My first venture into solo role-playing

The creativity surprised me.

[While the ostensible topic for this post is role-playing games (RPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons by yourself, I’ll also talk a bit about the creative process in general.]

I was very disappointed when my last role-playing group broke up. We had been friends for years. The surge of interest in online gaming that COVID inspired became the occasion to get the band back together again. Not only were there now widely-available meeting tools like Zoom and Google Meet, but there were also “virtual tabletops” that would function in the same fashion as a real table, covered in maps, counters, dice, books, and the other paraphernalia of the RPG hobby. Unfortunately, we got so busy with our day jobs that we lost momentum. We said our fond farewells, and I haven’t played an RPG since.

Until last week. I’d been hearing more and more about solo role-playing in the last couple of years. The whole idea seemed nonsensical. Wasn’t the whole point of RPGs to be social, to engage in collaborative story-telling with friends? One person creates a situation (“You’re the crew of a tramp space freighter, someone wants to hire you to transport her to a nearby world…”), and populates it with allies, enemies, monsters, you name it. The other players take on the roles of the protagonists (in our science fiction example, captain, engineer, doctor, scientist, etc.) and decide what they’ll do in this situation to meet these goals. Hijinks always ensue, and dealing with the unexpected is always part of the fun…As long as you have a good group of RPG pals with whom you can concoct these stories.

Shadowdark helped me see the light

But, given the buzz around solo RPGs, there had to be more to this different mode of play than I understood, so I did some investigating. What I found was intriguing, so I decided that I’d put the time into giving it a try. Simultaneously, I’d also heard a lot of good things about a new set of RPG rules, Shadowdark, that was becoming a popular replacement for the time-honored Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Shadowdark also seemed well-suited for solo RPG play, so I decided to use it as the vehicle for giving this “RPG by yourself” thing a go.

I sat down with the characters I had created, with a very rough idea of their collective goal. They are members of a team sent by a powerful church, in this fantasy setting, to recover powerful and therefore dangerous magical artifacts. My other equipment included the Shadowdark rules, the classic set of polyhedral RPG dice, a pencil, and my iPad for taking notes.

What followed was one of the most fun one-hour sessions of gaming I’d ever had. It was also one of the most surprising experiences I’ve had, in a very good way, as I’ll explain.

Solo role-playing is a lot more like freestyle creative writing than the classic RPG played with other people. You still start with a situation (“Go forth and find an artifact”) and some characters (“I want to find the artifact so that I can advance from novice to acolyte”). But you’re encouraged not to fill in too many details. Instead, you are supposed to use a set of tables full of options, called an “oracle,” to determine these details, as well as the consequences of their characters’ actions. Don’t know the answer to a question, such as will the bandits attack, how treacherous is the rope bridge across the chasm, or is the abandoned castle haunted? Pose the question, roll the dice, and then interpret the answer.

For example, as part of the process of creating Falc, the priestly character in question, I “rolled on a table” (roll the dice, match the number rolled to a line in the table, interpret the results) to determine where he came from, before taking on holy orders. Falc was an urchin. Now, I might leave it at that, just an interesting tidbit that Falc might list on whatever the medieval fantasy equivalent of a social media profile would be. Instead, I decided to push a little further. Falc was someone who, as a street person, stole from the Church. He was caught, and for his punishment, he was given the choice of either serving the Church in some clerical role, or going to prison. He chose the former.

Did being compelled to join the church make him resent the church? Rolling another die, I learned, no, he didn’t. Falc had some kind of epiphany, and now is grateful for the Church saving him from the extreme possibility of an early and ugly death. He has the zeal of many recent converts, so he’s willing to put himself in jeopardy to fulfill the mission the Church assigned him

That was a fun exercise, which I repeated for the other two protagonists. Who are these people? What are their ambitions? How do they feel about the Church, and some of the dangers they might face?

It’s these sorts of questions that, to be honest, often stymied me during my few efforts at fiction writing. In contrast, this system of dice and tables made it easy to overcome the classic blank page problem. You easily get into a rhythm of moving the story forward, posing important questions, rolling the dice, and getting exciting and interesting answers. Rinse and repeat.

But the best moment in this first session was yet to come.

Not the theme I expected

I wanted to know more about the Church itself, why it was sending out teams to recover magical relics, what sort of landscape was the setting for this story, and who peopled it. I didn’t want to waste too much in this early “world-building,” just enough to make sense of the place where the plot would unfold.

I had a secondary objective in this little bit of world-building. Generally, I’m not that keen on reading, let alone writing, yet another fantasy story set in a European-like, Tolkien-like setting. I wanted something different about the world that Falc and company occupied that didn’t hit all the bog-standard high fantasy tropes. Here’s the forest where the elves live. That mountain is where you find the dwarves. Stay away from the cave, that’s where the ogres hide out. Now go to that tavern and meet the mysterious stranger who has a dangerous mission for you.

The artifact that they needed to retrieve was The Infernal Armor Of Blood (a randomly generate name). That’s a very suggestive, and definitely the sort of thing that the Church wouldn’t want to fall into the wrong hands. Sadly, though, the name didn’t evoke anything that easily fell outside the all-too-familiar, D&D-esque setting.

So where would we find this relic? Rolling again, the result was The Vaults Of The Forbidden Elephant.

Huh.

Now that’s interesting. You don’t normally find elephants in some fantasy version of Western Europe (Tolkien’s oliphaunts aside). So what if, instead, the Church was from some nation that was very European fantasy-ish, but the setting for this story was culturally very different. And what if if the Church, and our protagonists, were colonizers in a decidedly non-European land. The retrieval of magical Maguffins might be one of the reasons (but not the only one) for the foreigners to be there.

Aha.

That’s an even more interesting idea. Imperialism, and all the damage it wreaks, isn’t normally part of that bog-standard fantasy background. Sure, there’s always some dark lord threatening to invade the lands of the shiny happy people, but that’s not the same sort of story as the agonizing histories of colonialism. What happens when a powerful civilization gets a foothold in a less powerful land? How can people who believe they have the best of intentions (recovering dangerous artifacts, bringing “civilization” to the locals) be the agents of chaos, strife, and suffering? And what can you do about the people who don’t have the best of intentions? Is there a way through this situation for individuals like Falc, without getting killed, morally compromised, vilified, imprisoned, or suffering some other horrible fate?

This was an idea I’m sure I would not have concocted on my own. It made me want to find out more, to play out the adventures of Falc and his companions, Gerlant and Rokur. It showed me a way to get out of the simplistic “kill the monsters, take their treasure” motif of mainstream fantasy role-playing. Sure, there would be monsters, and treasure, but the reasons for fighting the monsters, and getting the treasures, could be much more complex. So, too, could be the consequences of these superficially noble missions.

I’ve only played one more session, barely getting the story barely underway, but I look forward to what lies ahead in future sessions. Honestly, the whole colonial theme might be a bit too much to handle, especially given my lack of experience with solo RPGs. Will I be able to juggle this huge idea, while still running through the simpler sorts of adventures that RPGs like Shadowdark are designed to facilitate? Even if the answer is no, I’m glad the game gave me the inspiration. Maybe it will still be part of the background behind the tale of Falc. Maybe I’ll use it somewhere else. Or maybe I’ll just be glad for the enjoyment of that moment when something seemed really, really intriguing.

I certainly discovered what the big deal was about solo role-playing, and what appeals to its fans. But I also encountered something important about the creative process. I had an idea for an overarching theme to my game sessions that surprised me and made me want to keep going. If I had just been sitting in an armchair, trying big thoughts, I might never have imagined something like colonialism in someplace like Middle Earth.

That’s typical of the creative process. For example, some of the most memorable lines in movies (for instance, “We’re going to need a bigger boat”) were improvised. Trying to fix a scene that didn’t work, or acting on a whim, someone ad libbed dialogue that later became iconic.

A dream, an unexpected run-in with another person, a cloud, a lingering memory, an interesting tidbit in the news — there are plenty of sources of inspiration. Creativity doesn’t always come from locking yourself away from the world, cloistered from distracting stimuli. Engaging with the world is one of the best sources of inspiration, as long as you’re open to being surprised by whatever life, or the roll of the dice, throw your way.

Image from needpix.com, posted as free to use under the Creative Commons license.