Hi all! I see a fair amount of people in the Looking For GM forum asking about solo or small group games, and I'm wondering what that looks like? Are there certain systems that suit smaller groups? Are there styles of games that suit solo play? I'm imagining that it would allow for a lot more of a main character vibe, but I'd be interested to hear what advice/commentary you guys have about this style of play!

Honestly I think it's more about posting frequence than anything else.

Posting schedules and honestly a better experience in systems that aren't "you are a small warband of adventurers", since the GM can devote time to integrating all 3-5 PCs into a detailed world/plot. Mass games usually have high turnover, too, so you/r characters can't really bond to others, and the old-school (wonderful!) preservation of privacy on this site means you'll probably never find that person who vanished because their gran died IRL and whose character was the True Companion of yours ever again. There's some chance in smaller groups, as GMs of niche stuff tend to develop player pools.

As for solos, seems to me it's usually down to people playing in their very few spare moments without the story/players rushing on without them. I've played in/run a few, and that's been the case in my experience.

That said, if you specified you wanted a plot to revolve around your 'main' character in a solo, I'm sure someone would like to run you through their world.

I'm more talking about potentially running a solo or small group game, but before that I'd like to understand the pros and cons.

Ah, apologies!

Well, as I do a lot of solo for playtests, I can say that the biggest offender is combat.

If the game expects you to have a group of people against a group of people or one big bad guy, it's a problem. And it's compounded a hundredfold when the game expects each member of that group to be "Specialized".

When the specialization is mostly embedded in the lore (e.g. Shadowrun), you can step around by focusing on the character's strengths. But if it's hard-coded in the mechanics (tank/dps/controller or fighter/rogue/wizard/cleric or whatever the kids are calling their niches these days), you'll have a very tough time.

On the other hand, everything else usually runs more smoothly as long as you're not "blocked" by the lack of skills to overcome a specific challenge, but again, that depends on the game you're playing and the story.

One of the pros is that you can take advantage of what play by post does best, which is concentrate on storytelling in a more longform prose driven way.  With one or just a few folks it's easier to drill deep into scenes and story beats that would be logistically difficult or too time intensive for a GM to do with a bigger group.

It can make the flow of the game a little easier as well as the fewer folks participating the less potential waiting is done.  With a bigger group, unless the GM is willing to push forward at a set pace no matter what, you generally end up with a lot of slack as folks wait for everybody to post.

One of the cons is player attrition.  It happens.  If you've got a big group it can be easier to just paper over a player disappearing.  If you're doing a solo game obviously that ends the game.  With a small group game it can just be more difficult to deal with vs a larger group, especially if the story is more intertwined with the characters.

I guess an interesting follow-up question is:

What games do you think suit small groups/solo play best? What sorts of stories suit small groups/solo play best?

Psychological/slowburn horror, in my experience, but then I've kind of created a 'historical Call of Cthulhu' niche for myself here and have taken to using Dread for comedy-horror hybrids. Small-group exploration (don't have a particular system rec for that, but I'm sure others do) or more character-driven freeform would presumably work well, too. Non-journey stories in general.

As for losing players, it very much is an issue, but if your setting isn't too specialised and you have a warning in your game intro that anyone vanishing without warning for [however long is a definite gap in your post rate] effectively surrenders their character to the GM to rehome/NPC/kill off as they see fit, then you can generally advertise for a replacement player if the character is loadbearing.

I have written 6 games by now (well, maybe like 5.5 or 5.75, one was released early "by popular demand" if you can call it that) and they each call for different numbers of players for different reasons:

• B-Roll Call: No particular limit, but the number of players determine the film's budget score and it should be 20-40 points for most multiplayer scenarios.
• Crime and Chaos: 3-4, because that seems to be about the upper limit on active team members in the criminal sandboxes it was based on (some of course, being held in reserve).
• JRPG World: Ideally 10 or less main cast, ready to split up into 3 or 4 person groups as needed. Would relax this if I needed one per Major Arcana of a Tarot deck for... reasons.
• SCREAM!: About the cast of a slasher horror film.
• Visual Novel World: 4-15 depending on whether everyone's competing for the same Senpai, or they have their own. Same concession as JRPG World since that game was inspired by this one. It can be played in reverse as a Single Player game, where Sensei creates a number of characters and the one player tries to Harem them or go after whichever ones they want.

The final game, Badlands and Biomods doesn't have any particular guidelines yet. I'm in the midst of figuring out quite a lot of things with it. It's worth mention that this really only applies to the games I've written, but other games may have different player requirements for different reasons.

In reply to tibiotarsus (msg # 8):

How in the world do you make DREAD work on a forum? That's the most "this game needs a shared physical space" game I've ever played! Next you'll tell me you're running 10 Candles on RPOL while your IRL group plays This Discord Has Ghosts In It??
This message was last edited by the user at 20:48, Sun 10 Nov.

The dice roller can make up pretend dice with any sides, so a "jenga tower" is d54...I take a draw (roll it) and if it's 27 or less I've made the "tower" less stable, so we're using a d52 now. Etc. etc. A 1 is a tower collapse.

Works very well with the much slower pace of PbP, is inherently fairer, and my players have always instinctively adapted to treating the tower wobbling as a fail forward scenario, so it adds dynamism/wiggle room between success or death.

I haven't tried to adapt 10 Candles for RPoL myself, but I do know someone who's tried if you want me to ask...


edit: ...and another person who owns a board game that is more or less TDHGII, actually, but that buddy's not on here.
This message was last edited by the user at 20:58, Sun 10 Nov.

In reply to tibiotarsus (msg # 11):

You're a maniac, but I can respect it.

In reply to TenFoldMore (msg # 10):

Easy enough to use a digital Jenga game like https://www.gamenora.com/game/jenga/. The following blog article discusses other ways using Dread for remote play https://thebardicinquiry.com/2...ying-dread-remotely/.

Wouldn't even have to be that complicated. Use d54 roll under, and reduce the target number by 1 each time it's rolled starting at 54. Destroy the tower when players roll over the adjusted TN. Have a Notice thread that does nothing but show the current TN in the latest post.

@TenFold Thanks!

@ The rest of you: those are more complicated, less practical with several players and/or less fair, but yes, I do keep a 'tower thread' in the adaptation I use so no-one has to go stare at the dice roller to know what risk they're taking. I've played two games with it start-to-finish, one stalled due to player vanishment and no complaints in any iteration, though of course you should feel free to try and test your suggestions yourselves. Just wanted to get it on the board here that I'm not talking hypotheticals.

So, I currently run pretty much exclusively solo games, I'd say in terms of pros:

 - It's a lot easier to keep to a theme and an understanding when you only have to craft it around a single person - you have to tell a story which appeals to you and the other player and that's only one set of accomodations and comprimises you have to make to keep the game viable, rather than potentially needing to pull an idea in multiple different directions to suit a wider base of players. Equally, you can just focus on that one player's character and their arc as much as you want, rather than having to worry about sharing screen time.

 - Equally, whether logistically or in terms of the plotline, you don't have to weigh up spoiling one person's game to make someone else's - if something doesn't work and you and the player agree to a retcon, then you don't have to sell it to a third person - you just do it. If you need to do a timejump, then you don't need to sacrifice another player's plotline to do so.

 - Linked to that is player management. Accepting that everything sits on the pair of you, it also means you are never in a position where more than one person is ever waiting for a post or fretting about the game slowing down and having other people abandon ship, as long as there's an understanding between the people involved that they trust one another not to take the mickey and that they're both invested in the game.

 - More generally, I think solo games generally allow more depth and more control, and I think it's also more fun as a GM because you're still getting a lot of the fun bits of being the GM without a lot of the player management, dealing with arguments etc., and you're also in a situation where you almost get to play as much as the person you're running with. Your NPCs can have fully fledged characters because they're not competing for the spotlight with other players, and you can do more to talk about how you're planning and checking in to see what they need to make sure things hit the mark or how you can change the game to make you both happier.


In terms of cons:

 - Certainly, combat (especially where the system is based around group combat) is a lot harder to do well, and equally mechanics probably lose a bit of their sting when you know that the GM probably isn't going to just let the party be wiped out and make you start again unless it's agreed in advance. There are obviously ways around it and systems which can help with that in terms of changing where the balance sits (I've done some small group work with Ironsworn and that kind of SPRPG system is a bit more useful when getting a feasible approach), but you do lose that frisson of different characters interacting and synergising.

 - Beyond that, player choice is very important because there's nowhere else to hide if you're not clicking. You can't carry a player who isn't at the stage where they can write well, do some of the leg work themselves and is willing to inhabit a character rather than playing a class, and that includes both them understanding and setting up arcs alongside you and indeed give their character genuine weaknesses and moments of doubt without needing the GM to lean on them. It's also worth noting that it's not always a direct transfer from players who you admire or work well with in a group game automatically working well in a solo setting, so there's a lot of feeling each other out and being willing to walk away if it doesn't feel right.



In terms of game systems, I tend to run freeform or light homebrew for solo games where possible - random chance is less useful when a single character's rolling can't be as absorbed by a group's resilience, and the stats I do use tend to be more useful for prompting the feeling of one writer or another when going into a scene than necessarily defining the result of a story.

That being said, I do think there's also scope within a small game to do more with complex rulesets which might not get a good airing with wider groups because they're overly complex or unwieldy, or because the games encourage a personal journey which gets diluted with a wider group. I'm looking to run a 1E Promethian the Created game with my writing partner in the near future which I'd never do in more than a group of 2-3, and some of the more complex games like Werewolf the Forsaken or Mage the Awakening (where a lot of the higher level suppliment work might put off less experienced players who want a more general game) could give the space to really dig into those obscure bits of canon and high potential ideas which often don't get picked in group games because players don't want to steal the limelight or upset a party balance.

In terms of the sort of stories, I think the main thing is that you need something which means something to the characters and where the specifics of those character design choices change the experience and the outcome. That means you probably want to think about their arc and then create a plot/action around that, rather than having a ready-made plot, setting and story beats and have the characters fit themselves around that. That doesn't preclude any particular genres which I can think of, but it does mean that you have to consider how every move that you make as a GM contributes to that character and their emotions and personal goals, rather than the more mathematical/strategy challenge of setting up a complicated boss fight or a level to entertain a group of five who want a bit of schlocky dungeon crawling.