Following on from yesterday’s solo game report, I’ve had requests to “show the working” – in other words, how did I run my game?
My solo roleplaying arises from a quiet Friday night just two months ago and, since that first game, I’ve run a total of three sessions for myself. Yesterday’s game had a quality that was a little different to the previous sessions, however, and it is to those differences that I aim to place some emphasis.
In addition to helping to develop my solo roleplaying methodology, the session opened up a couple of key realisations that I’d like to share: firstly, that I have been a solo roleplayer for much longer than I had consciously realised; secondly, that the so-called preparation for gaming is (at least for the soloist) part of the game.
These points are likely to be obvious to the initiated solo roleplayer, but they stand in bold opposition to my earlier belief that solo gaming was in some way weird. On the contrary, I would assert that all Gamemasters are soloists right up until the moment they sit down with their players.
Choosing To Play Traveller
On Wednesday, I was home alone. Having worked through the first batch of holiday homework marking, I was ready for a break. As lunchtime arrived, I put down the Xbox controller and realised that this was a really good opportunity to do some solo roleplaying. But, the question nagged, what was I going to play?
Being tired of fantasy gaming is not a new feeling for me. During the vast majority of my roleplaying, I’ve been the Gamemaster for other people’s gaming itch and that has generally meant playing in fantasy settings, using fantasy genre tropes, or gaming with fantasy rules like Dungeons & Dragons. Because of this fantasy focus, my desire to run a science-fiction or modern genre game usually gives way to what others want. Thus, sadly, many non-fantasy games and settings languish on my “read but rarely played” pile.
On Wednesday afternoon, as I pondered my way through a minefield of doubt, I realised that what I really wanted to do was play in a science-fiction game. Thoughts of returning to my fledgling Serene Dawn setting swirled for a while, but I soon realised that I was hankering for my roots: Traveller.
For the uninitiated, Traveller was one of the earliest science-fiction roleplaying games, born in 1977, and was the most popular science-fiction roleplaying game of the 1980’s. It was my second roleplaying game and I played it solo long before I even realised that there was anything unusual about solo.
The key strength of Traveller has always been that it was a science-fiction ruleset originally designed to be used to create your own science-fiction stories. That Traveller evolved to become synonymous with what is termed the “Official Traveller Universe” of the Third Imperium setting is to miss the true richness of the original game. For my money, the game’s original authors forgot this; yesterday, I rediscovered it.
The game began with a two decisions:
- I would create an explorer character.
- I would use the Traveller world generation rules to create a sub-sector of space in which to explore.
In all honesty, the character got created first using the Cypher System that I reviewed the day before. I also chose to begin with the world generation systems from Traveller5, in a somewhat desperate bid to find use for the tome that roleplaying forgot. But, as I finished the process of randomly generating the 8-hex by 10-hex subsector, I realised that what I really wanted to do was to playtest the in-progress second edition of Mongoose Traveller.
And this is the truly beautiful thing about solo play: with nobody else to disappoint, you can make a change at any time. Thirty minutes later, Kal Drake was reborn into Traveller form.
Choosing to go it ALONe
I reviewed the beta version of the ALONe Solo Engine in an earlier post. I’d decided that having a game using at least some of the game’s systems was desirable. On Thursday morning, having defeated the second batch of holiday homework marking, I decided to purpose this solo engine to my needs.
The deck from ALONe
I’ve not played ALONe as intended. That said, I have used the cards and the basic resolution systems to fit my tastes, and to replace the key elements of the Mythic GM Emulator. In short, it worked well just using the card deck to resolve questions and a couple of other sub-systems to generate unexpected obstacles. More on this shortly.
What I really wanted to play with was the cards. ALONe comes with a deck of cards originally published (and available separately) as The Gamemaster’s Apprentice. If there’s one thing that this system offers over Mythic, it’s a reduction in the number of table look ups. In play, I also discovered that it reduces the amount of dice-rolling… something I never expected to prefer. Thus, because I love card decks, I purposed to play with this deck.
How Do You Use ALONe With Traveller?
Here’s how I brought the two systems together in playing through regular scenes.
Top half of a card, courtesy of Larcenous Designs (used without permission).
For solo GM emulation, I combined the use of several solo sub-systems:
- I used the “Likely Odds” section (#2 on image right) of the cards to answer yes/no questions.
- The scene sheet from Mythic was used to keep track of scenes.
- The “Difficulty Generator” (#1) on the cards, combined with the basic “Chaos Factor” from Mythic, provided the resolution of surprise scenes.
- Regular play of each scene was resolved using the standard rules of Mongoose Traveller (2e).
It was a blast! Let’s take each of those in turn.
Any solo game needs to emulate a Gamemaster, the player who presents the setting and the scenario to the other players who each take on the role of a character in that setting and scenario. This is because you need some means of answering the kind of questions that a player usually asks the Gamemaster, such as “do the ship’s sensors detect anything unusual?” As solo game designers have noticed, a lot of these questions are of the simple yes/no variety. Mythic resolves those questions on a d100 table; ALONe resolves them by flipping over the next card and looking at the Likely Odds table. I find that I prefer flipping a card based on three simple categories of likely odds: Bad, Even, or Good.
Mythic’s Scene Sheet, courtesy of Word Mill Games (used without permission).
To keep track of the scenes in the adventure, I retained the use of the Mythic scene sheet. This single-sided form has space to track eight scenes combined with two lists, the Character List and the Threads List, and a box at the bottom for the Chaos Factor. ALONe has a similar mechanic to the Chaos Factor, entitled the Tension Rating, but they essentially provide equivalent tools: you can use them to check whether the scene you expect is the scene you get, providing opportunity for surprise interruptions to your game.
I retained the Chaos Factor but used the flip of a card and reference to the “Difficulty Factor”, a single digit from 1 to 10 that is statistically weighted towards the median value.
This worked well: I had two unexpected events in the session. As an example, when I set up the scan of Han City the Difficulty Factor was less than the Chaos Factor, generating an unexpected event; drawing two cards from the deck (using ALONe‘s “verb, adjective, noun” card entry, labelled #6 on the card image) I referenced the verb and the noun to get “Strengthen” and “Death”, two words which triggered the idea of a missile launch at Kal’s shuttle. Easy.
The standard rules of Mongoose Traveller use 2d6 to roll a difficulty number or higher (most commonly, 8+) to see if you succeed. The game provides a mechanic for “how well you performed” by comparing the rolled value to the target number, with the difference in value as an indicator of levels of success. Thus, when Kal wanted to persuade the hunter Jesse to let him go, I rolled against Kal’s “Persuade” skill; the fact that I rolled bang on the target of 8 meant that Jesse remained guarded.
Using Traveller For Set-up
Earlier I asserted that all Gamemasters are soloists right up until the moment they sit down with their players. I realised this during the game because of the tools that Traveller offers to any Gamemaster, solo or not, to help them either flesh out a setting or add details to an existing background. In short, every time I previously sat down to prep Traveller and used the ship design sequences or the world generation system (to name but two), I was playing solo. In fact, every Gamemaster worth their salt prepares at least some details, and many of us even use random generators to do so; this is, in essence, solo play as preparation for group play.
Traveller is a treasure box for the science-fiction roleplayer. The Mongoose Traveller 2e packet (not to mention Classic Traveller before it) provides systems for random generation of characters, generating alien creatures, designing vehicles, creating spacecraft and starships, a trade system, and processes for generating a sector (or more) of space and worlds to populate it. There is probably more too, if you start counting the various supplements. Each system is either a mini-game unto itself, or a useful process for creating content. It’s the main reason I love Traveller so much and that I keep returning to it. This is all, of course, stuff for the solo player too.
Traveller has some default assumptions, such as the Jump Drive as a means of FTL travel and a galaxy full of sentient life, built right in. That aside, and ignoring the default setting of the Third Imperium, I decided to set up the campaign with the following narrative propositions:
A thousand years ago the world of Atheni was cut off from the First Empire by a devastating attack from one of the warring factions. On top of the orbital bombardment, the system was wracked by a powerful computer virus which rendered most technology useless and forced the instigation of The Purge. Following a desperate ground war which lasted for decades, the world was finally alone and the survivors sought to rebuild their broken society.
Fans of the official Traveller universe will be rolling their eyes at me, but hey – I’m having fun. My game, and all that.
Next, having used the world generation system to populate a sub-sector (8 hexes by 10 hexes, at 1 parsec per hex) with worlds, I used the remaining section of the same chapter of Traveller to detail the world of Atheni, Kal’s homeworld. By this point I had the following additional background text:
Two dominant factions have arisen over the intervening millennium, with the charismatic leadership of Arond Kery maintaining the upper-hand in recent decades. With only remnants of past technology and most of the databanks destroyed, the Athenians united under the leadership of their greatest General, Atris Kery, and the dynasty has survived intact. In addition, the ancient Chantry opened its doors to those in need and helped to rebuild a society in which the people could thrive through spiritual enlightenment; the Chantry openly supports the Kery faction.
The opposing faction is a representative democracy which has significant support outside of the planetary capital and which perpetuates an armed rebellion. Some rebel fighters identify themselves as descendants of the invading army from the time of The Purge, seeing themselves as distinct from native Athenians, but this faction has become intermingled and unites around the idea of toppling the dictatorship.
By the way, I used the excellent randomisers on donjon to provide random planet names (there’s a Traveller world creator, but I just used it for naming) and NPC names.
Before play began, I created the character of Kal Drake using the character generation system. Admittedly, I would prefer to design him using non-random systems, but this time it was a fun mini-game. I understand that the forthcoming edition will include a Traveller Companion book containing alternative character creation details, no doubt to include a points-buy option. This gave me an extensive background story for Kal (which I’ll not post here because the post is already large) and the set-up of the adventure:
Kal Drake, one of the finest sky-defender pilots of the Athenian aerospace force, has been invited to pilot the maiden trip through e-space to see what remains of the First Empire. His mission is to reconnoitre the Liu-Hai system and then to return with the data he gathers…
Finally, I used the Traveller High Guard starship creation rules to design the 95 displacement-ton (dTon) shuttle that the Athenians had retrofitted with a Jump Drive.
With a subsector of space, an interesting character, a starship design, and a cool adventure start… well, I was ready to play. The only other point to mention was that I decided to postpone using the world generation system to flesh out Liu-Han until Kal ran his sensor scan upon arrival. Doing so limited my information and helped to provide excitement and interest during an otherwise dull sensor scan: I was emulating the feeling players have as the Gamemaster reveals the information their characters uncover. It worked well!
Evaluation
The game ran smoothly and with a few things I didn’t expect. For example, there were fewer die rolls – something I usually relish – because the card-flipping removed the d100 rolls for yes/no answers; this in turn allowed me to focus on the resolution die rolls that really mattered, a factor which enriched the level of excitement during play. Score 1 for ALONe‘s card system.
The collection of tables on the ALONe card deck is worth talking about because each initially cluttered-looking card actually triggers stuff you don’t expect. For example, the second unexpected event should have been generated by the flipping of two cards to reference the verb and the noun, as mentioned earlier. In this case, however, my eye caught the top item on the middle panel of the card (#7 on the card image above) which read, simply, “Zap.” From this one word, I imagined a series of scenarios and quickly settled on the idea of a lone hunter shooting at Kal from the trees. The whole remainder of the refueling scene was generated from that single word. Score 2 for ALONe.
Dropping the narrative approach of ALONe, which emphasises descriptors as abilities rather than using numbers, was a matter of personal taste. However, using Traveller‘s rather low-crunch core systems provided a really good counterpart to the solo engine. I found that the 2d6 die rolls felt suitably dynamic but also simple enough to interpret and play with. Additionally, I realised you would be able to use the card deck’s “Difficulty Factor” to generate a random target number for a skill roll (if needed) simply by adding 2 to the number presented on the card; this provides a difficulty from 2 to 12, most commonly ranging from 6 to 8.
Overall, I enjoyed the game hugely and want to get to a second round as soon as possible after New Year celebrations subside. To be honest, playing solo was (once again) one of the best sessions I have ever run.
Game on!
