I finally decided to try solo gaming, and I’ll be totally honest it was way more fun than I was expecting. If you aren’t familiar with the concept there has been a trend in the last few years of folks playing full games of D&D (and other ttrpgs) fully by themselves using a variety of tables to generate dungeons as you crawl through them, arbitrating things as you go. Initially I found the idea daunting but after doing some research I decided to try it out. I bought a new notebook, I rolled up some characters and played a game.
Here’s what I’ve been using for everything so far:
Base System: OSE (I mostly use the SRD because its easy to reference on the fly and I have limited desk space for the amount of spreading out this tends to take.
Dungeon Generation: I’ve been using a combination of the AD&D random dungeon tables and the generation tables in Sandbox Generator. The Empty and Special Rooms in this are great especially and it has a bunch of other neat stuff like magic doors.
Resources and Knowledgeable folks:
SoloDungeonCrawler - these videos are great, especially for understanding the ins and outs of 0D&D and Chainmail, I decided to go with basic myself because that’s the system I tend to run and play games in and I was interested in making myself more familiar with the rules but much of the wisdom here carries over and he uses a few different systems in his playthroughs.
Chaoclypse - Seeing Chao post in a discord chat about solo gaming is what got me wanting to try it. Great channel and substack. The linked post has a ton of good advice for getting started!
So far it’s been a lot of fun, I’ll talk more about specific delves after I finish the comic pages for them. I like the idea of making this a series where I discuss how I arrived at various conclusions and how I decided to arbitrate stuff.
In the meantime, happy delving!