Getting into solo roleplaying.

The tabletop RPG scene has always been on my periphery, beginning with a stalled-out session zero of 2E Dungeons & Dragons in high school, of which the most memorable part was spent listening to my buddy attempt to explain THAC0. Fast forward to May 2025, and on the heels of a ninety-two hour playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, I thought it would be so awesome to give the hobby a proper try.

Everything about the TTRPG hobby enchanted me. I’ve been a fan of fantasy and science fiction in literature, film, and video games since childhood. I loved the sound and flash of rolling dice, and the thrill of not knowing how they would fall. The libraries of rulebooks, sourcebooks, and settings, with their interconnected mechanics and statistics actually scratched my coding and animation itch—the exercise of setting up a character and running her through a crunchy combat encounter or skill check delivered the same flavor of satisfaction as pickwhipping the heck out of disconnected artwork until you’ve got a dynamic character puppet to animate. Exploring the many and varied approaches to simulating (or at least adjudicating) completely open-ended actions was like kicking off a massive Rube Goldberg machine and discovering all the weird, unexpected results you get out of the other side. And with all that scaffolding established, I am at heart a maker and a storyteller. TTRPGs were made for me.

Of course now I’ve got a spouse and a kid and a job, and yeah, so do all of my closest friends, so for a hot second it felt like the ship had sailed. I considered joining a local group, but that would require meeting New People and that’s not my favorite. So what’s a nerd to do?

That’s around the time I discovered solo roleplaying: all the dice and rule books but without a group or a game master. It’s a thing! For the uninitiated, here’s how it works:

Find a system that sounds fun.

There are a few TTRPG systems that are specifically designed for solo or co-op play without a Game Master. Ironsworn and its sci-fi cousin Starforged are great examples. In that style of solo play, world-building is procedural (rolling dice on tables to determine the “Truths” of the world and help kickstart your story), and events that are outside of the player’s control (think NPC behavior, random encounters, the results of trying a creative action with an uncertain outcome) are guided by “oracles,” specialized dice rolls to answer yes or no questions and draw keywords from themed tables to help you figure out what happens next.

Many other systems, like Shadowdark and Cyberpunk RED, have official rules for solo play. Those rules generally follow the same oracle-based approach to not playing with a GM, while also making tweaks to some of the group-play mechanics to ease the bookkeeping burden, or balance the difficulty of combat encounters. It’s also not uncommon for the player community to publish unofficial solo rules for games that don’t include them, for example Solo_Work for CY_BORG or A Lonely Death In Space for Death In Space.

Choose a GM/oracle method

What if the game system you want to try doesn’t have any solo rules? Or what if the official solo tables get repetitive or boring and you need to juice up your inspiration engine? Now we’re talking about bringing a GM Emulator into the mix.

In my play I have grown very fond of the Mythic Game Master Emulator 2E by Tana Pigeon. Not a game unto itself (unless you want it to be! There are rules in the book for that!), Mythic instead sets out an easy-to-digest system of oracles and procedures that can be applied to any RPG system you want.

If Mythic isn’t your cup of tea, there are also specialized decks of cards and methods of using standard playing cards or tarot cards to stand in for a GM. These methods come with less structure and lean more heavily on your own creativity to push your story forward.

I have also become a big fan lately of Man Alone’s Prima Materia, which threads the needle between a system with tables of concrete prompts and the super open-ended interpretation of cards. Prima Materia is now my go-to for squishier issues like determining how non-player characters in my story are feeling about a subject we’re discussing, or digging myself out of a hole where I just have no clue at all where to go next.

Choose an expression of your play

Here’s where solo roleplaying really stands on its own as a distinctive hobby. Roleplaying games, played in a traditional group setting, are an exercise in collaborative storytelling. The GM sets up the pins (quests, story hooks, some key NPCs to interact with) and it’s the players’ job to work together to knock them down. The magic then comes from the group dynamics: the players don’t know what their GM will throw at them, and the GM can’t predict every action the players will take in response. While there are absolutely gamey elements that vary from system to system—mechanics for combat, negotiating with NPCs, exploring uncharted lands, etc—at the very foundation of the hobby is telling a story. It may seem at first like you need a group to create that feeling of a living, breathing, evolving story, but for real, you can do that all in your own head; in fact there’s a game for that. But what if you like drawing maps? Go nuts; there’s also a game specifically for the cartographically inclined. You can also novelize or journal your experience (and yep, there are games that lean hard into that as well, see Koriko: A Magical Year or Ion Heart), or just keep a shorthand of what your characters get up to and what happens next.

For my practice, I start with a pretty verbose log of what’s going on. Part of my fun is the creative writing exercise of coming up with dialogue, describing events longhand, but if I’m caught up in the moment I’ll let some detail fall by the wayside. I also like to record all my dice rolls and oracle questions; at first this was a deliberate move just to help me learn these systems, but I keep up with it because I love the artifact it creates.

Beyond the log, I have allowed the hobby to reignite my love of drawing. I’m all about making detailed hex maps, battle maps for especially consequential encounters, and I’ve even started to include drawings of scenes or characters when I’m feeling so inspired.

If that sounds like a lot, it is. But none of it is required! In solo play, you’re accountable only to yourself, so add or remove rules, tools, or expressions of play from game to game or session to session.

That’s pretty much it.

I plan to add lots of resources over in the Links section where you can learn more about this quirky subculture.