Looking at solo RPGs that give you boundaries and a limited space for games.
The Big Solo RPG Space
The solo RPG space has grown much larger in the last few years, since exploding in Covid. Journalling, gamebooks, GM Emulators, investigation games, world building and solo-specific games such as Ironsworn.
Lots of games rely on you having the roles of writer (Journalling games) or Gamesmaster (GM Emulators, Oracles) as well as player. You'll need to create ideas and content for your game,
But some solo games don't require this.
Bounded Solo Games
Bounded games don't require you to create anything new. You can follow the instructions and there will be an (hopefully) enjoyable game in it.
These are useful to play if you don't games that keep moving. If you don't have the energy to create responses to journal prompts or interpret oracle results.
Some include...
- Traditional Gamebooks that give you a branching narrative, choosing your own path. You follow variations of the same story, using elements such as ability tests, skills, puzzles and codewords . Either in a standalone book or as part of a series. Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf and Rider of the Black Sun are all examples.
- Open-World Gamebooks let you navigate around the book, going from location to location and back again. And then from book to book and back again. You have far more control over how the books progress. Fabled Lands, Legendary Kingdoms and Steam Highwayman are all examples.
- Dungeon Crawlers where you're entering the depths to fight monsters and get treasures (but without a board). 2d6 Dungeon, Ker-Nethalas and Four Against Darkness are examples of these.
- Other Bounded Games are the more unique ones, such as Delve where you're drawing your dwarf miners expanding underground. Or 5 Leagues from the Borderlands and 5 Parsecs from Home, solo skirmish miniatures games all generated from procedural random tables and choices.
- Semi-Bounded Games are the fuzzy ones that can be played with with some journalling or played as bounded games with nothing extra to add. The Broken Cask and Notorious are both in this category.
Finishing Up
Will try to expand on this in the future or find some other people talking about it.
