There are some newer games like Four Against Darkness (4AD) and Ruins of the Undercity (RotU) that look interesting.

I know asking about playing solo on a site for group play may seem strange but all the tools are available here.
It is also a way to not have a game ruined by undependable players.

Anyone do solo gaming?
Use it to fill in while waiting for a normal game?
Test out character strength and concept with some mock play?

Pathfinder and D&D have solo RPGs that are basically more complicated "choose your own adventure" paths. Same with the Steve Jackson Sorcery! line of games.

There are also some really advanced cooperative boardgames like Gloomhaven and Arkham Horror that can be played solo.

I am currently in a 1-on-1 Skulls & Shackles game and was tired of the first book (I was running it through two different groups at the time) so I solo'd my way through the first book and had a lot of fun. I would have my character sheets up and just flip through the books making decisions in my head and rolling dice. It went pretty fast until I decided to simulate the entire mutiny so I was running about 30 characters on a giant map...

Anyway you could totally use rPoL for a solo game to just track notes and work on story telling and narration. Hell at the end you can just conosolidate the posts and publish it as a novel :P

In reply to GreenTongue (msg # 1):

I tend to do a lot of solo gaming, mostly from lack of player. And because I'm the only one GMing GURPS.
I mostly use the Mythic GME for it, but The Collaborative Gamer (https://thecollaborativegamer.wordpress.com/worlds/) made a great set of GM-less rule for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, though I wish I could try it with other people...

I'm currently looking at Scarlet Heroes.
It looks like it is good for solo and flexible enough to include 1 or 2 players if there were any.

Not sure how the randomness feels. How disjointed things get.
Scarlet Heroes looks to use a system that might smooth things out to feel like a regular/normal game.

Haven't yet talked to anyone that has used it.

If you do a "browse / search the games" putting "solo" in the game name, you will get about twenty active solo games (there are for sure more that don't have the word "solo" in their name, but you will get a general overview anyway).

I am both a player and a GM of solo games and I found that they work quite well in RPoL, above all because nobody is delaying "the group" with a slow post rate, so you can relax a bit on post rate and feel a bit more free to post faster or slower, depending on your real life commitments.
The other thing that is easier to do in a solo game is having a higher mortality rate game, compared to group games :)
Personally, I often run the same solo adventure for several players, putting each player in a different group, so, if one of them drops off, you don't have to invent a new game altogether, but I can recycle quite a lot of description etc.
I also sometimes mix up solo games within campaigns with good satisfaction, depending on plots and characters' motivations.
This message was last edited by the user at 05:48, Fri 13 July 2018.

In reply to Yaztromo (msg # 5):

Do you get enough surprise results that it maintains interest?
Players are known for doing the unexpected. Is the system you use good about replicating that?

What about random results that don't fit in the game flow? Do you reroll or??

The solo game that is currently having more participation is a deadly dungeon crawl. There are some bits of it where I don't have many surprises and some other bits that seem to foster more creativity. Of course I encourage it and the adventure is robust enough not to be "broken" but also flexible enough to let the players be creative.
What helps me is that it is all written down and I don't have to make anything up apart from interpreting at best the situation.
Occasionally I forget some bit (especially for players going back and forward, so I risk losing a bit track of which enemies they already dispatched and which objects they already picked up), but I can see that the players are quite friendly and don't complain if I need to edit something, once in a while.

A few years ago I run a Sherlock Holmes investigation and the results were not as reliable. In that case I should have accepted only a player each time, but this breaks down a bit the main advantage of solo gaming, i.e. posting rate freedom, without having to apologize if you miss once or twice.

For example, a couple of my solo players are actually posting from hospital and they do post if and when they feel good enough. I am glad I can be a company for them without creating any pressure related with posting rate.
If they want me, I'm there, otherwise it's not a problem at all. No peer pressure from other players that would like to progress a game that got stuck because of you.

In reply to Yaztromo (msg # 7):

Sounds great.
Most of the games that I have run either end by one players "going over the top" or post rate dropping to the point there is no progress.

Because of Real Life, I don't like running a PC for the missing player. If they are delayed and return to find the game has moved on without them, less motivation to re-engage.

I really like you are able to be there for people that have medical reasons for slow play.

I used Scarlet Heroes when I only had one player show up for a Castles & Crusades (basically, D&D for the purposes of this post) session.  Although it can be run on its own, Scarlet Heroes can also be used as a supplement to a D&D-style game (which is what I did).  When used on top of a traditional D&D RPG, it allows a single PC to operate in an adventure that would normally require an entire party of comparable level to survive.  I found it worked extremely well.  My player had a blast.  The amped up combat abilities really fit well with my player's barbarian PC.  The game session took on a more Conan feel with the PC hacking his way through hordes of enemies while still being challenged.  If I were running a D&D game with just one player, I would definitely use Scarlet Heroes permanently as an overlay.  It gets a big thumb's up from me.

I have never tried running Scarlet Heroes as its own RPG, so I can't comment on how it plays by itself.
This message was last edited by the user at 14:58, Sun 15 July 2018.

OK, I see that we are now discussing RPG systems and I can offer my personal advice about Advanced Fighting Fantasy as a perfect quickstart and rules-light system that was actually born for solo gamebooks (somebody previously mentioned Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Sorcery! and Fighting Fantasy gamebooks... it's fundamentally that system).
There is a free Quickstart guide (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/pr...src=hottest_filtered) that is more than enough for a novice player that wants to get some experience with the game and it literally takes 5 minutes to get a character ready to play, so you don't need long and boring character generation sessions.
There is also an alternate version covering sci-fi, called Stellar Adventures, that is of course based on the same mechanics, but offers also stats for sci-fi weapons, vehicles and the like (somebody may remember that quite a few Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were set in a sci-fi background).