Building a solo practice: Foundations
Nov. 10th, 2025 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knightThis is going to be a series of posts, not in the least because I do not actually have ‘the answer’ to ‘how do I get started’.
The answer to that will be different for different people and different types of games, and depend on your mental state, time budget, and personal preferences, so expect this more like a which Discworld book should I read first chaotic flowchart than a simple ‘a, b, c’. .
The short, trial-and-error, might-be-fun-and-might-not answer is 'pick something that appeals to you, throw yourself into it, and keep tweaking it until you have fun (or until you're thoroughly bored with even the idea of solo play and give it up forever).
It's not wrong. Many people come to love solo RPGs by this route, but I would recommend that even if you're keen to delve in right now, you spend at least 10% of the time and spoons you have available researching other systems, and exploring what else you could play and how else you could play it.
In May or thereabouts I gave myself a year to explore the solo roleplay phase space (I’ll just stick with ‘soloverse’ for the forseeable future) to try out games, play as much as I can without making it into a chore, to try out different games and different types of games. Getting an overview of what I have and what resources I've got is part of that project.
Right now, I am stuck on one particular problem, and I am hoping that writing about it will help to unstick, but before I delve into my actual hurdle, I want to lay a bit more groundwork to make this series of posts easier to follow. (I'm describing the problem, which right now has no solution, at the end of this post.)
The overarching principle, the lens through which I view the whole of solo roleplay (and group roleplay, and gaming in general) is the Marie Kondo principle. Does this spark joy? Sometimes things that spark joy are complex and difficult and can feel overwhelming at times, and you need to put in work, and practice, and fail: but they still spark joy. Other things feel like chores even if they’re supposed to be hobbies, or they’re fast food: you get a small boost immediately while you’re doing it, and half an hour later, you’re hungry again. (They can still fulfil a purpose, you should just try to replace them with something better in the long run).
There's more than one axis here, so many games can be very simple along one axis and create a high mental load along another. If something feels too much, it's ok to walk away, sometimes for now, sometimes completely. I'm learning that lesson and will probably have to learn it again.
There are one-page game that work out of the box: you read a few paragraphs of intro, grab some dice or cards, but there's a straightforward mechanic for 'what do I do next' and while you need to come up with responses to prompts, the experience is guided. Those games are the easiest to play; they can take between half an hour to two hours, and you don't need to know much about roleplaying to give them a go.
Then there are ongoing games that may need a little more effort to set up, but once you're in, they pretty much run themselves - you don't have to spend a lot of time and effort to keep them going, and actual play might be twenty minutes resolving a particular thread or setting up something.
Last but not least there are the games – usually longer campaigns – where, like in DnD, you will always need to look up complex rules, and you're constantly bringing in new resources and prepping the next session where you actually get to roll some dice. Some of this may be mitigated by using third party materials like a published settings and adventures or random tables/quest hooks. I don't recommend starting here.
DnD rests on three pillars: Social, Exploration, and Combat. Solo play touches on all of these, but coming from a slightly different angle.
Pillar 1: Social.
When you're playing by yourself, social interactions are the most problematic. There may be longer games that put emphasis on social interactions, but I haven't played them yet.
In order to make social interactions interesting, you can employ randomisers: you can test whether an interaction happens as envisioned, you can determine the attitude of NPCs towards your character, you can try and best them in pseudo-combat where you roll to persuade a character and they roll to resist your silver tongue or treating them as obstacles ('I need to roll x to get past the bouncer/get the mayor to talk to me').
In practice, I find that I am writing out social interactions rather than playing them. That can be a lot of fun, too: using dice or cards as guidelines for how things go, and delving into the story.
Video games manage to provide memorable characters and memorable interactions, often with fairly limited dialogue trees, so at some point I want to look into how that is done, mechanically, and see wheher solo RPGs would benefit from that, though it's harder to keep the player in the dark about what an NPC will do and what else they could have done. As a player, I find it impossible to NOT read other entries in random tables.
Pillar 2: Exploration
There is a whole cozy genre of SoloRPGs which leans heavily into worldbuilding and discovering a town, a community.
There are hex crawls which should scratch the itch for exploration: you wander around a map you uncover bit by bit and learn what you encounter, including landmarks, people, and monsters.
Last but not least, there are dungeon crawls which should be straightforward and are not (I'll make more posts on the topic eventually; so far my attempts to find a straightforward dungeon crawl have not been successful, though I have multiple products to try out.)
Pillar 3: Combat
Most medium to long form solo games have a combat system and there's a huge variety of combat resolutions. Journalling games often only have a 'you meet an ogre. What happens' system where you narrate events or roll on a table/draw a card, and running away is almost always an option.
I'm just going to throw this in here. The next step along is complexity and which resolution system feels best to you; and how much time and energy you want to spend in combat. Here I feel I need to investigate a lot more games.
I *think* I'm tending more towards exploration than combat, especially as some of the fun parts of combat in TTRPGs – outwitting the DM by using special abilities and collaborating with other players – just don't work anywhere near as well in solo play.
If you're lucky, prep is play. Otherwise, at least make it fun.
Some games you open, read through, and five minutes later you're in the middle of gameplay.
For long, complex games you'll always have to do some prep (or outsource the prep).
But even some one-page games demand that you do prep, and in some cases, you have to do everything: you bring the characters, the plot, the setting, the events, the NPCs, the descriptions, while the game may tell you which room you're playing in and how to log the results of your actions.
Some of the preparation can be outsourced to random tables: you can generate towns, NPCs, or inns; you can also use a pregenerated setting (including NPCs and magic items and side quests). Some systems (like using Mythic GME as the sole system, rather than as an augmentation) demand that you think about the scenes you want to see, and how you think they will play out, and who the antagonists are, and what they're doing AND you have to keep track of everything that happens.
Creating and populating a world to play in is a major part of the fun of playing RPGs, This taps into the 'exploration' pillar and the last thing I want to do is discourage anyone. The trick here, I think, is to incorprate prep time into your fun time, by finding procedures that are fun, and by finding the fun in your preparations.
Some of that is finding the right tools, some of it is a shift in mindset: instead of going 'I'd love to play something, but I only have an hour before I need to do something else' I am slowly getting to the point of 'I don't have time to start a play session, but I can do a map/create a character/inn/village'
I don't feel I'm familiar enough with SoloRPG-the-Hobby to say much of substance on this topic yet.
This is a problem because this is how I will find the answer to 'what do I enjoy' and 'which game should I pick right now' if I don't know what's possible?
I mean, I've been studying soloRPGs for a few months, I've acquired a huge stack of games (some cheap, some free, some in bundles); I'm reading RPGs, solo and group games regularly; I'm rolling dice to try out mechanics, I'm (finally) playing games, I'm watching playthroughs… All the time I am finding ways of playing that I like and learning what is too complicated, too boring, or just too much of a mental load, all by poking at different systems.
From that point of view, I don't regret playing things that don't work for me; I'm learning from those games, too.
A lot of people who play solo seem to have a toolbox containing multiple approaches, so they can simplify conflict resolution, bring in additional subsystems, and just doing everything to keep the story flowing, and I definitely want to develop those skills.
TL;DR:
I don't think there is a straightforward answer to 'how do I start to play' beyond 'pick up some cheap/free games and mess around and see what you like while learning as much about the hobby as you can'.
To come back to the place where I'm stuck, because I think it's a good way of illustrating how solo RPG does or doesn't work:
I am currently attempting to start a short campaign using the Tiny Dungeon rule set. It's a game that is fairly pared down, originally a group game, but frequently soloed. I have used the Colorful Characters process to roll up three characters, who promptly came alive, and purchased a set of random dungeon cards that is highly praised, to see whether a randomly-created dungeon works for me.
So the main character (two are just along for the ride; this one has a goal and motivation, which was NOT my intention) comes to the city and is looking to pick up her first proper adventuring job (She'll just happen to team up with the other two characters I rolled).
I have a fair idea of what will happen to get her to the starter quest. If I was writing a book, I'd be skimming the surface of those scenes until we get to the real action, the dungeon is entered, and the first enemy awaits.
But I have been paying attention to how RPGs work, and – see the three pillars above – I don't want to play a game where all I do is fight enemies, even though this is the mechanic I want to try out.
If I was DMing this for others, I'd describe the marketplace a little and then ask 'what do you want to do'.
And I want to bring some of that energy – the 'play' aspect – into my own game, but I am not sure how yet. Which is frustrating.
So I will take this situation away, and think about it some more, and write out what I could do and how I could address it with the tools I *am* familiar with, and decide later. In the meantime, I'll check out more games and log some more resources and fill my toolbox, but I'm just somewhat frustrated and a little bit annoyed that I just… have no idea how to proceed from here.
I have a number of books _about_ solo play, and half a million rulesets; one of them will provide the answer, but I have no patience, I want to proceed NOW.
(How would you approach this in your own game? I don't want to create a complication; I don't want a fight in the marketplace, and I know exactly what the noticeboard looks like once my character finds it, but I want her to look around, maybe notice some NPCs or future quest hooks or potential allies. It may be relevant that Futto is a 4ft goblin in a marketplace of mixed clientele; she would NOT simply turn up and get an overview and head straight for the noticeboard.)
The answer to that will be different for different people and different types of games, and depend on your mental state, time budget, and personal preferences, so expect this more like a which Discworld book should I read first chaotic flowchart than a simple ‘a, b, c’. .
The short, trial-and-error, might-be-fun-and-might-not answer is 'pick something that appeals to you, throw yourself into it, and keep tweaking it until you have fun (or until you're thoroughly bored with even the idea of solo play and give it up forever).
It's not wrong. Many people come to love solo RPGs by this route, but I would recommend that even if you're keen to delve in right now, you spend at least 10% of the time and spoons you have available researching other systems, and exploring what else you could play and how else you could play it.
In May or thereabouts I gave myself a year to explore the solo roleplay phase space (I’ll just stick with ‘soloverse’ for the forseeable future) to try out games, play as much as I can without making it into a chore, to try out different games and different types of games. Getting an overview of what I have and what resources I've got is part of that project.
Right now, I am stuck on one particular problem, and I am hoping that writing about it will help to unstick, but before I delve into my actual hurdle, I want to lay a bit more groundwork to make this series of posts easier to follow. (I'm describing the problem, which right now has no solution, at the end of this post.)
The overarching principle, the lens through which I view the whole of solo roleplay (and group roleplay, and gaming in general) is the Marie Kondo principle. Does this spark joy? Sometimes things that spark joy are complex and difficult and can feel overwhelming at times, and you need to put in work, and practice, and fail: but they still spark joy. Other things feel like chores even if they’re supposed to be hobbies, or they’re fast food: you get a small boost immediately while you’re doing it, and half an hour later, you’re hungry again. (They can still fulfil a purpose, you should just try to replace them with something better in the long run).
Domain 1: Complexity
There's more than one axis here, so many games can be very simple along one axis and create a high mental load along another. If something feels too much, it's ok to walk away, sometimes for now, sometimes completely. I'm learning that lesson and will probably have to learn it again.
There are one-page game that work out of the box: you read a few paragraphs of intro, grab some dice or cards, but there's a straightforward mechanic for 'what do I do next' and while you need to come up with responses to prompts, the experience is guided. Those games are the easiest to play; they can take between half an hour to two hours, and you don't need to know much about roleplaying to give them a go.
Then there are ongoing games that may need a little more effort to set up, but once you're in, they pretty much run themselves - you don't have to spend a lot of time and effort to keep them going, and actual play might be twenty minutes resolving a particular thread or setting up something.
Last but not least there are the games – usually longer campaigns – where, like in DnD, you will always need to look up complex rules, and you're constantly bringing in new resources and prepping the next session where you actually get to roll some dice. Some of this may be mitigated by using third party materials like a published settings and adventures or random tables/quest hooks. I don't recommend starting here.
Domain 2: Style of Gameplay
DnD rests on three pillars: Social, Exploration, and Combat. Solo play touches on all of these, but coming from a slightly different angle.
Pillar 1: Social.
When you're playing by yourself, social interactions are the most problematic. There may be longer games that put emphasis on social interactions, but I haven't played them yet.
In order to make social interactions interesting, you can employ randomisers: you can test whether an interaction happens as envisioned, you can determine the attitude of NPCs towards your character, you can try and best them in pseudo-combat where you roll to persuade a character and they roll to resist your silver tongue or treating them as obstacles ('I need to roll x to get past the bouncer/get the mayor to talk to me').
In practice, I find that I am writing out social interactions rather than playing them. That can be a lot of fun, too: using dice or cards as guidelines for how things go, and delving into the story.
Video games manage to provide memorable characters and memorable interactions, often with fairly limited dialogue trees, so at some point I want to look into how that is done, mechanically, and see wheher solo RPGs would benefit from that, though it's harder to keep the player in the dark about what an NPC will do and what else they could have done. As a player, I find it impossible to NOT read other entries in random tables.
Pillar 2: Exploration
There is a whole cozy genre of SoloRPGs which leans heavily into worldbuilding and discovering a town, a community.
There are hex crawls which should scratch the itch for exploration: you wander around a map you uncover bit by bit and learn what you encounter, including landmarks, people, and monsters.
Last but not least, there are dungeon crawls which should be straightforward and are not (I'll make more posts on the topic eventually; so far my attempts to find a straightforward dungeon crawl have not been successful, though I have multiple products to try out.)
Pillar 3: Combat
Most medium to long form solo games have a combat system and there's a huge variety of combat resolutions. Journalling games often only have a 'you meet an ogre. What happens' system where you narrate events or roll on a table/draw a card, and running away is almost always an option.
I'm just going to throw this in here. The next step along is complexity and which resolution system feels best to you; and how much time and energy you want to spend in combat. Here I feel I need to investigate a lot more games.
I *think* I'm tending more towards exploration than combat, especially as some of the fun parts of combat in TTRPGs – outwitting the DM by using special abilities and collaborating with other players – just don't work anywhere near as well in solo play.
Domain 3: Preparation
If you're lucky, prep is play. Otherwise, at least make it fun.
Some games you open, read through, and five minutes later you're in the middle of gameplay.
For long, complex games you'll always have to do some prep (or outsource the prep).
But even some one-page games demand that you do prep, and in some cases, you have to do everything: you bring the characters, the plot, the setting, the events, the NPCs, the descriptions, while the game may tell you which room you're playing in and how to log the results of your actions.
Some of the preparation can be outsourced to random tables: you can generate towns, NPCs, or inns; you can also use a pregenerated setting (including NPCs and magic items and side quests). Some systems (like using Mythic GME as the sole system, rather than as an augmentation) demand that you think about the scenes you want to see, and how you think they will play out, and who the antagonists are, and what they're doing AND you have to keep track of everything that happens.
Creating and populating a world to play in is a major part of the fun of playing RPGs, This taps into the 'exploration' pillar and the last thing I want to do is discourage anyone. The trick here, I think, is to incorprate prep time into your fun time, by finding procedures that are fun, and by finding the fun in your preparations.
Some of that is finding the right tools, some of it is a shift in mindset: instead of going 'I'd love to play something, but I only have an hour before I need to do something else' I am slowly getting to the point of 'I don't have time to start a play session, but I can do a map/create a character/inn/village'
Domain 4: Gameplay Loop
I don't feel I'm familiar enough with SoloRPG-the-Hobby to say much of substance on this topic yet.
This is a problem because this is how I will find the answer to 'what do I enjoy' and 'which game should I pick right now' if I don't know what's possible?
I mean, I've been studying soloRPGs for a few months, I've acquired a huge stack of games (some cheap, some free, some in bundles); I'm reading RPGs, solo and group games regularly; I'm rolling dice to try out mechanics, I'm (finally) playing games, I'm watching playthroughs… All the time I am finding ways of playing that I like and learning what is too complicated, too boring, or just too much of a mental load, all by poking at different systems.
From that point of view, I don't regret playing things that don't work for me; I'm learning from those games, too.
A lot of people who play solo seem to have a toolbox containing multiple approaches, so they can simplify conflict resolution, bring in additional subsystems, and just doing everything to keep the story flowing, and I definitely want to develop those skills.
TL;DR:
I don't think there is a straightforward answer to 'how do I start to play' beyond 'pick up some cheap/free games and mess around and see what you like while learning as much about the hobby as you can'.
To come back to the place where I'm stuck, because I think it's a good way of illustrating how solo RPG does or doesn't work:
I am currently attempting to start a short campaign using the Tiny Dungeon rule set. It's a game that is fairly pared down, originally a group game, but frequently soloed. I have used the Colorful Characters process to roll up three characters, who promptly came alive, and purchased a set of random dungeon cards that is highly praised, to see whether a randomly-created dungeon works for me.
So the main character (two are just along for the ride; this one has a goal and motivation, which was NOT my intention) comes to the city and is looking to pick up her first proper adventuring job (She'll just happen to team up with the other two characters I rolled).
I have a fair idea of what will happen to get her to the starter quest. If I was writing a book, I'd be skimming the surface of those scenes until we get to the real action, the dungeon is entered, and the first enemy awaits.
But I have been paying attention to how RPGs work, and – see the three pillars above – I don't want to play a game where all I do is fight enemies, even though this is the mechanic I want to try out.
If I was DMing this for others, I'd describe the marketplace a little and then ask 'what do you want to do'.
And I want to bring some of that energy – the 'play' aspect – into my own game, but I am not sure how yet. Which is frustrating.
So I will take this situation away, and think about it some more, and write out what I could do and how I could address it with the tools I *am* familiar with, and decide later. In the meantime, I'll check out more games and log some more resources and fill my toolbox, but I'm just somewhat frustrated and a little bit annoyed that I just… have no idea how to proceed from here.
I have a number of books _about_ solo play, and half a million rulesets; one of them will provide the answer, but I have no patience, I want to proceed NOW.
(How would you approach this in your own game? I don't want to create a complication; I don't want a fight in the marketplace, and I know exactly what the noticeboard looks like once my character finds it, but I want her to look around, maybe notice some NPCs or future quest hooks or potential allies. It may be relevant that Futto is a 4ft goblin in a marketplace of mixed clientele; she would NOT simply turn up and get an overview and head straight for the noticeboard.)
