Designing Solo Rules: A Case Study
Pine Shallows case study, charity bundles, a look at Hiria: the Eternal City
In this issue:
An in depth look at Hiria: the Eternal City
Charity Bundles
Designing Solo Rules for Pine Shallows: A Case Study
An in depth look at Hiria: the Eternal City
Steph from Salt and Sass Games had an in depth look at Hiria: the Eternal City.
Interested? Find the game on Itch.io and DriveThruRpg
Charity Bundles
Support a good cause, and get some good games while you're doing it:
Pine Shallows is available in the TTRPGs for Palestine bundle
A Visit to San Sibilia is available in the Rio Grande do Sul Floods Relief Bundle
Designing Solo Rules for Pine Shallows
I've been looking into solo procedures for the last few weeks with the goal of adding solo rules to Pine Shallows. In the two previous issues of my newsletter I tried to summarize my findings. In this post you'll see how I used my research to design the solo rules.
Want to check out the Pine Shallows Solo Rules? Get the game on Itch.io or DriveThruRPG
These were the common elements found in most of the games I checked, and which I also wanted to add to the new solo rules:
A Game Loop
Oracles, specifically:
A Yes/No Oracle
Generic Prompt or Spark Oracles
Next to that, I also wanted to providing narrative structure for starting a game/storyline, moving the plot forward and wrapping up story lines.
Constraints and building blocks
I started by looking at what parts I already had, and which constraints I wanted to have in place for the new parts. I came up with the following:
All new tables/procedures should only use standard six sided dice, like the main rules. The solo rules should not introduce new types of dice.
Earlier I published the Pine Shallows Guide to Adventures, which is filled to the brim with random tables to create hooks, NPCs, cryptids, clues and more. Perfect for solo play!
Game loop
While I like the ORACLE system, the game loop as found in the Mothership solo adventure Thousand Empty Light by Alfred Valley (and used for the solo procedures in the great Eco Mofos by David Blandy), I wanted something a bit simpler.
Recently Allen M. Hall published Captain and Crew, great solo rules for Pirate Borg, in which introduced the OAR game loop:
Observe - Describe the scene.
Act - Decide how your character behaves.
Resolve - Determine how the scene changes.
Simple and concise!
Based on that I tried to come up with a good fitting acronym for my own loop. I started with PINE, but I couldn't find 4 good steps, so I stuck to three for the FIR game loop:
Frame - Describe the scene
Interact: Decide how your character behaves.
Resolve: Determine the outcome of their actions
Credit where credit's due, this really is a rebranded version of the OAR loop. (Allen makes great stuff, be sure to follow him!)
Oracles
For oracles I wanted both flavors: a Yes/No oracle for basic questions and a Spark table with prompts for sparking ideas in the player.
The Yes/No oracle is pretty basic, 50/50 change on both options. I added two extra twists:
When you feel one of the two options is more likely, you can roll two dice, and keep the highest/lowest depending on which option is the more likely. This changes it to a 25/75 split.
The possible And/But modifiers making the Yes/No weaker/stronger. The And option makes the answer stronger, the But makes it weaker:
Yes, there is someone eavesdropping, And they made a recording of your confession.
No, there is no guard at the door, But the door is slightly ajar.
Together these additions make this oracle surprising enough to create quite a bit of interesting answers.
Next to that I added two spark tables, an Action table filled with verbs from Avoid to Transform and a Subject table with nouns from Alarm to Wild. Both are d66 tables with 36 entries. These should spark enough creativity for most open questions.
Jason is sure he saw a light coming from the defunct lighthouse from his bedroom window. He snuck out and hopped on his bike to check it out. When he reaches the lighthouse he discovers something strange... What could it be?
The player rolls a 4 and a 3 for Lose on the Action table and a 6 and a 4 for Water on the Subject table. The player thinks about what that could mean. Yes! Of course, when Jason reaches the lighthouse and looks in the direction of the sea, he notices it's low tide, but Jason has never seen the sea retreated so far, the opening of a cave at the bottom of the rocky pier is now visible.
Story Clocks
Pine Shallows runs on familiar tropes and plots. A new session starts with rolling a new plot on the table from the Pine Shallows Guide to Adventure:
a LANDMARK is threatened with DANGER by VILLAIN
a CREATURE has been spotted in LOCATION, they are CREATURE-ADJECTIVE
a rival club has challenged the kids to a CHALLENGE
SOMEONE has been VERBED, who was last seen in LOCATION
A CRIME was committed by a VILLAIN
Roll twice & combine
Each of the all caps terms has its corresponding table. Enough to kickstart hundreds of adventures!
What's needed is a way to track the progress. In the main game rules progress clocks are explained, but those felt a bit too rigid: only when they're completely filled a certain goal is reached. I also wanted adding the possibility for (partial) success or failure, and to give the player a choice on when they felt the goal might have been reached.
For inspiration I looked at two similar mechanics: the Progress Move from Ironsworn and the Theorize Move from Brindlewood Bay.
Brindlewood Bay uses the same 2d6 roll as Pine Shallows with miss on 6-, partial success on 7-9 and full success on 10+. The Theorize move is basically rolling the 2d6 plus the number of clues collected minus the complexity of the story. While I like the openness of it: players can decide when they roll, I don't like the fact you need to both add to and subtract from your roll.
While Ironsworn does have a miss, weak hit and strong hit, the dice mechanic is very different. During a game you fill in a track for your progress, with a maximum of 10 filled segments and when you want to see if you can wrap up the thing you're tracking you roll 2d10 and try to roll under the number of segments filled. One die under is a weak hit, both dice under is a strong hit.
I combined and tweaked these a bit to come up with the Story Clock mechanism:
Depending on the time you want to spend, pick a clock of 6, 8 or 10 segments.
Every time you make significant progress towards your goal, fill in one of the segments.
You need to have filled in at least half of the segments to be able to resolve the story.
When you want to try and resolve the story, you roll 2d6 plus a bonus based on the number of filled in segments. If you have more than half of the segments filled you get a +1, if you have filled in the clock (almost) completely you get a +2.
You roll with the regular 6- being a failure, 7-9 a success with a complication and 10+ being a success.
Easier then adding/subtracting, but it still requires a lookup to know your bonus. This is the part I really want to playtest quite a bit to see if it needs more tweaking, or even a complete alternative.
Want to check out the Pine Shallows Solo Rules? Get the game on Itch.io or DriveThruRPG
What's next?
Besides the new solo procedures I also extended a lot the tables already in the Pine Shallows Guide to Adventure to give players even more options, but I'm working on some more.
Besides that? Playtesting of course! My plan is to post an actual play of Pine Shallows to this newsletter in the coming weeks to showcase and test the solo procedures.
The current version of the rules are available for download for all owners of the game (with community copies available). If you play the game, or have any thoughts after reading this article I'd love to hear from you!
I'm playing in a Public Access campaign (built off Brindlewood) and the whole time I'm thinking 'damn I need to use the Theorize move in a solo game'! Glad to see I'm not the only one. Your clock method seems inspy. I'll have to check it out.
Love this, sharing with my subs & discord members!