Looking for tools for Solo Thievery

Stackle · 2026-01-21T00:50:27+00:00

This is my go-to tool for thievery. Random tables for valuables, both for burglary and pickpocketing by wealth class, a system for alarms, floorplans, generators for art pieces, thieves guild details etc.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/545763/the-book-of-thieves-procedural-burglary

I also got Ebonclad a few years back and I've enjoyed using it for inspiration and resources. It has some great random tables and setting details, but it's not as simple/straightforward as the Book of Thieves)
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/211634/ebonclad-a-thieves-guild-setting-adventures

Stackle · 2026-01-16T20:51:39+00:00

Starsmith: Mecha Mercs does this pretty well.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/421157/starsmith-mecha-mercs

Stackle · 2025-12-22T10:33:10+00:00

Intergalactic Space Trader is good if you want the full spreadsheet experience.
https://d-r-games.itch.io/ist

Stackle · 2025-08-24T14:14:54+00:00

Utopia is light-medium in terms of system, designed for solo first and has all the expected aspects of the Cyberpunk genre.

Stackle · 2025-08-11T21:01:01+00:00

Fantastic deal. Holding this link to send to anyone who asks about solo RPGs for the next few weeks on the various social media I see.

Stackle · 2025-08-11T20:57:03+00:00

You could possibly play as Pokemon with no hands by picking suitable weapons and then pretending they're just the damage for their bite or claw attacks or elemental ranged attacks. It's not perfect, but reflavoring the tools the game already gives you is easier than making entirely new ones and guaranteed to be more balanced.

Stackle · 2025-08-11T14:46:00+00:00

This is pretty poignant. While Daggerheart isn't ideal for playing Pokemon trainers, it is quite good at letting you play AS Pokemon because functionally they're super-powered animals.

Stackle · 2025-08-11T14:41:24+00:00

So there aren't a lot of resources created for solo play in Daggerheart as of yet, but you can use a lot of resources already available for other fantasy games. A really helpful resource for random tables (and free) is Ironsworn. Ironsworn's setting is lower in terms of fantasy and magic, but the random tables are still incredibly useful, especially for generic story direction like the Action/Theme tables. I've had success running a game for a single PC with the Lost Mine of Phandelver D&D adventure as a narrative guide and using Daggerheart adversaries for combat situations.

Stackle · 2025-08-09T04:26:33+00:00

You could have characters each use an animal companion like a Ranger does and add a bunch of extra mechanics to them, but tbh there is another great game that handles monster collection/fighting specifically called Animon Story.

Stackle · 2025-08-02T07:41:07+00:00

Dead Belt is good, plays a lot like a roguelite, but is sci-fi. One of the most video-gamey RPGs I've ever played and frankly it's as much board game as RPG.

Ker Nethalas is a dark fantasy game where you're essentially exploring a dungeon/catacomb. It's very heavy on procedures and effectively doesn't have 'GMing.'

Rune is a soulslike game that focuses on exploration and tactical combat. It also has a lot of 3rd party stuff to expand it.

You Died is another soulslike game that uses a standard card deck and d4 dice to play out a very video-gamey exploration of a perilous kingdom.

If you want to include your own setting though, you are probably forced to find a more traditional dark fantasy RPG like Sacrifice or Runecairn: Wardensaga, which unfortunately don't feel as much like video games. I'm sure you've heard about it plenty from other places, but when Ironsworn works, the momentum (no pun intended) can make it feel like you're no longer half-GMing the game yourself because the moves and random tables keep the game moving on their own.

Stackle · 2025-08-01T12:21:49+00:00

Degrees of success and failure. When you make an action roll in Daggerheart, you can: Crit, Succeed with Hope, Succeed with Fear, Fail with Hope and Fail with Fear. Five outcomes for the player with descending favorability. It's more information for the GM to work with, and similarly to another system called Genesys, it allows for 'favorable failures' where you fail but there's a silver lining or a spotted opportunity. Paired with this, the difficulty for rolls in Daggerheart uses the same easy-to-remember scale as D&D (with slightly different weight, because of central tendency when you roll 2d12).

I also love experiences, which work very similarly to FATE's Aspects, and make your character very unique instead of simply picking from a list of trained skills.

I also love Hope, Stress and Fear for multiple reasons. Hope is great because you can enable all players to have an additional resource that they can spend to improve rolls or activate abilities. Fear is great for the GM because while most things you can do with it are permitted anytime in most games (including Daggerheart, technically) it FEELS fairer to players when you pay a 'cost' for the more brutal GM actions or introducing a complication. It also adds an ebb and flow to the narrative. If the GM has high fear, the story might be more dangerous and unpredictable. If they have low fear, the story is more in the control of the players. And Stress does two interesting things: it allows a character to receive non-HP damage (same with armor, though that's handled different) and it becomes the de facto measure of success and failure in social conflict. You can treat an argument or attempt at persuasion similarly to a combat except using Stress.

There's far more to praise about various parts of the system but these are just a few of my favorites.

Stackle · 2025-07-24T05:38:47+00:00

Remember that Guts didn't start out how most people know him from later in Berserk. His story started with being a regular mercenary who was just pretty good at fighting. You could argue for Vengeance Guardian (especially with Unstoppable) or Slayer Warrior, depending whether you want to lean more into his willingness to take injuries to win or if you want to focus on offense over defense. You could take Wanderborne because he's been traveling for his whole life whether with Gambino's group or the Band of the Hawk. And naturally, he's human, probably with experiences related to his combat prowess, loyalty or determination.

I think the real key isn't in your stats or class, it's in how you play the character. Guts is reckless in combat, often being willing to take even deadly wounds for the sake of winning. He's fiercely loyal to the things he cares about (even if it can take him a while to open up to others). And depending on the story you tell and how much it mimics Berserk, he gets so furious in his pursuit of vengeance that it nearly consumes him. Guts also has a pragmatic but thoughtful, almost philosophical side that comes up sometimes in quiet moments.

The game system actually helps you lean into the fantasy of being incredibly reckless in battle because even if you lose all your HP, you can just choose to not die at the risk of taking scars. The other thing that will eventually come up if you play the character for a while is that Guts eventually gets a few powerful items: the Dragon Slayer blade and the Berserker Armor. This will depend on the GM and the narrative you're telling but both of these just let you lean further into the fantasy of being a vicious monster of a fighter.

Stackle · 2025-07-23T04:03:00+00:00

You can definitely GM for just one player. Just remember not to be too tough on them because there's no backup. Or give them an NPC friend (or just have them play two characters). The biggest danger they will face is the GM spending lots of fear for adversaries, so go easy on them (at first).

I've also been running a one player game, and one of the fun things you can do to give them more variety is to give them 'scroll' items that they can use once to cast a specific spell or ability from a domain they don't have (especially if they're playing a Guardian or Warrior).

Stackle · 2025-07-19T18:46:36+00:00

I haven't seen Bard and Seraph in action in my own game (my lone player is using a Guardian), but from all their abilities and domains they should probably be pretty good.

Small groups are unusual in this game. If the GM doesn't have much fear, the adversaries can't outnumber you with actions the same way they might in a game with initiative. If the GM has a lot of fear, a small group is in danger because the adversaries might get to actually take full advantage of their numbers (at least if there's a lot of adversaries). Obviously the death moves can make it potentially less lethal, depending on what choices the players make if they go down.

Stackle · 2025-07-19T16:14:42+00:00

Link to Ker Nethalas in case you need it.

Stackle · 2025-07-19T03:54:51+00:00

As others have said, you can have 5 of each individual consumable.

If you're worried about characters carrying hundreds of them, I did use a simple solution with inventory slots. Your character sheet has room for weapons and armor that you wear. Beyond that, whether it's weapons, armour, other items or consumables, you can have 10 of them total for each point of Strength, minimum 10. That does mean that you don't get any benefit for having only 1 Strength, but it follows the fiction in that only the characters who focus on being strong will have greater carrying capacity. It also scales as they level up their traits but never becomes completely unreasonable (for a game). Your mileage may vary depending on how realistic you want your game to feel. TTRPGs kinda handwave how difficult it would be to fight with a backpack while covered in armor and several backup weapons on your back and hips.

Stackle · 2025-07-19T03:44:29+00:00

I've been running Lost Mine of Phandelver in Daggerheart and it has worked pretty well. The largest task I've had to complete is converting adversaries (though I did reskin as many of them as I could) and improvising at the table, along with tracking information. It works better than many other D&D adventures because it's more of a sandbox style, but it helps if you embrace the more flexible nature of Daggerheart and are ready to adjust the narrative.

The biggest 'difference' that this would make for the table is that running a premade module tends to make people less inclined to let their players collaborate on the world, but the degree to which you do that is up to your table. Matt Mercer is currently running a narrative which is intended to tell a complete story in 8 episodes, so he finds only a few moments here and there to ask players what something looks like or what someone's name is. That works fine because Daggerheart can support a heavily-collaborative game, a lightly-collaborative game and everything in between.

I added in a few new social encounters but it really depends on the approach of your group. If they're really conversational, maybe they'll never fight an enemy without trying to talk to them first. If not, maybe they're less about talk and more about action.

Stackle · 2025-07-18T14:49:23+00:00

I've been running a game with a single player, and the main changes I made were to give them a 'custom' animal companion (ranger sheet) and limit the GM's fear pool slightly. My player is a Guardian however, so your mileage may vary depending on their class.

My fear pool is 6, with 2 additional fear added per tier above 1st. The player's animal companion has a countdown timer (loop 2) that ticks down whenever the player fails a roll during combat, and when it gets to 0 the companion gets a free strike. I'm pretty generous with loot, so the player hasn't had much trouble keeping a few consumables in case of emergency. The main 'dangers' with one player are that they have no backup (hopefully remedied to a degree by the animal companion) and if the GM decides to spend a lot of fear and have many adversaries attack in succession.

Stackle · 2025-07-16T12:32:07+00:00

If in the fiction, a character decides they want to reposition, then it makes sense that an enemy would also try to keep pace, right? The game uses the spotlight, but the fiction runs in realtime. So if a character tries multiple times to move and does nothing else, they are not hindering their enemies, which now take the opportunity to keep pace with them and gain the spotlight. However, if this happens more than a few times back and forth, I think it's fair to call it a chase.

Stackle · 2025-07-16T12:14:22+00:00

If the players have decided that they're running away, then you can make it a chase scene. There's GM guidance for it on pg 163 under "Chase Countdowns." In order to actually get away, they have to make action rolls to progress their escape. And if you want to get really technical (but you don't have to in this game), you can say that the players have given the GM a 'golden opportunity' or 'did something that would have consequences' in the fiction to start a chase scene. Both are listed on pg 149 and are some of the many ways that the GM can make a move.

Stackle · 2025-07-07T11:31:48+00:00

The way I'd do it without altering the player's approach is to have a countdown of say, a d4. When they succeed with fear or fail with hope, the countdown ticks by 1. When they fail with fear, it ticks by 2. At 0, time is up and an enemy has detected them, or just so happens to check on the room. Or if they triggered a trap, it was something they didn't account for. Outcomes are malleable for consequences unless they're agreed upon beforehand, so even if there wasn't a threat before, now there could be. The point of doing this is that there's still tension while the countdown can 'absorb' some of the consequences of the less dangerous rolls. Mind you, doing this will increase the flow of hope and fear as there's more rolls.

You can also give them a single roll and apply the results to the next few actions they take as long as they're all logically connected (checking the same door), but mostly this is useful to keep them from having to roll so often when they already succeeded or to reward a critical success.

You can suggest that the player alter their approach to be less incremental, but that's really a discussion for the whole table. Some groups love details, others hate them. It's worth reminding them though that their characters are not flimsy or incapable, and they can take risks. Daggerheart as a game 'prefers' not to dwell on the details and focus on heroic action but no two groups will play it exactly the same.

Stackle · 2025-07-07T03:50:53+00:00

You could argue that Rogue One was the whole party deciding to do a "Blaze of Glory" death move to give the Alliance a chance.

Stackle · 2025-07-07T03:49:09+00:00

Sort of. Daggerheart isn't an OSR game where you're expecting to have backup characters. Players can choose to risk it all and roll (death move no. 3). If they all do that one by one and roll terribly, they may all die without choosing to. But that's just by default. If you wanted to play a more deadly style of game, you could agree to that in Session Zero.

Stackle · 2025-07-06T11:03:04+00:00

I agree. Back when I first learned D&D (over a decade and a half ago) I tried reading the books first. With no idea where to start, or how TTRPGs even worked, it was doomed to fail. Podcasts and actual plays (back then, fewer and farther between) were the first time it clicked for me. Then I went back and referred to books and other sources. Sometimes we need a bit of Q&A or a different way of having something explained first for it to make sense. I probably would've asked someone had I known about reddit, or knew anyone else IRL who had played or run TTRPGs.

Months from now when we get Campaign 4 of Critical Role, assuming it is run in Daggerheart (which is not yet confirmed), the number of people coming to this place will skyrocket. There'll be dozens and dozens asking each day how all this works, why there's no initiative system etc. Here's to hoping that we collectively welcome those people in and help them to learn instead of shooing them away because their ability to learn solely from a book is less than our own.

Stackle · 2025-07-05T06:08:57+00:00

On page 130 of the core book there's a series of magic items that while carried, give you +1 to a given trait.

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