For the longest time I did not understand solo RPGs.
From my conversations with others, I think this is a very common condition. The thought goes “I play RPGs to tell a story with my friends. If I wanted to tell a story to myself, I’d write a novel.” And for many solo games, the act of playing them can feel this way. I feel obligated to take a game’s prompt and, as instructed in a “typical” journaling solo game, write a proper and thorough response. Maybe I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do, and most of my friends who’ve tried the medium feel similarly.
But I wanted to understand them better, so I invited Seb Pines on the podcast to talk solo games, figuring it’d be a kick in the butt. I picked up a bunch of Seb’s recommendations, and then I discovered The Ink That Bleeds.
This week on the podcast I’ve got Emanoel Melo talking to me about character sheets. It’s such a visual subject, and there were so many more sheets I wanted to talk about than we had time for, that I thought I’d put together a companion blogpost here with some bonus thoughts and content.
This week on Dice Exploder: it’s the season 2 finale! Nychelle Schneider, also known as Mistletoe_Kiss, joins me to talk about customizing games for your table. Not making your own powered by the apocalypse game or whatever, but like adding new abilities and moves to Blades in the Dark or your game of choice. It’s a big conversation, way too big for one episode. This one is chock full of cool ideas that I hope people take and run with.
But since we don’t have as much in the way of specific examples on the podcast this week, I wanted to give some here on the blog…
On this week’s episode of the Dice Exploder podcast, I talked with Michael Elliot (@notwriting in most places) about Antiquarian Adventures. And while editing it, I was reflecting on our discussion on conflict in games and stories. We talked about how providing mechanical motivations for players to lean into conflict is a great thing to propel your story go forward. Failure and disaster are great because they give your story something to react to. Without conflict, story is boring, and at that point what are we even doing here?
...right? Is that true?
