If there’s one thing I’ve picked up from watching more Solo RPG videos, especially from The Grouch Couch, it’s that I should be playing more, not trying to write a novel.
There should be more dice rolling and less treating the play session as a creative writing exercise.
And that goes for any other tabletop games I’m trying to play, like Five Leagues and Five Parsecs.
I’ve found myself lost in simple things like trying to hard to come up with background details for a character I may or may not ever play, or trying to come up with names for regions/cities for my Five Leagues map.
And that’s probably one of the things that subconsciously prevents me from delving more into any of the Solo RPGs that i’ve already set up, all three of them.
I have one campaign underway (Star Trek Adventures/Captain’s Log), and two ready to start (Dragonbane, D&D 5E) but now I believe that the issue I was having was trying to describe events THAT HAVE NOT HAPPENED YET.
You can’t write a good story without an outline, so how can I describe how my adventure is going without playing out the situation?
For Star Trek: Excalibur, we’re about to continue our mission of exploration.
Irony: the last bit of storytelling for Star Trek: Excalibur was *totally* a creative writing exercise, no dice were rolled, just trying to advance the plot.
For Dragonbane, my character is about to delve into the unknown catacombs.
For D&D, my two-man party is about to enter the forest in search of a lost scouting party from a local town.
Other games will have some sort of after action report as they are played.
Don’t touch that dial!