Solo or not?
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another impromptu poll! I need your help deciding something. As you know, I've started messing around with a new game. This is a game that I'm building around a setting idea I had months ago, so it's pretty fleshed out already, after months of note-taking. All I'm doing now is trying to get the rules right. Which, funnily enough, is looking to be a no skills system! Yeah I know, I did not expect this at all either. It's not sure yet it will not have skills (I might be able to fix it; yes, not having skills is something to be fixed, it's a design flaw, I'm looking at you Alan), but how I'm going it's certainly looking that way. The reason why is that it's strongly focused on combat skills and exploration, and those ones are going to take such a focus that for everything else it's probably best to just use Ability scores (or "Attributes", as I prefer to call them).
In any case, my next hurdle is whether to include solo rules on this or not. I'm know for my solo games so it would be silly not to, but the scope of this game is larger than usual, since it's a sci-fantasy game that has you travelling across the universe, which makes it scary to think how to cover all eventualities as a solo player. So for now I'm leaning towards making this a traditional GM-led RPG, and solve the solo aspect in the future. Still, I want to know your opinion about this. Is it a mistake? It worked well for Sacrifice, which was initially released without solo rules. Don't get me wrong, it's me, it would still be super solo friendly cause I can't help adding random tables all over it, but certain things are always so much easier and faster to work on if you know there's a GM there to solve it for you, things such as balance and content.
By the way, I'm going with a dramatic flare when it comes to this game's title: it's called Ruthless Heavens, Boundless Fate. Bombastic, I know.
Comments (12)
I feel like putting in the solo now and building it in from the ground up to be solo/coop would be best, especially if you plan to add it either way. Even if it takes longer to get the book and you need more time, I would be willing to wait. Most importantly for me would be a nice system to control the foes actions in combat and reaction tables.
Yes, I've started working on the game already and since most of you wanted solo from the get go, that's what I'm doing! Thanks for the feedback!
I've got enough solo tools to last until my grandkids (not yet born) retire... as long as it's solo friendly, that's what I've come to enjoy from your games, Sacrifice being one of my favorites and I jumped in before all the solo stuff was added.
Thanks! Although it looks like most of you guys want solo tools from the get go, so I'll make sure it's fully soloable since release!
This is almost a philosophical question. Here is a zen koan for you: If a game goes unplayed, is it a game? You might say yes, but have you flipped through Vermis, the guide to a game that does not exist? And how many shelf queens with actual rules, sit unplayed upon your shelves? What then are they, if not Vermis, the promise of a game, unfulfilled. My point is that you'll have more buyers and more players by including solo rules.
Yeah, like Deathworks said, it was kind of a rhetorical question, I knew that the most of you would vote for solo rules. It just helps me frame the game better moving forward.
Is there merit in having a set of game-agnostic GM-less tools that you can add to any game or have as a stand-alone? There are some things that feature in your rules that are common or could be transplanted without fuss: NPC reaction, situation difficulty, action/theme. A solo companion would comprise these tables and they could be applied to any game which uses those concepts. I mean what game doesn't have NPCs or enemy reactions. The game itself would be obliged to present the theme-specific details (i.e. tables that either a GM, or solo player would use): portal effects, environmental conditions, room contents, ..., whathaveyou. Maybe it would have more detail on specific NPC reactions - e.g. a table for hostile NPC reactions - so once you've decided as a GM or rolled it up using the companion, you can get finer detail from the theme-specific source. Well, it was a thought. LOL.
I'm sure you've realized by now that I essentially already have that. As a matter of fact, I was going to add a kind of universal solo ruleset to Skill20. The problem isn't the sort of oracles and tables that make a game soloable, it's all the other stuff that goes behind a game's "engine" to make sure a GM isn't needed, like encounter balance, loot tables, and all that sort of thing.
You do realize that you just asked a rhetorical question😅
Haha
As long as it's solo friendly, it should be fine with a gm emulator But I'd sure want your own dedicated solo tools eventually, since it's my only way to play ! 🙏😄
Yeah, I'm just asking in case I see it would really require a design shift to make this properly soloable from the get-go!