DAY 29: BIGGER OR BETTER SOLO RULES
As a teenager, I loved gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf. I’ve also enjoyed various styles of solo roleplaying, like automated hex crawls or journalling games. I particularly love the solo winter phase activities from Pendragon, to cover what a character does in a year off if they miss the main adventure.
From the interest shown both here and on discord whenever people advertise new online games of Ars, it seems there are a lot of people who are geographically isolated from fellow players or unable to interest their local group in playing. There’s surely a reasonable market for material for the solo gamer.
Ars Magica has a reasonable set of solo rules (link to the start of the topic, which begins with Quinchris’ rules) which me and Ezechiel3571 tested in May 2016 - ten years ago!
V3 rules and V4 rules and the most recent V4.4 rules and V5.5 rules(I’ve linked the posts on this forum which contain the links, rather than the links directly) so you can follow the evolution over several years. Peripheral Code issue 2 contained a copy of the rules as they were in 2017.
Anyway, I think there’s a possibility of making an expanded version with more description and prompts. I’m sure there’s a good mechanic to be derived to allow plots to recur or escalate over time. Alternatively, a simple version could be turned into a simple browser game to allow people to while away time on the adventures of a magus they’ll never get round to playing with other people.
I mentioned the Pendragon winter solos - many 80s and 90s games included mechanics for specific areas of the game which could be handled as a mini-game. Perhaps there’s areas where we could come up with a mini-game or systems to handle some Ars Magica activities that can be handled with a few rolls, or done solo to free up table time?