Solo Diversion pt.1: Creating a system

I've danced around solo rping for a while, never quite taking the plunge on it. I used to pore over the Tunnels and Trolls solo gamebooks as a kid, but always felt constrained by them. Attempts to make my own dungeon-generation tables proved too cumbersome, while dungeon generators on the internet had too many drawbacks - seeing the whole layout at once, being stocked generically, and of course the ever present "not invented here syndrome". My own settings, or my own regions in others' settings, never felt fleshed out enough. Or, more accurately, they suffered from having exactly as much detail as was needed for the present adventure - there was no hidden detail to discover, none of Tolkein's "towers of a distant city, glimpsed through a sunlit mist". Well, two things have happened to convince me to have another go.

A wizard playing with himself; 
Image by Bob Giadrosich

First, Chris McDowell, one of my all-time design icons (which sounds more like a fashion thing than a roleplaying thing), has just put up a minimal solo engine called "Ask the Stars", which looks meaty enough to get me going. Generally speaking, it works like an "oracle", which is solo-gamer speak for a table to generate inspiration and unpredictability, and generally answer questions about the world, such as you might pose to a DM.

The second thing is that I've noticed myself doing something very unusual, for me: I've been having fun creating backstory for a PC I'm playing. My dungeon master, owner of an extensive, fleshed out world, kindly permitted me to port an existing character over from another campaign. I just had to write a brief catch up of what she'd been doing in the intervening decade or so. And the result was my basically writing a heap of fanfiction for my own character, something I'd observed others doing before, and always been vaguely snooty about myself. See, I usually live by the motto that what you put in your backstory doesn't survive contact with the table. Besides which, the adventures that matter are the ones you have in game time - why would you bury the interesting, defining events of your character's life somewhere you'll never play them out, when the whole game is about seeing your character develop in front of you, in unpredictable ways?

Well, I am snooty no longer. The reason being, it occurred to me that writing out reams and reams of character fluff might itself be a form of roleplaying, indeed, a solo form. Using the backstory at the table might be a secondary function to actually writing it, which is a way to get to know the character and build your own little corner of the world, an exercise undertaken for its own sake. And it occurred to me that solo gaming might not be a lost cause after all.

But I need a system. Chris McDowell's oracle is all very nice, but I want just slightly more than hard and soft yesses and nos. Besides which, I've had this freeform system cooking up for a while, and this is a good excuse to use it for something. It's not intrinsically a solo system, but it ticks a lot of the boxes. So here goes.

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The system will be more or less one part Risus, and one part Blades in the Dark. Of these, Risus gets us freeform character creation and simple, Tunnels and Trolls-esque challenge ratings for enemies/locations/situations, while Blades gets us PbtA-style partial successes, which should generate narrative quite nicely (and improves on Risus' dice pool mechanic).

First, the basics. Characters are defined by cliché. Clichés are a Risus concept - basically, think of a few descriptors that capture what your character is about, as if you had to pitch them in one or two sentences. Then assign a rating to each one depending on how central they are to the character. The rating gives you how many dice you roll when using that cliché. Characters get 7 dice (all D6s) to distribute. The only restriction is that no one cliché can have more than half a character's dice assigned to it. So a starting character's clichés will range from 1 - 3 dice. This just stops characters being too one-dimensional - having a wheelhouse is fine.

There's a bit of finesse to this process. First, most of your dice will probably go into one quite broad cliché. If someone had to describe you in three words, that's how they'd do so ("Sword-Wielding Barbarian", "Gifted Hacker", "Maverick Pilot" etc.). There can't be too much detail stuffed in there, but it can be quite versatile. It sort of serves the function of a class in a class-focused rpg - you know what their skills are likely to be, what they're likely to have in their pockets, even something about their outlook, potentially. Other clichés serve to flesh out the character. So we have, for example:

Kurox;
Image by James Denton

Kurox: Hulking Beastman (3), Wilderness Tracker (2), Brooding Mystic (2)

If it wasn't obvious, I like Risus because it's effectively built around the Rule of Genre. And that serves us well for solo rping; clichés keep your character in lock-step with the genre of the game, and tell us about the world.

Anyway, you use clichés when your character attempts something with an uncertain outcome. Pick an appropriate cliché, roll that many dice, and pick the highest. If it's a 1-3, you fail your task. 4 or 5 means you succeed, but introduce some complication. Try to make it something that drives the story forward - favour seeding scenes down the line over creating more obstacles. A 6 is a clean success. If two or more dice roll 6s, you get a critical success - think of some unexpected way things went really well for you, something even the character didn't see coming.

Try not to roll more than three times in a scene, as things will get kind of muddy and samey. I may end up using a formal resolution mechanic for scenes - something like a skill challenge, with x successes before y failures - but I'll try eyeballing it first, as that sort of numbers game can crush the creativity.

Quickfire round, edge cases and modifications for the main mechanic:

• If your cliché is only kind-of appropriate - if it's a bit of a stretch - roll with half dice, rounding down.
• Likewise, if a roll is super hard for some reason, the character may roll with fewer dice - probably a reduction of one die will be enough for most situations, but two may be appropriate for extremely difficult tasks.
• If rolling with 0 dice for any reason, roll two and select the lowest. If rolling with fewer than zero dice, add another die for each point below zero (so at -2 dice you roll 4d6 and take the lowest - yikes). You can still roll critical successes, but only if all the dice come up as 6s.

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That's more or less a complete system as is - everything from there on can be managed narratively. But there are some optional systems that might be interesting to play with.

Injuries: If you fail a test, or if it is narratively appropriate, you may suffer an injury - this consequence should be made clear before taking tests. Injuries can be anything from physical injury to loss of stamina to loss of pride or social standing, depending on the nature of the situation. For every relevant injury, a character rolls with -1 die. Exhaustion and wounds will be relevant for leaping a chasm, for instance, while wounded pride might be relevant for rolls to persuade or seduce. Heroes can typically take three injuries, after which any more will render them unable to continue adventuring (potentially because they are dead). Heroes heal 1 injury per day, or two at a safe, restorative haven of an appropriate sort.

Contests: When directly contesting an opposing force (e.g.: in combat), roll all the dice for your appropriate cliché. The opposing party will be given a single cliché and a number of dice, e.g.: Bored Guardsman (2), Perilous Mountain (4), which they will also roll. Match your highest die to that of the opponent. The party with the highest die wins, typically inflicting a wound on the opponent (decide how many wounds a non-player opponent can suffer). If the highest dice match, discard them, and compare the next two highest dice, repeating for further matches. If either party runs out of dice this way, the contest is a draw; think of some way to drive the action forward or complicate the scene that doesn't obviously favour either party.

[The contest rules are quite obviously cribbed from the boardgame Risk, but made symmetrical. I'm always itching to include it in rpg stuff - it has such a simple, robust conflict system. Also, you can use this for whole scenes.]

Pushing: A character can push themselves, gaining an extra die for a test at the cost of some setback. Decide ahead of time what the setback is, and whether it only occurs if the character fails the roll, or whether it happens regardless. Setbacks that occur only on a failure should be severe (e.g.: injuries) - the push makes success more likely, after all. Setbacks can be related to the task, such as equipment breakage or expenditure, exhaustion, or alienating an NPC, or can be unrelated, such as the results of bad luck, time-delayed complications that occur down the line and so on. Try to make setbacks complicate the situation or narrative in the same way as partial successes; introduce new complicating elements, don't just make challenges harder or introduce new ones. Wildcard elements make for interesting stories.

[Risus has a concept called "pumping clichés", which is where you shed dice from your clichés to give you extra dice up front. I never particularly liked it - for one thing, it seems like a patch to overcome Risus' poor scaling and target number system. It's also a little fiddly, and a little too punitive for what it gives you. Pushing is closer to Blades' "devil's bargain" system, which I adore. It does almost the same thing, except the drawback imposed isn't purely mechanical, instead being almost purely narrative. It's versatile enough to port over to pretty much any game - instead of D&D 5e's inspiration, which no one ever remembers to use, offer your players the opportunity to trade a setback for advantage on a roll. One of these days, I'm going to make a one page rpg that consists solely of that mechanic. One of these days...]

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And there you have it. Hopefully soon I'll actually be able to put this to use soloing. Next post on this line will be creating a setting using Ask the Stars - usually I'd use a setting I've got an idea for already, but I think generating one will be more inspiring, and will feel more like that coveted exploration. Until then, I'll be steeping my eyeballs in interesting Pinterest inspiration fodder. To the boards!