tl;dr version

Over the months of adapting my playstyle to the blog, some of the "Dougness" of my playing got increasingly lost. This post talks about trying to reclaim that and establishes the four baseline techniques I use to communicate my sessions to folks through this blog:

1. Play it in my normal style and then write up a recap (the original flavor)
2. Try to play it in-line with each session being an hour-ish spent playing and writing a blog at the same time
3. A fiction-first style of play where the mechanics are minimized and the focus is more on presentation and development of "chapters"
4. A style of play that embraces different modes (Gamemaster, Player, Lore, Commentary) to give the different elements each a fair shake to build up mental gaps

In this post, I will look at those different elements and talk a bit why a return to #1 while retaining #4 (and some #3) is likely the best options for me. 

It also has a longish example of the kind of roleplaying mistakes I like to make: building an entire session around lore and worldbuilding that never actually got used. 

The Four Solo Play Techniques of This Blog

My usual playstyle for solo RPGs, at least before I started this blog earlier this year, tends to be a bit haphazard fitting my mood, location, time-available and some other elements. I tend to lean a bit more digital-notes rather than physical because my handwriting is crap and I toss so much text into the game-space that my hands start cramping but past that it can lean anywhere from "a stream of notes in a text document" to a bundle of (digital) character sheets, digital maps, Mythic tools, VLC Player set to stream something ambient, a stack of PDFs, a handful of physical books, and a set of physical dice. 

One of my quirks is that no matter how much digital everything else gets, I tend to prefer physical dice unless it is just too inconvenient. It's a question of blame, you see. You can blame digital dice but you cannot properly build up a sense of resentment unless you have something physical at which to point and glare. 

This is not exactly a post about my overall playstyle, though, but instead about something closely related. As I started posting just a portion and ended up posting the vast majority of solo play content to this blog, I realized that haphazard notes and shorthand scribbles would not make anyone, not even myself, happy. I began to develop a few different write-up styles which in turn deeply impacted my own playstyle. 

Prep is play and play is prep, after all. 

I thought it could be a good time to sit down and quantify the four different styles that developed around this blog (with links to some examples). This gives me something to point towards when I am trying to explain some different flavors. 

Technique One: External Play with Recap and Notes

The original style used for this blog. Just play however I want to play with posts largely being just summations of that with some commentary and possibly links to actual supporting documents and notes.

The style here is to play as I normally play - digital files, pdfs, books, dice, notes - and then to type up a summary of what happened usually with some link (or embed) of maps and notes.

You can see it most in the earliest posts on the blogs initially. The first Bloody Hands episode - A Fragile Merger - has a link to an external document. The original Bleak + Pearl episodes - such as the Scarlet Minotaur playthroughs - had only a map with a few quick notes and then a lot longer recap trying to sum up some of the significant rolls and events. 

After a couple of weeks posting like this, I kept thinking about how to actually turn the blog as a whole into a more interesting long term project and that led me to phasing that style out because I, like a lot of folks new to something, felt the need to copy other people and their advice and there were a handful of people saying that fewer mechanics and more fictionalized story was the way. Which is a shame because a lot of my talent in the solo-sphere is the way I dance around with rules and rulings and concepts and flow and ebb to let things develop a bit organically (a paragraph might be several encounters or a lot of details alternatively). 

Eventually, I realized abandoning it entirely was a mistake that was trapping me into spending more time working on a blog than just playing and I brought it back for some campaigns. The Bloody Hands returned to this format with "The Late Returners" and by part 2 of that mini-arc, the idea occurred to me to go ahead and start posting the actual in-Doug-style type notes while prefacing it with a short recap. I really like that style. It gives me the freedom to both play in the vibe I tend to play and to have some mental space and time to go back and analyze, right up, and organize it. It maximizes my own particular solo play in both ways, without requiring a lot of external write-up. 

However, in the arc between starting this way and then returning to a modified version of it, three other styles started being used and all three deeply altered my own workflow for solo roleplaying. 

Technique Two: Blog-First Playing with Actual Play In-Line with the Blog

Trying to make posts that felt more like the standard style of such things, I started moving towards "in-line" play. I would fire up the blog editor and start typing. When I got to mechanics, I would put it in italics or have a footnote. As I wrapped up the post, I wrapped up the session (and vice versa)

This style involves typing into the blog directly as I play with mechanics set-aside but generally in-line with the rest of the post and the blog itself being the primary storage device of the session. The idea was to not slow down or hesitate but play as I wrote and write as I played. Mechanical notes start showing up at the bottom of the post (and sometimes in set-aside italics/bold-passages).

The earliest examples would be my playthrough/playtest of Sinister Semester X and then the fifth episode of The Bloody Hands (Biting the Hand that Feeds You). Both of these are definitely more in the older school of my posts and are written in a kind of quasi-summary style. A few patches of dialogue got worked in, some after-post edits showed up to blend early passages with later passages. 

Around the first delve in the Monolith of the Cyclops in Bleak + Pearl, you start to seeing this style mature a bit more. Mechanics are more blended into dialogue and room descriptions. At the peak of posts (roughly one a day), this was the style the blog was based around. 

However, it had two rough problems that are largely just a clash with own playstyle. The first, and primary one, was that mechanics tended to have been wrote up in a way that did not completely derail the flow of the fiction. My personal playstyle will sometimes involve writing up whole charts, maps, and details. 

Any but the simplest of these things simply did not fit (see the bonus story at the end of this post to see exactly the kind of thing that would not fit in with the "in-line technique"). 

Each post was a session and each session was a post and I generally wanted each to be whole unit: one played in a smooth, complete sort of flow. It put me in a mindspace where I was having to constantly bounce back and forth from a fiction writer to a gamemaster (with a much smaller sprinkle of player and a much larger sprinkle of editor). This meant that posts started getting shorter since it was more mentally exhausting. It was not easy to keep a thread going and as soon as some sort of twist or heavy scene shift occurred I would often have to take a break so I could contemplate and build up a few expectations before starting again. 

Things like scenes and threads starting getting muted because it was hard to tell exactly where one might end and another begin. I sometimes had to go back and rewrite earlier, even posted, sections because later developments would make these half-developed sections non-sensical. 

The breaking point of that playstyle was the Bleak + Pearl fight with the garfolk and the meeting of the strange mushroom man. 

Because of this, I developed another style to handle more OSR/event-heavy content. But first, the happy accident of me trying to Doug-up the in-line playstyle. 

Technique Three: The Fiction-First Game

Around the time I was taking a three week break from SoloDark to try and figure out how to move from Technique 1 to Technique 2, I embarked on what was meant to be a fancy one-shot: Gareth Hendrix and the Bunker Bigfoot. While it remains something of a successful failure that got better, that series worked out a new style for me. It is a modified take on the second technique - in-line blog-first play - but it put fiction first. 

For this style, game mechanics are minimal. Each scene tends to have only one or two rules and one or two oracles checks. Each chapter has between one and four scenes. The focus is on a more literary take with game mechanics being used to add plot twists, find out secrets, develop characters, and challenge me to take stories to places I did not expect. 

Gareth and his barely novella length adventure was a major reason this entire blog kept going. During the time period I was getting deeply frustrated about finding my voice there was a series that was entirely my own voice. It involved personal photographs and personal stories woven into the narrative and was set in (though fictionalized) my home town.

I love that I did that. It was a risk I would not have taken without this blog. 

That being said, there is a non-zero chance that the Eustace Delmont series might be the final time I try it for a while (I have long had an idea for a third part but I do not know). It can be frustrating. The Gareth storyline was kind of quick and punchy but trying to mature it into the Eustace one meant it takes a lot of time and a lot more external note taking. 

There is also the slight glitch that it is the solo roleplaying equivalent of a walking sim. 90% of the flow is decided with my own brain as the primary oracle. There were major twists that I did not expect but in between these islands of dice rolls were great seas of short story workshop. Maybe I just need to keep working on it. 

Going to the other end of the spectrum in the meantime... 

Technique Four: The Gamemaster + Player Style

In essentially the same week, I was wrapping the last of the original Bloody Hands arcs (Sink or Swim part 3) and concluding the garfolk obstacle in Bleak + Pearl (Drying off just to Get Wet Again). Both in the then standard "Technique 2" style. I had struggled through both (the "Doug's Notes" for each talks about frustrations and switching things up while trying to put a positive spin on it). The honeymoon era of the blog was fading and I was slowly but surely getting stuck with a completely alien way to play solo games where a month long gap was suddenly noticeable. 

Would I keep going? Would I just go back to my Google Docs and quick notes? I was not sure. However, I was becoming aware of two definitely truths: 

(1) I realized that I worked best when I gave myself space to cook. I had to play with the ingredients, tweak the tastes. I would never be consistent with the ebb of flow of my playing. Sometimes I just wanted a fight with no real backstory and sometimes I wanted a backstory with no real fight. Sometimes I would spend hours crafting a town to never really visit it and sometimes I would spend around 10 seconds to make a town that would be the backbone of a campaign. I needed something that allowed for me to be me. 

(2) I am not actually that good at what might be the kind of "standard" roleplaying set of tropes. I GM a lot of games and do a decent job. I play in some games and do a decent jobs. But when it is just me, the kind of old-standards just do not quite jive with the kind of stories I like to tell. I suck at being a being a murder hobo. I play at long and complex subplots. I like my dungeons to feel uniform and purposeful. I like my NPCs to sometimes have little details like "favorite food". Months might pass with the same story impact as days. 

I started playing with making a more Doug-like playstyle in the next Bleak + Pearl post (On Waterfalls in the Dark, Painting the Past, and When Fighting Is Best Saved for Another Day). What if I take time to construct the rooms and encounters completely separate from the "play" (though of course such prep is play even if the more in-line version made it hard to spend much time with prep without "spoiling" it) and then took more time to figuring out how the puzzles worked before trying to figure out how I, from a different viewpoint, would solve it. I have a lot of experience with dancing around the meta-game and I was pretty sure I could pull it off. 

This technique involves having two to four distinct phases of the game that each have their own methods. The first is the Gamemaster Phase which involves the construction of rooms, encounters, and scenarios using all the standard tools and a more relaxed flow that speeds up and slows down based on personal need and story requirements. Then there is the Player Phase that matches more the in-line phase but bounces off the stuff established by the Gamemaster with the post being in essentially "real time" with the play and writing flowing together. There are optional Lore Phases that are more like the Fiction-First Games of Technique 3 that are about pure world-building with a minimal amount of mechanics. Finally, there is a Commentary Phase to sum it up, figure what did and did not work, and to set-up expectations and ideas for the next session. 

The breaks in between phases allow for natural mental rests. The Gamemaster and Lore phases give a chance for worldbuilding, zooming out, and changing up the cadence so that not everything has to feel evenly split. The Player Phases then can be varied, quick, and often kind of punchy. Sometimes the Player Phase challenges the Gamemaster Phase's assumptions. Sometimes elements in the Gamemaster Phase are not used in the Player Phase. 

It works really well for me and is kind of the ultimate expression of my personal style, though is a bit more complicated than I need for all of my campaigns. 

A Real Life Example of Why Technique 4 Is Needed for Solo Players Like Me

To show a variation of this from before I had my blog, let me tell you a story about my Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign near the end of the Barston Bakersfield arc. 

I wanted a simple quest: a man along the side of the road has lost a valuable relic to some goblin bandits. Bog standard, right? Except I started out playing out what the jar was and who the man was. There was an entire session of backstory involving several moving pieces. He was a con-man who robbed old tombs. He had found the tomb of an ancient king and found, in this tomb, a relic that made anything inside seem valuable. People just had to have it. It was a perfect set-up for him. Toss in some rocks and sell people what they think is a jar full of gold. Later, they think they were robbed and he gets the jar back. 

Along the way to town to set up such a con, he runs into some goblins. These are not bad people, per se, but they are extremely cranky because their home had been overrun by hobgoblins who considered the short, unlucky gobs to be worthy of all the jokes and the pranks. They basically stole what they thought was a worthless jar because they were wanting to be petty. Only the man who stole the jar has angered a fairly powerful guardian who is hunting him. Now, it is hunting the goblins. Said goblins have gone to a grove that was once a place of giants and are staying in essentially a small garden that looks like a massive walled structure, complete with giant bees. 

This was going to be a set-up for a meta-story that had been going on since early in the campaign about people on the hunt for giants in the area. It was going to set-up some lore for the place. It was also going to establish a moral dilemma of the player trying to help thieving but not really bad goblins versus a righteous but murderous guardian. And there was a whole other place of power (the tomb) baked in for backstory. 

After this story session I spent time thinking what the giant garden might mean. Figuring out what might happen with the goblins if any survived. Would they become regular NPCs? Allies? Enemies? Would the conman get caught? Would the guardian be a multi-session arc? 

Only right as I was getting ready to play out the session where Barston meets this man and kicks off the whole thread I spent a couple of hours developing, a random event shows up. Barston's best friend needs help carrying out a task. It takes a couple of days then another event shows up that gets Barston tangled up with unraveling a conspiracy. This kicks off a big fight between guilds and establishes some important lore. 

I never got to play the scenario with the goblins. I never got to meet the conman. I never got to fight the guardian. I never got to visit the giant garden. 

I spent an entire worldbuilding session building up a lot of truths that never made it "to the table." Except they did (a side story involves a person who had to deal with the aftermath of the goblins fleeing into town while being hunted by the guardian). It is one of my favorite stories to tell because all of it is canon but all of it happened behind the scenes. 

I love the vibe of consistent inconsistences and organic plot development. I love side stories. I love dumb twists. I ADORE fun NPCs. I love ad hoc mechanics. I love off-the-cuff worldbuilding. I love that I have found different ways to achieve this in the blog format. 

It just means this blog needs to be my style of play rather than my style of play being a blog post. And I think I can do that.