Hey Veeky Forums, I'm kind of having a dry spell, as far as tabletop gaming goes. I don't know anyone around here that plays, and I'm done with playing with random people on roll20. So I gotta ask, have you ever played one of those solo games or used a GM simulator?
I'm thinking about starting a project where I write a series of episodic short stories that use published modules as a sort of template of events that happen to a party of characters. So, I'll write a party of four adventurers into the story, then follow them through a series of "adventures" playing out how I think they would act. I was thinking about not reading adventure modules first, so that I wouldn't know about secrets and such ahead of time, but I would go back and fix things as necessary. And I was going to roll to simulate all the normal amount of chance associated with combat and challenges.
Also, if anyone knows any modules that would make for interesting stories, I'm all ears! I have a few in mind, but I'm curious what all's out there.
Lucas White
try a gamebook?
Ayden Walker
The lone wolf books are really good for this.
Chase Jenkins
Putting together a party and running them through a module or adventure path can be pretty fun. Especially if you think up backstories for them and take moments to roleplay out what would happen and what characters would do. Be sure to keep a lot of roleplaying notes.
Eventually I decided I was better off just writing stories but I've been brainstorming some sort of method to "build" characters that you would write stories about and have game mechanics for determining how well characters react in the story and whether they succeed or fail.
But yeah, I vote you go nuts. First find or download a module you like and roll up the party, thinking up backstories for them. Pick out a day where you can be alone and stay up late, buy some snacks, put together a playlist of suitable songs. Then just have fun. It might feel weird and sad at first but then you get sucked in. It's no substitute for the real thing, but it's still pretty damn fun.
Aaron Stewart
>It's no substitute for the real thing, but it's still pretty damn fun
Yeah, ultimately I'm not trying to replace the tabletop gaming experience, but I'm trying to use this as a sort of venue for releasing this creative tension.
Normally, I'm not very good at deciding how a plot unfolds in a story, but maybe if I use adventures as a sort of "template" it would go a lot smoother.
I've randomized my party, and this is what I've got. In the event that any of them die, I'm just going to let things happen naturally. I won't intervene.
>Big Barbarian dude. He's stereotypical Chad Thundercock, the Barbarian. >Short, stacked gnomish rogue girl. She THICC and nimble. >Elven Sorceress, I'm thinking of writing a desire to ascend to dragonhood in her backstory. >And a knightly cleric who I think I'm going to eventually give levels of Paladin. Righteous!
Ian Scott
I just found a book that I didn't know I had called "Adventure 1". It's literally just a compilation of random adventures that you can run individually or slip in to a campaign. I think I'm going to have my characters play through all of these!
>Playing sad nerd games by himself >Posting fat >can't even find friends to play with How fucking sad can you get? Go outside dumbass
Brayden Scott
>Doesn't like T&A and a thin waist We can't all be cockgoblins, friend.
Dominic Richardson
I tried using a solo-play hexcrawl called "Barbarian Prince" which I think went up as free PDFs because the company bellied-up. It was pretty tough but kind of fun.
I'd suggest looking for hardcopy or printing it out though. Flipping through multiple pages of multiple tabs of PDFs on my laptop was a real pain in the ass.
And here's a couple of mine: The Department is a hybrid skirmish wargame/RPG where you (or you and a friend in co-op) play as a detective tracking down robotic criminals like a not-Blade Runner: mega.nz/#!RVEWWKDQ!ZS6hy6-iO3IEWtIrsj7R1tcMAlXaAl-wVcIbbsozWzw
Two Hour Wargames have a ton of stuff out that all supports head-to-head, co-op, and solo play. The core rules are under Chain Reaction 2015, everything else is built on top of those. mega.nz/#F!9R8G2aQb!g-dZXkyCmkrljzH60tZEhQ
Bentley Jackson
Bump. I love solo game puzzles that really test the grey matter. Lately I got ahold of some of the old Fighting Fantasy books and went to play through them. (They're kind of like Lone Wolf if you know of those.) But I just couldn't get into the story, I sort of rebelled after the first paragraph. It was (necessarily) railroady. The choices available to me didn't seem attached to anything rational, there was no way to identify the "best" choice, or poor choices. It's kind of got me bummed.
I'm trying to rewrite some of these to see if I can come up with something more intuitive yet challenging, but I am clearly a novice, and the work is making my brain hurt. If anyone has written works like these, I'd appreciate some tips.
David Campbell
I played Norse Odyssey on a train ride recently, and it was alright. My Earl didn't end up being very wealthy, but we had some splendid adventures.
Had my brother-in-law get killed by monks, picked up a Pictish nobleman, sacked a village, and generally had a good time. Wish there were more rules and stuff for action on land though.
Not sure I'd play it again, at least not without rewriting some stuff, but as I said it was an alright way to do a bit of writing and pass the time.
Nathan Bailey
So, I ended up running a solo game and writing things out as I went.
Just went with a single character, it's just a self insert of myself, doing the whole "transported to another world" scenario.
I'm gong really slow, and simulating a randomization of events, then sitting and thinking about it before writing out a response.
The first two months in-game we're spent getting settled in to a village with a low paying job as a farmhand, building stats and learning about the randomized setting.
Towards the end of my first session, An actual quest started, and I still didn't have basic supplies. I had to patchwork starting gear together, I managed to scavenge a spear and some light armor, and scout out the area surrounding the town. Haven't run in to any danger yet.
Jeremiah Russell
Isn't the whole point of Role Playing is playing with friends?
Carter Nelson
Grey matter user here, please would you post some samples of your writing style?
Ayden Jones
Legit question. Why the fuck would you play a solo RPG and not just play an MMO or literally any videogame? Is the entire point of TTRPGs not the group aspect of it? This isn't shitposting, I'm genuinely interested in the reasoning for this and what merits this has.
Kayden Cox
I can post some excerpts from my story, later tonight. I'm not a very good writer, but I'm having fun.
I'm sure that different people have different reasons for wanting to play solo games. For me personally, I don't like MMOs much, and video games don't really scratch the creative itch. Don't get me wrong, I play tons of games, but I'm also visually impaired, so it's better for me to slowly read something and contemplate on it before coming up with a response.
I also have a desire to write with an "interactive" template. One thing I'm finding out is that as I'm writing I will think I know what's going on, and then the dice will throw me for a loop. It's interesting.
It's sort of like playing a text based role playing game, but going solo. It felt awkward for about five minutes, but once it got going it was really fun.
Julian Edwards
Oh, I see now. You played through an existing module, rather than rewriting a module for solo play.
Matthew Gutierrez
I kinda do this, OP, but in my case it's just daydreaming with a consistent narrative. Not even a good one, either. It's just something to keep my mind occupied when I am bored. I've considered statting the characters up and doing RP with dice or something to make their battles feel more legitimate, but honestly I feel like I would just fudge it constantly to fit the narrative better. I like choosing who dies when rather than dice telling me. Also there are some characters who literally cannot die for plot reasons because it would ruin the story, so I guess that's another hole in that plan. Plus I don't really know what kind of system would even work for it. GURPS, I guess, except GURPS is too lethal. Oddly, d20 modern would work well if it were classless and had VP/WP, but I don't feel like homebrewing a whole thing for something I wouldn't even play outside of my own autistic freeform RP wankery. It's not even RP, honestly, it's just daydreaming. I did write a story once for english class that was a fantasy story and I ran all the combat in D&D 3.5, but it was awful.
Camden Collins
Tell us the story of your narrative. What's it about? Go full autist, this is the shit that gets my dick hard.
Luis King
It's really autistic and weird, but when I was younger I'd imagine space battles with twigs and pieces of paper in school, and imagined the school was a huge fortress and the trees were cities, this giant war between two peoples that had been going on for hundreds of years on a planet 1000 times the size of earth. There was a married couple that were the main characters, Mary Sue heroes. In the end they destroyed two of these giant fortresses before dying escaping the second one, their kids became the main characters, and ended up at a giant tree-city that was the good guys' capital, liberated it from the corrupt prince and married the princess. Thus he became the leader. They fended off multiple enemy sieges until it eventually was taken over by the enemy, there was a bunch of shit where the main character was captive and watched his people forced to dig their own graves and shit (his sister had already died in battle 2 years before), eventually a bunch of people who lived underground rose up to help fight, a full year after they promised to help, and recaptured the tree-city. Then the main character died in a battle where he ended up contaminating a disease superweapon so that the enemy were no longer immune to it. So billions of them died, the main character's children took over. I really miss their father, he was the main character of the story for 8 years and I got really attached to him, didn't regret killing him off until like a year after he "died" and now his daughter is on a quest to resurrect him, she has visions and believes she can with ancient tech, but I don't know if I'm actually going to go through with it or not since it would mean there'd be 3 main characters fighting for space where there used to be one. I have like 500 pages of writings about this shit, I left out 95% of the plot in this explanation, it's really just an autistic habit I have, it's also got a ton of really cringeworthy shit I left out as well.
Joshua Morales
1 million times better than anything Hollywood has come up with in recent years. Have you posted about this before, because it sounds similar to a story like this that I rad before, by another user.
And don't feel silly, I think a lot of people write stories like this for themselves.
I have this coworker that never talks much, but recently I heard a story that he'd been "writing" in his head since he was in middle school.
It was some story about some guys that start investigating a series of murders in their hometown, only to find they all have a supernatural element. They find that this "Bigfoot" like creature is responsible, so they go to it's cave to find a sort of time portal leading back to "Prehistoria, a land that time forgot".
He showed me a binder of drawings and chapters that he had, and it was fucking huge. He said that nowadays he mostly writes on the computer, but he didn't have a count of pages. He had 87 chapters, or so.
Ethan Morris
I'm glad you think so user. It probably is the same story, I have shared it quite a few times before. I've never shared anything about it with IRL friends, but then again your coworker's story sounds a bit less cringey than mine. It honestly sounds kinda cool. I would share more of the story but I don't want to derail the thread.
But anyway the point I meant to make, before I hit character limit, is that it is hard to get the same experience out of roleplaying alone simply because it's so tempting to just fudge things. Because you have more freedom to create your own story (since your interests are the only thing that matters), you are more likely to give in to that freedom, and fudge things, or else get disappointed by the result. But in my experience I've found I just devolve to wanting complete control, at which point you might as well be daydreaming / writing. That said, you could do sidestories unrelated to your main plot, just to see how long characters survive. Or you could make like a 1-person hexcrawl zombie survival board game. I don't think a normal roleplaying game would be that fulfilling, though. Saying that makes me feel oddly sad and hollow, I don't know quite why.
Owen Watson
>Saying that makes me feel oddly sad and hollow People like the troll user in this thread taught you to feel that way. It wasn't always like that. We used to play these games as simulations, just to see what it could be like, just like you're doing. The rush of competitive play made the larger part of the hobby what it is today, but that doesn't mean there's no room for simulation anymore. For example, Dwarf Fortress is a simulation. Explore your thing, user.
Colton Garcia
Way better than the alternative. A few years back I met this guy at party who believed there was this whole 'inner world' in him going on he could access with his dreams. He had a notebook full of recounting the high-fantasy happenings inside his head.
Of course, the best part of that was me and my ex hiding in a tent giggling our asses off as he used his story to beguile and seduce an (at least we thought until then) intelligent friend of ours into his tent.
Owen Jenkins
Yeah, sometimes the dice are gonna fall in a way you don't like. You're going to make a bad decision on occasion or things aren't gonna go your way, but you have to make a decision on whether you're going to stick to those things, and to what degree.
It actually reminds me of a Nuzlocke run, in Pokemon, actually. If your team gets wipes out, do you start over? So you pull a team of backups from your box?
And "losing" doesn't have to mean the end. You can still intervene the way a GM would, but you have to make those interventions interesting or have consequences.
>A character survives a mortal blow, but loses a limb >The party survives a deadly encounter, but they lose a settlement in the time they were gone.
Angel Morgan
>I spent two hours pretending to be lost ingeneric fantasy world last night >Even I think this is the cringiest thing I ever heard
Don't worry about derailing this thead! Tell us more about what you got going on or what ideas you have. Do you have any other ideas regarding the "solo play" or daydreaming medium?
This whole thread is reminding me of something. A while back, some buddies and I were talking about fanfiction and stories people share on FictionPress. It was all fun and games until he showed me this one "Bionicle" story that some guy has been writing for decades. It was probably the most in-depth setting I've ever seen. He went far and beyond the canon of that franchise and built a huge setting with multiple worlds and wars. It was beautiful.
Jack Parker
Yeah that's fair. I just think roleplaying needs another person to make it work well, the interaction between the GM's creation (the world) and the player's creation (the character) is a lot more organic, no "plot holes" like a contrived story (and every fictional novel is contrived, some are just better than others at hiding it). Fair, though.
>A character survives a mortal blow, but loses a limb >The party survives a deadly encounter, but they lose a settlement in the time they were gone.
I like it, kinda like FATE consequences. I actually considered FATE as a system for my story, seeing as death is voluntary in that system. I guess when I am writing / imagining, and a character is going to die, it just suddenly feels "right," and it is inescapable, even if he/she is one of my favorites. Or I'll think of a particularly fucked way for someone to go out, months in advance, and subtly work toward that happening. I do that when GMing sometimes, too, imagine these scenes then steer toward them, but not too hard: I hate hard, unsubtle railroading.
Xavier Gomez
>I spent two hours pretending to be lost ingeneric fantasy world last night >Even I think this is the cringiest thing I ever heard
I mean, it is, but who cares? You have to suppress your self-consciousness to play RPGs; otherwise you feel like a dork for sitting in a basement pretending to be a dwarf. I took a long walk along a beach once and imagined myself in my post-apocalyptic setting, watching the seaside town I had created, AK slung over my back, waiting in case any monsters came out of the sea to attack. It's just a part of my life. I have many worlds I like to escape into.
The sad thing is, as I get older, it becomes harder to daydream. It's like my brain realizes it is immature and has become old and boring. I wish I could escape back into my childhood.
>A while back, some buddies and I were talking about fanfiction and stories people share on FictionPress. It was all fun and games until he showed me this one "Bionicle" story that some guy has been writing for decades. It was probably the most in-depth setting I've ever seen. He went far and beyond the canon of that franchise and built a huge setting with multiple worlds and wars. It was beautiful.
That sounds amazing, honestly. Too bad it's based in an already-existent IP. Dunno why but for some reason I'd rather have the most cliche, dreary autistic OC, than any kind of fanfiction, no matter how good. That's probably just my own hangup, though.
Mason Moore
>as I get older, it becomes harder to daydream.
WHY IS THIS?! I would give anything to have the imagination I had when I was a kid.
>I had this generic space pilot action figure >He was the main protagonist in all my "stories" and games I'd play >He was a real man's man, who show machine guns, fought werewolf-robots, and fucked bitches >Had all these stories of him going on these really long, drawn out adventures >Can't even remember his name. He was basically Axe Cop, but with a bigger dick.
Justin King
See, I've always wanted to do this type of shit, but I can never settle on a setting. I always want to jump around and have different ideas. Am I just not blessed with the proper type of 'tism?
Lucas Turner
You have to work at it. You can't just say "Oh I can't do it immediately, I guess I just have the wrong kind of brain"
Liam Wright
This whole experiment has raised questions of how a modern person would fair in a generic fantasy setting.
I gave my character baseline, average joe-blo stats. So what sort of advantages would you have if you went to such a setting? I was just thinking of simple things of, simple turns of phrase and sayings. Would certain expressions or ideas be considered particularly astonishing to people in something like middle-earth?
Ryder Nelson
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was about that I think, at least a parody of it
Honestly a modern person's social and political ideas would be strange, and the implementation of more modern ideas that you'd think would lead to the One Man Industrial Revolution cliche would come down to time period, technologies, available infrastructure and the amount of knowledge that the character has, e.g. you won't be making gunpowder unless you're a chemist whose dabbled with making gunpowder in a way that medieval people could have made it and plausibly gains access to the required materials.
Then you'd get the weird parts, like telling doctors to wash their hands. Try to get them to see the merits of that without demonstrating you're a doctor yourself and you'd get thrown out for insulting them.
