If you are reading this you have a browser, and fortunately that will give you all you need to dip your toe into the wide wild wonderful worlds of solo gaming. Because of the rise in popularity of solo gaming (and by solo I mean one player and no GM) there are a great number of online tools available to give you the basics you need to play. Of course there are plenty of product I could recommend, but lets save you a few bucks while you try it out.
Here is first thing you need to keep in mind about the solo gaming experience. The sky is the limit. Want to play a dragon, an ancient artificial intelligence, a humble moistier farmer's nephew destined for greater things, or just a bloke at a tavern who has decided he wants more out of life than tending cattle for his widowed mother? Those are all great places to start. You are doing this for you. So there is no concept too low or too high to build a game around.
With that said, most published RPGs have certain parameters or expectations, just like they have different levels of complexity. I suggest, for the sake of this demo, grab the first game book that comes to mind, and pick a starting character concept from it. Don't bother building the character, after all this is a demo. Instead, just pin down who this character would be. I would go so far as to suggest for this demo don't even bother to give the character a name, but if one springs to mind jot it down.
Now that you have a character concept, lets get down to business. There are a couple of tools that MOST solo games use. One is the Yes/No oracle. The other is the random words generator. Both are used to answer questions. The sorts of questions you would ask a GM about, if you were playing a standard group session RPG. One for simple Yes/No questions, and the other for descriptive questions.
The oracle can be made quite nuanced, but most of us like a simple start and to grow into complexity, so I am going to give you the very simplest one I can find: a single 6 sided die. Because people like high numbers lets assume that any roll of 4, 5, or 6 is a Yes answer and any roll of 1, 2, or 3 is a No answer. Don't worry about nuance right now. Nuance can come later. Right now you just need to know if the door is unlocked, if the wallet you stole has money in it, or if that ogre staring you down is also has a club. The binary oracle will tell you just that.
Don't have a die at hand? There are plenty of dice emulators you can use online. If you are on Chrome just type in "roll a d6" into the search bar.
When do you roll it? Any time you would be unsure of the answer to a yes or no question.
The next tool you need is a random word generator, which could also be called a prompt generator. This is simply something that will give you a couple or few words to help jump start the imagination. This could be as easily done as typing "random word generator" into your browser and you will get plenty to choose from, but now is a time for a little bit of nuance so I suggest you go to the link below, which has options that focus on random word groups for adventure RPGs.
https://jamesturneronline.net/game-masters-apprentice/
Don't be overwhelmed by the many options this page provides. Just look under the top section and you will see a collection of three words, which you can use as prompts for your imagination. There is nothing wrong with the rest of the prompts on the page, but lets stick with the basics for now.
Still have your character concept. Excellent. Now Just pick where you want to play it. You don't need a detailed background, just a few words or images in your mind to tell you where you are and what the world is like. Between the character and the setting you get the context necessary for the random words to percolate in your brain. Context plus prompts can inspire an image or idea of what you are asking about. Go with what comes to mind first. If nothing does, add more words randomly until it tips off your imagination.
Between your yes/no oracle, your context (character and setting), your word groupings, and most importantly your imagination, you have all the necessary basic elements to emulate a game master content.
So lets spin out an example to get you started.
John Everyman is a humble human fighter who is sick of tending his widowed mothers cattle. He is well trained in the use of weapons and armor; perhaps he is a veteran of a recent war or a highly talented member of the local home guard. He lives in a barony that is frequently beset by wild beasts, which has ancient and foreboding ruins in every deep and dark valley and atop of many a craggy hill. Thick forest with many cart paths to places of interest border the village on all sides. (This is the context I will be working from.)
John is sitting at his local pub nursing a pint of cheap dark beer and keeping his ear cocked for rumors. What is this pub like? (Delay, Minor, Font) I know John is in a pub and we want to learn about the pub (context) so I interpret the three words to mean this is a small pub (Minor) with a limited selection (Minor Font) and it take forever to get service (Delay), probably because only the barman is working there.
In between grumbles about the service and the beer, the locals talk amid themselves. The cramped quarters make it impossible not to hear what other people are saying. Does John hear any juicy rumors that could spark an adventure? Here we roll our 6 sided die and come up with... 4, yes people are talking about something a penniless adventure would be interested in. What is the rumor? (Judge Impending Illness) Mostly the talk is of an out break of pox a couple of villages over and how the town elders should handle this news. This isn't very actionable so lets get more words (Defeat Arcane Tool). Some people whisper that the disease isn't natural, but probably springs forth from a curse (Arcane Tool). What is more, everyone knows that tower out in the North Country Forest isn't empty (something to Defeat). John considers the the honor and acclaim that could come his way if he found and stopped the source of the illness, so he settles his bar tab, gathers his gear, and strikes out for the North Forest.
So with a single die roll and a few prompts we have the bones of John's first adventure.
It really is that simple.
Try it out with the character you made. What does it predict its first (or maybe next, if it an experienced adventurer) will be? Let me know if the comments.
In the next article we can get a bit into that nuance and maybe see if John actually makes it to the ancient tower safely.
Link to part 2
W.D.
P.S.
(This is the work of an amateur writer. It is done as a labor of love, and it is far from perfect. I will keep going over it to work on the language and punctuation, but I feel the ideas are solid and easy to follow. As I mentioned above, it is just a little way to give back to the games and community that has come to mean so much to me)
P.S.S.
(To give credit where credit is due, to the best of my research, this technique was pioneered by Tana Pigeon in 2003 with her Mythic Roleplaying Game (still available on DrivethruRPG.com, but slated for a second edition some time in the next year or two). While this is a full RPG, just the Game Master Emulator portion is available in a first and second edition. The first edition is more bare bones, but it still is extremely useful for organizing and playing solo RPG sessions with any rules engine you like. The second edition has a polished version of the first GM Emulator along with a wide variety of "Variations" turning the book into a very nuanced tool kit for the solo player to get as close as possible to the exact experience they are looking for. All three product are choked full of well detailed examples that make it very easy to understand, and are well worth the cost.) W.D.
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