Solo Dungeoneering

[calithena]

My local library was dumping some stuff and to my surprise I found three copies of a fanzine I'd never heard of, Lone Warrior:

theminiaturespage.com/periodicals/lonewarr.html

This is the journal of the "Solo Wargamers Association" - people who play wargames with themselves.

I have sometimes done this and enjoyed it. I have also sometimes done this with D&D - rolled up a party of characters and took it through, e.g. the A series. (I thought that series actually worked better for self-DMing than group play in some ways - the railroady aspects are less bothersome when you're Elwita, Phanstern, and the DM all at the same time).

It seems to me that there ought to be a lot of good tools out there for solo D&D now. I would like to see some more work or thoughts on this if anyone has some.

I think sometimes solo play is stigmatized with RPGs even more than one-on-one play, but I don't see why that should be. I like daydreaming and D&D can be a fun adjunct to that.

[paleologos]

Solo play is definitely an option - I took the pregens through B8 "Journey to the Rock" to help me decide whether to run it for a group of friends or not.

For one thing, I was surprised at how easy it was to decide the various (?N)PC actions. Kind of like writing a story and trying to decide what various characters in the story should do or not do.

It also really exposed weaknesses in the adventure in a way that merely reading it would not have. As a result, I decided not to use it.

Only problem is that the experience was just the bare bones of what playing it with a group would have been. There was none of the inter-party rivalry/interaction/etc. that otherwise crops up.

Sooner or later I'm going to take a stab at Gary's random dungeoneering solo play from SR#1...

[tavis]

I agree that solo play through a dungeon would be a good way to learn what its gameplay is like. I'm bad at deciphering adventures this way, just like I am reading music. Playing through them solo would be like practicing reading sheet music so I could play with a chamber orchestra.

I had a DM for a number of years whose main play experience for a decade or so prior was solo dungeoneering. I could see how that developed skills that came to the fore in his campaign. The NPCs were very dynamic and always doing stuff behind the scenes; if we left a dungeon unattended or a let a villain escape, we'd come back and find everything not the way we left it. Sometimes he told us he'd played out these actions on his own, and in general I think solo play had taught him a deep bare-bones understanding of what was plausible for the NPCs to get away with.

I can understand the stigma, though. I think the negative association with one-on-one play is a fear of excessive intimacy: it's too much like that other kind of adult fantasy roleplaying. The stigma of solo play is: does this guy have a problem interacting with reality and other people that keeps him from playing with a group?

In this case, the answer was yes, pretty much. He stayed high as often as possible, which was almost all the time because he didn't have to work for a living, so that I gather this solo play happened between bong hits at 4 am. Not coincidentally, he had personality problems that eventually ended my participation in the group (despite liking the guy and enjoying his game).

That said, I think it's important to remember that "X has a special appeal for people who are crazy" is not the same as "X has no reason to appeal to people who aren't" or "X is the reason people are crazy".

Also, I think it's not either solo play or play with a group - although it's certainly hard to imagine when Gary ever found time for soloing!