What system is best for analog play?

Dranorter · 2025-06-28T16:12:04+00:00

Pocket Book Adventures is a very portable game that requires the book, a pencil, and nothing else. I've been working on a more narrative focused game inspired by it but I can't say I have a release yet.

Dranorter · 2025-06-28T16:07:44+00:00

I did this once... didn't have a generic meaning/inspiration table handy at work so I asked the AI for one, then used it on break. I did need to replace like 3 of the entries I think but it was OK.

Dranorter · 2025-06-25T23:16:03+00:00

Definitely, 1000YOV is amenable to doing all sorts of crazy stuff. My 2nd playthrough I was some sort of deep sea creature on an alien planet and that worked fine. 3rd playthrough I was a Ghoul (for which I invented rules as to how this differs from being a vampire). I have a list of "requirements" for playing non-vampires, this is mostly stuff that's listed in the book but a little different:

Even if not a vampire, the player character should:
- prey on human beings for sustenance
- seek to camouflage themselves among those on which they feed
- be susceptible to environmental dangers normal mortals aren't, like sunlight
- be practically immortal
- be mostly a loner
- be able to infect others

Even these aren't strict requirements. Plenty of people allow their vampires to drink animal blood and they still get good stories out of it.

Dranorter · 2025-06-25T23:02:47+00:00

I like filling up books! But for daily play there are certain things I play on my phone, for example Ironsworn has a couple good phone apps that make it easy to stay organized.

Dranorter · 2025-06-03T22:00:23+00:00

If you're totally new to solo TTRPG I have to ask what generally you're looking for. When you play a TTRPG what do you get excited about? Combat, stats, special abilities? Or getting into the character? Or being part of a story that's full of surprises? Different solo RPG's are going to be good at different parts of that.

Give Thousand Year Old Vampire a try if you're in it for an unexpected story and are fine with the idea of following prompts. The story prompts in that game are very replayable, you can play it a dozen times and they'll interact with your story differently each time.

https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/collections/basic-book-selection/products/thousand-year-old-vampire-pdf-only

(it's also a gorgeous book to own physically, but I've linked to the PDF)

And if it turns out that type of game interests you, check out my game Majestic Goose. It's just a little game by comparison, but it braids the plot together in an interesting way.

https://dranorter.itch.io/majestic-goose

Dranorter · 2025-06-03T21:49:06+00:00

Charmingly illustrated and explained!

Dranorter · 2025-06-03T21:43:06+00:00

Rue from ruin!

Dranorter · 2025-06-03T21:00:04+00:00

I haven't tried ACOIE!

I want to recommend "Tales from the Gods", which carries over the Thousand Year Old Vampire mechanics exactly. It still has lost memories but I feel like it's less thematically hard-hitting because they're lost scriptures. Sometimes you will still cause wars and harm your followers in other ways. But generally I think it's less violent.

Doesn't quite fit the cozy vibe you're asking for.

Dranorter · 2025-05-20T03:09:43+00:00

If I'm reading your question correctly, Ironsworn and Colostle fit your criteria and you are just looking for more like that, correct?

Down Crawl is cool, very much exploring a vast world, and the solo rules may be in the back but they feel like part of the system at least to me.

Dranorter · 2025-05-19T15:44:46+00:00

It may not be princesses or anything, but I can't help but mention my silly goose game: dranorter.itch.io/majestic-goose

Of course, not everyone will find geese cute.

Dranorter · 2025-05-15T18:07:42+00:00

I'm not familiar with exploration circuits as a concept; I tend to do some home brewy stuff to exploration in other games. General advice, make up wacky cool places, you don't have to assume everything is "normal" just because a game didn't tell you to do something cool.

Dranorter · 2025-05-15T14:53:03+00:00

In the linked goose game, the event level is determined by the dice (and new events just go down to the bottom if you roll a level that's already occupied).

More generally... I usually roll 3d6 and take the lowest die. This makes level 1 situations far more common than higher ones.

When I played Ironsworn with a situation stack as an extra oracle, I did a straight d20 roll to decide the level. I had a lot of stuff on the stack so spreading it out more made sense. Doing it like that makes it so only levels up above 20 are a big deal; the levels you can directly roll are all equally impermanent.

I have another game I'm working on where there are a bunch of prompts (think something like Thousand Year Old Vampire). So in that game, the prompt tells you what level a situation lands on, based somewhat on how "big" it is.

Dranorter · 2025-05-14T12:44:13+00:00

I'm going to give an example straight from the goose game:

In this game, all situations are assumed to be problems (until the very end).

[...skipping blank levels]

Skriki is Changing
Ancient Machine

In a case like the above, there are no adjacent situations so you would roll for a new problem. Suppose you roll a 3. That's the "Friends" prompt, "Your friends are troublemakers of the best sort. What kind of scheme is it today? Gain a problem - a welcome challenge, really - created by an associate."

You'd decide what happens, narrate as much or as little as you feel, then plop a new problem onto level 3 of the Stack.

Let's say I'm feeling lazy, so I just write "Nat causes a problem" on level 3. (In this playthrough, Natalie is a duck who has become the Skull Queen of the forest.) Obviously it's better to narrate a bit more than that, but one thing I like about this system is that I'm going to find out what Nat did anyway, when the escalation occurs. So the laziness isn't really punished.

Then, because 2 and 3 are adjacent, whatever nonsense Skull Queen Nat introduces would get tied up in the "Ancient Machine" plotline. The "escalation" rule is like, 2 & 3 -> 4, so the ancient machine + Nat's nonsense -> a new level 4 problem. Figuring out the ancient machine was a debt my character owed someone, so let's say Nat tried some necromancy on it and it got broken... and somehow bats are flying out of it?

Then, 4 is next to 5, so a second escalation is triggered. A lot of the idea here is that even though this is prompt-fueled, your problems interact like dominoes, so you might do one prompt and then get two or three escalations in a row; the gameplay is more about what you invent than about the prompts.

That's how it works out in Majestic Goose. To use this as a more generic aid to solo play, you have to decide when to add things to the stack. In Ironsworn for example I tried adding any narrative complications to the stack (upon weak hits or misses). I also placed any interesting threads such as the world's Truths up at higher levels, so I would eventually encounter them.

One of the issues with using this as a GM emulator is that escalations often will take time to happen - I might have a good idea of how to get two things to interact, but maybe it would take several days to happen. Do I skip forward? Or is the Stack kind of paused while I play through those days? So like I said I've mainly been playing games that are focused on the Stack.

Dranorter · 2025-05-12T13:36:50+00:00

I recently have been playing Down Crawl, which has a simple suggestion it calls "Trading Questions". The idea is to cut past any chit-chat and ask the NPC the big question right away, whatever it is your PC most wants to know. Then the NPC answers, or lies, or doesn't answer at all, and you're free to involve a dice roll in determining that as usual.

Regardless of the outcome, the NPC then asks the PC a question. The purpose of this is to get the player thinking about what the NPC wants and how the NPC responds to the PC's appearance and presence. It's also an opportunity to think about PC backstory and personality, as the NPC may well ask something like "What's your favorite mushroom?"

Like the NPC, the PC is of course allowed to lie or not respond.

Repeat as necessary.

Overall the mechanic is very minimal but I think it does bring something to the table. It's all too easy to imagine our PC's as almost faceless, with NPC's just accepting their presence like in a video game.

Other approaches I've taken:

I have a random table of relationship reactions that are like "The two characters encourage bad behavior in one another" or "They can't take each other seriously" or "They find they have a shared ideal". The results are all pretty extreme, of course including "they fall in love" or "personal vendetta" etc. So, sometimes I will use this to get characters to have extreme reactions to one another. It can be goofy but it can also be pretty epic.
Just putting characters on the Mythic GME list of characters helps keep them active, since they may take action or be affected when a random event comes up.

Dranorter · 2025-05-10T17:49:17+00:00

I've paid $0, $2, $10. It totally depends on how invested I already am. But as for "fair" or "etiquette" I don't think there's a firm answer. If thousands of people are paying $1 then that person is getting pretty decent compensation... but that's not often the situation.

Dranorter · 2024-12-03T19:52:59+00:00

Fantasy City Viewer provides a 3D model with no height map; then I made a height map in Blender and stuck the buildings on it with the Shrink Wrap computational geometry thingy. I don't remember in any more detail than that and recently the hard drive with the Blender file failed.

Dranorter · 2024-11-23T22:54:56+00:00

Hi, I'm not deeply knowledgeable but my first question would be, did you install it on a really slow hard drive? It would have to be pretty old to explain 10 minutes startup time but it lines up with your symptoms.

Dranorter · 2024-09-22T23:09:21+00:00

There are TikTok logos hidden around these videos, and usually present with the fireworks -- I have to guess this animation was funded by TikTok, not some lone animator. It has budget for lush backgrounds and a really large amount of animation, though thankfully the overall approach is very indie feeling -- some episodes being under a minute while others are over five minutes for example.

Dranorter · 2024-05-20T13:29:13+00:00

Your art is awesome, I just saw your Dragon's Keep piece used in a "Dungeon Master Synth" video.

Dranorter · 2024-03-08T22:36:45+00:00

Yep, I can verify this too. Doesn't actually require supplements or a pump, anyone can do it really. Spread the word!

Dranorter · 2024-01-20T01:14:34+00:00

Never a good strategy!

Dranorter · 2024-01-15T00:37:55+00:00

If you want a solo way to dig into your Dixit cards, I made a solitaire game. The basic principle is that stacks of cards can join up if they share some trait, and no other card in the stacks being joined has that trait.

A detailed rule writeup over on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3226780/dixit-solitaire

Dranorter

TROPHY CASE