No time? No friends? Still wanna play RPGs? Maybe you're interested in Solo RPGs?
That's the situation I find myself in right now. Well, the friends are still out there somewhere, and my last long-term gaming crew is still plugging along. But currently I'm not in it because time-wise, I'm toast. This year my older daughter started first grade, and that also meant she started getting homework. The last scrap of free time I'd been guarding kind of got eaten up with this development. Now I'm sitting with her and helping her through the work--well, mostly making sure she doesn't get distracted and wander away--and we generally aren't finished until after my gaming group has already been underway for half of their session. So I decided it was time to take a break from the group. But I still wanna play RPGs.
That's led me toward investigating some of the solo RPGs out there. In a certain way, when it works, playing a solo RPG is almost like taking part in a story you're reading. Playing RPGs in a group can be that way too, but there's an intimacy with the story that happens with a solo RPG that feels even more like the experience of reading-a-novel-while-also-taking-part-in-that-novel than group-play RPGs ever manage. And because of that, I'm intrigued.
So, in the little margins of my life that are left for me to do whatever I want with, I've been dabbling here and there in solo RPGs. I've tried generative RPGs like Four Against Darkness (where Dice rolls dictate the rooms in the dungeon and the occupants in those rooms); choose your own adventure type RPGs like Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy (which take the "choose your own adventure" approach a step farther by having you create a character, with stats and items, and then using that character and Dice rolls to resolve situations in the book), Solitaire Adventures for Tunnels and Trolls (similar to the choose your own adventure types mentioned above, but designed around the more-developed Tunnels and Trolls ruleset and therefore capable of being used as interludes for single characters, who can then also be used in group adventures), and storytelling/journaling RPGs like Be Like a Crow. I've even played through some traditional group-play RPG adventures for games like Dungeons and Dragons, just handling all the DMing and character decisions on my own. (For this particular approach, I've had some of my greatest success running character funnel level-0 adventures for Dungeon Crawl Classics--in part because you can generate the characters so easily using sites like Purple Sorcerer, and also because when you have that large of a group of characters dealing with a situation, it sort of naturally lends itself toward an abbreviated, action-oriented approach to character decisions).
And since I've been playing them, I figured I'd share a bit about my experience for all the other timeless, friendless RPG fans out there. I'll start with my experience with Be Like a Crow, and save coverage of other solo RPG experiences for others posts (if people seem interested and if I can find the time).
It's a nifty enough little game, well-written and attractively laid out, but I probably never would have bought a copy if it didn't come as part of a massive Magpie Games deal on Humble Bundle. Most of what the text provides is a fairly simple playing-card based system, with rule-tweaks and custom prompts for several different game settings. It's only about 70 pages long, and kind of light on content for the $20+ price. And my experience with it basically made me feel like I was using writing prompts to generate a written story, when generally I'd rather just follow my own imagination when I'm writing fiction. On the bright side, though, the game did teach me a bit about non-crow Corvid varieties, and that's pretty cool.
Anyway, to give you a sense of how the game works, and how the playing cards are used to generate events and also to resolve those events, here is my actual text produced while writing the game (which is what that picture at the top of this blog post is about: that's what the table looked like while I played the game--I used my alphasmart 3000 to do the writing).
Be Like a Crow - Corlin's Story
My name is Corlin. I am a fledgling Carrion Crow that lives in an old oak in the park, at the edge of the Sports Field. I live alone in a tattered nest, thrown together from twigs and trash and clippings from the field. I did not make the nest–it was made by my parents. I have not seen them since my first flight.
I spend my days watching the humans in the park, and on the field. At dawn and dusk I come down from my tree to search the fields for food–often the humans that come to watch the sports bring food with them, and often they leave scraps of it behind. Sometimes I hunt through the trash cans near the park benches, digging out half-eaten sandwiches and sauce-covered hot dogs. Occasionally I find a field mouse or vole that has perished beneath the lawnmower's blade. Once I caught a small fish in the pond. It had been released by a silly little girl who said she wanted it to be free, no longer jailed in its little bowl on her desk. The fish could not endure the wild waters of the pond–it went into shock quickly, floating near the shore. I swooped down and snatched it up, swallowed it in front of the girl. I didn’t want to wait and let one of the turtles or egrets in the pond get to it first.
Recently, I have begun to explore the Financial District that borders the park, but only on the weekends, when the streets are empty of people, and the trashcans sit waiting for the Monday morning pickup. I have also ventured into the Industrial Units just to their South. I would like to brave the pedestrian walkways of the Shopping Centre, with its crowds of food-wasting humans and its trashcans overflowing with greasy treats from the Centre’s food court. But so far, I haven’t felt bold enough to brave the crowds.
Soon, maybe. But not today. Today I am in my tree as the sun drifts above the buildings to the east, and the early morning joggers start their routes through the park. And this is where the story begins:
[[CARD DRAW (to generate the First Objective): 2 of Hearts. “A crow has passed away near the park. Go find them, grab an entourage on the way, and perform a ritual.”]]
I was watching a fat man walking along the path. He wore a track suit with matching pants and jacket, and a fuzzy white headband high up on his receding hairline. But instead of running, he was walking. And eating. He had a paper sack in one hand and a powdered donut in the other, and I watched as he bit into the donut and it crumbled, scattering white powder across his chin and chest. I was just considering dive-bombing him, to see if I could make him drop the donut–or maybe even the entire sack–when I noticed a glossy black spot at the side of the field behind him. The rising sun had just begun to give color to the world–that’s probably why I hadn’t noticed it before–and the light caught the black and enriched it with that familiar iridescent green and blue sheen. And I knew then that it was the body of a crow.
Just then a gust of wind came through the branches of my oak, and carried on past the fat man and along the field. When it reached the dead crow, the wind lifted one of its stiff wings up slightly, flight feathers splayed. It was an awkward parody of a crow’s natural movement–a jerky waving of the wing. And it filled me with a sense of unease, and disgust. A crow had died, within sight of my nest. Possibly while I slept, I reasoned, as I had not seen the body there the night before. And if it had died so recently, it had not yet had other crows come to put it to rest.
By our nature, crows are solitary creatures. And yet there are times when we come together, for feeding, for flying, for ritual. The death of a crow is one of those times. We need a Murder to gather to put the dead to rest.
I am alone in my tree, but there are others nearby. Another fledgling nests in an oak farther down the path. An ol’ crow lives in a redwood on the other side of the field. Knowing the dead crow needed a ritual to put it at piece, I immediately decided to SIGNAL, to try to call on them for help.
[[CARD DRAW (to establish target number for the SIGNAL skill check): 5 of Hearts]]
[[CARD DRAW (to see if I succeed in the SIGNAL attempt): 8 of Hearts]]
I threw my head back, opened my beak, and began to caw. This is something I had never done before–in my short life I had never yet needed to call on my brethren, and in all honesty I had a mild aversion to doing so in most situations. Fortunately, perhaps because the day was only just beginning and the park remained quiet, my SIGNAL carried sharp and clear in the quiet air. As if in deference to my plaintive call, the wind remained still, and my call split the air all around me. I heard an answering call from the fledgling in the oak nearby. And across the field, the Ol’ Crow dropped from its high perch and came speeding toward me.
The Ol’ Crow saw the body before he’d crossed half of the field. He diverted from his course toward me, and redirected himself toward the body. The other fledgling asked What? And I told it of the body and the Ol’ Crow’s flight to it. I heard it ruffling its feathers, preparing a flight of its own.
I had to do likewise. But, as I said, I have only recently begun to fly. In truth, I spend more of my time hopping–it’s harder to crash when you aren’t even spreading your wings. And yet the Ol’ Crow was already nearing the body, and I knew I had to hurry to his side.
I spread my wings and flapped them, feeling the uncertain muscles, the still-firming bones. And then I dropped from my branch and spread my wings to catch the wind, using my momentum to swing me back up. I began beating my wings to carry me onward.
[[CARD DRAW (to generate Flight Event): Queen of Clubs. “You fly into bad weather. Make a search check for a place to take shelter. If you succeed, you descend and take your next two turns on land. If you fail, you press on, taking one injury.”]]
[[CARD DRAW (to generate Skill Check target number): JOKER - saved]]
[[CARD DRAW (to generate Skill Check target number): 4 of Diamonds]]
[[CARD DRAW (to test SEARCH skill): 8 of Clubs plus one check mark equals 9]]
In the moment that I came to the peak of my upswing, another sudden gust of wind came, buffeting against me and making me lose control. Desperately I turned my head to regard the land beneath me, twisting my wings and kicking with my feet in an effort to correct my sudden tumble. Thankfully, I was able to lock my sight on a clear piece of ground, and to guide myself to it. I dropped to the earth more abruptly than I’d intended, but feet first and not hard enough to hurt. I had to make a quick hop to keep my balance, and I quickly turned it into a series of rapid hops, in hopes of hiding my clumsiness, as if my landing had been intentional and controlled. I hopped the rest of the way to the Ol’ Crows side, who had by then set down beside the dead bird’s body....
[end of session]