The year 2000 will be remembered for many things. The summer Olympics came and went, China got green-lighted for entry into the World Trade Organization, and both Microsoft and Apple introduced new operating systems, among other things. However, for gamers like us, the year 2000 will probably be remembered more for two other reasons. First, Avalon Hill re-emerged as the strategy games-arm of Hasbro, and actually put out some cool games. Second, Wizards of the Coast (the RPG and CCG arm of Hasbro) released a brand new edition of Dungeons and Dragons, the much-hyped 3rd edition (hereafter referred to as D&D3). There was a lot of buzz in gaming circles about this one. The granddaddy of RPGs was to be getting a MAJOR overhaul. Rumours ran rampant, and much ink was shed in speculation as to what the end result would be. When we finally saw it, most RPG players liked what they were seeing. In my own opinion, I think that D&D3 is one of the best fantasy RPGs ever published. Seriously. Not as good as Rolemaster, my all-time personal favourite, but easily in the top 5. Actually, one of the reasons I like the new D&D so much is that it leans pretty far in the direction that Rolemaster blazed years ago. But this is not a review of D&D3. This is an article about playing D&D3 solo. One of the ideas that the editors of Dungeon magazine (the D&D-specific magazine published by Wizards of the Coast) tried to beat into the heads of their readers was that the change to D&D3 provided a great opportunity to start new campaigns. “The rules allow all sorts of new stuff!” they cheered. “This is a great opportunity to begin a new campaign! Explore new continents! Encounter new people! Yippee!” It got pretty tedious. However, I did realize that starting up a solo D&D3 campaign would be a great way to test out the new rules, as well as allowing me to develop a good generic fantasy RPG solo mechanism, as D&D is pretty straight heroic fantasy, which translates well to other systems with similar philosophical underpinnings. What follows is a narrative description of the methods that I have used in my own solitaire D&D3 campaign, as well as some ideas that I haven‘t used, but that might work for other people. I have tried my best to put it all in a logical order, in order to make it as easy as possible for you to take my ideas and put them to use for yourself. Some of the elements are tied to the D&D3 rules set (known as the D20 system; we’ll deal with this in more depth later), while some are generic and could be used in any solo RPG campaign. IMPETUS One might wonder why anyone would ever bother playing a RPG solitaire. After all, RPGs are considered group activities. One player is the Game Master (Dungeon Master in D&D parlance), while the other players develop personal characters that will go on adventures in the world designed by the Game Master. How can one person both run the game world and run a character interacting with it? Well, this is done all the time. This is what authors do when they write fictional stories. They develop a world, and develop the characters, too. Then they have the characters interact with the world around them. Granted, in fiction stories the author almost always has a specific endpoint in mind, and drives things so that the story resolves the way they want. However, RPGs can easily be considered to be an exercise in interactive group storytelling, with all of the benefits and disadvantages that accrue from writing a story by committee. Some game groups even write up their adventures in prose form. The main thing that I like about RPGs is that they are great storytelling tools. When I play RPGs, whether group or solo, I am primarily interested in the story. Yes, character development is important, as is picking up cool stuff from the defeated dragon’s horde of treasure. But even those elements should tie into the over-arching story. Sometimes, I’ll even do something detrimental to my character because I believe it will progress the story better. Because of this emphasis on story, solo RPG play works for me. PREPARATION One of the best reasons for playing a solo D&D3 campaign is because there are so many resources for it. AD&D second edition had literally hundreds of supplements, adventures, and campaign settings written for it. D&D3 isn’t there yet, but they are publishing material for it at a good clip. Also, there are two magazines published specifically to support the game, Dragon magazine and Dungeon magazine. Dragon includes articles detailing new magic items, new monsters, new weapons, new feats (special personal abilities that characters can get), new prestige classes (a form of advanced character class), and other new game additions, as well as general RPG articles about improving your play, writing better adventures, and more. Dungeon is strictly adventures, with most issues having four or five adventures of various difficulty and length. One of the first things you need to do is to establish a campaign setting. This can be an elaborate setting that covers an entire world or group of worlds, or it could be as small as the village where the characters all grew up. It doesn’t have to all be detailed ahead of time, of course, but having some detail helps avoid logical inconsistencies that may arise during play. A rough sketch of a city and the surrounding lands, including names for major habitations and geographic features, should suffice for most people. For my campaign, I used the default Greyhawk setting that is assumed in the main rulebooks (the Player’s Handbook, Dungeonmaster’s Guide, and the Monster Manual). They have published a D&D Gazetteer, which contains brief overviews of each country and region, and includes a colour map of the Flanaess, which is the section of the continent that the Greyhawk setting deals with. I found this very handy. Wizards of the Coast has also released a guidebook to the “Living Greyhawk” campaign that the RPGA (Role-Playing Gamers Association) is running. This is a continually-evolving campaign that will shape the future of Greyhawk. The whole process is a little complex, and I won’t go into a discussion of it here, but let’s just say that the book should contain a lot more detail than what is included in the Gazetteer, if you are interested. Now that you have a setting, you need some characters (actually, you could develop the characters first, and then detail the campaign setting second; this is just the order in which I did it). The Challenge Rating system used in D&D3 to balance encounters assumes that your adventuring party consists of four characters. You of course could have as many as you wanted. Some people like to solo play with just one character (I myself have done this), while others like to play with 50 (sometimes handy when playing Tunnels & Trolls). But, for simplicity’s sake, I went with four characters. I flirted with the idea of having five, but eventually settled on just four. So, having settled on a number, I needed to determine what these characters would be. Whether you have one character or fifty, I do recommend that one, and only one, of these characters really be YOUR character. If you are able to really focus in on multiple characters without favouring one over the others, by all means go for it. But for the rest of us, it works best if you have one of the characters be “your” character, and let the others play supporting roles. I decided that my character would be a bard, as that is a character class that I have wanted to play in the past, but never actually did. Now that this was determined, and after rolling up my character and equipping him, it was time to develop the other three characters that would adventure with my bard. I used a mostly random system for this purpose. There are thirteen different character classes in D&D3, so I randomly determined what the classes would be for the other characters. I ended up with a wizard, a rogue, and a paladin. I then randomly rolled for race. I don’t remember what system I used, but I ended up with the wizard and rogue being elves, and the paladin being a dwarf. I then rolled for gender (1d6, with a 5+ being female), and the paladin came up as a female. I liked the elven wizard and rogue, and decided that they would be twin brothers. I didn’t like the female dwarven paladin, though, so I ditched the dwarven aspect and made her a human paladin. Yes, when rolling randomly, feel free to pitch what you don’t like. I really like random tables because they help spark my imagination, but if I really don’t like a result, I don’t always stick with it. Remember, I’m telling a story here, so it helps if I can at least stand the characters. One thing that I will mention here is the use of a journal or diary. This idea has been mentioned before, in David Elrick’s article on solo roleplaying in Lone Warrior 117. I will second David’s recommendation, as keeping a journal is an excellent way to maintain continuity in your adventures, as well as giving you a perfect place to jot down story notes, funny occurrences, etc. that may be important later, or just add character to your games. Keeping a journal has helped me a lot in keeping my games on track. PLAYING Now that you have your characters, it is time to go out and tell some stories. But to do that, we need an adventure for the characters to get involved in. You basically have two options here: you can write one yourself, or you can use somebody else’s adventure that they have already written. For my first adventure, I went with Evil Unearthed in Dungeon issue 82, which was written for 1st-level characters. Now, when playing a pre-written adventure, I recommend some ground rules. First, don’t read ahead. Second, don’t read ahead. Third, don’t read ... well, you get the picture. Granted, this never works out perfectly clean, as you will need to read the introduction to the adventure, which will give away some things, but the idea is to keep your own knowledge of what is going on to a minimum, so that you can make decisions in the proper environment. It doesn’t help the story if you reach a fork in the road and you already know what is down each path. Most adventures are written in a way that you can wait until after a decision is made to determine the results of that decision. So, let’s say that an adventure has you entering a town. Where will you go? A quick look at a map of the town should give you some options. Let’s say that you decide to find an inn. Choose one (most likely the one closest to the area of town your characters are in) and then go read its description. Then determine if there is anything to react to, and determine your reaction. For example, let’s assume that you enter an inn. The write-up on the inn gives a basic description of the inn, and also has sections on each major character that can be found at the inn. Read just enough of each description to get an idea of what role that character plays. If the character may or may not be in the inn, determine whether the character is present before reading the rest of that character’s description. Sometimes a character write-up will lay out that character’s reaction to other characters in the adventure. If those characters are present in the inn, use that knowledge to aid you in visualizing the scene. If not, then hold that knowledge for later, if the time arises where it is helpful to the story. The main thing you are trying to accomplish here is to read enough of the printed description to know what is going on, without reading so much that you don’t have anything left to discover about the adventure. The above paragraph gives some hints on how to do that, but it’s really up to you to decide how you want to handle these situations. If it works best for you to simply read an entire area description and just “selectively forget” stuff your character(s) haven’t yet discovered, then more power to you. I, however, find that it helps me greatly to set the scene in my mind if I selectively read only things that my characters would know, and hold off on the rest until they make their skill rolls, talk to the right people, etc. Now that that is out of the way, you have the job of determining how you will make decisions. Let’s say that you are chasing some bad guys, and you come across a fork in the road. Which way will you take? If a character makes a tracking roll, then the answer is (hopefully) easy. If not, though, a decision must be made. How this decision is made doesn’t matter, but you should determine ahead of time how you will make these decisions. Options that spring immediately to mind are to: A) dice for it B) make Intelligence checks, and have the character with the highest score make the decision based on what you have determined of their personality, disposition, etc. C) repeat option B, but then dice for it, and have the other characters blame the deciding character if things turn out wrong. If things turn out good, give that character a small experience point bonus, just for grins. This is a decent way to introduce “stress” into the group. Personally, I dice for most things, except in situations where I have established character attributes that would determine things on their own. At some point, you will get into a fight. This is D&D after all, and you will (most likely) fight things. D&D3 has been written to encourage the use of miniatures in combat. Lots of people have miniatures, so this isn’t a problem. I, also, have lots of miniatures, but I prefer to use them in wargames, not RPGs. Therefore, I just sketch the scene on graph paper and go from there. Anyway, combat in solo D&D3 games should be very easy. Just establish the scene (available cover, where everyone is in relation to said cover and the other combatants, etc.), and then follow the combat rules. Determining a combat style for each character ahead of times will help. Does your wizard dive right into the thick of things? Does she hang back and cast offensive spells? Does she hang back and cast defensive spells? Does your bard use his magic song ability before the fight? Answering these questions will give you a good idea of what your characters (and the enemy characters) will do, and then you just have them do it, and roll the dice to see what happens. It should be relatively easy. And that is really all the advice I can think to give you right now as to how you should play your game. You can come up with your own methods, of course, and you should, as it will be YOUR game, and not mine. Remember, you only lose if you don’t enjoy the game, and you can come up with some solid, entertaining stories this way. I wouldn’t recommend inflicting these stories on your wife, necessarily, but you probably knew that anyway. WRITING Of course, you might not want to play a pre-published adventure. You might have your own grand plans for a long, glorious campaign. If you want to tell your own, completely original tales, go ahead and do so. The obvious downside of doing this is that you will know what is going to happen before it actually does happen. This might minimize your enjoyment of the game. Then again, if done right, it probably won’t. I recently ran into a situation where my characters were ready to have another adventure, and I couldn’t find one that I liked that was already written. So what did I do? I invented my own. How did I do it? Ah, there’s the important question. The aspiring solo gamer has many options when designing his or her own adventure. The obvious one is to design a random dungeon, and then inflict it on your characters. Chapter 4 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide has tables to produce a completely random dungeon, and also contains a sample dungeon map that you could use as the basis for your own dungeon. Many third-party dungeon and adventure generators also exist. One of my favourites is Central Casting: Dungeons, which was printed by Task Force Games. It is, unfortunately, out of print to the best of my knowledge, but some determined searching should turn up a copy. There are also good dungeon/adventure programs to be found on the internet. Start at a site like www.rpghost.com, and then search around until you find something you like. But I did not use any of these options. I, instead, used an article from Dragon magazine #274, “The Hero with 1d1000 Faces.” This is actually a really good random adventure generator, if you can find a copy of the magazine. It has you break out adventure elements into the following categories: The Victim; The Villain; Mediations (how the characters get involved); Obstacles (problems the characters face); Donations (aids the characters receive); Rewards (what you get for beating the villain); and Penalties (what happens if you don’t beat the villain). Each element has a table that you roll dice against in order to get a result. The end product is a loose list of elements to flesh out as you go. I found that this worked well for me. For example, I ended up with the following list of elements: The Victim: A poor but proud peasant youth. The Villain: The high priest of a dark cult. Mediation: A storyteller or poet relates the tale of the villain, the victim, or both. Obstacles: The villain deploys henchmen to capture, ambush, or rob the heroes. The heroes are forbidden to interfere by some authority. Donations: A henchman of the villain turns against evil and helps the heroes. The heroes learn of a secret entrance into the villain’s stronghold. Reward: The heroes receive a small amount of treasure. Penalty: Rivals of the heroes save the victim, are rewarded, and gloat. This was the basic framework. Just for grins, I decided to spice things up a bit by adding an extra element. I own some of the marvelous Citybooks published by Flying Buffalo, Inc., and wanted to use them in my solo games. So, I rolled a D3, and decided that a “1” meant there would be no Citybook elements in the adventure, a “2” meant there would be 1 Citybook element, and a “3” meant 2 elements. I got a “2,” so I randomly determined which book I would use (within reason; different books cover different types of cities or city establishments), and I ended up with the Grey Minstrel Inn from Citybook I. So, I had the characters stay at that inn when the entered the town where the action would take place. If you have other “generic” RPG supplements that have easily-inserted elements, just come up with a quick system for using them, and feel free to insert them into your adventures. Now to flesh things out. Here are short write-ups for how I fleshed out the first three elements: The victim: A poor but proud peasant youth This young lad (11 to 12 years of age) recently had his home destroyed by worshippers of Hextor (an evil deity in the Greyhawk world). These men killed his parents, took away his two sisters (one older, one younger), and locked him in their base of operations. The high priest of Hextor seems to have plans for this one... The villain: The high priest of a dark cult A 10th level cleric of Hextor runs the god’s cult in this area. He and his followers have been slowly and methodically attacking outlying farmsteads for the last two months. They hope to create enough unrest and chaos to attract the attention of Gorsend’s (that’s the town the characters landed in) militia. Once the militia are alerted, Hextor’s agents can begin the next phase of their plan... (the next phase in totally unimportant to this adventure, so I left it unsettled, to be brought up in the future) Mediation: A storyteller or poet relates the tale of the villain, the victim, or both When the characters get to Gorsend, they will stay at The Grey Minstrel inn. The ghost of Lyran Fanti (an unearthly character that haunts the inn) will watch the characters their first evening. The second evening, the ghost will “visit” the characters and tell them about the young lad’s capture. Turns out the boy’s father was Lyran’s brother. When his brother was killed, his spirit came to Lyran’s and told him what had happened before passing on to the afterlife. Now, Lyran is keeping an eye out for heroes to avenge his brother and his family. This method works very well (for me at least), and it can be used with other adventure-generation methods, not just the one in the magazine I mentioned earlier. Look for headlines in the newspaper and use them as plot points. Take ideas from the last novel you read. Dream them up on the fly. Ask your friends for ideas. Draw random Magic: The Gathering cards. Whatever method works for you, run with it. But make sure that you include all the right elements. CAMPAIGNS So you’ve had your first adventure. Assuming that it wasn’t a massive disaster, you will likely want to continue the adventures of your party of characters. This is more difficult, but also more rewarding, than just running one-shot adventures with no continuity between them. I can think of two basic ways to establish and run a campaign for a solo player. First, you can establish an over-arching story that your characters will take part in. This will require more background work, as you must flesh out lots of details, including most of the adventures, ahead of time. The trick is to flesh out enough detail to allow you to design a great story without establishing so much detail that you can’t really “play” the adventures. I doubt that I could successfully pull this off myself, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t. What might help a lot is if you could enlist the aid of a friend who can take your over-arching story idea and develop individual adventures for you, and then give you the adventures as you need them. This maintains the element of surprise, but is probably a lot of work for your friend, especially if she gets into lots of detail. Or, your friend could help find pre-published adventures that she can tie into a solid campaign idea, and then let you know which adventure you need to run next. What I have used is the “free-form” campaign, where I don’t set out ahead of time any specific campaign. As I mentioned earlier, my first campaign was set in Greyhawk. I just picked a city to start in based on a character background, picked an adventure to play, and went to it. When that adventure was completed, I just picked another suitable adventure (based on suggested character levels, what area the adventure is set in, if it mentions a time of year, etc.) and used that one. I also fleshed out some details of the time between adventures in my journal. The trick here is to keep an eye open for any themes that seem to run through your adventures. For example, my initial group’s first adventure had them going up against a priest of Hextor, an evil deity. My third adventure had them going up against an “evil priest,” and I decided to make this fellow a priest of Hextor, too. Now we have an underlying theme of battling against the minions of Hextor. My group had a righteous paladin in it, so this made good sense. I find this method easier than the first one, but your mileage may vary. There’s no hard rule about this. My best advice is to try stuff and see what works. DEATH Sooner or later you will have to deal with this issue. I just recently had to deal with it, as my party of adventurers all got killed by a couple of ogres. Not the climactic ending to my campaign I had been hoping for, but when you roll “1”s for your heroes and “20”s for the bad guys consistently, things tend to turn out this way. There are a number of ways for you to deal with this. You can use the “video game” method, and roll-back the game to the last convenient decision point and go forward again from there. Your characters got killed in a combat? No problem; fight the combat again. Took the left fork in the road and got killed by giant wildebeests? Just “reload” the game and take the right fork this time. This method is good if you have a specific story you want to tell, and you need certain characters to survive to tell the story properly. It does take away the danger of combat and decision making, though, which might minimize your enjoyment of the game. Note that if individual characters die, it is possible to get them resurrected in many cases, assuming you have the funds. If the whole party dies, though, you must rely on third parties handling the resurrection, which doesn’t always make sense within a story (i.e., everyone dies in the middle of a vast desert). Second, you could use the “nobody really dies” method, where your characters can’t die. They can get horribly maimed, but they can’t die. If they get crushed in a combat, they are always able to retreat with “serious injuries,” and maybe loss of important items of equipment, as a penalty. I personally like this method better than the “reload” method, and you might restrict this to a handful of specific major characters that you need for your story. For example, when my group got killed by the ogres, I could have said that my primary character was just knocked unconscious and later recovered to find his equipment and money stolen and his friends all dead. This would most likely have a major effect on the specific adventure being undertaken, but at least it wouldn’t be a “game over” situation. Third, you have the “take it like a man” method, where everything that the rulebook says is lethal, is lethal. If your characters die, they are dead. Goodbye. Once again, they could be resurrected if the situation was right (and your campaign permits that), but don’t bet on it. This is the method that I used in my first campaign, but I might not the second time around. It’s tough for my characters to survive my streaks of bad luck. THE D20 PHENOMENON One of the really interested things about D&D3 is the fact that it is based on the D20 system, which is covered under the Open Gaming License. This license is based on the Gnu Public License that covers the distribution of some free operating systems, like Linux, Gnu, and FreeBSD. Basically, this opens up the core D&D3 rules for anyone to use in publishing their own gaming material. There are limitations to it, of course, but for the most part Wizards of the Coast has put their Intellectual Property into the public sphere. This has had a profound effect, with a large number of companies releasing products that use the D20 system. Most, if not all, of these products will be compatible with the D&D3 rules. Most of what we have seen as of the time I am writing this have been adventure modules, many of which have been published by new companies hoping to make a name for themselves. However, there are also campaign settings, monster collections, item and map collections, and other sourcebooks that have either been published or are in the pipeline. The end result of this is that you should not have a problem finding material for your solo D&D3 games. Your problem will be finding appropriate materials, and determining what you want to use. But that is the kind of problem we like to have. Take a trip to your local gaming store that sells RPGs, and you should find plenty of these items for you to look at. CLOSING REMARKS I hope that you found this article useful. There are a multitude of possibilities for story-telling when you play a solo RPG, and it can be a very rewarding experience. If you want to get involved but don’t know how to get started, D&D3 is as good a place as any. It has lots of support from its publisher and third parties, and is actually a rather good system. However, there are lots of other role-playing games that you can play. In future articles I will deal with solo play with other rules sets. These articles will (hopefully!) be shorter than this one, because I will not be repeating all of the basic concepts that I presented in this article, as far as developing a campaign, building an adventure, etc. Rather, I will focus on the unique aspects of the rules set I am dealing with, and how to handle those aspects to tell a successful, entertaining story. My next two articles will most likely deal with Legend of the Five Rings by Alderac Entertainment Group, and Warhammer Quest by Games Workshop. If you have any favourite rules set that you would like me to deal with, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to handle your request. I am also considering writing articles and/or reviews of computer RPGs, and would like to know if my readers are in favour of that idea or would rather that I stick with pen-and-paper games. See you back here next time! Any trademarks used in this article are copyright by their respective owners. Their use here is not a challenge to those copyrights, and is for informational purposes only. The article “The Hero With 1d1000 Faces” is copyright William J. White, its author, and Hasbro corporation. RANDOM THOUGHTS If you have not yet played Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord, you should really do so. In fact, put down this magazine, go online to battlefront.com, and download the demo. Do it now. You won’t be sorry. I would really appreciate it if Blizzard Entertainment could actually get a version of Diablo II out that will run on my computer. That’s the downside of playing computer games; sometimes you plunk down $40 for something that you can’t even play. [Happens on this side of the Pond as well. Kenn]. Iron Crown Enterprises, the publishers of my favourite RPG of all time, Rolemaster, has filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy, and the status of their game lines is being sorted out by the bankruptcy trustee. This is very sad for me, but a group of Rolemaster fans is putting together a proposal to buy the game from the trustee and keep the game in print. Whoever ends up with the game, I hope that they keep it active, rather than letting it die. Back to Table of Contents -- Lone Warrior #134 Back to Lone Warrior List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Solo Wargamers Association. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com