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Sunday, April 28, 2019

Solo Role-playing: The Lost City of Barakus Part 4 (Reflections / A Form of GM Prep)

I could be playing another session of this solo campaign right now, but I find myself just pondering the basic concept of solo role-playing instead and some possible other benefits of doing it.

In many ways I think this form of solitaire is actually a great method for GM prep.  You get to experience an adventure first-hand as a player, and see what you enjoyed about it and what you really didn't like at all.  You can use those experiences to better run the game for players in a more traditional session later on down the road.  Playing through an adventure is an experience unlike just READING over everything and taking notes, and really... it's more fun too.  It feels like you are crawling around in the guts and bowels of an adventure and not just looking down on it from some lofty vantage point.  It feels more personal, and the elements of the adventure are sticking in my mind more so than via other methods that I've used to memorize adventures.

I have run some adventures multiple times for multiple groups, such as The People of Pembrooktonshire from Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP), and while that helped me learn it, there is just something different (perhaps even better) about being a player inside an adventure that helps me remember things in more detail.  I tend to learn by doing, and in this case, by playing rather than just skimming over things. 

When you play, you don't go through the encounters in the adventure in an orderly fashion either (or at least I don't).  Often players will: skip encounters, bypass interesting NPCs (or kill them before they utter a word), and meander around in a chaotic fashion that the adventure designer could never anticipate.  Again, this is a different way of interacting with the adventure than just reading it over in an orderly fashion.

Solo role-playing in this light, as being a form of GM Prep, I think should help some people remove that stigma that is sometimes associated with this style of play.  I know I found myself thinking before trying it that playing through an adventure by myself was pathetic, or just seemed lonely, but I've been pleasantly surprised with this whole experiment.

Experimentation.  Sometimes you will be surprised when you try new things, as I have been via solo-role-playing.  I know I've been surprised in how vested I am in the player characters.  In each campaign I always try to do some new trick, or use a new technique that I heard about from some other role-player and this campaign is no different.  I love the interaction of the randomness of tables and dice blended with whatever just "makes sense" for a given encounter, and knowing the characters.

Another aspect is getting to know these characters in and more intimate way, and I suspect sole-roleplaying could help authors flesh out protagonists in unforeseen ways too.  I don't see myself every writing a true novel, but perhaps a short story about these characters might be in order. 

Just a few thoughts.  I hope everyone is having a decent day out there.

P.S. I miss the days of these blog entries automatically being posted to Google+.  Oh well.  It was fun while it lasted. 

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