Insert that well-worn idiom about teaching a man to fish, I guess.
The prompt-based journaling game is easy for me, as a designer. Sometimes it almost feels lazy, like I’m doing the same thing I’ve been doing for most of my life.
When my friends and I would make up our silly little worlds as kids and teenagers and even now, as adults, it would happen in a sort of freeform flow. Someone would suggest something. Someone else would think, briefly or not, and go “okay, and what about this?” and the back and forth would continue. It was a creative exercise that we’d do for fun, because it was fun. TTRPGs are just that with some extra spice layered on top. Toss a couple of dice, fill out some fancy spreadsheets, whatever.
There’s an excellent article by Jay Dragon about this kind of topic, the idea of play as truly happening on a playground.
So prompt-based games are easy for me. It’s just being the person asking the questions. It’s the basic “if [x], then what?” question. I give you a situation. You respond. I nod and give you a response to your response. The situation snowballs outwards. It’s a conversation, and I’m guiding you through a series of scenarios. It is, as I’ve mentioned before, a TTRPG game with a physically absent but textually present game master.
But what about a solo game that doesn’t want to depend on prompts?
This is like asking how you teach someone to write a story.
It’s difficult for many reasons. Writing is a skill everyone vaguely has, but it’s hard to teach in-depth things about it. The people who teach writing may view parts of it as intuitive. How can you easily teach what you know perfectly? Shouldn’t everyone know that already?
Most designers are, at heart, writers. This means we are probably not the best equipped to teach the basics of storytelling structure. What is intuitive to you and I may be less intuitive to the player. How do I know how to begin? How do I know how or when to end?
Moreover, imagination is embarrassing. It’s associated with kid stuff. Now, the strategy of wargames and miniatures? That’s real gaming, baby. And even answering prompts can almost be thought of as a writing exercise. Like you’re doing work. I’ve made you a playground.
But without prompts, I’m handing you some unmoored and colorful equipment and going “hey, have fun!”.
After some thought, I think I’ve solidified it down to a few ideas I use to make the solo promptless game easier to handle.
1. Create checkpoints.
By a checkpoint, I don’t mean a place where you make someone stop altogether and check in with themselves, though that can help.
I mean that you need to outline the parameters of success. Binary is much easier, at least in the initial presentation. Either you succeed or fail on the quest. Either you pass or fail the exam. Either you win or lose the game. Either you kill the horror or don’t. This gives the player something to strive towards. This doesn’t have to be how it actually plays out, but as a starting point, it’s much easier for people to understand.
Even a game like Wanderhome, whose rules are loose and malleable, still has the implication that the goal is to go home, even if you don’t know what home is yet. Either you go or find home, or you keep wandering. The name’s neat like that.
That’s simple stuff. A goal is always important. But you should also have, perhaps, some specific points at which things change.
A more clunky rule might vaguely sound like: On your fifth risky action, demanding a dice roll, roll on X table to add Y to the game. A new character. A new location. A new problem. Something to keep the flow going without requiring the player to feel like they have to look something extra up.
My recent game Spiritbreaker did this by triggering Thoughtshifts at certain points in an exploration.
In the game I’m working on now, because the gigs are longer and there’s more of a variety, there are more of what I’m tentatively calling Developments. As you succeed, the circumstances of the gig change and you learn more about the situation. Rather than a single random table, it’s a type of change with some options if the player isn’t sure what to do next. For example, at 3 successes, Someone Else Gets Involved.
This can be: a civilian, a rival, an authority, etc., etc.
For additional variety, I’m thinking of adding a way that you can randomize the order of events. I think over time you could thoroughly abandon these tables, but for someone who isn’t used to this kind of play, well — it can help.
2. Add time constraints.
I don’t mean real world time constraints, of course. I mean that, in games where it makes sense, it can be helpful to have something to keep the snowball from rolling down the hill forever, getting larger and more unwieldy. On six successful rolls, you succeed in the job, or on six failed rolls, you fail the job. This won’t work for every game, but it might be a way to keep more modular games — for example, a series of heists, or a set of jobs, or a progression of monster hunts — from having ridiculously long endless snowballs of difficulty.
It might be best to also write a way around that, if someone wants to embark on One Grand Heist for an entire game. When your game is less structured by prompts, it also means you have to — God, I don’t know. Attach more wheels to the bike, I guess. What I mean is you need more mechanics to facilitate different types of play. Prompts are a fairly solid and dense foundation. Without them, you should expect more variance in player actions, and you might need to add more mechanics to facilitate different kinds of play.
3. Replace complex prompts with some general questions.
So you can’t set up a scenario.
The player has to choose when to roll, and how to interpret the results. For designers and writers and GMs, the question of “what now” is probably an easy one to answer. It’s natural. You can have some tables of what happens when things get complicated, or what successes might mean. I usually have those too. But I think outlining the method of thought is helpful.
For example, I’ve written it out like this in one game:
- What actually happens? Consider the direct consequence of the roll. What do you get, or what do you fail to get?
- What do I learn? You can even learn something from a failure. You can find out what doesn’t work, or see a reaction you weren’t expecting.
- Consequences now or later? Some things happen directly, one after the other. If something has a repercussion or complication that might occur or matter later, make a note of it.
4. Precepts of play are good to have.
Rules, procedures, whatever. Who cares? How about this: I love when a game tells me what to think about.
I like to know at the start that this is a game about mech pilots who want to kiss each other, separated by overheating metallic carapaces on the opposite sides of a war versus mechs moving around in tactical combat in squads blasting their enemies away with a variety of horrible weapons.
Without prompts to guide thought, you might want to have a list of things that, well, guide thought anyway. Some of these are generalized to roleplaying games. Some are not.
I like to start these off with a verb. I also like the verb “make”, because it has multiple meanings and it implies personal creation. In the same game as above, I’ve added:
- Make checks when things are risky. Don’t waste time rolling to open an unlocked door.
- Make the more narratively interesting choice. Take risks. Be daring.
- Make notes or journal, depending your preferences. It’s easy to forget details.
- Make connections. If you like something you made up — a creature, a location, a person — you want to keep track of it for later.
These are general. I have world concepts that are different, but that’s more about lore and less about mechanics and methods of thought. I care a lot less if someone breaks my worldbuilding or whatever. Who gives a shit? I care a lot more about assisting people in learning how to play the game.
5. But it’s still not a technical manual.
Remember to have fun with it.
Be playful. This is a game. Inviting someone to play involves being playful yourself. If it feels like you’re reading a high-level TTRPG 400: How To Play The Solo Game manual, then it’s not a game any more and you might as well make a YouTube video essay called “Solo Tabletop Roleplaying Games: Choice Without Choice” or something like that. I don’t know how that algorithm works.
Teaching someone how to play is difficult. You can’t actually teach them how, especially adults. You have to teach them to remember how to play. This can be especially difficult in darker or more serious games, but “play” doesn’t always mean “wonder”. Kids make up all kinds of weird shit. Play can always be redefined as a process of discovery, of what if and what then. Solo play allows that kind of exploration in a much more dynamic way.
But taking away the guard rails of a GM is difficult, and it’s okay to put the training wheels on the bike, as long as you take them somewhere fun to ride and encourage them to think of it as fun, not training.
The hope is eventually they can take off the training wheels and pedal down the road themselves.
