The Hardest Player To Please Is Yourself, Part 1: Game Hoard

 Intro

    I have a small issue - which is to say, a zine. Get it? Hah! That's it folks, that's the article, see you next week.

    OK but actually - in 2024, I engaged with the work of two creators who would make me finally look at a kind of TTRPG I'd avoided up to this point, and in doing so lead me down a roughly year long collecting spree which is finally starting to pay off as I move from just planning on playing games into actually playing them: that is to say, Tatiana Gefter's fabulous work on the podcast Soul Operator which is a dramatized playthrough of A Yolland's Welcome To The Habitrails, and Sam Leigh's game Death of the Author. Both Habitrails and DotA (no, not that one) are tarot-centric solo journaling games which prompt you to respond to your card draws, but both in vastly different ways. When I was waiting around for Death of the Author's crowdfunder to fulfill, I decided I'd pick up Habitrails and another game I saw advertised a lot, Pandion Games' Whisper in the Walls 2e, for some Halloween fun. Whisper is also a card-based prompt game, but it uses a standard deck of playing cards which you prepare - and has 2d6 and d66 tables. And only then did I remember I'd actually seen another game that used a deck of playing cards - a game that I'd bought during the adrenaline rush of the ENnies in 2022 which had become a very nice shelf decoration but I'd only read a bit through - Nich Angell's Colostle, which uses the standard deck of cards to build prompts but ALSO has character classes and biome-based travel tables and suddenly I realized there was a lot more to all of this solo RPG stuff than I'd actually understood at the jump.

    In the intervening months since backing Sam's Death of the Author crowdfunder, I have amassed 19 games which are all intended for solo play directly out of the box rather than requiring 3rd party mods to turn them into solo games. I say that not as a dig at any game that has had a fandom strong enough to build an aftermarket solo mod for a game, I just mean that the market for solo games is by no means a small one. Likewise, some of these games are additionally intended to be played as duet games, or 1v1 player vs GM games, or even full party GM-less games. There are all different kinds of oracle methods, as well as all different kinds of actual playstyles to go through. In the interest of cataloging this backlog, and also making an attempt to make a sortable list for myself, I'm going to arrange these games into a lightly annotated list with pictures and first impressions so that not only do you know what I have out there, but I can also just roll a d20 and pick my next game to play pretty easily so that I actually play them rather than just hoard them because BOY HOWDY have I hit decision paralysis mode.

    I should also say - while I have these 19 physical games, to keep this a nice round 20 I'm including a lone bonus in-production solo game that I will absolutely buy once it exists in the physical world. Also, please know that these first impressions below are in almost all cases from a brief flip through - if I flagrantly miscategorize a game, please tell me, but also know that I'm sure I'll learn about it as I play it.

A d20-Rollable List of Games

1. Colostle, by Nich Angell

• Needed to Play: deck of playing cards, something to record your story, optionally the character sheet included at the back of the book
• Genre: adventure, robot fantasy
• Play Modes: Solo only.
• First Impression: Infinity Train, but make it D&D. This book is fucking huge. Most solo games are zines, at least as far as I've seen, but holy shit this thing is big and thin. Very simple character sheet, example of play seems pretty straightforward, seems like there's a lot of contextual tables for how you progress through the world.

2. Welcome to the Habitrails, by A Yolland

• Needed to Play: tarot deck, something to record your story
• Genre: various flavors of horror, sci-fi
• Play Modes: Solo only.
• First Impression: So this is cheating because I did actually begin a playthrough of this but also I've heard the first batch of episodes from Soul Operator so like I know what the vibe is, but for completeness' sake - this is a game that is gonna keep making things get weirder for you in a frog-in-the-pot-of-boiling-water kind of way.
  
  

3. Death of the Author, by Samantha Leigh

• Needed to Play: tarot deck, something to record your story
• Genre: any, though with a Frankenstinian lens
• Play Modes: Solo or Duet.
• First Impression: one of my favorite movies is "Stranger Than Fiction," one of Will Ferrell's only slightly serious movies where he realizes he's a character in a story and his author is going to kill him. This feels kind of like that.

4. Anamnesis, by Samantha Leigh

Needed to Play: tarot deck, something to record your story

Genre: self-discovery, potentially horror

Play Modes: Solo only.

First Impression: I feel like amnesia as a plot point came up a whole bunch in the 90s and 00s in most of the media I consumed - like, amnesia and quicksand were the two biggest concerns of my childhood. Thankfully I've had to deal with neither of them - but this does at least let me simulate the process of amnesia and self discovery, and I think that's a pretty valuable skill to exercise. Unclear if there's a hard mode that involves speedrunning before you sink into a pit of quicksand, but I'll check back and let you know.

5. The World We Left Behind, by Samantha Leigh

Needed to Play: standard deck of playing cards you're willing to besmirch, a besmirching device such as a fine-tipped marker, 1d6, something to record your story

Genre: exploration, introspection, sci-fi

Play Modes: 1-5 players GMless

First Impression: So this project has already had a ballet with a chiptune album score based on it, which fucking rips. But also, the idea of "ruining" a deck of cards as you play is quite interesting to me because while I am loath to alter any game through play (this is why I haven't played much of Yazeba's B&B T_T), I think there's a really interesting conceptual link between the idea of exploring the ruins of a civilization on a planet and then leaving your own mark on the world as you do so. That's just a fascinating thing to chew on.

6. Thousand Year Old Vampire, by Tim Hutchings

Needed to Play: 1d10, 1d6, something to record your story

Genre: historical vampire fiction

Play Modes: Solo or multiplayer GMless

First Impression: What a beautiful object. This book is probably the most beautiful TTRPG object that I own, if not the most interesting and beautiful book I own in general. In terms of play, I find it extremely fascinating that it encourages both quickplay and like full journaling situations.

7. My Mother's Kitchen, by Fleit Detrik

Needed to Play: tarot deck, 1d12, sticky notes/note cards/scissors/tape, something to record your story in

Genre: familial joy and trauma, fulfilling an oath

Play Modes: Solo only.

First Impression: This is also an amazing object. This is also a game that very much encourages you to physically create and then destroy things which is nice since they are not inherently game objects. As someone who lost their grandmother back in 2020, who was incidentally the person who taught me how to cook, I imagine I'm going to have a lot of emotions about this game.

8. Grotten: 1-Bit Deeper, by Tommy Sunzenauer

Needed to Play: 2d4, 2d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d20 (fuck d12s, all my homies hate d12s), something to record your character sheet, and either printing out the tiles for the maps and monsters or some graph paper to draw your dungeon in

Genre: oldschool fantasy dungeon crawling

Play Modes: Solo, or 1 player with a GM

First Impression: I ran this as a GM with a buddy of mine a while back and it worked remarkably well. In the way of many old adventures, I feel like it leaves a lot of space for you to project a story on to but only giving you a few things set in stone, which is neat. You'll get out of it what you put into it.

9. Lighthouse at the End of the World, by Ken Lowery

Needed to Play: a standard deck of cards, 1d6, a coin, a Jenga tumbling block tower, 10 tokens, any map that contains at least one hemisphere of coastlines, something to record your story in

Genre: nautical existentialist horror

Play Modes: Solo only.

First Impression: Look, as a certified Slut For Sea Shanties, giving me Age Of Sail stories of ghosts and isolation and introspection is basically laser targeted at my sensibilities. 

10. No-Tell Motel, by Ken Lowery

Needed to Play: a standard deck of cards, 1d6, something to record dossiers about characters and the room ledgers 

Genre: murder mystery

Play Modes: Solo only.

First Impression: God I love murder mysteries. Solving mysteries is extremely hard in TTRPGs in general - it's one of the reason I like the Brindlewood Bay/The Between approach to doing it since you never feel stupid while you're playing. I'm curious to see how this set of rules plays out, it seems very well thought out.

11. Eleventh Beast, by Exeunt Press

Needed to Play: paper/notebook to sketch on, 5d6, 1d8, a standard deck of cards, three kinds of tokens, and a map (either included or printable) 

Genre: monster hunting historical horror

Play Modes: Solo only.

First Impression: This also blows my mind as a combination mystery solving and monster hunting game. You also end up creating a little monster hunter journal, which I think could be a cool prop for other things.

12. Caveat Emptor: Expanded Edition, by Exeunt Press

Needed to Play: something to record your story, 3d6, a standard deck of cards, 3 tokens to go along with your curse tracker

Genre: Needful Things

Play Modes: Solo only

First Impression: Look, you had me at "Needful Things: The RPG," but the added bit that you're actually working for the Devil and thus are encouraged to do well at Cursed Capitalism or you get obliterated is extremely funny to me. This probably says a lot about who I am as a person, and that's unfortunate.

13. Blood Borg: Loser, by Adam Vass

Needed to Play: the base Blood Borg rules, a standard set of RPG dice plus a coin or d2 and d3 if you're fancy, a character sheet, something to record your story if you want 

Genre: punk-ass vampire shit

First Impression: God this zine is oozing with style. Or blood. Or both. I know this bends my rules a bit since technically the solo rules are in a zine separate from the main rulebook, but also, shhhhhhhhh. I love the idea of the solo mode basically being the "it's time to get the band back together for a job" except the band is a bunch of other vampires who probably hate you, the job is presumably killing people for fun and sport, and you'll need to outrun cops and monster hunters. Also you can summon weird little guys to help you!

14. Dark Fort, by Pelle Nilsson

Needed to Play: one of the provided character sheets, 1d4, 2d6, something to record your story if you want 

Genre: oldschool minimalist dungeon crawling

First Impression: seeing a micro-zine like this is honestly super inspiring as a game designer, because you can really just see the absolute distilled essence of a game that then would spiral out and become something bigger. I'm looking forward to an afternoon as Kargunt!

15. Last Oath, by Lucas Rolim

Needed to Play: 1d6, 1d20, something to record your story + a copy or sketch of the included map and character sheets

Genre: dungeon crawling choose your own adventure

First Impression: I know someone told me that there used to be a book series of choose your own adventure games that were also solo D&D or D&D-style adventures. This is that, but with the intent and assumption of multiple playthroughs. 

16. Kal-Arath, by Castle Grief

Needed to Play: d6, something to record your story and character sheet on, a hex map (or equivalent) to chart your world.

Genre: weird classic pulp fantasy

Play Modes: solo or with friends!

First Impression: So I got this along with its two companion zines as a part of Castle Grief's crowdfunder. I've looked through them and I've gotta say it's pretty cool to have something that you CAN play as fully solo, or with friends using the oracle and random rolling to generate the map, and it doesn't SAY you can run it GM'd but it also doesn't not say it. It's a very vibes-based way to storytelling a weird fantasy world that I think is neat. Excited to see how it plays!

17. HUNT(er/ed), by Dillin Apelyan and Meghan Cross

Needed to Play: for solo, 3d6, a standard deck of playing cards, a piece of paper, a token, and something to record your thoughts. For duet play, increase to 4d6. You can also replace the dice/paper/token with a hook and ring game.

Genre: undiscovered kink revealer, monster hunting

Play Modes: solo or duet!

First Impression: Whereas the duet version pits monster against hunter, the solo version of this game has you play someone not quite monster, not quite hunter, but definitely all conflicted as you move through accepting or denying who you are. The fact that the alternate play mode involves something sold as a drinking game which therefore means you could turn this into a drinking game for yourself or if you play it duet is ceaselessly fascinating to me. 

18. Endling, by M. Allen Hall

Needed to Play: 2d6, a deck of tarot cards, a token, an included hexflower map, something to record your progress

Genre: Apocalyptic survival

Play Modes: Solo only.

First Impression: This is, again, a beautiful object. It looks and feels like an old government manual, which I suspect was the point. This is also a game that I suspect will make me deeply, existentially sad while playing, which is to say that is is exactly my shit.

19. Whisper in the Walls 2e, by Pandion Games

Needed to Play: a standard deck of playing cards (with jokers! wow!), 2d6, something to record your story if you want 

Genre: horror, exploration

Play Mode: Solo only

First Impression: In a very real sense, this appears to be a haunted house simulator. That in and of itself is pretty fucking cool, because while I know some very talented VFX artists who have made some very gruesome costumes, and I know some haunt actors who are very good at scaring people, truly nothing is scarier than the things your own mind can summon against you.

20. Sin-Eater, by Anica Cihla

Needed to Play: candle, 2d6, something to write and sketch on, coins, included ritual mat

Genre: This is just what I assume it's like to go to a Catholic church service. No, I have never been to a Catholic church service, why do you ask?

Play Modes: Solo only.

First Impression: If the physical release of this game doesn't bleed when you open it, frankly I don't see the point in owning it. Speaking of bleed, this is a game that at a quick glance does more than most of the other games to force you into the life of the sin eater you are embodying. This is a game of rituals, and it is only a matter of time before it is your last. I suspect a proper session of this game is going to involve some emotional detoxing after, which is fine - but the use of ritual to bind you into the character rather than just having prompts and asking you to reflect upon them is...spicy. I will have more things to say about this later.

Outro

So, some quick fun numbers:

• roughly 25% of these games are dungeon crawlers
• roughly 35% of these require a standard deck of playing cards
• roughly 25% of these require a deck of tarot cards
• roughly 50% of these are explicitly horror games, while the rest are mostly just implied horror through the background radiation horror of adventuring or self discovery
• only one of these dips into Wretched And Alone territory - that is to say, uses a block tower

I just think that's neat! Anyway, while the purpose of this blog isn't really to do reviews, I do think I'll post play reports for these as I make my way through them - engaging with games both in play and to understand authorial intent absolutely is within the purview of this blog, and I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I think I will too.

Creating Mathematically Average Challenges

Understanding Averages 

Helps You Build Challenges

As An Adult, I Suck At Math

    When I start talking about numbers, I like to tell people that in college I got an English degree, and that means you legally can't make me do numbers anymore nor can you make me read any more books. This is, of course, a lie, because as I was reminded last night I have been playing roleplaying games for almost two decades and have not yet found a way to escape numbers or reading books. Being trapped as a Forever GM for most of those years led me to learning very niche applications of math insofar as they help run challenges on the fly - because no matter what the system is, you can justify whatever the dice are doing with whatever fluff you need to but at the end of the day you need to know what the dice are doing so you can move on. I would like to impart some of that knowledge to you.

    A quick word of warning: The things I am about to tell you are mathematically true, but if you are a math person you will likely be unhappy with the way this information is presented because I talk about Numbers the way Word People talk about Numbers, not the way Number People talk about Numbers. I'm also not talking about ways to build narratively interesting encounters here - there are many, many more eloquent and intelligent people on the internet who've beaten me to the punch on that one. What I am to do here is to equip you with a set of tools that will hopefully allow you to improvise challenges in games that require dice-based number generation such that it can be as on-the-fly as your regular cool story improvisation is.

Finding Dice Averages Quickly

    This is not secret knowledge, but just so it's here to reference: the average roll of a single die is [biggest side]/2 + .5. The average roll of two dice can be found by adding the largest and smallest sides of that die together. So, for example, the average roll on 1d6 is 3.5, whereas the average on 2d6 is 7. My mental shorthand works like this: If I need to find the average damage on a 3rd level Fireball in D&D 5e, I look, see that it's 8d6, and that means on average it's 4x7 since [2d6] as a variable is the same as 7. Likewise, if I was playing a Paladin two-handing a longsword with 16 STR using a 2nd level spell to power a Divine Smite, then I know that the damage is 1d10+3d8+3 (assuming they're not fighting an undead or fiend) which means that the average roll is 5.5+(4.5+9)+3, or 22.  That's all well and good for practical applications for players, but where does that help you as a GM?

    (As an aside, you can use this guy to do averages on your regular D&D polyhedral dice. If you're one of those sickos out there playing Genysys with those wacky symbol dice...good luck man, this post is mostly not for you, I haven't had time to review those rules yet. Sorry to all my Campaign: Star Wars and Skyjacks homies out there.)

An Average Challenge

    So keeping with D&D for most of its iterations and derivatives, we know that a stat score of 10 is supposed to be the average - narratively, that means that anyone at a 10 is assumed to be just about as good as any random person in things related to that ability, but mathematically what that means is that there is no modifier to a roll. If we pop back to the above and see that the average roll on one die is half of its size +.5, that means that a challenge with a DC of 10.5 would be average, or in other words, if someone is assumed to be average at something, it means they're going to succeed at doing it a little over half the time. I'm sure there's a better way to put that, but this is the thesis which we're going to be using moving forward: an average challenge is one that a character is assumed to succeed at doing a little over half the time.

5e (2014 edition)

    Now, the reason I keep bringing up D&D is of course because this was a concept I needed to understand while working on One Night Strahd. My co-author, Jake, is in fact a Numbers Person, and just does all this stuff in his head. I, as we have established, am a Words Person, and so I ended up having to write this out so I could interact with it properly. Now, 5e has a lot of variables that come into play which makes people think that balancing challenges is hard - commonly, I hear stories about how "oh, this one character is OP and therefore either I make my encounters challenging for that character and that means nobody else can interact, or I make it challenging for the other players and that character can just mop the floor with it." Now, setting aside the fact that many other games solve the problem of this level of balance granularity by simply not giving a fuck about it (see: much of the OSR scene, much of the narrative game scene, etc), if you need to know if a dice roll of any kind will be challenging to a character at any given level, I have constructed this table which takes into account proficiency bonus and stat score in a given level range, but does not take into account any spells or abilities that add on an extra die - but with that said, using the theory listed above, you should be able to figure out how that changes the odds. (It also doesn't take Advantage or Disadvantage into account. Mathematically, I have always counted Advantage as a +5 bonus and Disadvantage as a -5 bonus on a roll based on this post from 2012 and this post from 2014, so while I assume that in other systems it would be a 25% change up or down as well, I don't actually know the math and I'm not confident enough to account for it in any of the following parts of this, so just...like...take care of that yourself if it matters to you.)

    The other way to say what this table does is this: if you set a target number for a challenge, consult what level the character is at, then see where that number falls - if it's closer to a number on the left side of the table, it'll be easier, and if it's on the right side of the table it'll be harder. The reason this table has Proficiency Bonus included is, of course, because if you're rolling for something you're not proficient in, your bonus to it would never change, so if you somehow had a 0 in something and were rolling for it you'd always be at a -5, if you had a 10 you'd always have no bonus, and if you had a 20 in the stat is would be at +5, meaning that the control numbers here are 5/10/15, respectively. 

    With me so far? Let's try this out with a different game.

2d6+Stat Games (PbtA, etc)

    Systems that only use 1 or 2 dice at a time make this a whole lot easier to calculate - and it isn't lost on me that many of the games that use this system to resolve mechanics are often more narrative focused and thus don't have as much emphasis on trying to Make Number Go Up. Broadly speaking, in a lot of these systems, if you know you've got a negative bonus to a stat, you know that it's something you're not as good at, you're roleplaying that, whatever. There's a lot of ludonarrative consonance there. But for the sake of math let's see what this looks like for games that only let you have a -1 to +3 to your average 2d6 roll. (Again, not taking Advantage/Disadvantage into this because I am Math Stupid.)

    Knowing that PbtA games generally follow the rule of 6- being a failure, a 7-9 being a partial success and a 10+ being a critical success, I actually find this to be more numerically interesting than in a binary pass/fail system like D&D because now you can see that on average rolls, characters will almost always succeed with a cost on average, with only the truly penalized or specialized getting into the next tiers on average. I think there's probably a lot to chew on on the idea that a binary success/fail game like D&D considers an average challenge one that a player will succeed on a little over half the time whereas a more narrative system like the Powered by the Apocalypse family of games consider an average challenge being one that the player will succeed at a cost, but this post is already getting in the weeds. Suffice it to say that you can extrapolate data like this out to other in-game meta-currencies that allow you to push success up from Failure to either Mixed or Critical successes. (This in particular is something that makes the design choice in The Between so interesting re: Masks and other abilities that function as Masks in certain situations tasty choices to consider when selecting your characters, but that is perhaps a ramble for another day.)

Applying These Concepts To Other Systems/Challenge Designs

    So, without trying to detail every possible combination of mechanics, how can you apply these principles to designing challenges in whatever game you're designing for?

1. Figure out whatever Average looks like for your game - as in, the lowest possible number that you can generate based on stat modifiers and dice you're using, the highest possible number using modifiers, and the midpoint which should be what a roll with no modifiers looks like.
   
   
2. Figure out what you want Average to mean, narratively - do you want Average to just mean success? Do you mean Average to mean success with a drawback?
   
   
3. Compare your player characters' stats against the numbers you have set for your challenges - if the challenge target numbers fall farther towards the left of the distribution, the players will be less challenged, if they fall farther to the right the players will be more challenged.
   
   
4. You can do this on a character by character basis (or even stat by stat!) in order to test how challenged by certain parts of your challenge certain parts of the party will be (say that five times fast). When getting into the nitty gritty of design, especially for Published Adventures (TM), this can really be helpful when trying to gauge what kind of power level the adventure is. I find this to be much more useful information, especially when dealing in the world of D&D because the balance of a character is often more dependent on the proficiency of the player building the character and the availability of in-game bonuses than it is on the actual numbers derived from each level.

And there you have it! So simple a particularly disgruntled baby could do it. Have fun!