Solo-friendly? Soloable? Solo-compatible?

The other day we had an interesting conversation over at the Blackoath Discord regarding terminology. Okay, maybe this is not that interesting if you're not a designer, but it's definitely useful because it makes communicating what we mean easier, especially for me, as a designer/publisher. If I tell you "my game is a solo-friendly" RPG, I want you to understand exactly what I mean by "solo-friendly", so you are not disappointed when you find out that what you understand as "solo-friendly" is different from what I understand. It became clear, very quickly, that we all had slightly different definitions for the different nuances of solo games. So here I am, trying to define what I mean when I say "solo-friendly", "soloable", and all that stuff.

• Solo-Friendly (or "Solo-compatible"): For me, this is a game that it isn't really designed to be played without a GM, but that can be done without much trouble. The perfect example of this is Forbidden Lands (prior the release of the official solo rules, of course), or Ruin Masters. These are games that, thanks to a series of procedures (hexcrawling, in these examples), make it so that with only the addition of an oracle or two, one can play them solo or co-op without much trouble.

• Soloable (or just "Solo"): As I understand it, this is a game that has been designed from the ground-up to be played without a GM. It doesn't mean that it cannot be played with a GM, but it has clearly been written with the idea of not needing one. These games invariably come with a set of oracles and random tables to facilitate the type of solo gameplay we're all familiar with. The best example of this would be Ironsworn, or my own Broken Shores. 

These two categories might be of little consequence to those who don't play solo games, but I think it's very important to distinguish the two of them. If you're buying a game thinking that it will have everything you'll need to play it solo, and find out that it isn't the case, you are going to be frustrated if it's not clear why. You might think it's you who doesn't understand the rules and that's why you can't play the game alone as promised. 

There are some games that kind of fall between these two categories, but that's honestly due to a lack of tools and half-assed attempts. The first one that comes to mind is Fria Ligan's Twilight: 2000. I absolutely love this game (despite the setting, but that's a whole other story), but I was honestly quite disappointed when I bought it, because it was advertised as being solo. And yes, technically this is the case, it's really easy to solo. But this is due to how the core mechanics of the game are designed (a hexcrawl, basically identical to Forbidden Lands), and not to the meager oracles and solo procedures presented in just four pages of the book. Granted, this was Fria Ligan's first attempt at including solo rules, and they've gotten really good at it since then, with The One Ring's Strider Mode, or the solo Dragonbane rules. This is due to the fact that they got Ironsworn's designer working on them, though, and if there's someone who knows how to write solo rules, it's Shawn Tomkin. But yes, some games promise they are soloable, and then just throw a simple oracle and call it a day. In my opinion, a soloable game must have as many random tables as possible, in order to spark your imagination. The more time I spend making decisions about what's happening, the less time I'm actually playing the game, as a character within it. These sort of games that force you to constantly come up with a narrative feel like solo game-mastering, more than solo-playing. I suppose that's fine, but that's usually not the type of experience I'm after.

What do you guys think, do you agree with me? Can you think of any other categories I've missed? I didn't want to get into the whole "this game is a narrative game, this other one is a true RPG, this one's just a dungeon crawler" because that's a whole different post, but I'm sure we can discuss it in the future!