Question for the group--how did you first find out about Solo Roleplaying, and what led you to this group?
My answer--I was going to run a Pendragon campaign, and was reading a blog that recapped the game, which was run with just one player and the GM. The GM used the word "solo," which got me interested in single player games. Googling Solo RPG, I found this group. At first, I had no idea what to make of the idea, and it took me awhile to come around to the concept.
What about you?
(This was inspired a bit by Todd Maudlin's comment on this group crossing the 1000 member threshold. Which got me wondering on who the new members were, and what brought them here.)
I think it was an RPG.net thread, in my case. Mythic was mentioned, but I confess I'm not entirely sure in what context :-)rpg.net - Roleplaying Games & More - RPGnet
ReplyDeleteI'm still pretty new at this and quiet here in the group, but I think it was a random post showing up in my feed (reshared or Plus-shared by someone in my large RPG circle). This has lead to some small experimentation and reading of other people's play, and a line item on my recurring "do something fun" checklist to play a little solo session. Mostly I use matt jackson's so1um so far.
ReplyDeleteMy introduction to Solo Roleplaying was through the discovery of Mythic and its Yahoo group. It was probably a mention or a link on that group that brought me here. Since my face to face roleplaying group imploded a couple of years ago solo roleplaying has become of increasing importance and I hope to post some actual play reports in the near future.
ReplyDeleteThis group may not have a high volume of posts but the quality more than makes up for any lack of quantity.
Well, I was a fan of Tunnels and Trolls back in the pre-internet days. But, my modern day flirting with solo stems directly from having the technology and having way way too many games and not enough people to play them with. G+ is just icing on the cake.
ReplyDeleteFor me it started when I was reading forums somewhere on the Internet and Mythic was mentioned. It seemed like an interesting concept, so I looked it up on DriveThruRPG. I was instantly hooked, and I remember being amazed and excited at how well the Mythic GME guided a story in logical yet unexpected ways.
ReplyDeleteMythic led me to the Word Mill Games website where I found World vs Hero. I also loved this idea. My friends and I had been doing "multi-player novel" for years, and WvH was a perfect framework to put on top of that. Unfortunately, I found that the WvH community had been shutdown and taken offline several years ago due to some personal issues John Fiore was having at the time. I gained what information I could using web.archive.org.
The archived website led me to the Mythic and Word Mill Games Yahoo group. That group was not very active, but I did find some posts that mentioned this G+ group. So I headed over here and have happily been a member ever since.
I'm very thankful to this community for opening my eyes to a much wider world of solo gaming. Since joining just a few months back, I have discovered, tried, and purchased numerous other solo systems and tools. In addition to using them for solo games, I've also incorporated a lot of soloing methods into my regular group RPGs.
For me, I think it was John Fiore's now closed blog Solo Nexus. Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteevandro novel out of curiosity, how did you find that blog?
ReplyDeleteI was inspired by fellow blogger Sophia Brandt when I read her stuff and looked over the resources she has her on her blog. The other inspiration is the fact that my main gaming group that I play with that has people, they don't like changing up rule sets. They love Savage Worlds, heck, I love Savage Worlds- but they don't care to do a whole lot else and I'm not blind to things I might dislike SW.
ReplyDeleteSo, in an effort to get a combination of game time and a chance to play other sets, I decided to do this. If people are entertained by the stuff I put up on the Embassy all the better.
Thanks for the shout-outs! I got into solo RPG by reading about it on John Fiore's blog. I'm still impressed by his expertise and deep thinking about solo mechanics.
ReplyDeletemy little odissey: in 1999-2000 I wrote my solo rpg system (not very good indeed but playable), totally unaware that someone except me would be interested in this subject, then few years ago I started playing solo wargames, I searched the net and I found some blogs about it, among these there was tinysolitarysoldiers blog, the author wrote an article about solo rpg showing his solo rpg system and mentioning other systems including Mythic GME. My interest to the subject sparked again, I've found many blogs, rpgs, I wrote another couple of solo rpgs and finally I found this great google group. :)
ReplyDeletehttp://tinysolitarysoldiers.blogspot.it/2012/04/solo-rpg.html
it started with red box Bargle's dungeon and choose your own adventure, leading to the old solo D&D and AD&D modules.
ReplyDeletewhat really got me towards the new school of solo roleplaying was John Fiore, which eventually brought me here.
oops, almost forgot about tunnels and trolls. that's where i was right before John.
ReplyDeleteI was spending too much time in front of computer, both at work and with my hobbies at home (programming, electronics, video games, especially rogue-likes). I wanted something analog, but focused on process and creating story, which led me back to tabletop rpgs. I was reading actual plays and stumbled upon John Fiore Solonexus blog and john yorio Ever Expanding Dungeon http://tabletopdiversions.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteman, I'm so old, I find it hard to remember how I got here ("here" being RPG soloing)... I think my path is similar to Todd Zircher's: I had too many tabletop/pen and paper rpgs I was interested in, and not enough people to play with. I needed to find a way to experience these games and I ended up here looking for ideas and resources. I like to write, so that was a big motivator too. A lot of the tools I found are useful for that hobby as well. A few Christmases ago, I took some iTunes gift card money I had and downloaded some Tin Man Games gamebooks for my iphone, which reawakened my interest in gamebooks/solo adventures (I didn't know about T&T until recently but I did devour every Fighting Fantasy or CYOA book I found when I was a kid) and spent some time over in the Solo Board Game group. All of it sort of just coalesced and yeah, here I am, finding cool stuff like so1um and Mythic and GA Apprentice and RND and on and on. I'm very thankful to have this place as a resource and as a place to meet people and compare notes.
ReplyDeleteTodd Rokely I am afraid I don't remember how I found John's blog. It must have been in 2011. More or less at the same time, I also found the RPG Solitaire Challenge, in particular StoryLeaves. I can't remember if the link was from SoloNexus to the Challenge or the other way round :)
ReplyDeletehttp://rpgsolitairechallenge.blogspot.com/p/games.html
rpgsolitairechallenge.blogspot.it - Entries
It's been a long and and convoluted journey. I stopped gaming when I moved away from my college (UK not US University-style) friends.
ReplyDeleteI still had a lot of my gaming stuff, and added more as I dabbled in 'RPG research' (i.e. reading). Somehow I found out about Two Hour Wargames 'Larger Than Life' and then Mythic, which lead me to Googling solo role-playing in general. I was pretty much there for post 1 of Solo Nexus.
Since then I've just been swept along for the ride. It feels weird that there are solo resources and players lost to the mists of time/vagaries of the internet/real life.
I would say there's been an explosion of solo gaming systems, and even though I don't get to game as often as I like it's been really quite thrilling as a journey.
If only I could concentrate on one thing at a time, I'm sure I'd game a lot more!
I started with Aleena and Bargle as well and have messed around more or less with solo rpg ever since. Actually wrote my own system many, many years ago, which I sadly have since lost. When Mythic GME surfaced I learned about it quickly because I was already researching about the subject. My solo style has evolved (can I say Level Upped?)so that I don't write fiction to make it happen, or more accurately I don't write down notes more than I would do in regular group play. I still need to write down those NPC names etc. stuff you have to remember maybe a year later. I'm slow typer/handwriter and it slows down it too much for me. Currently I'm playing two games; one where I'm player with two PC characters and in the second game I'm the DM and use "player emulator" running four PCs. Good times :)
ReplyDeleteI first played an RPG in 1982, when I bought my own B/X Moldvay set with my hard-earned chore money at age 13. My friends were all excited about playing, but everyone wanted to be DM, and no one was any good at it. We gave it up pretty quickly, but I always held a spot in my heart for 'The Keep on the Borderlands', and what it might have been.
ReplyDeleteAbout 10 years ago I hit a mid-life crisis, and started getting interested in board games. My family didn't feel the same pull, so it's always been difficult to find players. I found the 1-Player Guild on BoardGameGeek.com, where I learned some of those purchases could actually be played fairly well solo.
Around that time, maybe three years ago, I started to see a lot of chatter about "old school" RPG interest spiking, and started wondering about the possibility of playing B/X solo, maybe a chance of finally finishing that first adventure module. I think I stumbled across posts by The Lone Crusader on playing through published adventures solo, and it snowballed from there, coupled with finding DriveThruRPG.com and the massive Humble Bundle of Pathfinder books and the box set. That set piqued my interest in CYOA-style stories, as well (I had kind of missed them in my teens, finding music and girls way more interesting).
I came across Mythic GME via various sites and picked it up along with FATE Core (mainly from interesting posts on SoloRPGVoyages, though they're almost impossible to read with that green-on-pumpkin color scheme LOL). Though I saw the possibilities, I was having a hard time getting my head around it all. More Googling, and I found the Die Heart blog, which I believe lead me here, and also to about a million other solo RPG systems and blogs. Without her site, I may not have found Scarlet Heroes, 4AD and so1um.
I completely understand the previous mentions of not being able to concentrate on more than one thing at a time! I also suffer from "Ooh, shiny!" syndrome, and collect more RPGs and board games than I could ever possibly play. On top of that, I'm a completist, which has formed the basis of a rather expensive hobby/collection. Between this group and the 'Map-Making in Games' group on G+, and the blogs I regularly visit ( Sophia Brandt's, Dyson's Dodecahedron, UbiquitousRat's, etc.), I keep busy. I just don't actually play much. Hopefully that will change soon; I now own a copy of 'The Keep on the Borderlands' again. Time to see if I can play it with Scarlet Heroes!
I was looking around for the Lonewolf books because I always loved playing gamebooks and I was on a nostalgia kick. Found this group, bookmarked for later.
ReplyDeleteWhen later finally came 'round, I was on a big OSR kick and gearing up to DM a sandbox style group Godbound game and I needed a project to teach myself Kivy anyway. So I wrote Pythia to facilitate creating random content for my Godbound sandbox, with a minor in solo session tracking.
The group campaign lasted about two sessions (turns out my players hate the concept of randomly generated content in play) but I've since played about two dozen (about half multi-session) solos, messing around a lot with narrative and story-driven stuff, and it's all good.
I first started playing solo with game sets to understand how the rules worked. It was D&D in 1976, and then Tunnels & Trolls a few years later. It was playing the T&T Solo Module that made me want to figure out how to play solo whenever I wanted. The problem is I have ADD and it's really easy for me to forget things.
ReplyDeleteI've played Choose-Your-Own Adventure books, but was always unhappy with the system, plus there were never enough books to continue play with the same character.
Playing things like Diablo 1 convinced me all over again it was possible to play Solo games, and that the rules apparently existed somewhere and in some form.
A friend demonstrated Non-System Gaming when I was in High School (around '79 or '80), which was one step closer. I spent some time interviewing my friends about how stories and roleplaying worked for them, and this gave me lists, which I could then turn into random tables.
About 4 years back, that was when I first came in contact with the term 'Solo Gaming' and Mythic GM-less play. So, really, I sort of approached Solo Gaming backwards.