This is the saddest title I've ever seen.
There are TTRPGs built for solo play.
Is Solitaire sad? Are single-player games? When did using your imagination become sad?
How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
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Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#52FWIW, there is an active solo wargaming community as well - the historical toy miniatures crowd. Donald Featherstone and Lionel Tarr were writing about this back in the 1960s. I found it particularly appealing when my local wargaming club didn't really play the games that scratched my itch, or when the scheduling didn't work out. I had a standing table set up in my garage and would solo game battles on a Saturday with a six-pack of beer. It allowed me to 'practice' things like playing more/less aggressively, alternate lines of approach, changing up my unit composition, understanding how things would game out when I made certain mistakes like walking into an ambush, etc.
One of the parts I particularly enjoyed was developing strategies to compensate for the fact that I always knew what "the other guy" was going to do. I did quite a bit of research, liberally stole ideas from sharper eggs, and came up with some of my own. It actually turned out pretty satisfying. The system I used, "I Ain't Been Shot, Mum", incorporates a 'blind' mechanism that worked really well.
My wife called me the Patron Saint of Lonely Nerds.
Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#53Every day it’s just more headlines of the modern dystopia we have created.
Plenty of people play video games by themselves for hours each day. I don't see how this is fundamentally worse.
Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironic that in a thread about shaming how people should be permitted by others to have fun, the first page of that web page is a long rant about the author's demand to gatekeep his purchasers political views, dripping with hatred for his opponents.
"If you stand by quietly as Republicans take the power of the vote from African Americans in Alabama and compete to hurt trans people as badly as possible then you are part of this problem. You are lobbying for the death of my friends and relations, you are pushing for dangerous authoritarians to destroy the systems that let books like mine come to be. And this goes for equivalent groups outside the US–you know who y…
That is a generous reading of the paragraphs of rambling on that page. The author lumps half of all voters in with actual "extremists". It is just useless, divisive political vitriol.
One thing I have learned over the years is that politics is extraordinarily complex. Painting with wide strokes and making caricatures of the "others" isn't useful or accurate. Nuance is just too complex for our monkey brains, so tribalism reigns. We must demand better every time this kind of drivel appears, regardless of the level of agreement with anything being said.
Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#55This is the saddest title I've ever seen.
Solo TTRPGs have been a thing since TTRPGs have been a thing. You do realize that centuries before solo video games, there were solo table-top games? They fell out of fashion due to (1) solo video games became standard (2) table top ended up being associated with group play because video games were exclusively solo until very recently (thanks to the rise of cloud and streaming).
Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#56I still remember playing D&D red box and blue box by myself. Party full of characters named after friends.
Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#57Aren't the point of tabletop RPGs primarily the fact that they are a social experience though? Wouldn't it be easier to just read a Choose Your Own Adventure, or play a solo text based adventure game? Or just log on to a roleplaying leaning MUD and still get the benefit of others?
Even at the very beginning of the Choose Your Own Adventure era there were RPG experiences (and were labeled as such): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy
The boundaries have always been fuzzy between RPGs that are a "social experience" and ones that are not. "Social experience" isn't necessarily a part of the definition of what an RPG is, even if you restrict it to just table top RPGs and not the equally long history of CYOA RPGs and Computer RPGs.
Between indie developers on sites like itch.io and elsewhere there's been a lot of interesting exploration of solo RPG adaptation (playing existing RPGs with their sometimes decades of lore and tools) and new solo RPG development. Which yes, to partially answer your questions: an RPG designed for a solo experience is likely always "easier" to play than playing an RPG designed for a table full of people, especially if you have to also do the work adapting it for solo play. (That said, again, there's an interesting growing market for "professional" solo adaptations of well loved table-top settings.)
Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#58FWIW, there is an active solo wargaming community as well - the historical toy miniatures crowd. Donald Featherstone and Lionel Tarr were writing about this back in the 1960s. I found it particularly appealing when my local wargaming club didn't really play the games that scratched my itch, or when the scheduling didn't work out. I had a standing table set up in my garage and would solo game battles on a Saturday wit…
Also, solo was always the majority of board wargamers (90% according to statistics from SPI).
Given the size, detail, the depth of the rules, the long playtime, the interest of reading or otherwise learning about the history as you play, etc., it works out well. Pretty much all wargames by the major publishers have listed a 'Solitaire Suitability' rating on the box for decades.
Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The scope of what's considered a "table top RPG" these days is pretty large. A large number of them are more focussed on the creativity and drama aspects, rather than the tactical combat. I'm not surprised that a lot of them are able to be solo'd versus played collaboratively. Hell, there are games like Microscope that would be incredibly fun playing solo.
A little confused by what you mean. TTRPGs were not originally about tactical combat (old RPGs were very lethal so combat was a fail state), and wouldn't tactical combat (rather than the RP) make the game more soloable (lots of video games are just the combat part of an RPG)?
Quite the contrary. D&D was originally a supplement for Chainmail, a skirmish wargame, in which they started adding characterization elements. Many/most of the early RPGs were very crunchy, and a lot of people played them focused on combat and stats. But it had started by adding story elements to a wargame, and over the years it continued adding more.
In the middle era, the trend was obvious with games like Vampire: The Masquerade and its Storyteller system, coupled with the LARPing fad and some diceless games.
Since that era, the trend has continued. Many games now have little or no crunch at all, and focus almost entirely on world-building, storytelling, and improv. Some games, like the mentioned Microscope, along with Ex Novo and The Quiet Year are almost entirely crunchless world-building and storytelling.
You can go quite far with just oracles and no system at all, and then if you need one, easily pull in something modern and light like FATE, Mythic, or Fu RPG that just adds a few die rolls to your otherwise creative campaign.
And it can be more soloable than crunchy games because you don't need tons of rules and stats and dice rolls. You instead have creative prompts and oracles and source material and can just go with it, reading, interpreting, writing wherever your imagination takes you.
I did also do a lot of solo wargaming, so crunch is not un-soloable, but less crunch is easier and can feel more rewarding.
Re: How to play tabletop RPGs by yourself: A beginner's guide to solo roleplaying
#60Every day it’s just more headlines of the modern dystopia we have created.
Plenty of people play video games by themselves for hours each day. I don't see how this is fundamentally worse.
When I play a video game an AI or another person’s programming is the other side. Imagine using a second controller to control the npcs and interact with your character.