I know they exist I just don't see the point. If you have no other players and no GM ... at that point just make up a story. Or read a book. The Choose Your Own Adventure books were a lot of fun back when - and still could be now - but they weren't a game. If your solo RPG is heavier on the "game" then your outcomes are either heavily pre-determined or completely random. You lose the input of the GM and that "guiding hand" of another human mind being involved. You also lose the input of fellow players which we all know can send things off in some very unexpected directions.
Obviously to me there is a huge collaborative element to a tabletop RPG. Anyone who's run a game for a group of people knows there's "how you thought it might go when you read it or wrote it" and there's "how it went once the players got involved" and those are usually two very different things. I've been playing with some of my crew for 10, 20, 30+ years now and they still surprise me! Even a published adventure, even one that I have run multiple times over multiple decades, can be a different experience with every new group of players. I know people who have published adventures (well, and RPGs) get a kick out of seeing accounts of how different groups tackled their various challenges. To me, a solo game is just not going to come close to that experience.
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| Oh yeah, this one too. |
My answer to "I don't have a group" problems is that there are a bunch of solo RPGs that can be a lot of fun to play. I know my friends and I played through a bunch of the early ones even as we were playing D&D or Gamma World or whatever when we could get together. The Ultima games, the Bard's Tale series, Wizardry this, Might & Magic that, the Gold Box games ... there were a ton of them and the stuff you can get nowadays is way more elaborate. From Baldur's Gate 1-2-3 and the other Obsidian Engine games to Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, the Elder Scrolls games, The Fallouts, and on through the Owlcat games like Kingmaker and Rogue Trader. Then of course there are the online options from World of Warcraft (now in 3 flavors!) to Star Trek Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Final Fantasy Number Whatever Online, City of Heroes ...I mean there's no lack of these either, most of them are free to play, and you can choose whatever level of "solo" you prefer, including "not".
I am just not a fan of the solo player tabletop pen & paper RPG. It lacks so much of what makes them special to me. That said, I get it on some level because I still occasionally play solo tabletop wargames even when there are perfectly good computer wargames out there and have been for years. The "solo" option, particularly as an add-on capability to a normal 2-player board wargame, has been a growth area for tabletop wargames the last few years. It's hard to find regular in-person opponents and it's even harder to schedule get-together time to play them - especially since we have an ongoing RPG campaign (and I'm not going to upset that schedule) and occasional 40K get-togethers (and I'm not going to break that either) so the board wargame time is limited. There are games made now specifically for solo play. They've been around for a long time but it was fairly quiet for a while and now it seems to be an active area again. This is a different animal than an RPG to me though - it's a specific scenario or situation with set forces so it is possible to have a satisfying game as a single player if the system is built to do that.
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| Such a good game - I have great memories of playing this "solo" game as a co-op game with a friend |
To wrap up I know there's an ongoing quest to make a good RPG that can be played solo but to me that's missing one of the major points of RPGs in the first place: a game where you can do pretty much anything you want to do. By definition, a solo RPG will be limited to the options that have been built into the solo rules. This applies to computer RPGs as well and is one of their biggest limitations: you can only go where they have made a map, you can only talk to NPCs where that was expected, and you can only encounter monsters that were set up in advance. It's not unplayable, it's just not the same thing as a decent tabletop RPG with a GM and (preferably) a group of friends.
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| Probably the highest achievement in this field and it's from 1981. Here's a decent take on it with some additional solo game discussion. |
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