Solo Tabletop RPGs: What They Are and How to Start
A solo tabletop RPG is a roleplaying game you play on your own: no group, no games master, just you, some dice, something to write with and a game built to surprise you. It sounds like a contradiction — roleplaying is supposed to be social — but solo play is older than most people think, it has never been more popular, and there is more of it to choose from now, much of it free, than at any point in the hobby’s history. This guide covers what solo RPGs are, where they came from, the different kinds, and how to pick a first one. Every section links to a deeper guide.
What makes a game “solo”
Any tabletop RPG needs someone to do three things: describe the world, answer the players’ questions about it, and decide what happens when they try something. In a group game, the GM does all three. A solo game has to hand those jobs to the dice and the page.
- The world comes from a written scenario, or from random tables you roll on as you go.
- The answers come from an oracle: a table that turns a dice roll into a yes or no you didn’t choose.
- The outcomes come from the rules, as in any RPG.
Get those three right and you get the thing that makes roleplaying worth doing: you don’t know what happens next. The full explanation, with a first session step by step, is in how to play a solo RPG.
A short history
Solo play is nearly as old as the hobby. Buffalo Castle, published by Flying Buffalo in 1976 for its Tunnels & Trolls system, was the first solo adventure written for a tabletop RPG: a book of numbered paragraphs that sent you from one to the next depending on your choices and your dice. Six years later, in 1982, Puffin published Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, and a generation of children learned what a skill check was from a paperback.
The next big step came in 2003, when Tana Pigeon’s Mythic Game Master Emulator gave players a way to run any RPG without a GM, using a yes/no table and a “chaos factor” that pushes the story around. That idea — an oracle you can bolt onto anything — is still the backbone of solo play.
Since then, two things have changed the field. Games began to be designed solo-first, with the oracle built into the rules rather than added on; Ironsworn is the best-known example. And a wave of journaling games, where play is writing, took off on itch.io, with Tim Hutchings’s Thousand Year Old Vampire (2019) the one most people have heard of.
The five kinds of solo RPG
1. Gamebooks. Numbered sections, choices, dice and a character sheet. The book does all the GM’s work, and you follow the paragraphs. The Fighting Fantasy line is the famous one, and the format is very much alive. Our own A Life In Death, the first Below the Murkline gamebook, sits squarely in that line.
2. Solo scenarios. A short, complete adventure with its own rules, maps and encounter tables, played in an evening. Less branching than a gamebook and more improvisation: the scenario sets the job and the dice fill in what happens. Our Postcard Adventures are this kind, and they are free.
3. GM emulators and oracles. Not a game but a toolkit that replaces the GM for a game you already own. Mythic is the classic. If you have a shelf of group RPGs you never get to play, this is how you play them. See solo RPG oracles.
4. Journaling games. Prompts, a deck of cards or a few dice, and a notebook. The game asks questions and you answer them in writing, so the story is the output. Often quiet, often devastating. See solo journaling RPGs.
5. Solo-first RPGs. Full roleplaying games with the oracle, the tables and the pacing built in, designed so one player can run a long campaign. Ironsworn is the best known; our own Foked is a darker, harder example, with groups of two or three as the variant rather than the default.
How to choose your first
- You’ve never played an RPG. Start with a solo scenario or a gamebook. Everything is on the page, and you’ll learn the rhythm of rolling, deciding and living with it in one evening.
- You love writing. Start with a journaling game.
- You own group RPGs you never get to play. Get an oracle.
- You want a long campaign. Start with a solo-first RPG, and expect to spend a session just learning it.
- You want it dark. Most of the solo scene leans that way already. If grim, rules-light fantasy is the draw, see the Mörk Borg alternatives, and the dark-fantasy field guide for folk horror and grimdark more widely.
Money needn’t come into it. There is a list of the best free solo RPGs, every one a complete game, not a demo.
Why play alone at all?
The obvious reason is that it’s hard to get a group together, and that is true. But most people who stick with solo play give other reasons. You play at your own pace, at midnight if you like, for twenty minutes or four hours. You can play the dark material a group might not want. Nobody is waiting for you to decide. And there is a particular feeling that solo play does better than group play: being the only person in a strange place, with nobody to share the blame. Horror games use it on purpose.
Common questions
Can I play D&D, or any other group RPG, on my own? Yes. Keep the rules for characters, combat and spells, and hand the GM’s jobs to an oracle and some random tables. You’ll have to prepare or improvise the world, which is more work than a game built for solo play, but plenty of people do it. Solo RPG oracles covers how.
Isn’t a solo RPG just a gamebook? Sometimes, and that’s fine: gamebooks are one kind of solo RPG. But most modern solo games are more open. A gamebook offers you two or three paths at each section; a solo scenario or a solo-first RPG lets you try anything you can describe, and uses the dice and the oracle to decide what happens.
Do I have to be good at writing? No. Most solo games ask for a few notes, not prose. Journaling games ask for more, but nobody is grading it, and short honest sentences beat long clever ones.
How long does a session take? As long as you like. A short scenario is an evening. A campaign in a solo-first RPG can be twenty minutes a night for months. One of the quiet advantages of playing alone is that you can stop mid-scene and pick up tomorrow.
Is it lonely? Less than you’d think. Playing feels more like reading a book you are partly writing than like sitting alone. And there is a large, friendly community sharing play reports and homemade tables online, which is where a lot of solo players end up once they’re hooked.
Can I play with someone else? Many solo games include rules for two or three players working together without a GM, using the same oracle. Ironsworn does, and so does Foked, which treats a small group as the variant and one player as the default.
What if the dice kill my character in the first ten minutes? In some games they will, and the dark ones lean into it. Make another; it takes a minute. Losing a character you’ve barely met teaches you how dangerous the world is, and the next one plays more carefully.
A glossary of solo terms
- Oracle — a table that answers yes/no questions from a dice roll, standing in for the GM.
- GM emulator — a fuller oracle system, like Mythic, meant to replace the GM for any RPG.
- Meaning table — a table that answers open questions with a word or pair of words to interpret.
- Random table — a list you roll on to generate something: an encounter, a name, the weather, what’s in the box.
- Prompt — in a journaling game, the question or situation you answer in writing.
- Clock — a track that fills as time passes or things go wrong, and triggers trouble when it fills. Foked’s is the Murk Clock.
- Encounter table — a random table rolled whenever you move somewhere new, to see what’s there.
- Gamebook — a book of numbered sections you move between according to choices and dice.
- Solo-first — a game designed for one player, with group play as the variant rather than the other way round.
- Actual play — a written or recorded account of a real session, the solo community’s favourite way of showing a game in action.
The guides in this series
- How to play a solo RPG: the beginner’s guide, with a first session step by step.
- Solo RPG oracles: how the dice replace the GM, and how to build your own.
- Solo journaling RPGs: games where the writing is the play.
- The best free solo RPGs: complete games that cost nothing.
- Mörk Borg alternatives: grim, rules-light games, and which of them work solo.
Books
