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Wickedly Solo

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I am deep into creating the Wicked Ones solo rules. One of the challenging aspects is the amount of negotiated actions.

In the group game many elements are based upon suggestions made by the group. What happens when you go feral? The nature of dark bargains, or even simply consequences of partial successes through to utter failures.

Getting the input of many minds is a recurring feature in the rules as written. So how to address this as a solo experience?

One option would be a dedicated oracle. Either of themed suggestions, or possibly of a Madlib structure.

Madlibs allow you to slot in key words into a structured sentence. If you have a tightly themes set of subjects, nouns, adjectives and verbs, you can build many suggestions.

[Someone/Someone else/A Friend/Not you]

[Takes /Breaks Something/Loses something]

[Becomes Bloodied/Loses a body Part/ Takes Shock/ Breaks something important]

Ok, so the final tool would need a few more options, but even that simple sample gives you 4 x 4 x 4 [64] options.

The other option is to try out a miniature ‘cut up’ style exercise. It could work in a similar way as the madlib, but in this case it would have parts of the dark bargains, and consequences, etc., and you pull out snippets to build something similar to the example consequences in the rules.

To speed the process up a mix of colours could be used. Either print a page and then take highlighter pens to the different types of snippets. Or jot them down on to coloured post-it notes.

Right now, nothing is set in stone. I am still throwing ideas around and trying to make things work nicely together, but, this is the thing that I am struggling with tonight.

3 thoughts on “Wickedly Solo”

  1. Could you use somthing similar to Mythic? Or apprentice GM deck?
    It’s just a mid of nouns and adjectives, the player then makes sense of them. It can allow for very surprising events.

    Reply
    • I certainly could, but what I am trying to achieve is to make it very integrated into the style and flavour of Wicked Ones.
      The nouns and adjectives approach is generally easier for solo players who are experienced GMs. The need to improvise on the fly is a core GMing skill. For players, it is less developed. You are fed a scene, and only need to improvise your own actions, or ask the GM for more information if you need it. Noun+Adjective can lead to inexperienced soloists hitting a brick wall, where the prompt does not speak to them or inspire an idea to move the story forward.

      Universal solo engines do not have the luxury of knowing the style of play, setting or genre. I am lucky in that I do know these things, and I want to capitalise on that advantage.

      Reply

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