I have completed my read-through of Modern AGE and made a character. I am going to start table building today. I will start playing using the Fantasy AGE oracle tables, and building modern equivalents as I go. This will help playtest the core tables.
I am going to start my playtesting assuming Cinematic mode. Often in solo play, we have to bolster a starting character to help survive. The cinematic mode may be sufficient. I can always turn up the ‘realism’ if things appear too easy. Having characters die too often is never conducive to fun testing.
Fantasy AGE
I played Fantasy AGE for seven sessions over Christmas. I wanted to play a simple dungeon crawl, just because they seemed the fashion of the moment. When my character died, I could easily have continued the adventure, there were obvious avenues to save him, but he had done the job I had set him.
I did the playtest publically on my blog, not mentioning that it was a playtest. I wanted to try out an easy format for actual plays. I also wanted to know how popular actual play blog posts would be. My blog typically gets just 30-50 visits a day, when I was posting the actual plays, that was up nearer 100 visits a day. The posts are relatively easy to create.
I find trying to solo play on camera extremely difficult, the written format gives me more time to think, and I can do things like multiple rounds of combat, and then just summarise it into a sentence or two. In the video, you end up doing round after round of roll to hit, roll damage. Low-level characters miss a lot, so it is not exactly fun to watch.
If you haven’t seen any of these posts, you can start the game here https://www.ppmgames.co.uk/2021/12/20/solo-dungeon-crawl-1/ and there are a total of seven parts.
Modern Playtest
It is my intention to run a similar thing for Modern AGE. Partly, so I can refine how I want to present actual plays; partly because it is good for Parts Per Million to have regular fresh, unique blog content, and it is good to let the playtest throw tables and options that need to be included in the solo rules.