Solo RPG's: You Never Forget Your First Game

Steve Jackson.

The Man.

The Myth.

The Legend.

Steve--freakin'--Jackson!

You most likely know him from this rather lucrative game series:

Although his credits go back to the early days of gaming, starting with this:

And if I mention Steve Jackson and role-playing games, 

you probably think I'm going to talk about this:

But you'd be wrong.

Let's go back further, to the 70's, the era that spawned D&D and Star Wars. In the 1970's, a twenty-something Steve Jackson was designing for a company called Metagaming.

Their forte was producing inexpensive wargames. Rulebooks were a few pages of 8.5 x 11" paper, folded and stapled, while game-boards were a similar size of folded cardstock. The whole thing was sold in a transparent plastic bag.


<   $2.95?!?

The games Jackson designed for Metagaming were big hits, starting with Ogre (a wargame about a miles-long cybernetic tank vs. a horde of smaller units) and G.E.V. (an expansion to Ogre.) Ironically, he was also one of the crew that worked on Monsters! Monsters! a sequel/expansion of Tunnels & Trolls that flipped the dungeon-crawling paradigm on its head.

Jackson, like everyone else at the time, shared the same love/hate reaction to D&D: he thought that a role-playing game about high fantasy heroes was a great concept, D&D just implemented it very poorly. Being of a more strategically-minded bent, Jackson wanted to create something with cleaner wargame-like mechanics that brought in some of his experiences with "actual" sword-play from his time in the Society for Creative Anachronism (the organization that spawned a million Renaissance festivals.)

And so he created Melee, a game of man-to-man gladiatorial combat. Characters had just two attributes: Strength (which also dictated how many points of damage you could take) and Dexterity. Combat was similarly bare-bones: you roll three dice, and try and get under your Dexterity score. And, other than adding in some typical wargame-like structure (such as a hex grid for movement), that was literally it. Clean, concise, simple. Melee was a big hit, so it was quickly followed up by Wizard, which added a third attribute, IQ, and rules for magic.

A third product, "In The Labyrinth," added skills and turned the two smaller games into a larger, fully-fledged RPG called "The Fantasy Trip." (In my mind, NOT naming both the system and the book "The Fantasy Trip" seems like a marketing blunder, but I digress.) Metagaming (like Tunnels & Trolls) saw that there was a market for solo play, and so they jumped onto the bandwagon, using their small, inexpensive model of producing games.

Like the Tunnels & Trolls and "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, the Fantasy Trip solos used numbered paragraphs to direct players through the storyline. But unlike Tunnels & Trolls, these were closer in tone to the serious, straightforward adventure modules of D&D. Each was set in a specific world (for example, Arthurian England for "Grail Quest," or post-apocalyptic fantasy  for "Security Station.") Games were also balanced so that players who worked through them rationally could succeed--no surprise "there's a Balrog in the next room, just because it's fun."

They did, however, employ a unique marketing gimmick on two of their adventures, where clues in the text led to a prize hidden in the real world: a silver dragon in one adventure and a gold unicorn in another. But, for the most part, these were solidly-constructed, entertaining adventures with a high replay value.

The Fantasy Trip could have turned out to be "The Next Big RPG," but unfortunately Jackson had a falling-out with Metagaming, and after the split, the company retained the rights to the game. Only a few years later, Metagaming went belly-up.

Jackson tried to purchase The Fantasy Trip, but in those pre-Munchkin days, the asking price higher than what he could afford. And so he went on to create another  RPG, the very successful. GURPS (the Generic Universal Role-Playing system.) Comparing the two, it's obvious that GURPS shares a huge portion of its DNA with The Fantasy Trip. (The differences are significant, and maybe worthy of a discussion for another day.) And, looking at the success of GURPS--which spawned a library's worth of follow-on books--you'd think that Jackson would be content to let The Fantasy Trip go.

But you never forget your first game, and for Jackson that was all the work he'd done for Metagaming. As the decades passed, he re-acquired the rights to all of his old games, one by one: Ogre, GEV, and eventually, The Fantasy Trip.

Now, it's been rebooted through an INSANELY successful Kickstarter, and is now available in gorgeous new editions, with revived versions of solo games and many add-on products. 

People looking for a simple, straightforward solo RPG experience couldn't go wrong by choosing The Fantasy Trip. Highly recommended. My personal favorites are Grail Quest and Security Station. The latter shared The Fantasy Trip's default 's setting of Cidri, a "high fantasy world" that evolves from the ruins of a technological world (a post-post apocalyptic?) similar to the "Shannara" book series or the Ralph Bakshi movie "Wizards." A unique take on standard fantasy tropes.

You can find The Fantasy Trip here.

So, what parts of The Fantasy Trip does the FAST RPG share? Well, early on, our designers wanted FAST  to work with as few attributes as possible, which was a key ingredient of Melee and Wizard. Simple, clean, consistent mechanics and a point-buy method for constructing characters is also something that both games share. Like The Fantasy Trip and Tunnels & Trolls, FAST eschews polyhedral dice, and uses d6's. And finally, thinking about TFT's hex-grid based movement, we here at FAST are about to embark on a new project, one that uses the hex grid, but in a new way.

That's a story for another time--like the story of how I pissed off Steve Jackson at a convention. In the meantime...

Game on!

Falstaffe

Solo RPG's: The Second One

"Imagine if you will, a world without Zelda or Azeroth,

No polyhedral dice or dry-erase maps.

When a "character sheet"  went on your mattress 

and was filled with the Charlie Brown kids.

A world we call...the No-RPG Zone."

For some, it's hard to imagine a time before D&D was cool, but grey-beards like Falstaffe can remember back to before it existed at all--when wargames and miniatures were the closest you could get to RPG-like flights of fancy (and for me, that was Avalon Hill's Starship Troopers and Lou Zocchi's Star Fleet Battle Manual.) 

Still, try and place yourself in that era. Imagine hearing of a new kind of game--it wasn't even called a "Role-Playing Game" yet--described by players bursting with excitement and enthusiasm as something new and revolutionary--only to get smacked in the face with the glorious chaos that is the original 3-book ruleset.

Imagine all that and you'll get a glimmer of what faced Ken St. Andre back in 1975. He loved the idea of high-fantasy adventuring, but hated the confusing mess of the D&D system itself. And so he decided to make up his own game, using only easily-available six-sided dice that had simple, concise rules. This is the birth of the second published RPG called "Tunnels & Trolls." 

 First five T&T editions

The game owes a lot of its flavor to the personality of the creator and his crew, including artist Liz Danforth, James "Bear" Peters, Rick Loomis, Rob Carver, Steve Crompton, Michael Stackpole, and others. Where D&D was pretentious and verbose, T&T was humorous and rules-light, with spells like "Alaka-Scram," "Take That You Fiend!" or "Shake & Break."

It used D&D's core six Attributes, but added others including Speed, Wizardry, and Luck. Any these could be used in "Saving Throws" and to accomplish various tasks--one of the earliest stabs at a universal skills and task system.

Combat was handled in a very different way than D&D. Instead of throwing a single d20, each combatant rolled a number of d6's based on the weapon used, plus "Adds" from Strength, Luck, Dexterity and Speed (using Attribute Bonus rules that were, again, much more consistently applied than D&D.) The total from each side was compared, with the larger number winning. The amount over WAS the damage dealt out to the loser--one roll did it all. Unlike D&D's weirdly unintuitive Armor class, armor in T&T simply absorbed points of damage (as did Runequest, another early RPG.) 

One advantage to T&T combat was the way it sped up group combat: all the efforts of a party of adventurers could be combined into a single "party total." This could then be compared to the total from all the monsters. The group with the higher total won. And, in a unique twist, the losing side got to decide how to divide up the damage taken, making parties of mixed levels and abilities a viable option.

Early on, T&T's creators realized that there was more hunger for RPG's than there were players and GM's, so they created a series of solo adventures. 

Just like the core rules, they reflected the impish humor of the creators. You never knew what might happen next in a T&T adventure. For example, in one solo, the jolly green giant literally appears. In a dungeon. Turning yourself green and trying to pass yourself off as another jolly green giant is a viable choice for the player. 

But T&T solos also kept players on their toes, as they were notoriously difficult and deadly. T&T characters could be quickly and easily created, which was a good thing because they usually didn't last long.

Pressed for a favorite, I'd recommend the Blue Frog Tavern and it's sequels, if only for the bar's owner, a grumpy blue rock demon named Quartz. (Yes, much like Star Trek Deep Space Nine's Quark.)

While interest in T&T has waxed and waned over the years, in 2015 a successful Kickstarter campaign resulted in a new edition: Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls, featuring revised mechanics, the Trollworld campaign setting, and gorgeous new art from Liz Danforth and other T&T stalwarts. 

With the successful launch of the revised edition, T&T's solo adventures were also revised and re-released, and you can find them here, along with many other fine GM resources like the "Grimtooth's Traps" and "Citybook" book series. 

  

Another way to try Tunnels & Trolls is the free smartphone app. It features adaptations of many of the original modules and automates combat and saving rolls (the "Borgoth vs Guard Leader" screenshot is from the online game.) It even allows for custom character creation. Do expect a few glitches, but it's a good intro to the T&T system. Best of all, it gives a generous helping of free play before you hit the pay wall.

For those of you looking for a simple, rules-lite solo game with a little bit of humor, T&T is a great choice. There's a large library of adventures, many of them available in three different formats: print, PDF, or via the app. 

As one of my first RPG games, it still holds a place in my heart and was definitely an inspiration for the FAST RPG. We both share a rules-lite architecture, quick game-play, and unified mechanics (albeit in very different ways.) Initially, we tried doing a similar "one roll does all" combat roll, but couldn't quite make it work satisfactorily for us, although a ghost of it survives in FAST's "Light Mode." And finally, I hope that T&T's good humor and dedication to  creating a fun role-playing experience for players also lives on in our game. 

Thanks, T&T!

Next up: You Never Forget Your First Love

Solo RPG Adventures

And suddenly, the whole world joined me in the retired lifestyle.

Put on your daytime pajamas, sit a spell, and let your pal Falstaffe tell you a story. Since we're all getting cozy, let me tell you about role-playing games that built their fanbases on solo RPG play. But hold up--these aren't some "ghosts of gaming past." These systems are still alive and kicking today in new and refreshed editions, and from their original creators, no less! Listen a spell, check out my links, grab some dice, and you, too, can be playing a solo RPG (or, at least as soon as it takes for the Amazon Prime truck to deliver.)

First off: Mea Culpa--I am definitely biased, and this isn't an exhaustive examination of all the solo systems out there. Feel free to tell me about your favorites in the comments. And yes, both of the systems covered here contributed to the FAST RPG in one way or another. 

Bias noted, forge on!

First, a few words on solo play for the uninitiated. These adventures are very similar to "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels where the story is broken up and scattered throughout the pages of the book. Players make decisions at key points in the story that guide them through a flowchart-like narrative. 

"Your path takes you to a chasm. A thin tree trunk spans the gap. Do you walk across (go to page 5) or attempt to jump the distance (go to page 23)?"

Solo RPG's follow this model, adding RPG rules to the experience, which allows for more variety in the outcomes of things like traps, combat, or the after-effects of drinking deadly poison. Solo RPG's also differ from "Choose Your Own" books in that players create an adventuring hero who can embark on multiple book-adventures, creating the feeling of a campaign. It's not tabletop, but a close approximation.

Solo RPG's were wildly popular back in the early days of gaming when most people had no idea what an RPG was, or how to find other players. Dave Arneson and the "Blackmoor Bunch" who created the hobby went to great creative lengths to find potential players. For example, they found books in the library related to wargaming and called up the people whose names were written on the sign-out cards! (That's how we stalked people back in the olden day, kids!)

But this style of play is far less common today for some obvious reasons. The hobby has many more players, GM's, and systems. It's far easier to connect with other players thanks to Social media sites, YouTube, game stores and conventions. The result being that the hobby has become so pervasive that people who would never consider themselves "gamers" still thrill to computer and console RPG's, or who binge-watch movies and TV shows ripped straight from TSR modules. (Looking at you, Witcher!) 

Sure, there's a nostalgia factor at work here, looking at solo RPG's that use real books, paper, and dice, but don't discount them altogether. Many find Solo RPG's to be a rewarding, creative, (and right now a relevant) experience. 

So, to paraphrase Freddie Mercury of the band Queen, "You had your time, you had the power. You've yet to have your finest hour. Solo RPG's--someone still loves you!"

Game on!

Now let's begin at the beginning (almost.)