Solo Advice: Consider Rolling TWICE

Solo play is a spectrum and in that spectrum you tend to have different pieces that make up your engine:  some kind of yes/no style oracle, a series of prompts, some random content generators, a level of situational framework, and/or a base game that the above pieces are placed upon. When learning to play, oracles in the broad yes/no sense are "easy". Is the door locked? Does she know what the secret is? Is the monster still following me? Yes. No. Yes, and... Maybe. Etc. 

Asking the question is usually the hard part of the yes/no layer but that is a different blog post from this one. 

This one addresses a different sort of problem that creeps up from time to time. In your prompts and random tables of events/people/dungeons/colors/clouds/whatever a lot of those seem definite in a way that yes/no + and/but are not. By this I mean, if I ask "Does she say yes?" and get a "Yes" then she says yes, sure but if I roll a random event table and get, "A farmer has lost his sheep and is seeking adventurer to track them down" then that feels much more contained. 

For the former question I could have asked "Is she excited?" or "Does she seem hesitant?" or "Does she already have a date?" or "Is she going to the dance already?" or a relative infinity of related but different questions and, in principle, the dice would have still said yes. Again, the question part is hard the answer part is much easier. Each variation of the question is a different angle you might get a snapshot of your world. 

But for that farmer that feels like a photo already taken. 

On the positive side, if you want a quest then you have a quest. If you want a snippet of something happening in a town (presumably one where a farmer and his sheep make sense) then you have an event. But while that yes/no oracle was about you the solo player exploring the world you are creating AND to which you are reacting, a lot of these tables to generate other elements are less about exploring and more about being told. 

A way to address that which I have been working on is to consider rolling twice on a lot of these tables. Roll two doors. Two sets of room features. Two quests. Two icons on the image table. Two emotional states. Two rumors around town. 

Then, as you see fit to what figures best into your world you can either

1. Combine the two wholly
2. Take elements from the two and fuse them together
3. Pick the one that makes the most sense
4. Make one primary and one secondary as a sort of background detail
5. Make on primary and the other, or at least elements from the other, as a kind of answer to a question about the other

Let us look at a few examples of what I mean. Take the "Town Quests" table from The Great Book of Random Tables: Quests by Matt & Erin Davids. Let's say you roll...

• 4: "An arrogant noble has won the archery competition five years in a row. The town is ready to cast honors and glory on anyone who can beat him." +
• 57: "A string of burglaries has the city’s nobles on edge. The party is asked to investigate."

Either of those might work as a quest just fine though if play a lot of sessions using that table you might get some repetition. Using the above, though, you might get something like this...

1. There is a string of burglaries in [City] and PCs are asked to investigate. While there they find that [City] has an archery competition and there is a noble who always wins so PCs also might boost moral by showing up one of their nobles that hired them. 
2. One noble has been challenging other nobles to compete and during these competitions things go missing so one of the losers wants PCs to investigate the one who keeps winning... OR PCs investigate a string of burglaries and while doing so find an underground archery contest where people compete for the things stolen. 
3. It makes no sense to be involved in archery contest so you ignore that one and focus on the other. 
4. The main focus is on the burglaries which started some years ago after a noble that had long run rigged archery contests was finally beaten.
5. Something important was stolen from a noble and he is willing to pay good money to get it back. What was stolen? A bow his family used in some past war and which is considered to be a symbol of the house name.

Of course the #4 option and the #1 option might be pretty similar but the idea is that though you are using both, one is the actual quest while the other is more a background flavor or certain elements are brought over rather than the whole.

Another example might be the image oracle from the various Tricube Tales micro-settings. For instance, in "Arcane Agents"  you get one that looks like this (at least the first half):

Let us say you get the 1,4 (House on Fire) and 3,4 (People Talking) icons. In the context of Tricube Tales these are meant to be interpretive. The house on fire might mean a fire, a house where drama is taking place, a family breaking apart, a house "under fire", or a literal house fire. Likewise the people talking could be a more literal conversation, a need to talk, a reference to language/words, a crowd, or some other interpretation. In that, they already offer a good deal of freedom. However, combined we might get things like:

1. A house burns down and there are lots of rumors going around town (maybe about the house, maybe not).
2. Inside a house you hear shouts and loud conversations OR a group of people are talking about starting a fire somewhere.
3. You stick with just the house fire icon because you don't want another talkie scene.
4. Two people are getting together and having whispered conversations in a coffee shop...the twist is both of them were patients at a hospital that once shut down due to an investigation but otherwise seem to not know one another (until now).
5. People keep seeing weird lights over an old hotel. What about them is weird? There lights make a strange buzzing sound as they sparkle... 

Because the nature of this second oracle is already meant to be more open to filling the blanks, some of the combinations are a bit more obvious but even then, having both images at once can spark connections that might not be immediate if you got one or the other (either one could lead to the details that matched all of these). 

The main benefit is that this method returns some of the self-exploration elements to the kind of tables that might be more about specific details or facts. Even if you need those set-in-stone details having two rolls in front of you means you have more control over which one is picked.

It also helps to extend the tables. If you play a lot of Tricube Tales like I do, you will quite likely get at least some of the image oracle results more than once. While they are open to broad interpretation, having two at the same time just makes it more interesting to me. 

In a cyberpunk game maybe you get "Corpo assassin is targeting laundromats in Old Town due to money owed" and the second time it comes up (being maybe a d20 style table) you end up rerolling it, maybe more than once if you had played even just four or five off that table. But if you take that and mix it with "Body of well known local boxer washes up at docks with all of her augmentations ripped out" you can slice and dice those together in a many different ways. Corpo assassin was blackmailing the gym the boxer worked at OR the boxer was the one shaking down the laundromats OR local boxer has become a corpo assassin AND so on. 

This can be applied to meaning tables. Prompt tables. Element tables. You can definitely do it across tables. 

It should not be applied to yes/no oracles since those are already pretty extensible based on how you ask the question and how you apply the results. 

Likewise, even for those rolls where it makes sense you might not want to do it more than 2-3 times because too many options and oracles just bogs the flow down. 

At any rate, give it a try and see if it helps spark some more joy out of your games. I like it and it might also work for you.