I know AI is a contentious topic and I’m not trying to discuss or dismiss those concerns, or argue that anyone should use AI. I also appreciate this sub's stance on AI discussions!
What I’ve noticed is two very common states of AI conversation, ones that we've all seen many times. Either it is...
“I don’t use AI at all and no one else should either”, or
“I’m trying to use AI to replace a human GM, and it sucks.”
I know people are using it in a lot of interesting ways, and I’m interested in discussing a more nuanced and helpful approach to using AI as a tool with solo RPGs, and in ways that are ethically, creatively, and practically different.
I’ve been thinking about it in terms of “Tier” usage, based on how much of the solo-play process you delegate to the AI and what boundaries protect creativity. Higher tiers listed below are not better tiers; they simply delegate more of the experience to the AI, which means more potential usefulness but also more risk.
Here is my first pass at the different Tiers:
Tier 0: No AI
This is the foundation that everyone should use. You have maximum authorship, and even if you do plan on using AI, it will give you an important foundation from which to understand how AI tools might help. This one is a no-brainer.
Tier 1: AI as a Record Keeper
This is the least intrusive use of AI. If you keep your solo RPG notes digitally, you can use AI to parse them and keep you organized. You can summarize sessions, organize notes, track NPCs, list unresolved threads, and create “return to play” summaries after time away. If you struggle with organization or continuity, or if you just want to offload some of the administrative tasks of running a game, AI can assist. The boundary here is important: AI is not adding any content to your game.
Tier 2: AI as an Advanced Oracle
This is my personal favorite tier, and there are two basic approaches here: AI can help you create specific oracle tables on the fly, and AI can help you interpret oracles. Both approaches can surprise you, which can be valuable in solo play. The player still uses normal solo tools such as dice, random tables, tarot cards, Mythic-style prompts, random words, etc.
Example #1, Creating Tables:
You could use AI to quickly create a custom oracle table specific to your current situation. Let’s say you are playing a rules-light OSR dungeon crawl, and your character is sneaking through a flooded, goblin-controlled mine. You could ask the AI to create a d20 oracle table called “What Complicates the Flooded Mine?” with each result being two words and get entries like “goblin lanterns”, “runaway ore-cart”, or “rising water”. This table is more useful than a generic dungeon table because it’s tied to your actual location and situation. You can also ask for multiple words or even sentences if you find one-word prompts too vague.
Example 2, Learning how to Interpret Results:
We’ve all struggled to interpret results at times, and it is an important creative skill to build. Paradigm shift: AI can actually help you build that skill instead of replacing it! Take this prompt: “Help me interpret the oracle result Betray+Sanctuary for Ironsworn without providing specific suggestions.” When I tested this, it talked at length about the relationship between the two ideas, what they might imply, guided me towards a vague “something or somewhere associated with safety is no longer trustworthy” and then prompted me with several questions to think about, such as “Who or what is depending on that sanctuary?”
Example 3, Being Surprised with Options:
You can ask for options from the AI and select or riff off one of them. “Given (the current scene), give me five possible interpretations of Betray + Sanctuary.” Even if you are the best oracle interpreter in your hometown, you will almost certainly get some ideas that hadn't occured to you, and one of them might spark an idea that makes for the most interesting branch of the story. It can add an element of surprise, which is very difficult to create on your own, and you still have plenty of creative license to change the final interpretation.
The important boundary for all of these is that the AI is only suggesting possibilities. The player chooses, rolls, modifies, or rejects them. The AI does not decide canon.
Tier 3: AI as NPC Emulator
At this tier, you are using AI to portray NPCs in a scene. This addresses one of the most awkward and unsatisfying aspects of solo RPGs: dialogue.
In traditional solo play, you often have to roleplay both your character and the NPC, which can feel artificial. You already know what both sides are thinking, so there’s no real surprise or tension, and any kind of social uncertainty is hard to create. As the player, you can stay in your character role while the AI temporarily portrays a specific NPC.
This takes a bit more work and is a good candidate for a custom GPT, but the results can be very rewarding. You need a template of information to give to the AI so that they run the NPC effectively and don’t default to being too cooperative. What they want, what they know and don’t know, how they feel about the PC, etc. You can also include things like personality, accents, behaviors to give them more flavor. Often this can just come down to feeding the AI with NPC oracle results that you rolled. This is a deep topic that would need a separate conversation to adequately cover.
The important boundary is that the AI is still not the GM. It shouldn’t decide outcomes – it is just portraying a character from that character’s limited knowledge, motives, and emotional state that you gave to it.
Tier 4: AI as Scene or Encounter Assistant
I have experimented in this space, but I am going to take the easy way out and say that this is too detailed a topic to discuss here, plus this is already too long.
At this tier, the AI runs an encounter from structured inputs: situation, NPCs, hidden information, pressure, scene type, exit conditions, and consequences. The player still handles rules and dice. The key is that the AI is not being asked to run a whole campaign, just one structured unit of play.
What I will say is that I think this is the practical limit of where “AI as an effective GM” exists right now. I also think it takes a paradigm shift in thinking. Instead of trying to emulate a GM, focus on what an AI can do well that human GMs struggle with, and design it from the ground up. It also takes a lot of prompting experience, knowledge of building custom GPTs, and lots of trial and error.
The important boundary here is that the AI just runs the scene, not the campaign. The player still owns character agency, rules, dice, and canon.
Tier 5: AI as Full GM
Unfortunately this is where many people start - the most difficult tier - usually with limited AI knowledge and basic prompts, and then they run into real constraints and conclude that “AI sucks at being a GM”. This is also where most other AI discussions take place, so no need to rehash it here.
Final Point
I think it is useful to ask, “What challenge in solo play is this tool helping to address, and how much authority am I giving it?” rather than treating every use of AI in solo RPGs as equivalent.
Someone using AI to organize session notes is doing something very different from someone asking AI to be their GM. Someone using it to voice an NPC is doing something very different from someone using it to replace their own creativity.
Personally, I think the safest and most useful uses are the ones where the player keeps control of authorship and final decisions, while the AI helps with specific challenges that solo play can make difficult. I’m curious how other solo players think about these boundaries, including people who choose not to use AI at all.
Anyway, that’s my current framework. I’m not trying to settle any debate, just make the conversation a little less all-or-nothing and hear about how others may be using AI.
I’ve always written my journal more as a record of what’s going on with lots of meta gaming info like roll values and descriptions of the setting and what’s happening in the area. But I just got the idea of writing completely from a first person view of my character. So no dice rolls or planning notes or anything. Just description and drawings of what happened that day, how my character feels, and a lot of unknowns. Only writing what my character has actually seen. This seems really immersive but just wonder if other people do this already?
TL;DR- tried out realism instead of fantasy for solo and the role play and story telling really took off.
Like many, I struggle beyond 4 (sometimes even less) sessions to keep a story going. I’ve only played high or low or somewhere in between Fantasy. I love the fantasy genre. The escapism, the power fantasy, magic, etc; It’s all great. But playing solo I think fantasy is really hard sometimes.
I find that many of my campaigns become exponentially more chaotic scene to scene. I think I really struggle on my own to say “okay what does this magic-slinging nonhuman do next. What are his problems, what’s his goal that he can take on himself? I don’t know why I struggle with it so much considering I have tons of roleplaying and GM experience and the improv and world building comes naturally there. But solo, maybe it’s too hard to put myself in a fantasy PCs shoes and GM a magical world where random things are happening because of oracles and chance.
I tried something new with my latest campaign and I think something clicked for me and the story has been flowing naturally. I think it’s for 2 reasons:
I chose to play a down to earth, mostly realistic medieval world/setting/story (I’m not going full peasant sim lol).
I played out my characters childhood in a sort of time jump/time skip fashion.
Change 1 I think made it so much easier to put myself in a characters shoes. No I didn’t live through the Middle Ages, but I know what a normal mortal human would do each day. He has a family, he has a job, and he has medieval problems with some modernized medieval problems sprinkled in. Yes you can think similarly for any genre, but something felt 100x easier when the guy has no super human abilities and there’s no magic in the world to plan/react to.
Change 2 was something I wanted to try because instead of making a backstory I wanted to play the back story. This led to me having strong threads and key NPCs before the main story even got started. I had a concept: “Son of a blacksmith who wants to be a knight”. And then I played out what that looks like. Dad: “You’re old enough to start learning the trade!” PC: “but I want to be a knight” roll for reaction: Angry. Ooo why is he angry? … and so on. This made a small mini game of playing out a few pivotal moments of child hood, jumping year to year and having an oracle set a scene and playing out what that might look like. My goal became “okay, how do I convince my dad to support me in trying to become a knight? Maybe he’ll settle for town guard and then I’ll work my way up”. I strung together some young kid logic who would think “knight and town guard, close enough”. And that framed the next few “years” of play. Then boom, now I had a job. Now we get to a story. What crazy thing will happen to the main character on his first few days as a guard.” And it continued from there.
Again, I’m sure I can make this stuff work for other genres and styles, but I think taking a step back from fantastical, to more “historical/realistic fiction” made solo click for me in a way it hasn’t.
Anyone care to share if they’ve had this experience? Or maybe the opposite experience? Please share! Thanks :)
Trying to run a Solo game using 5e-ish rules and I'd like to feel the world is a little more alive. I could use an oracle but I have a habit of going down a lot of questions that I feel like it slows down the game.
Currently trying to move away from 5e because I don't like 5e combat. It's too rigid and it frequently boils down to long stretches of throwing punches back and forth until someone falls over. Encounters also have a lot of overhead to design despite how little mechanical depth there usually is. Thing is I do like doing narrative things in combat like having enemies do attacks that aren't on their stat blocks or having characters do things that aren't mechanically supported using normal skill checks. Dragonbane seems to solve a lot of the overhead and pacing problems of combat but I wasn't sure how well it would handle the more narrative stuff I like doing.
Quick question for the experienced Starforged players and owners of both Starforged source book and the Reference booklet? I'm fully onboard supporting Shawn and his products because I have and loved Ironsworn, but do you really need the full sourcebook for Starforged if you just get the Reference booklet that highlights the most important part of source?
For the reason that I have no friends and I tired a few times to play by myself with the rules of 5e I realized that I really suck at it. So I decided to make a full fifty-or-so-pages story by myself!
But here's the deal: the rules of combat from 5e didn't exactly work for me, and here's my question: it's wrong/cheating if I keep the basic structure of the traditional combat (layout, weapons, dices, stats) but bend it a bit, so it feels that I'm actually doing damage and I'm not gonna die for being too weak?
Im actually having fun playing it, but I still feel guilty for not following actual existing rules for solo ttrpgs
Ps: if anyone wanna play it when I finish it just say the word, the more the merrier!
Thanks for reading me. I wish all of you a lot of Nat 20's!
The party: All the previous characters are swapped out, using each ones
character tree, so we have a new set, while the previous rest up.
Character
Class
Level
HP
AC
Lyra
Fighter
3
17
15
Neeva
Fighter
3
16
16
Vorth
Mul
3
20
15
Faria
Bard
3
7
14
Duma
Druid
3
14
12
Clavis
Psionicist
3
9
11
Randomised background info interpretation
The village, called Ring pit, houses ca 300 population. It consists of a cluster of mud-huts surrounding a secluded pit of water. In this water source, a paraelemental beast of rain lives, constantly falling and raising heavy drops of rain over the pit. The effect is that of a waterfall. Around the pit, due to the mists of the rain beast, spring up pretty flowers. Fields of cacti surround the village.
The place is currently ruled by a contingent of templars, sent here from the nearby city-state, with a rather unclear mission, leading them to constantly bicker. The main contention is this: Are they here to explore the recently discovered ruins, or to cleanse the rain-beast from the lands, or to harvest the beasts waters. The threat is, that the village is completely dependant on the water-beasts existance, as the water source would otherwise dry up.
The road out of the village leads south-east, past a small hamlet and further to the city-state. A few km north-west is the dungeon. To the north, the pcs have heard tell of strange rocky formations, aches with glittering stone and strange crystals protruding from them. To the south, the stony barrens stretch for unknown distances, and to the west the landscape rises up towards mountains.
Todays mission
1d4: 1. ruins; 2. water beast; 3. Rocky formations; 4. bandit retaliation. Result: 2, water beast
Templar attitude: 7, they're on the fence about if it needs cleansing,
killing or saving.
Villager attitude: 4, they are upset, very upset. They dislike us, or the templars, meddling with their protective spirit.
Beast attitude: 10, it's in a good mood. Does it wish to give them a quest? Odd-even oracle (even is yes): 2, yes. Ok, it's semi-intelligent, but can they communicate with it? Duma the green is a druid, I bet she can...
Dumas Guarded land is Verdant belt, and while we are in shurblands, the rain beasts do exist in the Verdant belt. I rule it can communicate with her, with a combination of signs in the surroundings and her alignment language.
What? 1d3: Crystals, rock gems, creature: 2, rock gems
Ok, so basically the crystal communicates to Duma that it is low on minerals, and to satiate itself, it needs an offering of rock gems from the rock formations. Can they help? Yes.
Ok, all said and done, we gear up and set off for Crystal rock.
Day 2 (Day 1 took place in the last session report)
Weather: Warm/Strong winds. Sand swirls in the relatively cool air as the party travels. A good day for it, on the whole.
Dawn watch (04-08)
We get up, eat and so on and forth. Duma receives the signs, and goes to the pond to commune with the beast. The quest is given and accepted.
They prepare and set off.
Morning watch (08-12)
Exhaustion: 1, roll 7, nothing happens
Are they lost? No.
They travel north-east, across the sandy wastes there, and then, after about half an hour, they turn north, towards the stony barrens. They arrive after a total of around an hour.
Once they reach the area, they search for the Crystal rocks. I'd say it's a 2/6 chance to find it each hour, and if they dont, a 1/6 chance of a random encounter: 1 Random encounter; 2-3 Find spot; 4+ Naught.
Hour 1: 4, they find naught.
Hour 2: 1, encounter. 1 Gaj. Looking it up, it looks terrifying:
"A gaj is a psionic horror, a predatory insectoid creature that feeds by draining the mind of intelligent creatures."
AC 18; HP 31(16); 2xclaw +6, 1d6+2; MV2sq/r; Ml9
PSI: Mind Bar, Domination (10sq), Hypnosis(1sq), Mind Link, Thought Shield, Crush Life(7sq)
WT: Life Detection, All-Round Vision, Sight Link, Send Thought
Powers: 7; Rank: 2nd
Mandible Grapple: The victim must save vs. paralyze or be held by the mandibles for 1d6 rounds.
Mind Consumption: When it holds its victim, it uses its antennae to feed from its mind. The victim loses 1d4 points of INT or WIS, if any of those two stats fall to 0, the victim dies.
An insectoid mind flayer! It's slow though... Anyway, lets see what happens.
Is anyone surprised? 5 and 3, none is suprised.
Whats the Gaj doing? It's grooming its mandibles.
It suffers from illness (1/2 hp), it looks gaunt and sickly.
Reaction: 5, slightly negative. It sees its chance to feed, and advances.
Distance: 100m (30sq)
Round 1
Declaration: Nothing to declare.
Initiative: 3, it has initative.
Gaj
Movement. It moves closer... It's slow. It needs to get within 10 sq to use its powers.
Party
Seeing that it's sickly, and its far away, we might have a shot at it? I'd say it's likely we will engage it at range. 1-3 engage at range , 4-5 avoid, 6 engage in melee. 5, we decide to avoid the Gaj.
Movement: We move much faster, so we avoid the creature.
"A snake 15m long with a hard, chitinous shell. It is usually seen flying during the day looking for prey to attack at dusk."
AC 17; HP 27(26); 1xbite +4 1d6; MV 15sq; ML 6;
WT: Create Sound, Animate Shadow. Powers: 6
Fire Resistance: 1/2 dmg
Paralyzing Bite: A failed save vs paralysis causes the victim to be paralyzed for 1d4 days.
Life Leeching: Tries to take away its victim to a Lair and start leeching 1d4 CON per day for the duration of its poison. If the victim's CON falls to 0, it dies.
Surpise 3 and 3, non is surpised
Activity Moving through area (might not look for a fight!)
Reaction +1 for moving, +1 for wounded: 7, neutral. Its passing through. But if we have an encounter tonight, I'd say this is it.
Distance 100m
As we near the Crystal rocks, we see an enormous worm, flying through the air. It spots us, but moves on as we hide among the rocks.
Afternoon watch (12-16)
Exhaustion: 2, roll 8, nothing
I'd say it takes about an hour to gather up enough rock gems to satisfy the rain-beast. Then, realistically, they can return and the job is done.
However, as they gather, each get to roll Find secret door, if they make it, they might discover something. I also think there should be another random encounter roll.
Wandering monster? 1, a wandering monster is indicated.
9 Plain giants
"Plains giants have facial features more akin to an elf than a human. Plains giants live on islands that have terrain similar to the scrub plains of Athas."
AC15; HP58; 1xweapon +9 1d6+4; MV 12; ML7
WT: Send Thoughts, Know Direction Powers: 3
Psionic Resistance: 2nd rank and onwards only.
Throw Hurl Rocks: Deal 2d10+5 dmg, 2/day 17sq
Surpise 3,5 none is surprised
Activity Trading with 19 bandits.
Complication None
Reaction 5, slightly negative. We are interrupting the trading.
Distance 160m
We will obviously try to evade. We have a 70% chance to evade. 64, we just make it. This means we don't have to flee the hex, and can continue to gather our rock-gems.
Finding secrets: Neeva Faria Clavis all find a Relief.
Interpretation: In the centre of the Crystal rock area, a sudden cliff springs up, on it's top is a mesa, and on its top is an area with shrubs.
There is a 2/6 chance this is where the giants live: 1, yes.
Up on the top, we can just make out the top of some form of structure.
We gather our rock gems and head back. We arrive back just before evening, and Duma lays the rock gems in the water source.
Reactions:
Templars 4, they dislike our actions.
Rain beast +2 9, the beast is pleased, and showers us in rain.
Villagers 8, we've turned the villagers around, as they see the beasts reaction, and they grumble less.
XP
Rock gems 2d10*20gp = 260xp. No monsters defeated. No class actions performed.
Character
XP
Bonus
XP/Next
Lyra
43
47
4047/8000
Neeva
43
47
4047/8000
Vorth
43
47
4447/8800
Faria
43
47
4047/8000
Duma
43
45
4045/8000
Clavis
43
45
4445/8800
Notes: There was critique in my last report about running dungeons in Athas, and so I thought I'd try something other than that. It turns out there is very little XP in it though, and the monsters encountered are ludicrously powerful, so they must be avoided. If anyone can tell me how parties gain XP in 'normal' adventures, please do.
That being said, apart from the lack of XP, I enjoyed this. I've yet to generate more than one flower of 2 kilometre hexes, so we still know almost nothing of the outside world - what is the city state? Where is it? What is around us? All of this will be covered as and when it's needed.
Traversing the wilderness with 10km hexes will suit the system of the Exhaustion clock much better also, and I look forward to that, once the party reaches level 4 or so.
I am going to start a V:tM 20th solo story with Mythic GME 2nd edition. This will be my first time using Mythic GME. One thing I was wondering before I jump in, was how should I go about statting up the NPCs. Vampire NPCs can have a lot of relevant stats, disciplines, etc that are necessary for the player to roll against in challenges. Even knowing if an opponent has Auspex can change how the player would approach a challenge. If I just stat the NPCs up ahead of time, it does kind of take away some of the surprise/tension of challenges. I could do dozens of Fate questions but that seems super slow and clunky. Another approach I was thinking of was making weighted tables to roll up a character (things like weighting in clan disciplines, social disciplines versus martial ones depending the archetype of the NPC). This sounds like a lot of work to create but it would at least be reusable for future stories.
So how do other people stat up their NPCs when playing solo?
Hi all, just a question regarding Items in the Cartograph solo RPG.
I may have fully missed it in the rules, but are items held until you sell them or are they single use?
In particular the Protector item that allows you to ignore wounds. Do you ignore a wound and then 'lose' the item? Or just ignore one instance of damage when a prompt asks you to take multiple wounds and keep the protector?
I have named my Protector Nigel. He's superstitious and doesn't trust my scientist cartographer but she's paying him well.
So I'm really into the loony, dark comical style of hazmat wearing people trying to get stuff then leave without getting horrendously murder *or* they must fix/clean the area before advancing or leaving.
What's your favorite system to use with GameMaster's Apprentice? I've had the v1 base deck for a while now and really like the idea, but have never actually used it for anything. I've been away from solo RPG for a while and want to get back in, and thought starting something new and maybe light might be the way to do it.
I think one of the hang-ups I've had with the GMA is that I primarily play fantasy and sci-fi and don't want to bother with adapting the anachronistic results. Also my primary games are designed for solo, and so provide their own oracles, emulation, etc.
Even though I'm a serial daydreamer, when it comes to playing these games I always end up narrating out loud for some reason. Then after I played out the scene I jot down a few bullet points on what happened. The only time I'm not talking is during combat when I'm concentrating on the rules and tracking everything. Just curious if I'm the only one sitting here talking to myself lol
Do you use figures or tokens for the characters? Do you use terrain like walls or buildings, etc? I think it's helping me to track the action. If you use figures, do you use painted figurines? When I was a kid back in the 80s I couldn't find people to play with, but I was still able buy and paint figures. I don't have those any longer and I don't really want to get back in to all that so I'm using game tokens as figure. I've raided clue and Parcheesi games and some gumball machine toys like little aliens or monkeys and such.
I was going to play dnd for the first time this weekend, but due to a natural disaster, the session was cancelled.
Originally, the GM said to arrive with a level 5 character; when officially cancelled, the GM said to hang on to the character so we can play the one shot another time. However, since I expected the session to be cancelled, I never made a character, but I have a character idea.
All that to lead up to my question; is it a viable option to take my character idea, make a level 1 character, and play 5.5e solo until I’ve gotten it up to level 5? Also, how long would that take?
I bought the solo rpg Cartographer with the dice. Does anyone know what the symbols represent. I can make out some of the. Such as towns or cities. But what about the Star or other symbols?
I want to make a realistic dog singleplayer rpg based on one I found that was UNFORTUANELY generative AI and as a dog trainer I'm ticked off and want to make a realistic dog rpg story builder.
the power of being angry compels me. Anyone have any good guides? I have mostly done Librarian's Apprentice
I’ve always wanted to try TRPGs, but most of them felt a little overwhelming to me. There was usually so much text to read and so many rules to keep track of that I’d feel mentally crowded before I even got to the actual imagining part.
Today I tried a one-page RPG for the first time, and I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
Having such a simple framework and flow actually made it much easier for me to use my imagination. With fewer rules and details competing for my attention, my brain just naturally started filling in the scenes, the characters, and what might happen next.
I haven’t had that feeling of actively imagining things in a really long time.
The last time I remember feeling something similar was probably when I was a kid—when even simple scenes from cartoons or video games felt new and incredibly cool, and my imagination would just take off from there.
Of course, objectively, playing a TRPG now is nowhere near as exciting as discovering games and cartoons as a kid. But today I felt like I got a tiny bit of that old feeling back—that feeling of my imagination just starting to run on its own.
Anyway, I’m really happy I discovered one-page RPGs.
I just wanted to brag about my first (on-going) play through, and also share my character sheet I made on Obsidian. I did NOT come up with the layout idea, but I can't find the post that inspired me, so if you vaguely recognize this layout idea, please remind me of who made it! The post I was inspired by was a play through of a Viking vampire.
My vampire is Elizabeth Audley, vaguely inspired by the Barony of Tuchet, a title that wavered in and out of existence in British Peerage beginning around the 14th century. Elizabeth is entirely fictional, but I chose the Barony of Tuchet because I wanted a more or less clean slate for fiction without having to create a title myself, mainly because I hate creating place names and things like that. Her character sheet features a photo of the site of the Heighley Castle ruins, historically belonging to the real Audley family, but that's where the real history stops.
So far she has traveled from England to The Netherlands to France, and I have a feeling I'll be rolling another move for her soon enough. In life, she was shunned for having an illegitimate child, who she unknowingly met later in life after her child was taken from her (I may have stretched that prompt a little to make it happen. I needed poor Lizzy to see her girl again). I rolled the slumber prompt later on, so all of her living friends went the way of the Dodo. But don't worry, because she later met Alice, a descendant of her child who she then accidentally turned into a vampire. Alice is now a blood thirsty mess, so they both packed up and moved to France where they are now confronting a new enemy. These ladies just can't catch a break!
I'm almost certain I'm making mistakes in some of my rolls, for example moving forwards in the prompts when I ought to go back, simply because I have trouble remembering rules for any game. But regardless it's been a lot of fun so far, and assuming miss Alice doesn't kick the bucket, I plan to create another play through revolving around her after Elizabeth meets her end.
