Stat It: Five Star Wars From Home

Five Parsecs from Home looks to be the best means to play a sci-fi open world campaign (or rather open galaxy?) as it plays out in an episodic story of a motley crew of space-faring mercs with randomized events that go on between different planets, supplying both a gamist and narrativist effect while giving a simulationist feel once you get your boots on the ground in the battle portions of the game.

However, the game is primarily for skirmishes, which means you will need quite a lot of minis and terrains, as well as a different view of how to move units and attack. Basically, it’s less like playing D&D and more like playing Warhammer. Even with the Freelancers Handbook, it feels rather a little too complex for me to jump right into it…

Luckily for me, though, there’s a spacefaring game that I want to play for a very long time and this would serve as the perfect framework. Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars RPG is well known for its unique dice mechanics and character customization and I’ve been meaning to do a solo game on it for a long time. And, to my good fortune, there’s even a solo oracle that works well with the Genesys system, assuming I would need to ask questions along the way.

Let’s get to work with creating our crew first.

Alice is Missing, Impossible to Solo?

I think I found the first game that I’ve come across that can’t be soloable. Now, granted, I’ve come across some games in the past that have had that similar moniker before, but in those cases, the rules were inconsistent and incomplete at best and problematic at worst.

This is a case where the rules are not only complete and playable, but it has strong and heavy themes that befit a teen drama. The game I’m talking about is Alice is Missing, and if you are familiar with it, you’ll know exactly why I might be stumped.

Why Do I Do Remembrance Day Posts?

As some of you know, I make it a tradition to write one article that has to do with Remembrance Day, be it a solo game or even write up solo rules. However, this year, I want to spice things up and instead, write an article on why I choose this day out of all holidays of the year to keep this tradition alive when all others I’ve left to the curb.

At first, I began this tradition simply because I found a neat game to play that I wanted to play repeatedly whenever the time comes to play it. Though, another part of the reason was because the holiday holds a very special meaning in my country, honoring the many people who both placed their lives on the line and sacrificed them to ensure the peace we have now to play games like the ones we have now.

Stat It: Dominion Rules

The newest season of Me, Myself, and Die (or Season 3 if you’re reading this sometime after this is posted) had been a pretty good rollercoaster of mystery as both Trevor and the audience piece together what happened to Edbert that landed him on a deserted island with pirates chasing him. It recently concluded on an amazing note that gave Egbert the closure to his character arc that began all the way back in Season 1 and is a testament to just how high a quality campaign people can make their solo games.

Running the mechanics for the third season is a rather obscure RPG. Whereas Savage Worlds had some popularity and Ironsworn is the quintessential soloist RPG, Dominion Rules is obscure to say the least. Without specifying the RPG, you might end up finding rules to the Deck Building Game Dominion. In fact, googling Roll20 Dominion gets me results for exactly how one were to make assets for said card game.

This essentially means that Roll20 and Foundry don’t have the sheet programmed in. Foundry has improved quite a bit to the point where there’s a few systems that allow you to make your own system, but you still need to figure out how to maneuver the programming, which is doable, though I simply want to create a character for Dominion and not an entire system for it.

While Astral would be able to patch this problem up, it unfortunately died at the end of August, so that brought me back to square one (not that I really enjoyed playing it since I found it to be resource intensive compared to Roll20 or Foundry). This means this will be one of the few times I’ll have to make the sheet by hand, something I will show at the end of the Stat It.

The Fabletop Campaign Reboot, Session 1

A long time ago, I decided to get serious in doing a campaign for a game called Fabletop, a virtual tabletop that uses its own built-in universal RPG system. However, the site I published it on no longer has any sort of functionality. So, I decided to reboot the Fabletop Campaign for this blog.

We’ll start in a tavern where we’re introduced to our protagonist, Red the Rogue. Character creation is rather easy since you just select what sort of class and feel of the character you want to make.

Anyways, the tavern has four different people. Two guards, a drunk, and a bartender.

Spotlight Mini: The Auger

This is going to be a brief post, namely because I have not purchased the Auger and so I can’t put it through an in-depth look like I did with Foundry.

Though that is a good segue into this post. One of the downsides to Foundry was its asking price of $50 USD plus tax. While it now has a plethora of RPG systems and tools to help facilitate a solo gaming experience, you are paying a hefty amount of money which can be a deal breaker for some people.

Which is why I’m happy to talk about the Auger, a program that costs $20 USD. Practically half the price of Foundry. From the screenshots alone, it has the feeling of an old-school computer RPG where you have a character status screen, an over world map to explore, and even a scene where you can fight monster.

Mortzes and Ricksters: Post Mortym

So, having finished playing the Rick and Morty dungeon module, I have quite a lot of thoughts on both playing the module and playing it solo. Of course, minor spoilers for the module ahead:

As a stand-alone dungeon, this is one of the more unique dungeons I have ever played in. Not every room is a straight forward “kill all the bad guys” scenario and in fact some of the rooms actively discourage you from killing or otherwise have a heavy emphasis on roleplaying being the solution. The writing is also rather humorous (it helps that meta humor is my favorite type) and, in the hands of the right DM, has the potential to be the funniest officially published D&D Adventure for the Fifth Edition. Maybe even just D&D in general.

Mortzes And Ricksters Part 2: It’s A Far Out Game

Alright, in this post, we’ll try to finish the dungeon featured in the Rick and Morty D&D Game: The Lost Dungeon of Rickedness. When we last left off our heroes, they had just resolved a conflict between people with asses and people without asses. Like that Dr. Seuss book on crack. And now, we continue onwards.

The Most Common Complaint On Solo Roleplaying and Why It Ultimately Doesn’t Matter

A common complaint seen with solo roleplaying is how the process is so isolated that there’s no true back and forth like a usual RPG. That, even with using randomized numbers with a fixed yes-to-no ratio based on either odds or situational context or even creating randomized events that your character has to overcome, you’re still just wearing the hat of a GM before switching it out for a player’s. This often leads to a question I think a lot of people will hear when talking about solo roleplaying:

“Isn’t it a lot like writing then?”

And that’s… honestly a good question. It’s definitely one that you’ll have different answers to depending on who you ask. Obviously, if you’re playing a solo game for the sake of the game, such as playing the Micro RPG chapbooks, then no. It’s not like writing at all. Same if you just play the game to get a feel for how your character or the world reacts and responds. These two aspects rely more on the crunch of a game rather than its fluff.

However, there is a serious question here if you care more for the story. You have the final say of what happens, after all, so, wouldn’t it just be the same as writing a book?

This article is here to debunk that question, and it will do so with one simple explanation: No, you don’t have a final say.

Witchy Superheroes

Gonna preface this now, we’re dealing with witch trials and a cult preforming human sacrifices. Yeah, it’s one of those sessions.

So, unfortunately, I was unable to complete The Lost Dungeon of Rickedness for Solo Gaming Appreciation Month. Rather than release part 2 and then make part 3, however, I decided to take a look at another journaling game, as its premise had grabbed my interest: No Witches, Just Superheroes.

The setting’s premise speaks for itself: superheroes, but they’ve been time warped to the era of Witch Trials. Basically, if anything went wrong, people would just point to someone, call them a witch, burn them at the stake, then let God sort it out. There’s a lot of nice narrative potential with this and the game was pretty cheap, so I bought it and dedicated these last days of November to playing it.

So, who is our superhero? Well, I think a Time-based superhero would be cool since that can explain why he was able to time travel. While the game says that he’s unable to, my idea could be that his powers went out of control.

He’ll need a name… Hm… [roll] Royal Timeless Cosmic. … Okay, let me shuffle this around. Timeless Cosmic Royale. There we go. His backstory could be that he is a cosmic entity representing time itself but had the trouble of adjusting to the physical plane and, as a result, his powers are considerably nerfed.

Now, the game offers a physical feature to the game in that the three Witch Trials require real world items. Fire trials require burnable material, water trials require a bowl of water, and the scratching trials require paper. Though, this is flavor-wise. As this is mostly done through writing a computer with the deck drawing done through Tabletop Simulator, I won’t really be doing these activities, but I can see these adding a sort of investmental vibe to the game.

Without any further to do, let’s begin play.