Solo RPGs

[IsabellaRose]

Has anyone tried playing solo RPGs, or playing standard RPGs using something like Mythic GM Emulator to be able to play solo?

I'm currently playing an idea I had where my character wakes up with amnesia and no ID in a small backwater town. She has an ability that will become apparent to her over time, but she is unaware of what it is, how it works, or that it's even there in the beginning. It just happens and she thinks it's just a lot of strange coincidence. For this solo game, I've set her ability myself rather than randomly generate it, and she has a sort of "instant turn-on/attractiveness" effect that sometimes works on people around her. I haven't put anything in stone a to whether it's a biological or magical effect, so the cause could be anything, and the random elements I generate during play will slowly bring me to an answer. 

For this game I'm using a very light Cortex ruleset with just a few base stats and several stress tracks. I'm using Mythic GM Emulator v2 with the Chaos Factor set to 5. I skipped the chaos factor for the opening scenes of 1. waking in a hospital, 2. meeting local medical, law enforcement, and social services personnel as she recovers, and 3. being discharged into the world. Now she's on her own in a small town where everybody knows everyone else, and they all knows she's "Amnesia Girl". 

Mechanically it's pretty simple to use Mythic - whenever I would ask the GM a question like, "is there anyone else at the community center when she goes there to find a room at the shelter for he night?", I take a guess as to how likely a yes answer is (50/50 in this case) and roll on the "Fate Chart" using the current Chaos Factor. Then I interpret the answer. For more randomness, I fed the mythic rules to ai and let it generate the possible yes, no, strong yes, and strong no responses ahead of time. Then I roll and I have an answer, and go from there. 

Mythic and AI combined have generated a few NPCs for me so far, but the only story thread I have so far is "who am i?" which I imagine would be the thing that bounces around inside your skull most often if you wake up with amnesia. I'm curious if this will be a superhero story, a spy thriller, a modern fantasy/magic story, or what. As a bonus, I've come up with a list of skills she may know that she could suddenly just "use" under pressure. If a situation requires a very specific skill, I'll roll randomly to see if she suddenly uses it and then we get a whole new mystery... why do I know kung fu? Where did I learn to evasive driving techniques? What were those words I just said and why did all the lights go out when i said them? Maybe she's magic, maybe she's a spy, maybe an alien... I kind of like not knowing for now.

[inkylore]

i  did at some point if only because i didn't have friends to play a traditional game of dnd with, quickly stopped doing so when i discovered it required a book, and sense i couldn't find a pirated version of the book i just kind of gave up on looking

[WickedCadrach]

Mythic GM looks fun, but I haven't tried it out myself. I've played through a couple specialized Solo RPGs like Thousand Year Old Vampire and really enjoyed them. It's interesting how those sorts of systems force you make your own meaning. With a human GM, there's some prepared thread or at least intentional elements in the sandbox, and you assume there's going to be coherence before you open the next door. But with tables and interpretation, you end up having to justify it yourself, and I've found that sort of system gives you these really delicious moments where something from earlier in the story ends up dramatically recontextualized. In my TYOV playthrough, I had this late-game moment where I realized my vampire had been lying to herself over the ages and purposefully forgotten that her cherished ally and touchstone of her humanity had betrayed and tried to kill her, leading them into a tearful 'why are you doing this?' final showdown. 

[IsabellaRose]

2 hours ago, inkylore said:

i  did at some point if only because i didn't have friends to play a traditional game of dnd with, quickly stopped doing so when i discovered it required a book, and sense i couldn't find a pirated version of the book i just kind of gave up on looking

I have a printed copy of Mythic. Can’t remember where I got it, maybe Drivethrurpg.com? I also have a PDF and since I’m a big spreadsheet weirdo I made my own copy of a bunch of the tables and forms in Excel.