Easier Solo Play Peter Rudin-Burgess CREDITS Written By: Peter Rudin-Burgess Easier Solo Play, Copyright 2021 Parts Per Million Limited Parts Per Million Limited International House, 12 Constance Street, Constance Street, London, England, E16 2DQ 1 CONTENTS 1. Introduction 2.Roll as many questions as you like 5 3.Mind maps for investigations 8 4.Start with a One-Shot 12 5.Cover your bases 14 6.Training Wheels 17 7.Don’t Judge yourself against professionals 20 8.Don’t play the boring stuff 23 9.combats can be oracled away 25 10.First Level Again? 28 11.A short History of Time 31 12.What works for you? 34 13.Character weaknesses 38 14.Improv vs. Prep 42 15.Rogue Oracle 46 16.Safety Tools 49 17.Stickies vs. Cards 52 18.Power Hooks 54 19.The Importance of NPCs 57 20.The Importance of Places 61 21.Building Villains I 63 22.Building Villains II 67 23.Building Villains III 69 24.Short is Sweet 71 25.Oracle World Building 75 26.Oracle Mashups 79 27.Oracles & Muses 83 28. The Adjective Ladder 85 29. Random Generators 88 30. Organise your Tools 91 2 1. INTRODUCTION he tips and advice I share in this book come from my own experiences of solo Trole-playing many different games. I started seriously solo playing while I was writing role-playing game reviews. Many of the reviews on blogs are based only on reading through the PDF version of the game. This sounds a bit shallow, but the prevailing view was that you could get a good impression just from a read-through if you had seen enough games. This attitude still exists today for games, adventures, and just about everything else in the RPG industry. I tended to disagree but getting to play all the games I was sent was impossible. When I first 3 discovered AD&D™, that had solo playing rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. They mainly consisted of some random dungeon rooms and random encounters. My role-playing social group was very much into wargaming. Wargames at the time arrived with solo rules as part of the main rules. I eventually put two and two together and went looking for the more recent solo rules. That is when I discovered a simple system called Tiny Solitary Soldiers. From there, I discovered Mythic GME. Neither really did exactly what I wanted. If I played a dice pool system, I wanted the solo rules to work the same way. I didn’t want to have to flip between how the solo rules worked and how the game worked. It didn’t take long before I was receiving a review copy of a game, and I was reading it through and then creating a solo tool that used the same ideas and game mechanics. Then I could play the game and write an honest review. I have lost count of how many different games I have played, but it is well over a hundred different systems. Some of the advice in this book relates to the physical playing of the game, some of it is more about expectations. The tips and advice is presented in no particular order. They are simply in the order that I first started making the preparatory notes. 4 2. ROLL AS MANY QUESTIONS AS YOU LIKE caught myself doing this the first time during a game of Stars Without Number. My character Iwas snooping around an old factory, where he had been a security guard before it shut down. He headed up to the admin offices, and all the computers had been ripped out, wandered into where they used to do the payroll, and there was the safe, still locked, as it was left. The manager’s office was also locked, and that struck me as unusual. Why lock an office you are never coming back to? After a bit more of a walk around, I left the factory, and that locked office really bugged me. I was coming back with a big hammer to open the door, but that was for the next session. 5 I played those scenes on video. When I watched it back, I noticed that I was almost constantly rolling yes/no questions. Nearly every roll was a straight 50/50, drop the dice, glance at the result and move on. It was almost subconscious. Where the computers still there? Was the payroll office door locked? Was the safe open? Was the manager’s office locked? So it went on. The next time was in a Delta Green game. My character left his partner in the car on the street, as look out, I entered an apartment block, rode the escalator to the right floor, and then searched the apartment. This was not a big scene. This time, I wrote up the scene using Word, writing the descriptive text in the body and inserted a footnote with my questions, rolls, and answers. Alt+F is a very easy key combination to insert the footnote, and it gives a nice separation. When I looked back over my game, the footnotes were as big or bigger than the narrative! It is generally accepted advice to not ask too many questions. That advice is based upon the idea that the questions should just set the scene, They should fire your imagination, and you improvise off them. If I played in a group game, the GM would 6 not describe the factory or apartment down to the minutest detail and expect us to remember and visualize it perfectly. Instead, what would happen is the GM would give you a broad-stroke description of the location, and as you interact with it, they would fill in more detail in a back and forth exchange. That is what I find myself emulating, and it works for me. I have seen and heard people saying that they struggle with making up everything from their own imaginations, but I find the simple question allays that issue as it is easier to pick one of two options. The simple questions become supports. I did not have to imagine the entire apartment when I opened the door; I could explore it and learn as my character learned. The advice to not ask too many questions was such an accepted truth that I have often repeated it myself and written it in getting started advice in early solo books that I published. Unfortunately, it was the wrong advice for me, and I don’t think I was unique. 7 3. MIND MAPS FOR INVESTIGATIONS magine a police incident room with pictures of suspects pinned to a board and key facts Ithat have been discovered about them jotted around each image. Then lines connecting fact to fact. I did this in a cyberpunk game using Cepheus System. As I learned facts about my game world, set in the subway rail network, I added these to a mind map. As I played, the more facts I added to the map, I found myself using the oracle less and less. Finally, the map gave me an overall picture of what was going on. The need to generate random answers was diminished because I already knew what was happening or what a place was like. 8 Normally, I would keep a journal and lists of places and NPCs I had visited or met. These are perfectly good ways of recording one’s games. Still, when looking for a particular fact or reference, they are not ideal. They are very linear, and when looking for information, you have to work from one end to the other. Mind maps are far from linear. If you are not familiar with mind maps, they are quite a good method of recording ideas. You start with a single idea or fact written in the center of the page. Then as you learn new facts, you add them to the sheet and draw connections between them. For example, if you create an NPC as a witness, you can interview them, and as they give their account, you can add what you learn to the mind map. It doesn’t matter who they are talking about, every character is present on the map, and you can fill in the facts in the right places. There are some great mind mapping tools, but I think that pencil and paper are hard to beat. The example below started with a John Doe victim of a car crash. As I investigated, I discovered that there was a gun and bullet casings in the footwell of the car. The victim had no ID on him but did have animal bite marks on his forearms. The crashed car was a Tesla, and I discovered that it was registered to a Miss Grey, who was a Drug Enforcement Officer. Unfortunately, it also 9 happened that Miss Grey had not turned up to work and was unreachable. As I discovered more about Miss Grey, I could add it straight onto her ‘bubble’ on the mind map. If I discovered more about the victim, I could add it to his ‘bubble’. My next move would have been to try and trace the weapon, to see who owned it. At this stage, I could even start speculating about what happened. Is Miss Grey a werewolf? The John Doe was a meal she picked up, and she removed the ID intentionally. As it happened, 10 the dinner date went wrong, and the vehicle was wrecked. Or, is Miss Grey in mortal danger and needs rescuing? This visual representation of your investigation invites you to try and create theories about what happened and fit the facts.