Some thoughts on solo roleplaying

 This is another post copied from that abandoned blog.

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 I will just start by saying I am not very experienced so far. I started out using D&D 5e with the "Solo Adventurer's Toolbox" books but switched to using GURPS and Mythic (first edition). Combined I have run about 20 sessions. But I have also spent time creating characters and researching settings.

The first thing that comes to mind is that solo roleplaying takes effort. It involves using your brain. Basically you are creating something and that takes effort. The roleplaying system of your choice and the oracle of your choice can help with that but you have to put effort into creating the story. I think this is why some people are more interested in using AI because it has some of the advantages of a computer game where you don't have to create the story yourself.

 I also think it is something that takes some getting used to and some practice to get right. For example, you have to find a balance between creating a narrative yourself and the dice. If you just let the dice do everything then the game can feel disjointed and random. But if you are putting in all the effort then you might as well just be writing a story. So the trick is to find some middle ground where it still has game aspects but it also has some kind of narrative coherence. I think this is a bit trickier than it seems at first. 

Some people are happy with a dungeon crawl where it is all combat and loot. This solves the problem of balancing narrative and the dice by landing firmly on the dice side of things. With the dungeon crawl you can just roll on random encounter tables and dungeon generation tables and then just roll the dice for combat. This definitely has some appeal because it is less effort and I do feel combat is fun. However, I kind of suspect that if I was doing combat all the time I would get bored and drop it.

Personally, I think there is something attractive about having a story. That is one of the reasons I switched to GURPS. Basically I was interested in being able to explore a variety of worlds. And so far I have done that. It has been fun to create some specific settings. Another attraction of GURPS is the wide variety of books. The Napoleonic Era book sparked some ideas about creating a setting in revolutionary Paris involving a famous chess cafe. I am also hoping to make use of the mass combat rules to get involved in a Napoleonic battle. I also started a Chinese martial arts novel type campaign where the hero was trained at the Shaolin Temple but is also good at the game of go. I am working on developing a character for the so called Golden Age of Islam around the 9th and 10th centuries in Baghdad. 

So I think part of it is just realizing that to some extent it does take some effort and some exploration and some practice to learn what you like and what you don't like. This may be a bit trickier than it seems at first.