This post originally appeared on Medium, 1st February, 2022.
It’s different to go alone! Solo adventure design in TTRPGs
Or: my experiments with adventure design
“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.” — The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are rightly a niche area. The DNA of these games is part playground pretend (and I mean that in the best, purest way) and part oral storytelling tradition, with occasional dragons. That is to say, the idea of group activity is built in as a default.
Solo TTRPGs are a niche within a niche, an enclosed thicket within the forest. The signs of tentative entry to this space, like places in the fence panel where one could duck through into another world, have a certain endearing quality. Posts on Reddit, Stack Overflow, Quora asking: can I play alone?
Beyond the fence lies a vibrant space. Like TTRPGs as a whole, it has a range of different inhabitants. On one side you have the traditional player who no longer has the time or inclination for group play, who trades tips online on how to solo published adventures. On the other side you have the player who enjoys solitaire-first systems, games that often dip into the realms of journalling and writing prompts.
In the TTRPG space, ‘adventure’ has a pretty specific meaning. It’s usually a published supplement designed either for a particular game system or, in the case of system-agnostic examples, a type of game system. Whilst the legacy of everyone’s favourite dragon game is built on a foundation of adventure modules, there is not a rich history of these types of adventures published specifically for solo play.
This is not a real adventure
So what does a solo adventure look like?
We can start to answer that by answering this: how do you have an adventure on your lonesome? As in real life, you place yourself in uncertain situations. You take risks. You get lost.
Practically speaking, playing alone comes down to answering questions. Some questions are closed (yes or no?). Some are more open (what’s in this room?). Others are provoking (how does this make me feel?).
In my experience, there are a handful of approaches for solo adventuring in TTRPGs. Starting with the ‘player puts in the initiative’ category:
Bootstrapping
Take a (non-solo) game system, and strap a solo tool to it. Think of it like going for a wander but forgoing a tour guide (and fellow wanderers) in favour of a map. Mythic Game Master Emulator is almost a decade old and still one of the most popular tools for this purpose, but there are others (e.g. the Conjectural Roleplaying GM Emulator). As the names suggest, by strapping one of these onto your game, you’re effectively trying to replace a living, breathing games master with a reference document. They are typically suited to answering the closed and open questions.
Table diving
Whereas your options for bootstrapping tend to present complete packages for soloing, with arrays of tables or generalised ones that could work in any situation, another approach is to indulge in some specialised pick’n’mix.
Essentially a deconstructed form of bootstrapping, ‘table diving’ replaces the one-size-fits-all approach with your own bespoke curation of random tables of all shapes and sizes. And there are a lot in the world. Cover your IRL table with charts to determine names, enemy miens, NPC motivations, quest hooks, pots of treasure, goblin attire, the things lurking in the airlock, etc. Ranging from universal to incredibly specific, the way you curate your selection of random tables directly flavours the adventure to be had. This approach is suited to answering the open questions (provided you have the right table for the job).
Blinkering
If you sit down with a published adventure designed for group play, with the intention to play it on your own, you quickly run into a problem: hidden information. The GM in a group game is intrinsically a conduit for hidden information: stats, traps, twists and turns. Your party of characters comes to a door with a secret. Except you know the secret. It will shoot a face-melting laser as soon as someone decides to start pick pick picking at it. What do you do?
The solution some players take is to embrace the idea of objectively playing the role of their characters. Is my angry peasant the type to try and force this door even though it’s got some scary looking runes on it? I call this blinkering — a conscious decision to pretend you haven’t read what you’ve read. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the classic wargamer approach of playing a two player battle as both sides and trying to hide your strategic decisions from yourself. Often the process of restaging a historic battle on a board is the act of play, with the player adopting a role as a sort of ultimate administrator, enforcing the laws of play, invoking the will of both sides and letting the simulation play itself out.
Similarly, blinkering in a TTRPG can bring the solo player closer to the role of a caretaker for a system. You could play both sides of a dungeon crawl, say, delighting in the working of the mechanics and its outcomes rather than victories. This approach can be good at answering the closed and open questions, but it’s dependent on the source material.
And moving on to the ‘game designer puts in the initiative’ category:
Branched narratives
One way to enforce a sort of blinkering from a designer’s point of view is to physically hide information. Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) stories are a good example of this. The implications of your decision as a player are obscured by the fact that they live on another page, something you have to make a conscious effort to view.
Some published adventures take the form of the CYOA story and blend it with the classic stat- and dice-driven approach of the tabletop roleplaying game. Alone Against The Flames for Call of Cthulhu is a prime example of this, walking the player narratively through character creation and then presenting choices, many of which will call on the player to roll the dice to determine what happens.
It’s sort of like having a GM who only gives you a handful of limited choices in any given situation. Play proceeds through a combination of narrow choices and chance. Arguably these aren’t designed for answering questions like the other resources — you can’t stop and ask, hey is this demon for real? You just gotta ride the rails.
Solo-first systems
AKA the made-to-measure approach. Some solo games are designed to create a very specific type of ‘adventure’ experience. Take the The Portal at Hill House, for example. This is a storytelling game of cosmic horror that places the player as someone wondering through a cursed house, drawing playing cards to determine the uneasy things they find there, racing to reach the end before they meet their doom. The very mechanics (and tables) that structure the gameplay — making a map of the house, drawing cards, responding to stimuli and narrating the character’s experience — are also what guide the adventure of discovery. System and adventure are essentially one.
(This experience may not be what some people associate with ‘adventure’, particularly coming from the traditional D&D mode, but of course it is as valid as any other.)
Where these systems depart from a GM emulator (as in the bootstrapping approach) is that they aim for specificity not universality. I could use a GM emulator and a resolution mechanic of my choice and make a good stab at having a high society comedy of errors adventure. By design I could not do that with The Portal at Hill House without hacking it.
In an inversion of the usual structure, this style of solo adventuring is often about creating provoking questions for the player to answer.
Unreliable material
And then we come to the least common approach, in my experience.
If you’re a game designer and you want to make a solo adventure module, you naturally have to wrestle with the quantity and quality of information you give the player. The enforced blinkering technique of the branched narrative is one option, i.e. hiding crucial information behind different pages. Randomising the encounters and outcomes via tables and chance is another.
The one that interests me most is plying the player with a wealth of information whilst simultaneously signposting that it is:
- inaccurate
- untrustworthy
- incomplete
This is a technique borrowed directly from fiction where it is relatively common. Why isn’t it more common in roleplaying games? Straight fiction has an implicit fictional narrator; when you read The Great Gatsby you intuitively know that the character narrating things is not the author. In games, we don’t have this default reading. And that’s because on some level the text of a game conveys the objective mechanics of how to actually play, and as readers and players we naturally assume the voice behind this is the game designer themselves.
Let’s talk examples
In 2021 I made a solo-first setting and adventure called Tundrabower. It’s 10 pages with no stat blocks or random tables. It is only very loosely pinned to a system: my own game, Lay On Hands (and that is solely because there’s a secret code in the former that can be deciphered in conjunction with the latter*).
Tundrabower’s use as a solo adventure is tied directly to the fact the whole thing is presented as a letter from a stranger. “You are unknown to me but I must entrust you with the fate of all of us,” it begins. The letter writer continues to explain the dire situation they’re in and offers notes about a strange land called the Black Steppe, full of off-the-cuff details and hearsay. Who is this stranger? We don’t know, they seem cagey about revealing their identity. In fact, lots of crucial information is missing. If the player takes up this quest they will navigate this place with uncertain steps and see for themselves through play what is true and what isn’t.
Would this still require a player to use other solo tools to help play? Absolutely. But crucially the text provides the narrative drive for the adventure, and the gaps it leaves are there to be filled by the player.
Thousand Empty Light, for use with Mothership RPG
This blurring of the lines between source material and playable adventure is something I’ve pushed further with my current project Thousand Empty Light. Described as a solo adventure for the Mothership RPG, this adventure presents itself entirely as an in-universe corporate document, a sort of training resource for the solitary industrial operator who has to maintain an abandoned underwater tunnel on an uninhabited planet.
From a game designer’s point of view the challenge with this approach is flagging to the player which parts of the text are for flavour and which are actionable mechanically. But the juicy stuff, in terms of narrative, comes from the interplay of two contrasting unreliable narrators.
The player navigates the tunnel section by section, and at the start of each section they consult a terminal that provides them with two things: a corporate-written overview of the area, and the transcribed maintenance report from the previous technician who passed through.
Throughout the whole text it’s hinted that the corporation behind this material isn’t being 100% honest with you. In fact, it’s not clear why exactly you’ve been sent on what seems to be a bit of a pointless mission.
A letter from the director of the corporation with a suspiciously-placed sticker…
The transcripts from your colleague (or should that be ex-colleague?) are similarly imperfect documents. They are recorded as part of a procedural process, they’re full of conjecture and offer a view of the tunnel that is notably incomplete. As a player, when you begin to traverse a part of the tunnel you know the general layout (sort of) and you know what happened before (sort of) and the rest, the now, is up to you to determine.
The adventure sets the tone and boundaries, shows off its blank bits and asks you to read between the lines. All the while it leads you, section by section, through the type of story (sci-fi survival horror) that it wants to tell. How deep you go is up to you.
Thousand Empty Light is crowdfunding on Kickstarter between 1st February and 14th February.
You can find me on Twitter @ValleyOfAlfred
*I haven’t seen any evidence of this code having been cracked yet.