thread: 2005-03-16 : Solo Play and Kid Play
On 2005-03-15, Ed Heil wrote:
Tobias—
I think the difficulty in 1-player RPGs is the difficulty of generating an ongoing verbal record of "what happened."
In a tabletop roleplaying game, "what happened" is the collective memory of the players about what was agreed to have happened.
In an old Flying Buffalo "Solo Dungeon," "what happened" is the sequence of paragraphs that you chose your way through.
In a "solo roleplaying game" you almost have to write down everything that happens, and at that point, you're just kind of writing a story. Unless there's some in-game notation/logging system rich enough to provide a useful definition of "what happened"...
Also, "solo roleplaying games with rules" play havoc with the Lumpley Principle—if what the rules really do is apportion credibility among the players, and there's only one player, why bother? (I don't mean to say that this means that Solo RPGs are impossible necessarily, but if they are possible then they are an unusual enough case that some otherwise useful theoretical apparatus, e.g. the Lumpley Principle, fails to apply to them in a clear way.)
