Last updated on 14/02/2026

Solo TTRPGs do a very silly thing. They ask you to be surprised by a magic trick you’re also performing. In a group game, a huge part of the joy, on both sides of the screen, is not knowing exactly what’s going to happen next. As a GM, you prep situations and then wait for your table to shit on your creation by going completely off the rails, but in an affectionate way. As a player, you negotiate the big themes in session zero and then let the details blindside you in the best possible way. In both cases, we’re playing to find out.

Solo play, by default, mutes both of those experiences. When I’m the one laying the track and I’m also the train, I can’t pretend I don’t know there’s a bend coming up in half a mile. That’s the tension at the heart of solo TTRPGs: learning how to be two minds at once without feeling like you’re constantly spoiling yourself.

This essay is about that tension, the cognitive dissonance of being GM and player simultaneously, why it can feel weird, why it’s not actually a problem (mostly), and how to lean into solo’s strengths without lying to yourself about what it can’t do.

What’s the problem, specifically?

At most tables, the Game Master and the players are separate entities for good reasons. The roles have different incentives and responsibilities.

• As GM, you’re world creator, rules arbiter, and generator of conflict and uncertainty. You imagine situations and prepare to be surprised by how other human beings, people who are not you, react.
• As player, you’re the avatar in the fiction, filtering the world through your character’s goals, competencies, and blind spots. You want to be surprised by the story as it unfolds.

In solo play, those roles collapse into one person. The world builder, the character, and the engine of uncertainty are all wearing the same face. (Yours. Mine. The only one in the room.)

There’s also the simple reality that gaming is social for a lot of us. Solo play removes the performative energy of friends at the table, the in‑jokes, the supportive nods, the “holy shit did you see that?” laughter, the “put your goddamned phone down and roll Steve”s that make up the landscape of the tables we play with. The ambient pressure to not waste each other’s precious time on earth is lost, but not without getting something in return. You gain focus on whatever it is that you as a person care about. No table to negotiate with, but you also lose push back and surprise.

So yes: fewer external surprises, less social juice, and a single clarity of vision and purpose trying to both set the joke and spike the punch line.

Is that a problem, really?

Well… no. Not inherently. It’s just different. Solo can still surprise you; it just routes that surprise through different mechanisms.

There’s still surprise

• Oracular generation. Yes/no oracles, random event tables, prompt decks, these inject externalized randomness. You’re still interpreting, but you’re not choosing the seed. That’s a distinction that matters.
• The dice. Mechanics force you to live with outcomes you wouldn’t script for yourself.
  • Interesting failure. A miss that complicates the situation without halting progress keeps tension alive. You didn’t “choose” to fail; you chose to play honest with the roll.
  • Critical success & “Yes, and…”. When fortune smiles, push the momentum. Surprise yourself by granting more than you would have dared to ask for.

Everyone already separates player and character knowledge

We call it metagaming for a reason. Even in group play, you constantly gate what you know versus what your character could reasonably intuit. Sometimes that’s healthy:

• Knowing that Sleep is a powerful low‑level spell? Great. Build characters and tactics accordingly.
• Recognizing Monster X and instantly exploiting Weaknesses Y and Z when your character has no in‑fiction reason to be a walking bestiary? Less great.

And in healthy tables, we play to and for each other all the time:

• We avoid themes likely to re‑traumatize a friend.
• We lean into the stuff that lights people up (if Sally loves airships and Jimmy is wearing a Tailspin shirt, you’re getting sky pirates if the setting can bear it).
• We shoulder more or less spotlight for someone who’s had a rough week.

We also respect real‑world constraints, wrapping a scene because folks have to work in the morning is its own kind of pacing mechanic.

Surprise isn’t the only reason we play

• Making a story is intrinsically fun.
• Manipulating mechanics and systems is also fun.
• Sharing the story afterward, journals, blogs, voice notes, is itself a social outlet, even if it’s asynchronous.

So no, solo’s not “worse” or “lesser.” It’s just different.

And yes… some genres really do suffer

That said, there are some real honest to god drawbacks, and I don’t want to sugarcoat them.

• Mystery is tricky solo.
  • You’re both clue‑planter and clue‑solver
  • The genre’s core pleasure, discovery, is hard to fake without scaffolding.
• Horror can wobble, especially:
  • Jump‑scare horror. You can’t sneak up on yourself.
  • Cosmic horror. The whole point is grappling with the unknowable; maintaining consistent unknowability you didn’t decide five minutes ago is tough.

There’s also a structural tension:

• Not knowing the true motivations of major entities helps you feel discovery, but fights:
  • a coherent narrative with discernible themes,
  • consistent behavior from your BBEG and factions, and
  • your ability to do any prep.

Finally, pacing a single session is hard when you don’t have a group’s energy to naturally declare act breaks. Without those social beats, you can over‑linger or rush.

None of that is fatal, of course. It provides new challenges. New challenges means new skills to develop, and developing skills in a safe, nonthreatening setting is the heart of play after all.

So, What Do?

Solo asks you to be both magician and audience. I don’t know if you like stage magic, but I really do. Some of my favorite performers are Penn & Teller, and my favorite piece they’ve done involves Teller ‘smoking a cigarette’ on stage while Penn plays base. The scene unfolds with Teller doing some brilliant slight of hand work that looks like a noir detective smoking under a streetlight. Teller plays bass and describes the fundamentals of magic, then they play the entire routine again with teller facing the other way.

Nothing, absolutely nothing is lost by showing the trick again after having explained it, and that is because they are both absolute masters of their craft. Knowing what is going on if anything heightens the joy of the piece because you get to marvel at the effect and artistry of Teller’s sleight of hand. And then of course he fools you anyway, because you only needed to be misdirected for a second for him to surprise you with something truly unexpected.

Solo can be like that too. Knowing the trick doesn’t ruin the experience, it just changes what joy you get from it. And as comparison is the thief of joy, maybe don’t expect it to be something it isn’t.

Align your expectations

You won’t shock yourself with the broad motivations of a faction you invented. But you can surprise yourself with:

• Origins. How did they get here? Who radicalized whom? What unplanned resource or crisis pushed them over the edge?
• Moment‑to‑moment choices. Given their goals, what’s the weird-but-true next move?

For cosmic horror, make the human layer comprehensible and the cosmic layer truly opaque:

• Cultists and institutions have motivations you can parse through a human lens.
• The entity is beyond your ken. If it triggers a chain of events that appear unrelated, don’t retrofit a neat bow. Ask, “Does this fit the fiction I’m portraying right now?” If not, it happens off‑screen. If yes, let it intrude like a radio signal cutting through static.

Rely on tools that center mystery and discovery

• Use mystery‑specific solo frameworks where clues are guaranteed or algorithmically surfaced. You’re outsourcing “what exists” so you can focus on interpreting “what it means.”
• Try deck‑dealt map crawls that pre‑distribute nodes and connections. Even if you generated the deck, experiencing the map in play scratches the discovery itch.
• Lean on incremental map/dungeon generation. Reveal the next room or hex only when you enter it. Treat the procedure as an NPC with its own whims.

Reduce friction on oracular generation

Any creative exercise is a bit like flying a plane. If you start moving too slowly, you run the risk of stalling out and falling out of your heady flow state and crashing back to earth. To that end, keep oracular generation fast.

• Fast access. Keep your oracles at hand, bookmarked PDFs, index cards, a minimal app.
• On‑theme, narrowly scoped oracles.
  • Nouns is too broad. Nouns in a dungeon is better, and nouns for dungeons in your setting are best.
  • For heaven’s sake, come to the oracle with a well formed question. “What’s in the room?” is too broad. “What is the smell that betrays this ruin’s former purpose?” is better.
• Wide genre reading. The more reference points you carry, the less you’ll stall interpreting a prompt. (It’s not about copying; it’s about pattern recognition and recombination.)

Let Solo Be Solo

Not every structure demands surprise about who did what to whom.

• The Columbo model. Start knowing the culprit. The game is how you prove it, what it costs, and who you become in the process.
• Non‑linear timelines. Use flashbacks and flash‑forwards to rough in motives and then play to discover the connective tissue. Declare an ending beat, then earn it.
• Smaller, truer stories. Not every solo needs to be a mythic epic. “A person trying to get by in a world that doesn’t think they’re special” is a bottomless well. Slice‑of‑life with pressure is catnip for solo.

These are, perhaps interestingly, structures that don’t always shine at the group table. Leaning into the unique things solo play has to offer is, I think, essential to enjoying the hobby and getting better at playing. Unconventional narrative structure does dual work in both better aligning with how solo games can uniquely tell stories and subtly reminding you that you aren’t just playing group TTRPGs in an impoverished way.

Solo is a Mindset

Solo play works best when you stop trying to replicate the social table and instead optimize for solitude:

• You won’t be shocked by the broad strokes of a faction you invented. So stop aiming for shock. Aim for inevitability: the feeling that, of course, this is where all those tiny choices were always going.
• You can’t jump‑scare yourself. Fine. Trade jump scares for slow dread and moral stress. You can absolutely haunt yourself with those.
• You won’t get spontaneous riffs from friends. Replace that with procedural provocation: tightly scoped oracles, timed act breaks, and prompts that force decisions.

Remember: surprise is only one fuel. The other fuel, careful craft, mechanical play, the pleasure of making, these all burn clean in solo. And when you’re done, you still get to tell people about the strange, specific thing you made. You still get the social part, just time‑shifted.