The Gameplay Diamond

Here’s a phrase I hate typing into Google: "solo dnd system". I hate this phrase because it reminds me that I’m never going to find the magical system I’m looking for.

See, I have this seemingly unique and eldritch desire to play D&D alone. I say it’s unique, but what I really mean is that whoever is coming up with the right SEO phrases to get their search results to show up for "solo dnd system" really do not mean the same thing that I do. Articulating this image that’s been in my head has been very difficult, clashing often with the visions of those that really believed they were providing search engine spelunkers with the pinnacle of their solo D&D desires.

What usually gets suggested when you clue people familiar with this space in to your desires to do all of this solo, is what I can only best describe as “storytelling tools”. Some of these are really good storytelling tools, but most all of them feel more like tea leaf divination than they do any semblance of playing a game.

Why does this happen? "solo dnd system" on its own should be pretty clear - I want to do everything I would be able to do at a table playing a typical RPG, but without a human DM. What ends up happening is that it gets interpreted as “So you want to be the DM, huh?”. DM-ing is not easy; creating a massive world tailored to the people at the gaming table takes not only tons of prep work, but also a very well-read person in order to run it well. Picking up games like Ironsworn or systems like Mythic feel like I’m being told that what I want isn’t actually what I said I wanted.

The gameplay diamond helps me illustrate games as intersecting capabilities, rather than defined roles. Those capabilities are:

• Performing actions
• Interpreting choices
• Updating states, and
• Informing players

Let’s take a look at the terms in the gameplay diamond:

• Players: People. They define what the game is
• Modules: Settings, lore, attributes, characters, etc. These define why the game is played
• Engines: The mechanics. These define how the game works

How does this relate to solo D&D? Primarily, it helped me determine that what I was looking for was not going to be found by searching for solo D&D - I’ll get to that in a follow-up post. First, let’s understand how existing RPGs fit into this mold, and why "solo dnd system" could mean so many things to different people.

In D&D, Interpreting, Updating, and Informing are done primarily by the DM - a reasonable human who can be negotiated with and arbitrate rules decisions. They are responsible for providing both outputs of modules; Interpretation - taking creative choices and turning them into hard numbers that can be manipulated, and Information - taking those numbers and using them to paint an illustrative scenery of what has transpired as a result.

While Updating is straight-forwardly laid out by the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, Interpretation and Information are more of an art form. Various posts and texts exist that cross the boundary of gaming over into storytelling techniques, research and theory. It takes a lot of creativity to tell a good story using numbers, and a metric shit-ton of reference materials to inspire that creativity. Simply put, a poorly creative person won’t make for a good DM, otherwise you could just replace them with a calculator.

On the player side is where things get even more interesting, though. When it comes to video games, things are pretty cut-and-dry - the game engine and the modules you use to interact with it are set in stone. However, in tabletop RPGs (and other board games, to an extent), the players take an active role in not only Performing, but also Interpreting and even Informing. This isn’t a product of role-playing inherently, but more a result of having what is essentially a human game engine acting as a DM, and the focus there is sociability. If the DM acted more as a robotic and rigid referee, players of TTRPGs would be relegated to a video game-esque relationship, being unable to participate in the interpretation of their actions within the world. In practice, players who enjoy Performing can freely take a back seat and allow the DM and other players to dominate the other capabilities, while players who want to take greater part in the world-building can lean heavily into Interpreting their actions and collaboratively flesh out the Information the DM provides.

Okay, so we have a clear picture of how D&D works, let’s now take a look at how Ironsworn works. I’ll single out Ironsworn for this post since it’s, at least in my experience, the most commonly referenced ‘solution’ to the solo D&D itch recently, but this also applies to systems like FATE, Mythic, and almost any other system that touts itself as allowing you to be able to play games “without a DM”.

In Ironsworn, the players take over the responsibilities of the DM. Keyword there: takeover - Ironsworn doesn’t remove the need to Interpret, Update, or Inform on the game state. Everything is shouldered onto the player. The main thing that jumps out here, is that Ironsworn is only as fun as the player is creative, which is a bummer if you were looking for anything resembling a D&D experience.

Ironsworn descends from a legacy of self-proclaimed Narratavist games, usually falling under the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game system umbrella. I won’t go too deeply into those concepts here - that’s a post for another day - the important idea is that these games sell themselves as providing more storytelling, fictional, and narrative focus and opportunities than games like D&D or Pathfinder. “Narratavist” games assume that every player at the gaming table wants to Interpret and Inform more than they Perform actions. Thing is, they achieve this by 1) reducing the scope of Updating to (marginally) reduce the DM burden, then 2) taking the individual archetype of a DM and splitting it out into piece-meal functions amongst the players at the table, before finally 3) simplifying and streamlining the responsibilities of a player when it comes to Performing actions.

In my opinion, this really only achieves three things:

1. Eliminates a lot of authority the DM has in a typical RPG system
2. Vastly limits the practical effect that players have in altering the game state, and
3. Actually, that’s really it

This style of game is essentially focused on players who would otherwise be DMs.

I’d argue that Updating is by far the easiest part of a DM’s job. Interpreting and Informing are far more important, as those are usually the only ways to communicate Modules to a player, and Modules are what give players reasons to continue playing the game. The real goal of PbtA games, and self-proclaimed Narrativist games on a general level, are to eliminate DM authority and turn players into mini-DMs, giving them more control over the Modules, and thus, the storytelling, fiction, and narrative of the game. This irks me for several reasons, main one being that, well, nothing in D&D or Pathfinder, as examples, prevents you from achieving that goal in the first place.

You can imagine my frustration, then, at seeing Ironsworn pop up as the most recommended game for people looking to play D&D solo - I was typing the wrong search terms into the search box. This isn’t a fault of Ironsworn, mind you. I’m not trying to say it’s a bad game, but it doesn’t achieve what I was actually looking for: a solo game that allows me to freely choose between just-Performing, and Interpreting and Informing as and when I feel like it. In games like Ironsworn, you have to do all of these things all of the time. As I said earlier: a lot of tea leaf divination.

In the same way a D&D player can listen to the DM wax and wane about the history of these two warring nation-states, and how the Grand Vicar has seized the opportunity to brainwash the local populace into sacrificing their first-borns, in order to feed the thirst for souls of the Greater Demon King, who lurks in the crypts beneath the aqueduct beneath the slums beneath the city, and keeps his son in hellish captivity because he lost a bet with a literal Angel - and respond with a simple “I attack with my steel dagger” - and negotiate with the DM so that it results in an action that makes sense, I want to do that in a solo game. I want to be surprised that that’s the story, dive deeper into some aspects of this, maybe even chat with some townsfolk - and I want to do all of this in a consistent way, as opposed to being greeted by Clark, the jester paladin blood sherriff I defeated several hours back the moment I step foot past the city gates because I rolled “An enemy returns as an ally”, and he’s so ridiculously generated that he’s the only enemy I can think of to dredge up at this point in the story.

Ironsworn’s response is to ask me to first interpret the results of die rolls and prompts to come up with such an elaborate scenario myself, make the context meaningful and consistent, and add enough intrigue, treachery, backstory, twists, turns, and other story elements to make it interesting - and then I can play it.

If I didn’t know any better I’d assume Google was transforming my search queries into "solo DM system" after the fact.