Solo Advice: Avoiding Journal Creep

A frequent bit of advice asked by people on forums like the r/Solo_Roleplaying subreddit is some variation of "How do you journal?" (in this case, asked by the perfectly human sounding name of u/Typical-Ad-3513 [heh]). The questions vary, but to quote part of Ad's post:

"I love journaling but over half of the time when I play is journaling which doesn't necessarily feel like playing. I've tried less details but I feel like it takes away half the imagination. Do you guys have any tips to make journalling [sic] more fun or less work?"

Of course, any time a post like this shows up, a lot of the responses take on a flavor of, "Just don't journal," or, "Make your journal into just bullet points." And I will say that these 100% are potentially valid pieces of advice. It's solo play. Absolutely the only person that you have to make happy is yourself. 

It just simply does not work for people like me. I write long winded posts where I spend a lot of time working in character dialogue, scene setting, and trying to figure out logic behind my action sequences. Here is one example that has 25ish tests/checks and, when pasted into a document, is 30ish pages with formatting. That ends up being a dice roll (etc) per page [though several of the pages are just commentary, lore, white space, images, etc]. That's a lot. Maybe too much but at the time the Eustace & Hitomi series was in desperate need for fairly intense character moments to establish why and who and where and all that. Still, I probably wouldn't do that much again. 

I've started to recognize there is a pretty big line between "just a few bullet points" and full on journal creep.

What Is Journal Creep?

I am considering journal creep to be the point where the act of journaling a solo play session starts to feel like work - or just a creative writing exercise - and it takes away from the actual play portions. There is nothing wrong with writing, essentially, a short story that only takes a few rolls or checks. Much like the bullet-points-are-valid argument above, it all comes down to you. You are playing a hobby that has, in theory, an audience of one. 

Only there are moments with a lot of us where if we write too little we feel disconnected from our play. I suffer this pretty badly with pen-and-paper rogue-likes like D100 Dungeon where I can 100% speed up the play loop too much and just no longer care about anything happening. On the flip side, though, the opposite can be true. We can get so caught up into the act of journaling that we once again disconnect from our play. 

In this way, journal creep is a problem only when you feel obligated to keep up a journal no matter what the rhythm and flow of play requires. 

A non-solo-play variation might be if you are prepping an adventure for other players and you spend hours coming up with backstory that might not ever show up, paint miniatures that you do not know if you will use, or generate a bunch of handouts that players may or may not actually enjoy. Much like the solo-play journal, none of these are bad things, but they have a chance to creep into the enjoyment of the game at hand. 

It can be a tricky balance.

Some Ways I Have Started to Avoid It

The Eustace & Hitomi arc helped me to realize that I was hitting that point pretty hard. I have tried things in the past while writing up more basic notes and then writing up a recap. I have tried things like having a more reactive journal that has a few basic scenes and then a few built up scenes. Both work. Both are valid. Neither quite hit my own needs at this time. Both I might end up using more in the future if my desires change. 

In my response to that post, I laid out a few bullet points where the overall gist is to make your journal more about the scenes and moments that matter to you and to find ways to shortcut some of the ones that are draining your energy. These are things I have been using more and more, whether or not is obvious. I just wanted to share these here because I think they are pretty good for a person like me who wants some journal creep but also a few exit strategies.

1. Compress some scenes - especially repetitive ones or the ones that interest me less - into a few lines and descriptors and very simple dialogue.
2. Even more so, if I have several of the above scenes in a row, or just don't have time to play as much, maybe cut a few scene out and resolve them with a 1-2 tests each. Just pick up the next scene I feel is more pivotal to dive in deeper. The classic "A few hours later" type moment for a movie or book. "It's a good thing we managed to escape those goblins!"
3. Cut almost every scene "early" as soon as the focus goal/test is resolved. Presumably my characters have a lots of dialogue and actions "off camera" but I try to mostly look at the bits that really interest me.
4. Use this freed-up time to pick a few scenes here or there to really dig in and focus. Establish my world. Establish my characters. Let my imagination flow. Sometimes this hits with scenes/elements I thought I was going to compress because that third wandering goblin suddenly triggers some backstory I want to see.
5. In general just being ok that I might get the balance wrong as long as I am having fun.
6. Graphical elements sometimes help but these can actually take a lot of time depending on the flow. Things like a few screenshots to sum up combat placements, a couple of pieces of stock art to represent something that characters might be seeing, a quickly drawn map so I can avoid writing out much about the directions/shapes of a room/area.

I'm not the best at my own advice but I have been trying those sort of steps. Turning the journal and my play sessions to fewer scenes of higher impact and interest with other scenes more assumed or summed up. Allowing me to focus on 5-6 scenes per post/session with the idea that there are at least 3-4 more "off camera". A good example of my growth in this regard could be the Traversing Wyrmfathom session from The Bloody Hands. Each "scene" had 1-3 rooms. Each room had a central conflict or character moment. I worked it out, focused on things that moved the campaign forward, and then went through another door. Once they leave Wyrmfathom, they skip ahead a day or two and focus on the aftermath rather playing 3+ scenes talking about arranging a funeral and a marriage. 

The Possible Downsides

Does this make it feel artificial? Not really. It certainly can. When you are a table with other players, there is a lot of downtime. You have roleplaying scenes and GM narration and moments where you fiddle with the map. Each player takes up a portion of the total time with a fairly heavy percentage being low- to no-impact on a particular player or their character. 

When you play a solo-RPG you are suddenly "on" 100% of the time. You are the thief keeping watch in the tree (and the things the thief sees), the fighter looking over the map (and the person creating the map in real time), and the wizard cooking dinner (and possibly figuring out how to make it an interesting challenge). You are the goblins sneaking up in the bushes. You are the weather. The dirt. The RNG chance of the world and the upcoming enemy fort into which the characters are planning to infiltrate. 

There is a reason why traditional RPGs can take up 4-6 hours per session - at least did much of my youth though lately the move is maybe towards 2-3 hour sessions - and it feels like a lot of solo games max out at around the two hour mark with not all the two hours being used to actually play. This is guesswork on my part, but let's assume I am roughly correct based on the people I've talked to, watched, and interacted with online. 

So while using more variable compression of the scenes to make the journal a bit more impactful is artificial, it actually kind of emulates the way that you might be waiting 15+ minutes for your character to show back up at the table itself.

A Few Other Mentioned Alternatives That Might Work For You

Read the above linked thread for more advice but there were two things that I liked even if they would not really work for me:

• Try better journaling software to take some of the mechanical aspects away, and
• Try writing a journal in a different format - either as a script or as an old school journal. 

For the former, this blog is pretty hand crafted to be the kind of journal I like - warts and all - and as for the latter my tests with other formats just don't quite work. Maybe in the future, though.