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Strider™ Mode for The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game Out Now!

As it says in the title, it is a Solo and co-op mode for the game, which as with most RPGs normally requires a GM. It is $4.99 USD at DriveThru RPG.

Its interesting but I have never actually had any interest in playing any of these games solo.

I would find it seriously weird, bordering on dusturbing, roleplaying a character to myself :]

Cyel wrote:
I would find it seriously weird, bordering on dusturbing, roleplaying a character to myself :]

You've never played a Chose your own Adventure or programed solo adventure? Admittedly this is different as there is no "script", but the principle is the same.

For example; Grail Quest for The Fantasy Trip. Your character is a knight of the Round Table and you are seeking the Holy Grail. It works on a paragraph system and your decisions will send you to different paragraphs. Unlike a Chose your own Adventure book, you create your own character. Also combat is not abstracted.

Steve Jackson Games offers a free PDF of Melee if anyone is interested. The Fantasy Trip: Death Test and Death Test 2 are two preprogrammed solo adventures for that system. In those adventures, the emphasis is on combat, and you run a team of four characters trying to escape the dungeon.

I did buy Strider Mode. As I'm new to the One Ring system, some things are unclear. I think I need to reread the core mechanics and then some of the solo mechanics introduced should make more sense.

I played Choose your own Adventure and I play board games solo (I have Machina Arcana set up in front of me right now ). But these are no RPGs like this is supposed to be.

RPGs are about roleplaying (!) a character to shape it through behaviour, actions and dialogue. For example in a dungeon crawl board game you just have a warrior with stats. But in an RPG your portrayal decides whether he's grim and rugged or pretends to be cynical but has a good heart or is melancholic and hardly ever speaks etc

It is roleplayed and needs some kind of audience -GM and other players who can see how you speak as this character and how you describe his behaviour. Doing such things (for example roleplaying dialogue) solo feels extremely weird. But without it we don't talk about an RPG, but just some kind of a dungeon crawl board game which is a different thing altogether.

Cyel wrote:
I played Choose your own Adventure and I play board games solo (I have Machina Arcana set up in front of me right now ). But these are no RPGs like this is supposed to be.

RPGs are about roleplaying (!) a character to shape it through behaviour, actions and dialogue. For example in a dungeon crawl board game you just have a warrior with stats. But in an RPG your portrayal decides whether he's grim and rugged or pretends to be cynical but has a good heart or is melancholic and hardly ever speaks etc

It is roleplayed and needs some kind of audience -GM and other players who can see how you speak as this character and how you describe his behaviour. Doing such things (for example roleplaying dialogue) solo feels extremely weird. But without it we don't talk about an RPG, but just some kind of a dungeon crawl board game which is a different thing altogether.

Fair enough. By your definition, should I play Strider Mode, I'd really be conducting a solo adventure. I'd certainly not bother with dialogue; the goal is the focus. To take a canonical example from LotR; when Gandalf asked Aragorn to find Gollum, even though the trail was years cold. So the game would be about overcoming various obstacles, finding and capturing Gollum, and bringing him back to Gandalf. There's no need for role-playing or acting as one would in a live tabletop RPG.

Anyway, I posted the original link in case people were interested.

Makes sense. Maybe just not doing these things aloud, but having an inner monologue a la film noir could work "as I was entering the glade I smiled, seeing my good friend Almarith there, but my mood slumped when I realised he was distressed. "Elen sila lumen omentialvo" I greeted him but he hardly looked up from the ground where he was investigating some creature's tracks".

The stuff Cyel brings up is mostly my opinion as well.

The thing is you should make your games to play to the strengths of the medium. A TTRPG is strong for character interaction and collaborative story telling in a way most mediums just can never match.

But a solo game... why not just a video game? Graphics can handle paragraphs of description and atmosphere that you reading something out of a book just cannot match. The systems backend rolling on tables and doing stuff will keep the action moving.

Even a board game will use a board, cards, chits etc etc... to represent and mechanically facilitate a lot of the world actions. But a TTRPG? So you get a mission to dump the ring in the volcano or whatever and you move your tell yourself you are doing over land travel and then roll on a random table, read all of what it says, guess your being ambushed now? Guess il roll for the villains and myself for the combat and see who wins...

It doesn't play to ANY strength of the medium.

I just don't get it.

Yes, it seems this gets extremely upkeep heavy with all these random tables to consult, and NPC AI to take care of and bookkeeping. Like the game is mostly upkeep with actual gameplay (decisions, choices, roleplay) being only lightly sprinkled on top. 20% of the time you play the game and 80% of the time the game plays you.