Small Post on Solo Play & Motivation

 

This is gonna be a free-written process/analysis post. Probably loose and rough. Troubleshooting. We're talking arts and crafts!

[Header image by me, thrown together in Affinity Photo with the League Gothic and League Spartan open-source typefaces from the League of Movable Type, published under the SIL Open Font License, some True Grit Texture Supply Brushes, which are excellent and I highly recommend, and public domain flowers off wikimedia commons, from the now-defunct educational publisher Pearson Scott Foresman.]

 

[Author's note: this is NOT actually a small post. It was supposed to be! It escalated. Anyway, I'm keeping the title because I like it, but it's technically false. Just want to manage expectations.]

So, I've been reflecting on solo play a bit, because it's one of the main ways I've actually managed to do the gameplay part of ttrpgs lately, and I've been meaning to throw together a post about how I play Mothership solo, since it's kind of cobbled together but has worked well so far (this is NOT that post). And because I think solo ttrpgs are a fascinating (and slightly bizarre) artistic medium which warrants at least casual study.

Except: I often lose interest a couple short sessions in.

Same as coming up short when writing short fiction, I find myself coming to decision points, being unsure where to go next, and then ... stopping. Some of this, let's be honest, is just schedule and forgetfulness. But also, I think it's a lack of investment. I could put in the work to find out what happens next. But often I don't, and I think it's because I'm not interested enough in finding out what happens next. 

Which I think is a solvable problem, but before we get to possible solutions, I think the problem itself is interesting, and potentially instructive. Certainly about my habits and wiring, but also the medium at large, Mothership as a specific game system, and horror in a tabletop context.

Uh, oh. This isn't sounding like that small of a post anymore.

background

One of the big things here is that I started playing solo as a purely mechanical exercise. At first, just rolling attacks and damage for Mothership monsters and characters, to get a feel for the damage model. Then, wanting a more complete simulation, ran a (fairly generic) crew through Dead Planet's excellent self-contained derelict-dungeon "Screaming on the Alexis." What was just meant to be something of a fact-finding operation ... actually turned out to be really fun. And here was an opportunity to play games that didn't require some combination of scheduling, videoconferencing software, or meeting new people. Just me, some dice, some rules. Which sounded ideal, and still does.

I think part of the reason I want to dig into solo play to work out what makes it tick (for me at least), is that I'm not particularly good at it, and would really like to be. I love that it's something I can play with pencil, paper, and dice. It's tactile and reflective. That's cool. I like that. 

running drills

I started running solo as a very literal test run, and I haven't entirely stopped. Obviously, getting started with anything is a learning experience, and one of the reasons I'm fixated on ttrpgs as a medium is that they've remained challenging over the 10+ years I've been running them, and I almost always feel like I've learned something by playing. Which is cool! I like that!

But there's a (significant) difference between something you learn from and something which is relegated to being a "test," or "experiment," especially in a creative context. Not to say that studies, experiments, and practice aren't valuable, because they absolutely are. Case in point: by playing games solo, lingering "test run" feeling or not, I'm learning how the form works, what works for me, how to improve, etc. And it's something I've been getting better at. 

depth

At the same time, I'm not getting the depth out of it that I want out of it. And one of the big differences, I think, is commitment. Not leaning far enough in. I want immersion, which by definition means being all-in, entirely covered or submerged. Which isn't really something you can get by just dipping your toes in the pond.

The water is cold, dark, and welcoming. It's a vulnerability thing. I'm not very good at vulnerability.

Caught at cross-purposes here because I want to write something useful and informative, a workable analysis of the form or something like that, but also, the particular problems and dynamics I'm working with are heavily informed simply by the way I'm wired. Maybe this is a personal essay. Maybe there's value in that.

empty hands

In A Choreographer's Handbook (Routledge 2010), Jonathan Burrows writes, "Empty hands means you don't hold so tight to the thing you're trying to make that you crush it" (154). This was part of assigned reading at school, and I think about empty hands a lot. I got the book because of this sentence, and really ought to read more of it than I have. It's a brilliant, sparse exploration of creative process.

"Empty hands," is part of a discussion of chance processes in choreography, attaching a "gamut," of shapes, moves, results, etc. to some kind of chance element like dice or coins. Sound familiar? To paraphrase Burrows: chance gives you empty hands.

I use Alfred Valley's Combined Systems Semiotic Standard oracle from Thousand Empty Light (something else brilliant and sparse I should read more of than I have), and a heavily cut and modified form of the Necropraxis Hazard Die, both converted into cardstock-and-sharpie card decks. And the rules for Mothership itself, which are tense and brutal. These help empty my hands, which I've found really critical for feeling surprise and uncertainty playing solo; where, otherwise, I have all the decision making power.

How do you surprise yourself? 

Specifically, I found that planning too much detail took the tension out. So in practice, I've been throwing together simple flowchart maps with the station generator in A Pound of Flesh, and leaving them without internal descriptions, to be filled out in play as the characters discover them and oracle/encounter cards are drawn. For the most part, this works well, and recreates much of the engaging tension of both playing and running games.

But it feels like there's a piece missing that I'm trying to pin down.

Why do we care? How do we genuinely resonate with the story? Am I playing because it's exciting and uncertain, or just because I feel like I "should"? How much can you be immersed in something that isn't real? Is that even safe? Do I want something that isn't really possible to get out of the medium? Or am I the limiting factor?

handholds

If the advantage of playing loose and leaning into chance is that it helps empty my hands and create surprise, the disadvantage is that it maybe doesn't give me enough to hang on to. To return to the pondwater metaphor, it feels as though I am too buoyant, always being pulled back to the surface.

For the most part. In the most recent solo game I'm running, I slowed down for a session in the second operation. Played into atmosphere. Played with downtime. There were only a handful of rolls, and not much action, but it was easily the strongest session I've played solo so far, and felt like welcome proof of the medium's viability for me. For a moment, I felt alongside the character I was playing. And that was really neat.

I think that's one of the core appeals of role-playing games, after all. Being somebody else for a bit.

You can check out the unedited log here, if you're curious. Operation 2 is towards the bottom. Don't know that reading it gets to the same experience as playing through did, which in itself is fascinating. Specifically, there was a crit-success rest save that felt great.

Then, next session, it got all fucked up.

fubar

Okay, reading back, that's not entirely fair, but it does feel like that. I picked up some really dramatic random oracle results midway through a scene [Disaster, Steep (Suddenness/Change), and rolled a "leak" encounter after having established the ocean beneath the outpost was a carnivorous organism, whoops] and some unfortunate follow-up rolls meant things went from work meeting to FUBAR in a single mechanical round.

And this is very in keeping with Mothership, its world, and the situations it's designed to create and model, but not necessarily what I was hoping to play through, at least, not without more build-up. The resulting situation felt a little arbitrary and unearned, largely because it was, and I haven't returned to it for more than a month. Not an unusual gap, by any means, but not what I was hoping to set up, which is a small solo campaign that I want to return to.

Small scale, there are easy solutions to this:

• Option A: Press on, play through the consequences, honor chance, and see what happens. 
• Option B: Roll back the scene, and hang out in the steady-state world for a little longer before things go horribly wrong. Maybe adjust how frequently disasters occur (1-in-10 is a lot!).  
• Option C: Ditch the campaign and start over with something more suitable. I haven't put that much work into the setup, and the campaign frame (corporate investigators working their way through encounters with UCR entries) isn't quite what I want to sink my teeth into. 

I'll probably go with Option C, for reasons I'll get into later, though I do think it's worth highlighting the others. 

A: I think with harsh games especially, I sometimes feel a desire to ... not have bad things happen. Which is a lot of the point of a game being hard! Otherwise there's less tension! And I think it's very easy with role-playing games as a story-adjacent medium to get the feeling that success or survival is the only way forward, even though there's lots and lots of interesting ways to fail, and interesting things that can come out of disaster. Certainly, I could play through the rest of the scenario and see what happens, and who survives, and what comes of it, and where the characters are forced to go.

B: on the other hand, when we talk about ttrpgs or games generally, we're talking about a medium for desired experience. Maybe that's fun, maybe that's catharsis, maybe that's tension. Whatever floats your boat. So taking something back because it doesn't create the experience you want (or creates one you don't) is aligned with the core objective of the whole fucking exercise. Which is good. Don't be afraid to play video games at the difficulty you enjoy, engage with media in ways that work for you, don't stick with choices you don't like, and so on. That's more of a General Media Literacy note, to be honest.

Hey Kid from Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast (Jay Dragon et al, Possum Creek Games, 2023) refers to this idea as "take-backsies," in the YB&B's excellent safety tools section, which is where I first (or most clearly) encountered it: "If you have an idea and then realize later that you don’t like it, you can always do take-backsies." 

It's one of the clearest and simplest expressions of player agency and consent I've seen, and a useful tool for your toolbox. 

I picked up a digital copy from itch in order to confirm that's where I'd first seen the concept. (It was.) Good call. Yazeba's is 500+ pages, and on skimming through, looks beautiful. The safety tools section can also be found in the free ashcan version, if you're curious. It's worth a look. 

"Take-backsies," in came up in the last group session I ran of a homemade horror game, and I think it may have averted a real bummer of an ending. At the very least, I made an unfun decision as referee, and we reverted it rather than let it ride, and the game was better for it. Anyway, rolling stuff back can be really helpful. In this case, though, I think I'd rather throw away than roll back. I haven't been playing this particular game-iteration (not even yet a campaign) for very long, so there's not much to lose, and maybe a lot to gain by ditching it.

I uh, haven't talked about motivation much here, have I? Better do that.

the boat anchor

My brain has the approximate inertial qualities of a fucking boat anchor. This is because I don't have enough of a specific kind of tiny particle floating around in my body. Or I don't make enough of them? I still don't entirely know. 

The boat anchor is a metaphor. Just so we're clear.

If I'm not moving, it's hard to get moving. Once I'm moving, it's hard to stop. This is great for getting ttrpg blog posts written or props fabricated or game prep done, but not so great if I need to then shift to doing, say, my actual job. Unfortunately, the boat anchor is a metaphor, and I am a person (more complicated!), and unlike a boat anchor, I have preferences. Needing to do something, wanting to do something, and having enough motivation to actually do that thing are distinct quantities.

There's the rub.

anchor chain

I think we're back down to that thing about commitment, immersion, vulnerability from earlier. I spend tons of time, thinking and reading and writing about role-playing games, but I don't put that kind of time or energy into putting together solo games. Some of this is to stay loose, and because it opens up the field of play to explore later, and that's all fine, but it also means I'm often working with a setting and characters I neither know or care much about.

Now, I'm a big believer in taking things a session at a time, even when it means there's no useful prep for me to spend time on (and I want to spend time on prep). But I think, in solo play, I may have found the limit to that. And maybe it isn't a question of "prep more," so much as "prep better," and by better, I mean, "more like myself." 

What I've been playing has been largely generic. Which is to say, it isn't personal. I'm not digging into the stuff I'm really interested in. I'm leaning a lot more on random tables than handcrafting, despite increasingly preferring the latter. And I could talk a lot about how valuable the externality of randomness is for driving unexpected creative decisions, but often? I'm not following it up with the creative decisions. I'm playing solo casually when I don't want a casual game. 

I want something I can get lost in. 

And be excited about. 

personal possibilities

Over the last week, I wrote up a bunch of setting possibilities for Mothership, and they're not all my speed, but a lot of them are based on stuff I'm interested in: culture, body horror, sexuality, sea voyages. And it got me thinking about how much farther I could push the world and characters towards something I find really juicy. Which I haven't been doing. 

Don't get me wrong, I like Mothership's default setting a lot. And its relatively grounded baseline makes it more accessible to players. Playing alone, though? You don't really need it to be accessible to anyone but yourself! I can use my KSP-level understanding of orbital mechanics if I want, or incorporate weird synergies with Herman Melville's discursive symbolfest Moby Dick. Will I? Hard to say. But I could, and for the purposes of discussion, that's what's important.

[See also: APPENDIX M-LNOW, below.]

I'm picky, but I also know what I like. It shouldn't be hard to tap into that. I just haven't really tried.

Play is about possibility, among so many other things. And it's a personal act. So make it personal.

APPENDIX M-LNOW

• Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville
• The King in Yellow (1895) Robert W. Chambers [1]
• The Illustrated Man (1951), Ray Bradbury
• Seven Samurai (1954), Akira Kurosawa 
• The Thing (1982), John Carpenter
• It (1986), Stephen King
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Hayao Miyazaki
• Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson
• The Things They Carried (1990) Tim O'Brien
• The Secret History (1992) Donna Tartt
• The X-Files (1993), Chris Carter
• Cowboy Bebop (1998), Shinichirō Watanabe
• House of Leaves (2000), Mark Z. Danielewski
• Oryx and Crake (2003), Margaret Atwood
• Veniss Underground (2003), Jeff VanderMeer
• XCOM: Enemy Within (2012), Firaxis Games
• Kerbal Space Program (2011), Squad 
• The Martian (2011), Andy Weir
• Things from the Flood (2016), Simon Stålenhag
• Alien: Covenant (2017), Ridley Scott [2]
• On a Sunbeam (2018), Tillie Walden
  
• To Be Taught, if Fortunate (2019), Becky Chambers
• Madhouse at the End of the Earth (2021), Julian Sancton
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker (2022), Blackbird Interactive
• Barotrauma (2023), FakeFish
• Frontier (2024), Guillaume Singelin [3]

[1] Content warning for ableism. Among many other things, but that's the one that stands out. Worth a read, but set expectations accordingly.

[2] Frustrating movie. But the costume design is phenomenal, and more than any other piece of media it's what got me into Mothership. My memory is fuzzy, but I remember a frustrating disaster cascade from contrived decision making (both by the characters and filmmakers), and I'm obsessed with the idea of playing through similar situations but making better decisions.

[3] Gorgeous, tactile, and heartfelt. On of my biggest single touchstones for the way I want Mothership to look and feel in its non-horror moments. Picked it up from the kickstarter so I'm not sure where it's available yet. Highly, highly recommend.

Plus whatever books about space, dinosaurs, aircraft, human anatomy, first aid, photography, abstract art, and antarctic exploration I could get my grubby hands on. The more pictures the better. Probably more stuff than I can remember here, too, obviously. I'll update if I can. 

Some things are here not so much because they have a bearing on how I think about Mothership, but because they have an impact on most things I do creatively. 

Not a lot of horror media in this list, oddly. If I had to guess, it's because a lot of my horror inspiration comes from the real world rather than fiction, a mix of history, biology, anatomy, zeitgeist, and my experience with mental illness. Or there's just a bunch of stuff I've forgotten. Maybe both!

(Credit to Throne of Salt's APPENDIX M-DAN for the naming convention, a reference to AD&D's "Appendix N." Throne of Salt in general is a major inspiration for the way I think about and write for Mothership, as well.)

lethality and attachment

Mothership kills characters. Maybe not quite as often as its reputation would suggest, but enough that I've seen a casualty or two with most situations I've sent crews into, and the survivors come back wounded and stressed. Granted, I've been setting up pretty high-risk locations, but that's pretty standard for the system-as-intended.

In and of itself, this isn't a problem. It's one of the things that hooked me on the system to begin with, and I really like the tension it creates. But it can make continuity a challenge, and I find it makes me hesitant. Situations become survival puzzles, but the nature of role-playing games as an emergent medium and my righteous disregard for balancing during prep means that there isn't always a solution. And in theory this is something I love about the medium. But in practice, I struggle with it.

It's all good if I'm not attached to the characters and I just want to see the game unfold, but once I am attached to the characters, (which is the fiction working as intended, creating emotional connection) it's difficult to commit to watching the carnage unfold. On the flip-side, if I don't care, then it's less meaningful. The intensity is lost.

One of the big things I like about Mothership is the mechanics are tough. I'm a bit of a scaredy-cat GM to be honest, so having a set of tools to hurt and endanger the characters is really helpful for me. A lot of the rest, I can fill in myself. I've got a lot of practice with performance and fiction writing. Much less practice being mean.

scaffolds

Another wrinkle: if the overarching game is tied to the characters, then the game ends when the characters do. I think this is the main thing that makes character death such a point of consideration or anxiety among GMs, players, and game designers alike.

What is a good end?

One of the big solutions here is to tie the game to something outside the characters. My points of reference for high-lethality game design, XCOM and Darkest Dungeon, do this by giving the characters a shared organization, goal, antagonist, and base of operations. (I am a coward in these games, too.) Mothership itself offers a number of campaign frames, centers modules on locations, and has ships as a base of operations. 

And in the past, I've usually gone with a shared organization, which in theory would be shared by replacement crews. In practice, I didn't do much more than name the Company the crew worked for, and so was usually a lot more interested in the crew than the organization and its (thin or totally non-specified) goals, so it wouldn't provide much of a scaffold. Putting some more work in here, to create a more dynamic and interesting above-character layer, is probably all that's needed.

acceptance or denial

Some other pathways forward: I. accept that characters will die, or II. prevent them from dying (by fudging rolls, reducing scenario deadliness, playing with rules that make death opt-in, and so on). Depending on the game and players, I think both can work. For myself, it's hard to say.

The blogpost/essay "The Sacrament of Death" is one of my big points of reference here, and goes into a lot more detail and nuance on the subject than I do here (though specifically within a trad rpg context, which isn't quite what we're working with here). Worth reading.

Both are also perfectly justifiable within Mothership's setting. Space is dangerous, and working for the Company moreso. Patch entries like "Live Free and Die," "IF I'M RUNNING KEEP UP," and "Grim Reaper Backpatch," suggest an awareness of or preoccupation with death in spacer culture, which could be interesting to play up. And who can blame them? 

Alternately, characters could be sleeved and re-sleeved through a succession of bio-printed bodies, the form disposable but the mind and personality maintaining continuity. (Retaining Stress and Panic results.) There's some interesting stuff to play with in either case.

The Quinns Quest review of Mothership absolutely nails the ideal dynamic:

“Players need to want two contradictory things at once. One: players, you gotta want bad things to happen to your character … Two: Players, you gotta NOT want bad things to happen to your character.”

Quinns goes on to say: 

"On some level, all ttrpgs are gambling. But horror games are the most gambling, and you gotta enjoy that gamble."

It's a wonderfully succinct way of looking at lethality and horror, and honestly clarifies a lot of it for me.

In a lethal game environment, play with death and against it. Embrace death as a part of each character's existence. Acknowledge its presence at the table, in the world, in spacer culture, in the atmosphere of the places the crew digs into. But the juiciness and tension of a dangerous environment is created by resisting, playing the odds, making it a little longer than you thought. Putting it all on the line.

I don't know that it's actually a contradiction so much as a kind of dramatic mutuality. Tension is often creatively productive! It's where the good stuff happens. Wanting two things when you can't have both? That's uncertain. It's juicy.

And whether I can pull it off remains to be seen.

roadmap

okay, great. tons of theory.

but how do I actually get there?

I think a bigger, more dramatic campaign framework is needed: something that anchors the game outside its fragile characters. A ship could work, but that might even be too small-scale as a through-line, given how easily Mothership's spacecraft can be reduced to hollow, irradiated derelicts. Centering on a conflict or antagonist as it moves through a few jump clusters is probably the way to go.

(Or maybe just jumping into one of the big modules, like A Pound of Flesh.)

Then, maybe multiple characters, from the very start! Gives me some flexibility to bounce around if I'm not feeling like a particular area or gameplay. Maybe they link up, maybe they don't. Characters become little POV cameras for the bigger show, (whatever that is). 

Flavor, and lots of it. Knock out some conceptual writing and put together some mood boards. I do this for scenarios I'm writing, modules I'm running, and pretty much any creative project I start up now, why not for solo play? The best session I've had was from leaning into atmosphere and mood alone, so in-session play can hang out there and that's enough. Sit in a bar. Toss and turn on a spongy rack-mattress. Wait for assignment in the crews' lounge amid the baked-in smell of cheap coffee. And so on.

Adding more character traits and appearances from a big ol' spreadsheet repository and character deck I've been working on (you can find the first 100*4 entries here) could help a ton for jump-starting characterization. I've often found my crews turn out vague and mechanical, and I'd like to dig deeper, faster. 

With Mothership's lethality being what it is, lean towards character-as-poem, rather than character-as-novel. Establish quickly, and hold lightly. Play for momentary, ephemeral stuff rather than the payoff of long arcs. Let the characters know their chances and react accordingly.

Some detailed sandbox maps, some factions, some important NPCs. Previously, I've tried putting everything in a single logbook, which works great for portability, but in play means I'm flipping back and forth between the active log and the scenario map or any world information. Should probably separate the two, either with loose maps and play materials, or a notebook or binder that has all the setting and scenario information in it, that way I can reference both at once.

Leaning into the way I usually approach creative projects, with visual research, auxiliary design work, and experimental free-writing might be helpful as well. Keeping it multi-disciplinary. 

Running a game strictly in a logbook, which has been my procedure up to this point, I think risks reducing the medium to a linear modality. Which role-playing games aren't. They can move in different ways, operate on chance and interaction, unfold new layers.

I think that's it!

in closing (feat. more theory)

I don't know how this will work out. Might update if I find out. Might not! I think a some of the trouble with the latest solo campaign is that I ran it partially with blogging and community engagement in mind, so there was an invisible audience in the back of my head. Made me self-conscious sometimes, which is sort of the opposite of what you want for play. 

One of the big differences in solo play, I realize, is that there's little-to-no performance component, to the point that it may actually be a separate-but-interrelated medium from group ttrpgs. I don't know how useful a taxonomic distinction is, but the difference between the presence/absence of performance/audience is nontrivial. 

Ritual is still very much involved, and I think there is an open question whether or not individual play and ritual practice includes or constitutes performance by-and-for a combined cast-audience of one person. Hardly the first person to make this observation, I'm sure. Something to chew on, though. 

Certainly, I already think ttrpgs aren't precisely a medium in the same way as like, oil painting, but rather a collection of symbiotic media. Granted, this is true of a lot of ritual and performance media, which tend to incorporate a wide variety of disciplines, from accounting to juggling, while still widely and, critically, functionally being considered a single "medium." Maybe media stack. 

There is multiplicity in whatever it is. All is manifold.

In future, I'd like to put together a shorter, more practical post about how I've been playing Mothership solo, and how to get started, since I think it might be helpful for some folks, and that'll incorporate any discoveries I make in upcoming play. There's some good solo-play resources out there already, like Thousand Empty Light, and RV Games' Advanced Rules, which I recommend checking out. 

We'll see how it goes!

Finally, if you've made it all the way down here, thanks for reading! I hope there was something helpful in here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, if you'd like to share!