My first solo play session was attempted using a published adventure module (the Hero Kids “Basement o’ Rats” introductory adventure). I had fun — I was able to use a simple d6 yes/no mechanic to pose questions and emulate GM responses — but I also had enough foreknowledge (and inexperience) that it was too confining compared to more free-form, generated-on-the-fly sort of play. And that’s the problem, right? Modules are published for GMs, so they’re chock full of great stuff that absolutely spoils things for the players if they come into such knowledge before the proper time. As a solo…
Resources
I’m not sure if anyone actually uses it, but I’ve updated the Hero Kids Compatible Encounter Generator web app (henceforth known as HKGen because that’s too much to type out every time…). It’s set up as an offline, responsive javascript web app using an appcache manifest. You don’t necessarily need to know that, but you should see a popup asking if it should reload any time you visit the page after the code gets updated. I actually had issue with this on my Android phone and had to go in and clear the cached data in the mobile Chrome browser…
Lately I’ve been playing a nifty little dungeon-crawling game called Four Against Darkness. Some might call it a board game instead of an RPG, but whatever it is, it’s a solo game designed for one player to delve into a randomly-generated, old-school style dungeon — using only a pencil, paper, and a few d6 dice. I’ve been enjoying it, but I won’t get into the details here (stay tuned for an actual play / review post). Instead, I just wanted to share the 4AD Game Board I’ve created for use with Four Against Darkness — in both 20×28 and 30×42 sized grid-flavors!…
So you read through the Rolling Solo series and learned how to engage in solitaire role-playing — great job! I hope you enjoyed it. But, if you were left asking yourself questions like “That’s it???” or “Now what???” or “Help!!!!?“, I don’t want you to think I’ve left you hanging. Wisps of Time got your back. But, what should I do now?? If I haven’t said it enough already: whatever you want! It’s up to you! But, if you’re like me and often want or need a little more direction when faced with such an open-ended response, I have some suggestions for you. First,…
Not much to see here, I just wanted to point you to my latest community contribution: ap_shortcodes.js. It is a drop-in JavaScript solution for easily formatting your actual play reports with custom BBCode/WordPress-style “shortcodes”, such as [story] to wrap your narrative elements, that get replaced out with HTML+CSS to consistently style them across your site. Check it out at the link, and also check out the GitHub project, where you can contribute code or to the Wiki (or, dare I say, report bugs). I don’t actually use it to format my posts here, but I do basically the same thing with…
The Wheel of Fate is a volvelle representation of the Mythic: Game Master Emulator’s “Fate Chart”. A volvelle is also known by other names: wheel chart, “dial-o-matic”, info chart, dial chart, calculator, and more. While the term originally referred to such tools created for astronomy (and became rather popular in the Middle Ages up through the twentieth century), volvelle seems to be the universal term for them now. You’ll find them employed for everything from baseball stats to oil filter selectors. To use the Wheel of Fate, one simply turns the “dial” to indicate the current Chaos Rank, and then…
I’ll be using an old-school-inspired “sword & sorcery” game called Sharp Swords and Sinister Spells (Pay What You Want) for my final solo play in this series. As talked about last time, we’ll also be stepping up to the Mythic Game Master Emulator — the “gold standard” of solo engines. Chapter 6 will be broken up into 3 parts: Mythic GME overview, SS&SS overview, and an Actual Play example putting the two together. If you’re only interested in the action, you can jump over to the actual play. If you don’t know what solo role-playing is, you may want…
So, I’m going to try playing a pen & paper role-playing game by myself. Crazy, right? You need a Game Master (GM) and at least one player — probably more, to make it interesting — don’t you? Otherwise, it’s silly talk?! Apparently not! What is Solo Role-playing? With a little help, one person can fulfill both the player(s)’s and GM’s roles for most any role-playing game! How is this possible?!, you ask. Some of your duties as GM simply get outsourced — to chance. You relinquish control of certain outcomes and the answers to certain questions, just as you would…