Oct 26, 2025
starts making something like this but for solo RPGs
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starts making something like this but for solo RPGs
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i feel like everyone who dabbles in ttrpg design should get to experience, at least once, the joy of creating an incomprehensible abomination of a home-cooked oracle which you could not explain the function of to someone else to a usable degree if you tried
thinking about two subtypes of player agency, and how to incorporate them into the looser parts of solo play where they tend to just be waved off by most solo systems and advice. (and by that i mean they're two of the subtypes of player agency, not that they're the only two subtypes, to be clear.)
one subtype is: this choice will affect the game going forward in ways that i am roughly betting on now; how it plays out in practice remains to be seen, but i'm tipping the scale in advance. making a character with a high strength stat or specific backstory, making them a paladin, choosing a scifi setting, choosing a game with rules that facilitate horror, etc etc.
the other subtype is: i am seeing a specific outcome looming in front of me that i don't like, and i am going to change it (or try to). these are your rerolls, your brindlewood bay crowns, your abilities that you activate to turn a fight your way, and so on.
and like... it's pretty normal to have both of those baked into a game with, say, crunchy combat rules and pass/fail scenarios. not every game fitting those parameters has them, but it's pretty common and a good way to make the game fun by letting you strategize toward an outcome you want, and you're unlikely to have people lecturing you about being flexible and listening to the dice if you use one of the rerolls or abilities afforded you by the rules.
the thing is that there largely just... isn't any such thing for games where the outcome you're looking for, or trying to avoid, isn't necessarily a matter of pass/fail? there's either 'if you don't like it then just ignore it,' which--while good to have as a backup--can erode the enjoyable parts of the structure and kind of suck the fun out of trying to play a game, or there's 'just take whatever the dice give you and consider it a challenge to roll with it.' and unlike the advice and support given for pass/fail-type outcomes, which tend to have a big emphasis on the failures a) giving successes meaning and b) making for a fun story in their own right if you're willing to embrace them, the failure mode of 'this part of the story doesn't gel with me' is... part of your story not being fun. not just not being fun, even, but being wrong. your reward is 'this sucks now i guess. if i'm lucky it might grow on me, but in all likelihood it'll probably just be a rock in my shoe for the rest of the game.'
and the real bitch of it is that it's not always easy to see it coming, either. you can generally avoid doing stupid stuff that's likely to get you killed randomly to no reward, if you don't want to lose your PC in your average adventuring game (at least when that isn't the whole point), but it can be hard to know when some assumed detail like 'the PC's cousin is outgoing but mysterious and thinks they're pretty cool' is load-bearing to your game in the same way until a random oracle roll wipes it out. there's no contingency built into the rules for that, no real way for you to plan ahead: any random dice roll could do the equivalent of turning your PC to a smear on the floor without any warning or opportunity to avert it.
and some people enjoy playing games like that, sometimes or all the time! but like. if that's not your jam then that is the stuff DM horror stories are made of. i do not enjoy playing games that are like that about the fleshier, more individual bits of a narrative.
and the thing is that i'm sitting here talking about contingency plans, but i'm not even just talking about this as a contingency plan--i want games where this is part of the game! a lot of the tone of the advice/in-game support for this kind of thing is 'do it if you must' (to differing degrees of judginess), but making use of rerolls and abilities and whatnot in, say, a dungeon-crawler is part of the fun! i would LOVE to play games that are in actual conversation with me as a player about this kind of thing, that are doing the dance of 'is this right? is this compelling? could it be?' with me instead of stomping all over my feet and demanding i either knuckle under and deal with it or sit the dance out completely. i don't even really know what that would look like (it doesn't look like pbta games for me, i can tell you that much; if anything that brand of fiction-forward tends to be the exact opposite of what i need and make it worse), but god, man, i want it. i want it so much.
i think probably one of the biggest struggles i have with playing (especially but not exclusively solo) ttrpgs is: what order do i need to learn the details of this campaign in? what order do i want to learn the details of this campaign in? what order are this system's rules built to develop or reveal those details in? is that at odds with what i want out of it, and if so will the system still be playable if i try to bring it more in line with my needs?
So I've been trying for a long time to figure out a good, simple way to substitute dice for a deck of playing cards. I made this primarily for the sake of accessibility--I am disabled in such a way that I can't use physical cards, and it is much, much harder to find good offline digital card decks than dice rollers--but I'm hoping it will also be useful for people who don't have playing cards on hand or space to use them.
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You will need:
A d10 and d6.
Preferably a way to record which cards you've drawn to which pile.
How to draw a card:
You will be rolling from 1 of 9 tables; the d10 is your table die, and the d6 is your result die. If you roll a 10 on the table die, reroll.
If playing without jokers, reroll on a 5-6 result from Table 9. If playing with jokers, roll normally.
The default order of suits is Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs, though you may change this if you want.
The order of numbered cards is Ace to King for each suit, followed by the black joker and red joker.
Roll 1d10 and 1d6.
Table 1:
1: Ace of Spades
2: 2 of Spades
3: 3 of Spades
4: 4 of Spades
5: 5 of Spades
6: 6 of Spades
Table 2:
1: 7 of Spades
2: 8 of Spades
3: 9 of Spades
4: 10 of Spades
5: Jack of Spades
6: Queen of Spades
Table 3:
1: King of Spades
2: Ace of Hearts
3: 2 of Hearts
4: 3 of Hearts
5: 4 of Hearts
6: 5 of Hearts
Table 4:
1: 6 of Hearts
2: 7 of Hearts
3: 8 of Hearts
4: 9 of Hearts
5: 10 of Hearts
6: Jack of Hearts
Table 5:
1: Queen of Hearts
2: King of Hearts
3: Ace of Diamonds
4: 2 of Diamonds
5: 3 of Diamonds
6: 4 of Diamonds
Table 6:
1: 5 of Diamonds
2: 6 of Diamonds
3: 7 of Diamonds
4: 8 of Diamonds
5: 9 of Diamonds
6: 10 of Diamonds
Table 7:
1: Jack of Diamonds
2: Queen of Diamonds
3: King of Diamonds
4: Ace of Clubs
5: 2 of Clubs
6: 3 of Clubs
Table 8:
1: 4 of Clubs
2: 5 of Clubs
3: 6 of Clubs
4: 7 of Clubs
5: 8 of Clubs
6: 9 of Clubs
Table 9:
1: 10 of Clubs
2: Jack of Clubs
3: Queen of Clubs
4: King of Clubs
5: Black Joker
6: Red Joker
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Methods to efficiently keep track of a deck are another story, and will be one of my next projects, but for now have this in case it's helpful to you. Enjoy!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
to be expanded on: animal crossing vibes over the mountain horror hack where you have to keep the neighbors alive and uncorrupted for as long as possible, without telling them what's going on
writing exercise i have decided to start doing, since it's much easier for me to set writing goals based on sentences than on word counts: the 1d10 challenge. just roll 1d10 and write that many sentences on your WIP of choice for the day. if you feel like you're not tapped out afterward, but you don't want to keep going without a goal, roll 1d10 again. rinse and repeat until you decide you're done for today. you're welcome
OKAY. I finally managed to carve down an actually simplified version of the offline pocket edition I made for the excellent RPGSolo system. I definitely have more things in mind to expand on as options for players who want them, and this draft is Rough and near entirely unedited because I pounded it out in like half an hour during a migraine, oops, BUT! It should be fully functional as it is currently, and I hope people enjoy it as much as I have been.
(Also, if you like it I encourage you to go give the creator of the original site some support! This wouldn't exist without his work, and there's all kinds of neat extra tools and in-depth explanations to be found there and on the forums. Go check it out!)