Solo-RPG General?

bump

I guess I'll post about my solo campaign again. It's been pretty fun.

>Play shameless self-insert character, give myself average stats (10s in everything)
>Wake up in the woods on a riverbank
>Wander for a few days before find a town
>Can't speak their language, and they basically tell me to fuck off
>Eventually an old lady NPC gives me a job as a farmhand for a couple coppers a day. I can sleep in her stables
>Spend two months working for her, gradually gaining a couple of ability points, and learning to speak the very basics of their language
>During those two months I roll random encounters, but they are minor things that the guard deal with long before I notice them
>After two months, something happens
>A wounded merchant limps into town
>This is my chance!
>Have a level one adventure that I haven't run before
>Stay up one night, soloing the adventure
(Continued.)

>The merchant says his caravan was ambushed a couple of miles outside of town.
>Walk up the road to the scene of the attack
>Scavenging supplies from the reckage, I have a club and some mismatching armor
>Find the hideout of the attackers, some abandoned ruins on a hill. There's a fire, so there must be a guard
>Sneak up there to find there's no guard, but whoever was on duty left their shit
>Get a spear and some gear and head down I to the ruin
>Sneak around for a bit, dispatching a guard and finding some mind controlled slaves
>Release some other slaves from a cage, they apparently weren't effected by the mind control
>Out of the dozen of them, I can convince one to help me kill the bandit leader
>They are being led by a naga-like snake lady
>We set up a time in the hall outside her chamber
>After we storm in, we flee, triggering the trap on her, which lights her on fire
>Once she's weakened we subdue her and take her and her enthralled slaves back to town
(Continued.)

>Returning to town, everyone just calls me foolish for running off
>I split my findings with the freed slave, who says he is going to buy a cottage and live out his days in peace
>A caravan is sent to a town to the north, where priests will decide what to do with the serpent woman and release the thralls from their mind control
>I decide to spend the week it will take scouting the area around the village
>Practice hunting small rat/coyote-like animals in the area, learn to skin and cook them
>Also see some small, goblinoid creatures to the south that are peaceful, yet fearful of humans
>Steer clear of the forests to the west, which have sasquatch-like badger-men. (All of these species are randomly generated using various tables and tools.)
>Spy the ruins of an abandoned cathedral of a local diety
>Snoop around but find nothing of interest but a locked door
>Go back to town and find those priests from the northern town
>Tell them about the ruins and convince them to go with me to clear the place out and maybe find use for it
>We go into the locked basement to find an old cellar and a burial chamber
>There are some mummy creatures inside
>Despite major injuries to the party, I tell them to press on, which results in the death of one of the priests
>As we go to leave, yellow worm-like parasites burst from his eyes, mouth, and nostrils, and his body writhes in undeath
>As we struggle to lock the door behind us, one of the other priests is dragged into the darkness by the mummy things
>All I can do is stab him in hopes to keep him from suffering at their hands or turning himself
>The mummies break through the doors and are now roaming the countryside

Ever since I cut my teeth on gamebooks in the 80's, I've always had an interest in 1-player pen-and-paper games. Computer offerings have definitely taken their cut of the business since then. But despite the great advancement of software design tools, I think we're still one or two iterations away from tech neophyte authors being able to create HTML5 adventures of some substance. We seem to be in this odd, transitional, and barren middle ground.

What I've found in developing 1-player games is that without great care, you end up developing the game for someone else and will never play it yourself. Some things must be static to create solid value, but without giving the designer an unfair edge in play. Other things must be dynamic to prevent that edge, but not so many that dullness results. (Think of the tedium of forced CRPG random encounters that are of absolutely no interest to you, that's what I mean.)

One thing that's been on my mind for awhile is the guy who would add foibles and GURPS-like drawbacks to his character when playing through modules. He would predetermine that his character had a fear of undead and would always run from them, for example. I'm looking into a more realistic foible concept for the game I'm working on. I feel there is a freedom in 1-player games to create new and vastly different systems where in a multiplayer tabletop setting they just wouldn't be played for the burden of having to learn the new rules.

Ok, you know what I'll bite. I'm out of the country in bumfuck asia at the moment and there is no way in hell i'm going to be able to find a game group while i'm here and the time difference makes online games problematic, so why not i'll bite. How does one play a one person rpg? Are there materials for it? Also, assuming that this is something I end up doing, and assuming you do make a general for it i'll contribute whatever stories come out of it.

Is Solo Wargaming (i.e. non-RPG's) welcome in here?

>GURPS-like drawbacks

Yeah, but those kind of suck. They rely on the player remembering to play sub-optimally. I think it's better to have drawbacks be enforced by a reward system. Gain some mechanical leverage every time you make a sub-optimal decision that fits your character's drawbacks. Like Burning Wheel, where a major drawback like "one leg" costs a lot of points, because it can cause trouble in all sorts of situations, meaning it will generate artha and other points like crazy. That way you get a stronger character if you survive all the troubles you get yourself into.
It makes for an exciting game of skirting the razor's edge, pushing your character into tight spots instead of studiously avoiding them, because playing it safe won't advance your character as fast, but not playing it safe enough will get him killed.

Well, the pick-up-and-go solution would be gamebooks. These are one-player adventure modules where you do a CYOA (the book, not the shitty image macro) thing for the most part, and then sometimes you roll dice for the outcome.

Beyond that you get into solo modules, which are like gamebooks, but they run with standard RPG rules. There are ones out there for D&D, Tunnels and Trolls, The Fantasy Trip (proto-GURPS), World of Darkness, and probably more.

If you want to go full nerd with it, pick up any system you like, and grab a GM emulator. Mythic is the grandaddy of them all, but there's a lot of others out there. (A lot of folks think Mythic's a bit too rules heavy for what it does. I dunno, I thought it worked well for me) A GM Emulator is like a magic 8 ball, but one that's tuned for RPG use. Any time there's something you can't determine from the RPG's rules, you ask the GME a question and roll on the table, then interpret the results.
Mythic in particular has a "detailed question" mechanic that's like an I Ching for RPGs, where it will give you a short, cryptic phrase that you then try to interpret. Like having a Hollywood martial arts guru for a DM.

If I theoretically wanted to do world of darkness where would be a good place to start looking for resources for that?

They add difficulty to the game. I don't have the guy's link anymore, but this was done to handle getting information from the module that would normally spoil solo play.

For example, reading from the module paragraph that "there is a trap on the floor in front of the chest" automatically makes him aware of it. So if he now decides to search for traps on the floor, he's "cheating", because he wouldn't have done it earlier. But if he says up front that his rogue is very circumspect and always checks for traps in every room, now if he reads this blurb he doesn't feel the shitty sting of cheating.

The drawback to my shitty rushed example is that this rogue's skitzo paranoia causes him to slow down when he is chased into an unknown room, allowing him to be caught. It's highly implausible, so I want something more all encompassing and in line with healthy real-life personalities, but presented simply enough to not be burdensome.

Haven't tried it myself yet, but there is a game called Scrawl or something like that on Drivethru. It's supposed to be a solo crawl game of some kind.

Also, does anyone know of any solo card games? Not just traditional solitaire, but well... something else I suppose.

YES. Any solo-gaming whatsoever, really.

solo tabletop gaming is the best as it allows me to better visualize being the girl I will never be, without creeping out other players.