I was incredibly skeptical of solo play. Just seemed like masturbation to me. However, watching Bandit's Keep do a solo play OD&D series on his actual play channel has changed my mind. It's still masturbation, but it's masturbation using a Fleshlight or the like.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLWlyyPUNLSxVSJUJ5hxyqKMDZnE5LQ9M

Whoa, that's an impressive play list.  Will have to dip my toe in the water.

Quote from: zircher on November 09, 2023, 08:22:07 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on November 09, 2023, 01:15:12 PM
I get a lot of request for solo rules for my games lately. So from my vantage point, it looks like there is more interest in this (I just honestly don't know enough about solo RPGs to really make anything at this point)

If you want to give that a stab, take a look at what Part Per Million does.  He writes a lot of system specific solo tools and that might give you some inspiration.  In a nut shell, you want an oracle that uses the same dice and/or mechanics as your main game.  For example Traveller/Cepheus Engine uses 2d6 for everything, so a 2d6 based oracle makes sense along with d66 tables for encounters, events, NPCs/patrons, and such.

My games are all d10 dice pools where you roll and take the single highest result. How close to your core system does the oracle need to be (i.e. is it likely I would find an existing solo RPG to direct people to for my game or is this something where I am better off making something myself)

Given such a system, I would embrace that.  For the oracle, have a 'likelihood' value and vary that from 1=very unlike to 5= high probability.  So, ask the question, determine the rough odds, roll the dice, and see if the answer is yes/success.  To make it more spicy, add something like rolling 1's add a negative trait to the answer with rolling 10's adds a positive trait.  This models 'no, and/but' and 'yes, and/but' answers and perhaps allows for some plot twists.  Of course, tweak to match your actual success probabilities.

For example, you want to ask the oracle "Is the door locked?"  You figure that is 50/50 and roll 3d10 getting 1, 9, and 9.  So, yes the door is locked, and there is something negative.  Perhaps it has a cypher lock on it.

Of course, there is a lot more you can do with that.  And doing some homework will help.  You can always start with CRGE (a freebie over on DTRPG) as an example.  What you may notice quickly is that there is an 'art of the asking the question'.  This is normal, you can ask silly questions and you should expect silly results.

What about using GAI like ChatGPT?

The latest versions are pretty good, the trick is to ask leading questions and re-integrate past details (due to the limited number of tokens.)  The downside for me is that local versions of the various text AI are not good enough and I get frequent AI 'hallucinations'.