I play tabletop RPGs by myself, not as a sad substitute for a group, but as its own thing: part game, part meditation, mostly writing practice to be honest with you. I do a lot of technical writing for the day job and I missed making things up. Solo play scratches that itch. (It’s also where Little Black Notebook came from.)
These are my essays on how solo play works, why it counts, and how to do it without it feeling like homework. If you’d like a place to start try Not Everything Is Play And I’m Tired of Pretending It Is. Play and leisure aren’t the same thing, and I’m real (faux) mad about it.
Other pieces, roughly from “why it works” to “how to do it”:
- Not Everything Is Play And I’m Tired of Pretending It Is – Faux outrage, possibly real insights
- You’re (Not) Doing It Wrong – the one-GM, one-party, one-line-of-time setup is just a single point in a much bigger space.
- In TTRPGs, Group Play is a Spectrum – and even playing solo, you’re never quite playing by yourself: the designer and the world they built are at the table with you.
- Solo Play, Containing Multitudes – how you manage to surprise yourself when you’re both the GM and the player. The central magic trick.
- Solo TTRPG Philosophy 201 – the practical part: how I actually set up and run a session, software-brain and all.
Where this is going: I’m building a solo system of my own (quelle surprise), one made to help a player (who, let’s be honest, may just be me) tell a story worth telling. Character creation doesn’t start with rolling 5d6 and keeping the best three; it starts with the lie your character believes and the truth they need to learn. The dice serve that story instead of interrupting it: a roll tells you not just whether you succeeded but why, the same win might come from cold training or pure desperate rage, and which one it was changes the scene. The resolution is chunky and fiddly on purpose, every roll a small tactical puzzle that hands you the next beat of fiction, built for survival and hard-expeditionary stories where everything erodes and every choice costs. In progress; follow on Ko-fi to know when there’s something to play.