A Wizard Dad Short: "Wait, can we hit the rewind button?"

I am a solo RPG player at this point in my life. I have run games for small groups and extraordinarily large groups, and I loved every minute of it.  In solo play, though, you get opportunities that just don't work for group games. One of them is the rewind button.

In a recent game my character, a strict honor bound warrior, was exiled by way of promotion to a distant provincial estate that he now has to run, and at a profit at that. This opened up whole new vistas of roleplaying and I was very much looking forward to it. But then the Game Master Emulator (GME), kept raising the stakes. It was indicated there was a rebellion against the last chamberlain of they estate. Monsters and bandits were all over the place, and the province surrounding the estate was in terrible peril. 

Normally, I would jump into this with both feet. Normally, I don't mind my expectations being subverted, but the deeper the action oriented trouble grew for the province, the less engaged I felt. It was very much as if a GM had done a bait and switch on me. This isn't the game I wanted to play. 

After spending a day trying to engage it I was nearly ready to toss in the towel and make a new character.

Then I remembered that this is a solo game, and the only audience I have to please is myself. So I flipped back several pages in my notes, to the point the game had jumped the rails and sped out of control and I hit the reset button.

This time I was more careful with what I asked my oracle and I let things play out according to my expectations for a while. Some people may consider this cheating. And if you have strong feelings about that, I have not a single fault with you, but I don't see it that way.

Sometimes, I am looking for a specific game style, and the thing about GMEs and random prompts is that they are just that: random. This is why it is so important to wear both hats, GM and Player, when you are solo gaming. It is ok to want to play a specific kind of game. It is also ok to hit the rewind button rather than scrap a character you enjoy. 

Solo gaming gives opportunities not found in group games, but it has its own special challenges as well. If you need permission to retcon, or rewind I grant it to you. There is no one here to please but yourself. Make the game you want, if it gets a curveball that sounds like fun, run with it. If just isn't what you want to play just roll back to the last save position and start again. The point is to have fun. Don't let too much randomness wreck that fun.

W.D.