - if I roll under that number it is a yes. This was braodly pretty easy and did not slow down play too much. it lacked some granularity that I wanted at times though.
Random image dice: traps, elements, weather, treasure dungeon rooms, directions, npcs - these were great prompts and often took the place of a generator or oracle.
In depth d100: I would pick a likely percentage of something being successful - if it were withing 10% above or below a qualifier of “but” was added to the “yes” or “no”. 10% from the top and bottom yielded more extreme qualifiers, like “and” - this was broadly more applicable and exciting!
Lessons for RiftWalker
There were some new rules I wanted to rapidly play test. This included but was not limited to:
Rests - Our main game rarely needed rests as it is not combat focused. Being the RW and RM of a solo game means that anything with defined structures of play makes it easier. Checks had more binary success/failure definition, combat was more prescribed etc. Having the two rests per adventurer, per session was easy to keep track of and an interesting additional resource to use.
Generic Personality Statement for Fate and Corruption Points - It was determined that corruption and fate points would be used as normal - instant success or reroll appropriately. Having how many of these resources you had determined by the nature/nurture of the character really helped with immersion. I also reduced the total number you had as that was a main piece of feedback given by my players.
Pool Slots - This was a system to mechanically track the effects of downtime and mutations/critical hits that come up during game play. Having a dedicated space for this gives more structure, without much more administrative overhead. It gave me something to work towrads for characters - and showed the impact of my adventuring.
Endurance Pools – For Gear, Turn Order Bonuses and Tracker Bonuses
Will Power Pools – For Contacts, New Skills and Legends
Weapon and Armour allocation - I wanted the game to have a mechanical way to grow in power for attack and defense. Not “i buy a more powerful weapon” - I found in game this was tedious and the only focus of player currency. I would rather that money go toward ‘interesting’ weapons/armour with tradeoffs and effects, rather than straight statistical increases. I tried out that Endurance was a total pool you could distribute between weapons and armour of a physical nature. Speed for ranged weapons and Might for melee weapons. To balance out more Will Power focused characters, I used those pools as ‘weapons’ and ‘armour’ of morale - seeing if an enemy wanted to keep fighting. Mind was chosen for ‘melee’ morale attacks and Social was trialed for ‘ranged’ morale attacks. This was broadly very successful. It allowed another choice to differentiate characters and more variation to combat.
Role types and character synergy - It was fun to build characters and see the impact of characters synergizing with each other. I build a Warrior “Holy Soldier” and a Support “Forest Gnome” character. The synergy between those assisting in combat - gaining extra dice - and using powers to assist in non combat situations; worked great! Will need to do more play testing with people to see the different role abilities in action. The holy soldier having enhanced resting and the gnome having additional healing was cool to try out.
New power creation - I created a set of guidelines to assist in the creation of new powers for characters. I have moved away from having a massive list of abilities that need to be play tested, and instead gone to guidelines for the creation of them. If my players want to select new powers, this wil be easier to refine in the future.
Power creation guidelines
I can’t wait to try more characters and give more of it a go when I have some spare time!
