Solo RPGs are way older than you think
A philosophical history of Solo RPG play | Guest Post from Tin Star Games
Hello Toad Warriors, and welcome to our first guest post of the holiday season! We are in for a treat because we have Steve Dee of Tin Star Games.
Steve Dee has worked in the gaming industry since 1998 as a journalist, writer, critic, editor, designer, consultant, teacher, event organiser, podcaster, publisher and much more. Editor note - Holy shit, that’s a lot of stuff!
He has won several awards for his game designs, including five ENNie awards, a Freeplay Award and many more nominations.
Be sure to check out Tin Star Games after you read this post. They have a ton of great solo games, such as Tin Star and Two Faces.
Take it away, Steve!
The solo RPG is much, much older than the multiplayer version of the hobby.
Possibly the origin of the solo RPG could be Consider the Consequences. Written by Mary Alden Hopkins and Doris Webster in 1930, this was the first known example of what would later be called “choose your own adventure” stories. That name comes from Edward Packard, who wrote the first version of his books in 1970, originally calling them “The Adventure of You”. 1970 is substantially before Gygax and Arneson were nudging Chainmail towards a system of individual figures. The series was a million-dollar mainstream smash hit - and so were the Fighting Fantasy novels - by 1983, long before D&D made any kind of cultural dent, let alone became a household name.
Solo play was of course part of tabletop roleplaying straight away. D&D’s first competitor was Tunnels and Trolls (1976), which came with solo adventures as standard. So many of us got our start in “redbook” Basic D&D by watching Bargle kill Aleena, in a solo adventure that taught the rules. Many RPGs in the 80s had this as a standard teaching tool. Randomness also began to give us lifepaths and backstories and power combinations. Ghostbusters (1984) famously had “sequences” which were like chunks of “scenes”, determined by a random roll. For example, if your characters ended up in court, or the hospital, you could break out of any adventure and into a random table to get ideas for how that might go; wandering monsters, but for scenes.
And that’s only considering formal play. Informal play is a huge part of playing games - the part where we do all the things not covered by the standard rules and game play loop, like making up characters we’ll probably never play. For most of my life I had rulebooks but no players and I spent endless hours in my room making up endless characters from endless random tables. I also rolled to randomly map out dungeons and wildernesses and to fill them with random creatures.
In the late 90s and across the 2000s, randomness became taboo. It wasn’t fun, apparently, to determine who you were or what happened by consulting a table: it was much better (and more artistic) to have a vision of who you wanted to be and then sculpt that vision from entirely non-random tools. But this attitude didn’t last long. When D&D 4E came out in 2007, the random tables in the revised Gamma World were a bright new star. The decade of hating random tables passed away, and we never looked back.
We can go further back, too, for origins. Since human history began, we have known that we have a subconscious as well as a conscious mind. This is a deeply powerful and also confusing concept! We know that there are things we can think about that we can’t think about. We can only access these parts of our mind through dreams, say, or ecstatic states, or drugs, all processes that switch off our consciousness so we can listen to the other parts of ourselves. This feels arcane and mysterious, so naturally it is the province of the shaman and the priest. It is also, we know, the realm of the artist. Many artists speak of it as if there is some unconscious voice or power that moves through them, drawing up ideas that they know must come from within them, but cannot clearly explain. Sometimes we only understand the things we are feeling after making them into art, as if our subconscious has messages for us from “the other side”.
As well as drugs and dance, shamans have used another method to see within: randomness. Tossing bones or runes, dealing random cards, consulting the i-ching, even consulting auguries of living and dead animals: these are the ancient ways of trying to access the subconscious through randomness. Artists too, have used random things to inspire them, making art from inkblots or leaf-prints or doodles. Sometimes this is formalised, with games like Exquisite Corpse. David Bowie used to write song lyrics by picking random words and phrases from a bowl, a practice not unlike cut-up poetry. Things like automatic writing and speaking in tongues are where this artistic expression and spiritual practice intersect, trying to access some random, instinctual thing to give voice to the supernatural or supernal.
Not all of these use randomness, but where they do, they are games. Indeed, it’s not an accident that tarot cards were invented from playing cards, that dominoes were used to tell the future, or that the ancient Mayans used to use positions and scores in their ball games to understand the will of the gods. Instinctively, we know that the randomness of games, the inherent unknowability of them, connects to the unknowable within ourselves, or outside our universe. And as soon as you have random elements throwing out dramatic or narrative concepts, why, you have an RPG, and usually a solo one.
Or indeed, a more solo one, for as I indicated earlier, all RPGs have an element of solo play to them. They are, after all, books that must be read before they can be enjoyed, and reading is always a solitary affair. Game masters spend so many waking hours thinking about their games and dreaming up places and people, stories and situations. Most character generation is also a solitary experience, even when done at the same table. One is given one’s own character sheet, after all, and few games have a shared thing to build together. Rulebooks often have special reminders that the players ensure that their characters get along and come together for a common cause, because this kind of solitary creation can so easily come unstuck. Everyone has had a game where they have found another character duplicates something they can do, or is intolerable to adventure alongside. Every GM has asked his players to produce suitable characters only to find some or all of them have, in isolation, played their solo game in such a way that they have nothing suitable at all.
Then there’s the fact that although we are technically agreeing to participate in a shared storymaking experience, there’s no guarantee at all that we’re all imagining the same thing. Again, we’ve all had many a game break down when someone thought one thing was happening, but someone else had a different view entirely. We are doing one thing together, but there’s a whole other thing happening inside our heads, as we visualise the action and ponder how our character might react. That process has to be solo. It cannot be anything else. The gameplay loop of an RPG begins as a shared experience, then becomes a solo one, and then we output back to the table something for others to also experience by themselves. And while this state may be said to exist in all games - our opponent moves a piece in chess, we think, we move a piece, they think - it’s not quite the same because there is an element in RPGs of some sort of “playing” our roles, of embodiment. Unless we are in are LARPing in a completely perfect simulation, we internalise the information and see it in our mind’s eye, and then try to react to it in character. And in doing so, we are also expressing ourselves, which also means communicating with our subconscious.
And sometimes, in roleplaying, our subconscious gets activated very powerfully, and we experience bleed.
That is, after all, what roleplaying was originally designed to do, when it was invented by psychologists, although they usually use the term for playing yourself in situations, not other people. Roleplaying is more like masked rituals. Cultures across the world and again going back to the beginning of history have rituals where we put on a different face and act things out and let the emotions of those things carry us away. In modern day this can be as simple as dressing in our team’s colours and getting exhilarated by a shared victory, or as familiar as feeling more important when we’re wearing our uniform. It might also show up in a protest march when we feel like the warriors we are evoking, or when we exorcize our revulsion at evil warlords by winning a game of Risk. All games are masks we wear, and all of them thus are ways to tap into our subconscious. Putting that alongside randomness, we find that sometimes that all of a sudden we are feeling things we never knew we felt, having thoughts we never knew we thought.
When making the film La Bamba about the tragic death of Richie Valens in a plane crash, his family were on set for much of the shooting. As she saw the actor Lou Diamond Phillips who played her son walk onto the plane, Richie Valens’ mother ran onto the shot and grabbed him and told him not to go. Through that reenactment, she was able to access and shed more grief. That was something we might expect, whereas in RPGs we are often blindsided. All of a sudden we realise that the character we’re playing or the scene we’re creating, thrown together from some random elements, is pulling something out of our subconscious, like a thorn we did not know had burrowed down under a callous and suddenly pulled loose. We never set out to tell a certain story, but along the way the part of our brain that we can’t think about was doing its work. And randomness is a powerful way we tap into that, and always have.
What does all this mean? It means that a few words and a random number generator is all it takes to wring incredible emotion out of your audience - if you do it right. Below is my game MID6E, inspired by the horror movie M3GAN. Nobody wants their art to make people so overcome with emotion they feel sick or become enraged, but at the same time, I do have some pride in the fact that this little game has caused more reaction than anything else I’ve ever written. People have banned it from forums and demanded it be taken down from my social media. It made people distraught. It made people sad. It made people angry. It brought forth darkness. Not unexpectedly, of course: it is about the worst thing imaginable. The thing that haunts every parent in the darkest corners of their soul. But unexpected in its tremendous power.
I think most of all that game draws its power from the same source that made Choose Your Own Adventures so compelling, and that makes all RPGs so compelling: they all work in the second person perspective. Not I, not they, but you. They are about you. And the second person is always individual. Even if I say “all of you, come with me”, you cannot respond as a group, as a they - as soon as you are addressed, you must be an individual. The you is always solo. Always internal. You must move your pieces. You must make a choice, and then you must turn the page indicated. You must make your character and choose your class and race. You must choose your consequences.
In the solo game, this is of course intensified. There aren’t any other people to provide other ideas so everything must come from within. There’s only you and the rules and the randomness. There’s nobody to make sure you’re not cheating or let you off the hook if you are. And there’s only you to know if you did. Only you to know what your character did. Only you to remember. Only you to keep score. In a sense that can mean it doesn’t matter … or it can matter more than it ever possibly could with others.
In Buckaroo Banzai, John Lithgow’s character says “History is made at night. Characters is who you are in the dark.” I’d say that as much as games are the cornerstone of how we socialise, solo is where you really play, and play is always at least partly solo. Inside your head is where the mask takes over - and you discover who you really are. That can be a dark place to walk. Or as a famous video game once said: it is dangerous to go, alone. Yet we have no choice. And so we walk on, into the shadowed places of our mind, with only our dice to save us.
But we can go alone together, if we both recognise the power of these paths and share this hobby, and push aside anyone who says this isn’t worthy. Walk with me, won’t you? It’s dark, but it isn’t far. The solo RPG is much, much older than the multiplayer version of the hobby.
Thank you, Steve, for that thought proviking romb through the philosophy of solo RPG play. I’m amazed at the different points of view Solo RPGs can evoke.
Again, check out Tin Star games for a ton of cool games. If you go to any conventions in Australia, Steve will probably be there, so be sure to say hello!
Writing is speech to paper...and it is whatever is inside coming outside. A game is just another way of expression internal thoughts.
This is a really good take. I love both writing fiction and playing ttrpgs and I think writing fiction is rather like playing a solo ttrpg, but even so there's a desire to share what you're creating/experiencing. That line "we can go alone together" captures the experience of shared imagination so well.