Solo RPG toolbox ideas for THW games
Jan 19, 2020 14:49:53 GMT
infierno, easyeight, and 11 more like this
Post by davidlhsl on Jan 19, 2020 14:49:53 GMT
I've been meaning to share this for some time, but never got around to it. I now have a round tuit, so here goes:
Some Tools for Enhancing Role-Playing in Your THW Encounters
Shout Outs!
No mention of solo roleplaying would be complete without giving a shout-out to the book "Mythic GM Emulator" by Tana Pigeon. While you might not use all of the tools she provides, her thorough discussion of the topic of solo RPG along with providing numerous application examples are nevertheless invaluable. I can't recommend this more highly, and the two Variations booklets released afterwards are also great add-ons. See www.wordmillgames.com or www.drivethrurpg.com.
I also highly recommend the Gamemaster's Apprentice decks of cards designed by Nathan Rockwood. These are available at www.rpgnow.com in both pdf and physical playing card format.
Youtube has many excellent videos devoted to the topic. Just search "solo rpg." Particularly noteworthy are the series of videos produced by Geek Gamers entitled "Easy Ways to be your own GM (solo RPGing)."
Finally, a massive shout-out to THW games, which is massively underrated as a fantastic solo RPG platform. Their games provide tremendous flexibility in handling a variety of genres, effective fog-of-war mechanics for keeping you in the dark on what you may encounter until you run into them, a method of determining NPC behavior (including NPCs that may accompany your in-game character), persistent characters that you can encounter several times across multiple encounters, and a method of interacting with them beyond just running into bad guys who attack you. You know the place: www.twohourwargames.com, but there are other books formerly at THW's site now at www.rebelminis.com/rulessystems.html.
Let's Get Started...
I'm now going to share three tools I've been using extensively in my THW encounters. The first is inspired by the Fate Chart from the "Mythic GM Emulator," though the method I'll share is more basic and easier to use. It's possible that someone else has developed a system similar to what I'll share.
The other two are tools provided by THW itself, although you'll see that I'll embellish them to make them even more powerful.
Tool #1: Yes/No
If you're playing with a game master (GM), the GM will describe the setting to you as a preface for turning action to the players to see what they will do next. Players can ask the GM questions for clarification and for further details about the situation. If you're playing solo, you're both the GM and the player. However, with a pair of different colored d6, you can actually flesh out your encounters by asking a series of Yes/No questions and rolling the dice to determine the answers.
Roll 2 d6, each a different color. One die is the Yes/No die, the other is the modifier die.
Ask a yes/no question, and determine the chance you think a yes answer would occur:
Highly Unlikely: Target number 1
Unlikely: Target number 2
50/50, Unsure: Target number 3
Likely: Target number 4
Highly Likely: Target number 5.
Roll the dice. If the Yes/No die is <= the target number, the answer is Yes. Otherwise, the answer is No.
If the modifier die = 6, then you get an Exceptional Yes or Exceptional No result.
If the modifier die is 1-5, then you can either ignore the modifier and consider the answer a standard Yes/No result, or you can use the result as a strength of the Yes/No. This can be useful for questions such as “Is the market crowded?” or “Does she know anything about the Big Bad?” where you can have varying degrees of Yes/No:
1: Weak Yes/No
2: Modest Yes/No
3: Average/Standard Yes/No
4: Firm Yes/No
5: Strong Yes/No (but not as strong as an Exceptional result)
The reason the 1-5 result isn’t always applicable is that not all Yes/No answers necessarily have different degrees of the answer. If I ask “Does the bartender have a weapon behind the bar?” and the answer is No, then that's pretty much the answer.
Tool #2: Challenge Tests
Ed Teixeira, the Rep 8 chief of THW, has stated in the forums frequently that the challenge tests are the most underutilized tool in THW rules. This is actually more specific regarding creating your own custom challenges to encounters, because the rules themselves are predominately challenge tests. That fact alone should prove the flexibility of this rule.
When playing an RPG, the GM will frequently ask players to make perception checks, agility checks, persuasion checks... the list goes on and on. In THW terms, these are challenges! You can thus use them in your encounters as you would in an RPG.
I won't recap the rule here, because the rulebooks do that already. However, I would like to embellish this a bit to make this rule even more powerful.
Pass 1d6. The way the table is listed, you have the option of taking the challenge again with a subsequent result of Pass 1d6 resulting in failure (Pass 0d6). However, you can also tweak this to provide more variety in how the challenge operates.
Example: You want to crack open a safe.
Pass 2d6: You open the safe!
Pass 1d6: You aren't able to open the safe just yet. You may attempt the challenge again.
Pass 0d6: You can't open the safe and cannot attempt this challenge further.
This differs from the standard challenge test in that Pass 1d6 doesn't resolve as 0d6 on the second attempt. You can use this to test whether your attempt is interrupted by someone walking in on you.
Example: You want to sneak past a guard.
Pass 2d6: You sneak past the guard.
Pass 1d6: Roll 1d6 vs. the Rep of the guard. If Pass, then the guard catches you. Otherwise, you sneak past the guard.
Pass 0d6: The guard catches you.
If you're playing a THW game that uses activation rolls, then consider this:
Example: You want to crack open a safe. (You are very persistent, you sneaky thief.)
Pass 2d6: You open the safe!
Pass 1d6: The safe doesn't open. You may try again during your next activation.
Pass 036: You can't open the safe and cannot attempt this challenge further.
Do know that you should still use the Pass 1d6 the way it is written in many of your challenges, because it is a fun "push your luck" mechanic.
Example: You want to crack open a safe.
Pass 2d6: You open the safe!
Pass 1d6: The safe doesn't open. You can try one more time, but if you Pass 1d6 on the second attempt, consider it Pass 0d6.
Pass 0d6: You can't open the safe and 1/2 d6 guards walk in and catch you in the act. Confrontation!
Tool #3: Possibilities (also referred to as numbers in parentheses)
Ed thinks the challenge tests are the most underulitized rule, but I would propose that possibility rolls are even more underutilized... except by me. I use this all the time, and it greatly enhances my encounters. Similar to challenge tests, THW rule books use possibility rolls frequently to provide variety in the results you might roll, such as weapons, professions, race, gender, etc.
If you're generating your own story, you can easily fall into a momentum where your story goes into auto-pilot. If you pause during your story and become aware of the parts of the story where things can branch in different ways, you'll find opportunities to make a possibility roll.
Example, using the way you normally play:
You're in a saloon and you resolve a PEF as two cowboys. You perform a Talk the Talk test (aka, Opposed Challenge) and get a Confrontation result. You go immediately into a draw or in sight procedure and start the battle.
That's fun, but consider the possibilities. Try to imagine yourself in this actual situation and consider other ways that the cowboys might act if they don't like you. Those can be possibilities. As a rule of thumb, I try to create 3 possibilities:
Possibility #1: The cowboys stop by your table and loudly insult you, daring you to act. You can either initiate combat, or you can back down and suffer a -1 to your Rep on all future Talk the Talk tests in this town.
Possibility #2: The cowboys trigger a confrontation as normally handled by the rules.
Possibility #3: The cowboys walk by your table and out the door without saying a word or acting unusual. When you end your encounter (thus exiting the saloon), they await outside to ambush you with 1/2 d6 additional cowboys joining them. Proceed to draw / in sight at -2 to your Rep.
Yipes! Now instead of always playing your encounters the same way, you have now opened your encounters to more options.
How do you determine what happens? Easy: roll a d6. However, you have several ways to distribute the odds of the result being determined. Some examples:
Even odds: (1-2) Possibility #1, (3-4) Possibility #2, (5-6) Possibility #3.
3-2-1: (1-3) Possibility #1, (4-5) Possibility #2, (6) Possibility #3.
4-1-1: (1-4) Possibility #1, (5) Possibility #2, (6) Possibility #3.
Follow-up roll: (1-4) Possibility #1, (5-6) Roll again, with (1-5) Possibility #2, (6) Possibility #3.
By the way, in my actual game, I rolled the ambush. Me and my party of two other gunslingers were blown to smithereens.
Another use of possibility rolls is to further enhance your challenge tests. That's right, you can combined both tools for a major boost to your gaming!
Example: You want to crack open a safe.
Pass 2d6: You open the safe. You find (1-3) money and the documents you seek, (4-5) the documents you seek, (6) Al Capone's handkerchief.
Pass 1d6: You can try the challenge again. If you do and get Pass 1d6, treat it as Pass 0d6.
Pass 0d6: You can't open the safe. (1) the safe is booby-trapped, (2) a guard walks in and catches you in the act, (3-6) you hear footsteps approaching and have just enough time to escape unnoticed if you leave immediately.
These tools do require imagination and the ability to improvise on-the-fly. If you learn to master these tools, you can greatly enhance your gaming.
Edit: I did forget one item that should be added:
The THW Rulebooks
I think pretty much every THW knows this by now, but I should include it for completeness. All of the THW rule books are an invaluable source of inspiration beyond the genres they cover. The Draw mechanic in Six Gun Sound can be used in a Sci-Fi setting. The Pursuit encounter in 5150: Working Grave can be used in a Fantasy setting when you want to chase down an important group of NPCs that run away in the Will to Fight test.
Don't forget that old-school mechanics are still viable. Do you have 5150: Urban Renewal? You can use the reaction tests, shooting and melee system, and PEF system for table top play if you want to set up a detailed table top battle. You can utilize the testing for successes method in your 2d6 games.
The reverse is also true. Maybe you have a classic version of Six Gun Sounds. Why not plug in the 2d6 system in those rules? You can fight your Warrior Heroes Legends confrontations on the battle board.
With a little extra work, you can reskin the rules in exciting new ways. Do you have Machinas? You can tweak the system to run a political election or businesses on the stock market. Do you like the melee rules? You don't have to use them for hand-to-hand combat. You can use them as a challenge test. For example, you can set up hacking into a computer with a Rep representing difficulty, such as Rep 4. Then use the melee system to use your Rep 5 star to hack into the Rep 4 computer.
Always look for opportunities to cross-pollinate the rules to match what fits your campaign.
Some Tools for Enhancing Role-Playing in Your THW Encounters
Shout Outs!
No mention of solo roleplaying would be complete without giving a shout-out to the book "Mythic GM Emulator" by Tana Pigeon. While you might not use all of the tools she provides, her thorough discussion of the topic of solo RPG along with providing numerous application examples are nevertheless invaluable. I can't recommend this more highly, and the two Variations booklets released afterwards are also great add-ons. See www.wordmillgames.com or www.drivethrurpg.com.
I also highly recommend the Gamemaster's Apprentice decks of cards designed by Nathan Rockwood. These are available at www.rpgnow.com in both pdf and physical playing card format.
Youtube has many excellent videos devoted to the topic. Just search "solo rpg." Particularly noteworthy are the series of videos produced by Geek Gamers entitled "Easy Ways to be your own GM (solo RPGing)."
Finally, a massive shout-out to THW games, which is massively underrated as a fantastic solo RPG platform. Their games provide tremendous flexibility in handling a variety of genres, effective fog-of-war mechanics for keeping you in the dark on what you may encounter until you run into them, a method of determining NPC behavior (including NPCs that may accompany your in-game character), persistent characters that you can encounter several times across multiple encounters, and a method of interacting with them beyond just running into bad guys who attack you. You know the place: www.twohourwargames.com, but there are other books formerly at THW's site now at www.rebelminis.com/rulessystems.html.
Let's Get Started...
I'm now going to share three tools I've been using extensively in my THW encounters. The first is inspired by the Fate Chart from the "Mythic GM Emulator," though the method I'll share is more basic and easier to use. It's possible that someone else has developed a system similar to what I'll share.
The other two are tools provided by THW itself, although you'll see that I'll embellish them to make them even more powerful.
Tool #1: Yes/No
If you're playing with a game master (GM), the GM will describe the setting to you as a preface for turning action to the players to see what they will do next. Players can ask the GM questions for clarification and for further details about the situation. If you're playing solo, you're both the GM and the player. However, with a pair of different colored d6, you can actually flesh out your encounters by asking a series of Yes/No questions and rolling the dice to determine the answers.
Roll 2 d6, each a different color. One die is the Yes/No die, the other is the modifier die.
Ask a yes/no question, and determine the chance you think a yes answer would occur:
Highly Unlikely: Target number 1
Unlikely: Target number 2
50/50, Unsure: Target number 3
Likely: Target number 4
Highly Likely: Target number 5.
Roll the dice. If the Yes/No die is <= the target number, the answer is Yes. Otherwise, the answer is No.
If the modifier die = 6, then you get an Exceptional Yes or Exceptional No result.
If the modifier die is 1-5, then you can either ignore the modifier and consider the answer a standard Yes/No result, or you can use the result as a strength of the Yes/No. This can be useful for questions such as “Is the market crowded?” or “Does she know anything about the Big Bad?” where you can have varying degrees of Yes/No:
1: Weak Yes/No
2: Modest Yes/No
3: Average/Standard Yes/No
4: Firm Yes/No
5: Strong Yes/No (but not as strong as an Exceptional result)
The reason the 1-5 result isn’t always applicable is that not all Yes/No answers necessarily have different degrees of the answer. If I ask “Does the bartender have a weapon behind the bar?” and the answer is No, then that's pretty much the answer.
Tool #2: Challenge Tests
Ed Teixeira, the Rep 8 chief of THW, has stated in the forums frequently that the challenge tests are the most underutilized tool in THW rules. This is actually more specific regarding creating your own custom challenges to encounters, because the rules themselves are predominately challenge tests. That fact alone should prove the flexibility of this rule.
When playing an RPG, the GM will frequently ask players to make perception checks, agility checks, persuasion checks... the list goes on and on. In THW terms, these are challenges! You can thus use them in your encounters as you would in an RPG.
I won't recap the rule here, because the rulebooks do that already. However, I would like to embellish this a bit to make this rule even more powerful.
Pass 1d6. The way the table is listed, you have the option of taking the challenge again with a subsequent result of Pass 1d6 resulting in failure (Pass 0d6). However, you can also tweak this to provide more variety in how the challenge operates.
Example: You want to crack open a safe.
Pass 2d6: You open the safe!
Pass 1d6: You aren't able to open the safe just yet. You may attempt the challenge again.
Pass 0d6: You can't open the safe and cannot attempt this challenge further.
This differs from the standard challenge test in that Pass 1d6 doesn't resolve as 0d6 on the second attempt. You can use this to test whether your attempt is interrupted by someone walking in on you.
Example: You want to sneak past a guard.
Pass 2d6: You sneak past the guard.
Pass 1d6: Roll 1d6 vs. the Rep of the guard. If Pass, then the guard catches you. Otherwise, you sneak past the guard.
Pass 0d6: The guard catches you.
If you're playing a THW game that uses activation rolls, then consider this:
Example: You want to crack open a safe. (You are very persistent, you sneaky thief.)
Pass 2d6: You open the safe!
Pass 1d6: The safe doesn't open. You may try again during your next activation.
Pass 036: You can't open the safe and cannot attempt this challenge further.
Do know that you should still use the Pass 1d6 the way it is written in many of your challenges, because it is a fun "push your luck" mechanic.
Example: You want to crack open a safe.
Pass 2d6: You open the safe!
Pass 1d6: The safe doesn't open. You can try one more time, but if you Pass 1d6 on the second attempt, consider it Pass 0d6.
Pass 0d6: You can't open the safe and 1/2 d6 guards walk in and catch you in the act. Confrontation!
Tool #3: Possibilities (also referred to as numbers in parentheses)
Ed thinks the challenge tests are the most underulitized rule, but I would propose that possibility rolls are even more underutilized... except by me. I use this all the time, and it greatly enhances my encounters. Similar to challenge tests, THW rule books use possibility rolls frequently to provide variety in the results you might roll, such as weapons, professions, race, gender, etc.
If you're generating your own story, you can easily fall into a momentum where your story goes into auto-pilot. If you pause during your story and become aware of the parts of the story where things can branch in different ways, you'll find opportunities to make a possibility roll.
Example, using the way you normally play:
You're in a saloon and you resolve a PEF as two cowboys. You perform a Talk the Talk test (aka, Opposed Challenge) and get a Confrontation result. You go immediately into a draw or in sight procedure and start the battle.
That's fun, but consider the possibilities. Try to imagine yourself in this actual situation and consider other ways that the cowboys might act if they don't like you. Those can be possibilities. As a rule of thumb, I try to create 3 possibilities:
Possibility #1: The cowboys stop by your table and loudly insult you, daring you to act. You can either initiate combat, or you can back down and suffer a -1 to your Rep on all future Talk the Talk tests in this town.
Possibility #2: The cowboys trigger a confrontation as normally handled by the rules.
Possibility #3: The cowboys walk by your table and out the door without saying a word or acting unusual. When you end your encounter (thus exiting the saloon), they await outside to ambush you with 1/2 d6 additional cowboys joining them. Proceed to draw / in sight at -2 to your Rep.
Yipes! Now instead of always playing your encounters the same way, you have now opened your encounters to more options.
How do you determine what happens? Easy: roll a d6. However, you have several ways to distribute the odds of the result being determined. Some examples:
Even odds: (1-2) Possibility #1, (3-4) Possibility #2, (5-6) Possibility #3.
3-2-1: (1-3) Possibility #1, (4-5) Possibility #2, (6) Possibility #3.
4-1-1: (1-4) Possibility #1, (5) Possibility #2, (6) Possibility #3.
Follow-up roll: (1-4) Possibility #1, (5-6) Roll again, with (1-5) Possibility #2, (6) Possibility #3.
By the way, in my actual game, I rolled the ambush. Me and my party of two other gunslingers were blown to smithereens.
Another use of possibility rolls is to further enhance your challenge tests. That's right, you can combined both tools for a major boost to your gaming!
Example: You want to crack open a safe.
Pass 2d6: You open the safe. You find (1-3) money and the documents you seek, (4-5) the documents you seek, (6) Al Capone's handkerchief.
Pass 1d6: You can try the challenge again. If you do and get Pass 1d6, treat it as Pass 0d6.
Pass 0d6: You can't open the safe. (1) the safe is booby-trapped, (2) a guard walks in and catches you in the act, (3-6) you hear footsteps approaching and have just enough time to escape unnoticed if you leave immediately.
These tools do require imagination and the ability to improvise on-the-fly. If you learn to master these tools, you can greatly enhance your gaming.
Edit: I did forget one item that should be added:
The THW Rulebooks
I think pretty much every THW knows this by now, but I should include it for completeness. All of the THW rule books are an invaluable source of inspiration beyond the genres they cover. The Draw mechanic in Six Gun Sound can be used in a Sci-Fi setting. The Pursuit encounter in 5150: Working Grave can be used in a Fantasy setting when you want to chase down an important group of NPCs that run away in the Will to Fight test.
Don't forget that old-school mechanics are still viable. Do you have 5150: Urban Renewal? You can use the reaction tests, shooting and melee system, and PEF system for table top play if you want to set up a detailed table top battle. You can utilize the testing for successes method in your 2d6 games.
The reverse is also true. Maybe you have a classic version of Six Gun Sounds. Why not plug in the 2d6 system in those rules? You can fight your Warrior Heroes Legends confrontations on the battle board.
With a little extra work, you can reskin the rules in exciting new ways. Do you have Machinas? You can tweak the system to run a political election or businesses on the stock market. Do you like the melee rules? You don't have to use them for hand-to-hand combat. You can use them as a challenge test. For example, you can set up hacking into a computer with a Rep representing difficulty, such as Rep 4. Then use the melee system to use your Rep 5 star to hack into the Rep 4 computer.
Always look for opportunities to cross-pollinate the rules to match what fits your campaign.
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