Reconsidering Fairness in Solo RPGs: The tl;dr Version

Reconsidering Fairness in Solo RPGS: the tl;dr version 

When you are playing a solo RPG all the basic assumptions of fairness ultimately come down to your own sense of fun. 

When in doubt, play to your solo "table" as you want the table to play to you: an empowering and interesting story where you get to make the decision about what those terms mean. Ask yourself what you would do if you were running this campaign for someone else, what might you do to make their story better. Then do that for yourself. Even if that means ignoring some rules or adding some details not covered in the book.

Spend all the time mapping if you want. All the time making potions. All the time flying a space ship. Or run a tight dungeon crawl without distraction. The game's tempo is your tempo. A lot of action limits and time balance are mostly there to stop you from hogging the spotlight. You are the spotlight now.

There is no cheating in the classic sense because the primary issue of cheating in group play is about stealing joy and focus from other players. 

Many group sessions involve talking out bad luck and offering chances to overcome it: a team takes a downed character to be healed, the GM gives clues to a deadly trap, an NPC gets inserted to help the characters. Group play often focuses on how to overcome conflict as a team. This can be difficult when it is just you so move away from the assumption that what is fair in one context must fair in another.

An RPG's main goal as a set of rules and concepts is to enable roughly equal fun for everyone at the table and when you are the only one at the table then that changes the dynamic greatly. Metagaming becomes the norm. Spoiling the surprise is unavoidable. Retcons make more sense when character and player knowledge comes into play (do not believe? play a single journaling game). 

You are never wasting your own time as long as you are having fun. 

If you are not having fun, you can walk away and no one's feelings will be hurt. Unless it hurts your feelings and then maybe ask what you need to bridge that gap and give it to yourself.

Solo play is about how to overcome conflict when you are running both sides of the table. This is a deeply divergent play style and can not be judged by classical concepts.

You should never be harsher on yourself than you would be to other players. Unless you want to be. It is a bonus, not a penalty, always. It is up to you. 

In solo play you have the space to give yourself grace.

Do not sweat the small things. When in the moment, it can be ok to ignore rules or concepts that bog down your play. You are doing it alone and it is easy to wear yourself down having to mentally run back and forth. Let the rules inform your game, shape your game, but also step back when you need. 

You get to decide your comfort line. 

If you get it wrong, you can go back and change it or just say "oops" and roll with it. 

Tweak the rules. Get creative with the oracles. That is often the point of having rules and oracles.

You have the only and all deciding vote about how strict the rules are for you and there is no inherent punishment if you change your mind, retcon, or do anything that might disrupt a multi-player game. Solo play is an empowering experience. You do not have to rely on other people to tell how to play. Not even me and I am writing this.

You can take all the loot. Unless the loot makes it boring, then throw it away.

You and your character are the star. All other rules to balance narrative weight mean nothing when all the narrative weight is yourself. It is up to you keep them in or forget them entirely.

Spark your own joy. 

The Sparking of a Series

I started out wanting to type out a quick blog post talking about some of my personal thoughts on fairness in solo play RPGs and then as I kept going and writing more and more notes to address many philosophical and mechanical considerations I kept summing up the important take aways as kind of a "tl;dr" [too long; didn't read] aphorism-style version that itself was starting to get quite long. That's what you see above.

Then I realized that outside of that quick summary, I had kind of a lot to say about the topic and it might be good to give myself space to go into more details.

So this is the kick off of my Reconsidering Fairness series. Sort of...one of the first articles I posted to this blog was STEAL THIS RULE: "DEATH IS PRIMARILY A NARRATIVE CONCEIT" and in all reality that is very much so in the vein of the rest of this so I'll tag that one in. 

For those interested, the series will go on to talk about things like table balance with a single character, the loss of metagaming, the added stress that losing prep and downtime causes, campaign balance, reasons behind different types of fairness, similarities and differences, rules breaking vs homebrewing, and so forth. 

However, for now, the important take away of all of that will these concepts above. That's the heart. The rest will be fluff. Sometimes with math. Also...I'm going to complain about how poorly they treated thieves.