Solo Role Playing

[Rali]

I'm curious if there are any of you out there Solo Role Playing After the Bomb, or TMNT. If so, I'd love to hear about it. Honestly, I hadn't even heard of Solo Role Playing as being a thing until recently.

I haven't started yet, but I've been watching numerous YouTube channels for inspiration and guidance (shout-out to the Geek Gamers and Me, Myself & Die! Channels). Through these searches I have come across several ideas and resources for trying solo gaming, currently looking through the Mythic Game Master Emulator and The GameMaster’s Apprentice cards for their Oracle systems.

What's an Oracle system? It's the bit that answers the questions you would normally pose to your GM. Yes and No questions mostly, but they also have janky ways of answering your more open ended questions.

The hardest part, for me, has been getting starting. Building that opening scene. I've got a number of hooks and adventure ideas from the past that I could probably dust off, but I've been looking for a way of building and running myself through a story that I wasn't in control of except for my characters reactions.

So if any of you have some advice or personal experience, please share.

[Rali]

Well, I finally ran myself through a Session using a few devices to build with. The setting I picked was: Fur & Brimstone (something I've been tinkering with that's basically a modern unnamed city under the threat of demons), the scenario was picked by drawing cards,from The GameMaster’s Apprentice I drew location: Playground, then three cards from Once Upon A Time (Child, Door, Transformation). Based on my setting, I decided that the scenario would be interpreted as my character witnessing a child being kidnapped from a playground by a group of four thugs (to be used by cultists in some sort of ceremony).

The session itself was quite chaotic. My character (Poe) was a mutant raven crime fighter, with psionic powers. I had planned on trailing the thug’s van from above, to wherever they were taking the kid to, but that took an unexpected turn when the van ran a light and crashed into a parked vehicle, right in front of a police cruiser. I flew down to watch what happened next, but my perch failed me and I ended up dropping down onto the roof of the cruiser.

This caused quite a stir from the thugs, the cops, and the pedestrian gawkers. One cop drew his gun on Poe, the other on the thugs that were exiting their wrecked vehicle. In this chaos, two thugs ran off with the kid, Poe used his psionics to cause the officer that had drawn a gun on him to recoil in fear, while the other officer dealt with the remaining two criminals.

Poe was able to fly up above the buildings, pick up the trail of the escaping kidnappers, and trailed them to a dark alley. Feeling that I couldn’t let the child remain in danger, Poe dropped from the sky, subdued the thugs, and freed the child. I ended the session by dropping the kid back at the playground, and then dropping the thugs back at the scene of the accident (onto the roof of the police cruiser).

Unfortunately, my character didn’t learn anything about the cult or their intentions during this game, so I’ll have to see if the next may offer a clue.

As far as all was concerned, I was pretty happy with the results. I only controlled during the session was my character’s actions, the rest was decided by rolls on the Mythic Game Master Emulator’s Fate Chart or by consulting a card drawn from the GameMaster’s Apprentice deck.

I hope this might encourage others of you to try this out if you aren’t able to do any “around the table” gaming these days.

[Captain_Nibbz]

This is fascinating. Keep us updated as you go! I want to see how it all turns out.

[Rali]

I'll see if I can post a once a week update. I'll also try to answer any questions anyone may have about solo roleplaying.

[Rali]

So, it turns out that with no one but myself to participate in a solo game, I find it quite easy to blow off game sessions.

Anyway, the latest recap of the last solo session. I'm going to include some of the inner workings of how my solo session ran with the Cards and Emulator mechanics. Let me know if you'd rather just get the end result synopsis in any future posts, or if you'd like to see how the sausage is made.

Using the Mythic Game Master Emulator's Scene rules, my expected next scene was modified, or in this case, "Interrupted". You see, every time you are about to start a scene you've set, you make a roll against the current game Chaos Rating (default is 5, but increases or decreases based on how chaotic the last scene was. I'm currently at Chaos 6) to see if that scene is modified: Altered or Interrupted. With an altered scene, something you set has changed, but with an Interrupted scene, you end up with a new scene.

The scene I had set for Poe was that we were going to head to the impound lot and use his ability to object read on the thugs van to track it back to the criminals lair. Unfortunately, the interruption meant that something else was going to happen instead. I drew rolled on the tables and came up with the cues that the next scene was going to focus on a positive NPC event. So far the only NPCs I'd brought in were the thugs, the two officers, and the child. Next I rolled for a meaning to this event and came up with the cues, "Pursue" & "Status Quo". I eventually took this to indicate one of the Officers involved in the arrest, since the police tend to pursue maintaining the "status quo", I then drew a card to answer the question, "Did the officer get promoted", and received a yes.

So what I came up for the interrupting scene was that after the two officers arrested the thugs and brought them back to the precinct, one of the officers, Officer Lyonia Katz, was pulled aside by their lieutenant and informed that their application for promotion to the rank of Detective had been granted and that they were to report to their new supervisor the next day.

(I have absolutely no idea how police promotions work in real life; just what I've seen in movies and TV... So I'll just pretend that this makes sense.)

So, now I have a new named character, Detective Lyonia Katz, who I'm also considering promoting to a secondary PC.

The scene was also pretty straight forward, so I reduce my Chaos Rating back to 5.

This didn't take long and didn't impact my original scene, so I decided to see if it would now takes place. It does, but it's now altered. So, Poe arrives at the impound lot late in the night and starts looking for the van. I decide to pose a few questions to the Mythic Fate Chart:
Is the van there? No
Did someone pick it up? No
Was it sent to the wrecking yard? Exceptional Yes

So, unfortunately, Poe can't read the melted down scrap. This begs the question, how did this happen? The van was evidence in a crime after all. Let's hit up the Fate Chart again:
What the van destroyed by mistake? Exceptional No
Can Poe locate a lot employee? Exceptional Yes
Is the employee a "bad guy"? Exceptional Yes
Is the bad guy a demon in disguise? Yes

Well, this makes things interesting. While searching the lot Poe spies a lot worker dropping the van from a crane into the machinery that will shred and melt the van into oblivion (yeah... I don't know how impound lot/scrap yards work either). As the worker exits the crane, Poe swoops in the grab the worker and question them. Unfortunately the worker senses Poe's attack and is able to get the first strike in. A battle ensued with the demon dropping it's guise as a human worker and gets a few good hits on Poe, singeing a few feathers. The demon tries to make its escape, but Poe swoops down and pulls the demon into the air. In the struggle, the demon breaks free, but falls into the shredder and comes to the same fate as the van.

In the end, Poe leaves with no answers; only more questions. This will raise the chaos rating for the next session back to 6.

[Trooper Jim]

Awesome session. I ran a quick TMNT solo adventure awhile back also. As for the promotion thing, she wouldn't be promoted t detective based on 1 arrest, Detective is a job, not a rank. Kinda like SWAT. But she could have already taken the test and they were going to make her a detective due to her scores and her arrest of these crooks could have speed up the timetable. So it kinda works.

[Trooper Jim]

Here’s how mine shook out.


I just wanted to give the Mythic Emulator a spin, so I set up a quick adventure. The set up was a basic hostage rescue mission. A friend of the PC had a family member kidnapped by a local street gang. The PC, Dave the mutant koala, started conducting surveillance of the gang trying to locate the young victim. I decided that it made sense that the gang members were operating at a higher level of awareness, but they all failed their Perception rolls when Dave was tailing them. During his observation, he was able to due to a successful “exceptional yes” roll on the Fate chart, and a good prowl roll, Dave was able to locate a lone member of the gang and capture him for interrogation. The gang member was a 13-year-old “Samuel Li”, at first “Sammy” was resistant to Dave’s interrogation, but he eventually was able to get him to crack, and he gave Dave the location of the gang’s base, the leaders name, how many members are usually there at any given time, along with the reason that the victim had been kidnapped. They did it because they thought his father was a high-ranking member of an opposing gang.
Utilizing Sammy’s intel, Dave conducted a recon of the gang’s headquarters and determined that he would probably need some assistance to complete his goal. So Dave reached out to an old friend Master Tanaka, the leader of a clan of Ninja mice (back story to come later). One of Tanaka Sensei’s top students, a Ninja also named Dave, agreed to help. This part was done with a string of successful rolls on the fate table, nothing exceptional, I figured an exceptional outcome would have had more mice or even Tanaka himself coming. Later that night the duo made their way to the gang’s base.
From their vantage point from the roof of a close-by building, they spotted the lone guard on the outside. Because of high Prowl rolls, and **** perception rolls, the two Dave’s got the drop on the unfortunate soul. Using his silenced DSA carbine, Dave the Koala was able to score a headshot on his first roll but rolled almost all ones. Ninja Dave rolled low for his attack with his bow, boing almost no damage.
Even though DtK’s (Dave the Koala) DSA was suppressed and DtN (Dave the Ninja) was using a bow, the gangbanger had an unsuppressed Glock 17, so the racket alerted the building occupants to the assault. The element of surprise had been ruined. And four more Gang members started heading to investigate. The two Dave’s were able to kill the guard before his back-up arrived.
Two of the gang members appeared and opened fire on DtN, DtK had rolled well on his prowl roll. DtN engaged one of the gang members and scored a critical hit headshot, dropping his HP by half. Dave fired a quick burst and hit the other guy, they made short work of the enemy and dropped them before anyone else was able to arrive. DtK placed a breaching charge on the door and stunned one of the guys. DtK fired a quick Natural 20 headshot and rolled four 6’s and one 5, doing 82 points of damage, killing him in one shot. DtN was struggling with his guy. The gang member was able to dodge a couple of his attacks. DtK shot the bad guy in the head, another 18, killing him. That left 2 more bad guys, one generic bad guy, and the gang’s leader.
DtK was able to kill the leader after a Hollywood style gun battle culminating in DtK scoring a killing headshot. The remaining gang member was left at 1 hit point and the Dave’s and young hostage were able to escape before the police responded.
Overall the adventure was pretty fun, I did learn a few things, a few I had already known but had forgotten. The main thing is firearms are absolutely devastating in the Palladium system. Also, melee weapons and even standard bows…..not so much. DtN’s bow was almost worthless, it wasn’t until he got close in and started using other weapons, mostly his wakizashi and even a kusarigama. Also, the lack of a Perception system is complicated. Luckily, I was able to find rules in the Rifts Unlimited Edition, so I used those. As for Mythic it worked well, but I was initially confused by the “Chaos Factor” I ended up just winging and raising and lowering it as it made sense.