Ever since I stopped the solo game I played using the original Basic Roleplaying system, later modified by Magic World, I find my mind returning towards the location where the action began: Crag’s Ruin. That tower on the hill haunts my thoughts on occasion as I wonder, “What’s REALLY in there?”
This is the joy of solo roleplaying: the discovery of places, people, and things that populate an ever-growing fantasy (or other type) world. Questions remain unanswered and they niggle at the mind. I stopped playing because I didn’t like where the game began to take the characters, but the world pulls me back.
Being largely stuck and uncertain about what to play, the thought occurs to me that a a new set of characters might salvage the world that had started to arise from play. I felt that several of the specific options Magic World had turned on also didn’t fit my style, so a system change might be on the cards – at least to dial in the options I want.
But I also have this question about how little system I can happily get away with for my play. My desire for more descriptive language and less numbers / mechanisms has me eying one or two different game engines for a further experiment. More than this, however, I am considering my “sacred” ideas about RPG methodology and questioning their validity.
What would happen if I took some heroes back to Crag’s Ruin? What would it be like to play solo with more descriptive tools and fewer detailed rules? Instead of the original randomly rolled characters I used before, who would I be most interested in playing?
Game on!
Roleplay Rescue’s Blog 
Thanks for tickling my brain with the idea of solo play.
I haven’t done solo RPGing much since the first year I got into D&D. Back then, I used the appendices in the back of the AD&D DMG to make random dungeons, because my brother had left for college, and I hadn’t met anyone else to play with yet. Since I got into my first roleplaying group, other than a few solo dungeon’s that were introductory adventures for RPGs, or items in gaming magazines, almost all my table top roleplaying has been with at least one other player. My limited experience with solo play was always much more ‘game’ focused, than ‘roleplay’ focused, without other people to bounce off of.
The idea of using solo play to build out and fill in details of a world is intriguing, though. It’s got me thinking of whether I could use a GM emulator and other random generators to adventure in worlds I’ve created for my campaigns, and get into them in different way. Could it give me something useful to add to the games I run for others? I also wonder if using AI could enhance the results from random generators and help give them more descriptive detail.
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I am finding that solo play helps to flesh out the world from the player perspective. There’s a temptation for the GM to focus on things that the players won’t really interact with in play, but soloing places you in their perspective so you find yourself describing places, people, and things as they arise. The resultant world is built with more usability, I feel. It’s fun too.
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