A table that answers.

I started playing roleplaying games at ten. Until I was fifteen, the only other person at my table was my brother, and most of the time, he wasn’t there either. This was the 80s. Between the Satanic Panic and living out in the sticks, role-playing games were not well-known (or well-liked).

So I played all the parts. I drew the map, named the towns and decided what cavernous tombs lay under them. I wrote histories nobody would ever ask about. Young me created a character, walked them into a world I had built that same afternoon, and pretended to be surprised by it.

I got very good at pretending to be surprised. I never found a way to actually be surprised. That’s the whole problem statement, and it took me a long time to be able to put it in one sentence.

Ask anyone why we play role-playing games and you get a similar list of the benefits: Teamwork. Compromise. Shared narrative. Collaborative storytelling. Snacks.

That list describes the benefits that playing with a group provides. It has nothing at all to say about playing solo (except the snacks). For many people there is no group: the campaign collapsed, or the DM had a kid, or everyone moved away. I didn’t learn until the pandemic that there was a name for this other mode of RPGs, with a whole shelf-load of extraordinary games. I’ve been reading and playing them ever since, and I can tell you exactly where I keep getting stuck.

A bard walks into a seaside village.

… and that is where it stops. Before my character has said a word to anybody, the other half of my brain steps in. It’s the DM half, the one that enjoys this part of the process, taking over. Who founded this place? What do they pull out of the cavernous deep? Who is angry about it, and since when?

An hour later I have a fully stocked town but no story, and the character who was supposed to be walking through the gate is standing in the road holding a notebook with a weird look on his face. I am not playing at that point. I am preparing. And preparing, alone, with nobody waiting on you, is where my solo campaign quietly dies — not in a bad session, but in an unfinished folder.

What I want, at that moment, is for something outside of me to answer.

What is this town’s deal?

Two Men Tell It Two Different Ways + Bitter Water

The tricky balance between creativity and mechanics isn’t a problem solo games invented. It runs through the whole hobby, and it’s the problem I have been circling since I was a teenager.

Solo games inherit the same gap and double it. A great many of them hand you a premise, a list of prompts, and the trust to journal your way to a story. That is a real form of play and people make beautiful things with it. It’s not the thing I was reaching for. I don’t want prompts. I want a world with opinions.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Most of the machinery I have been describing has already been built. It’s scattered, that’s all.

Powered by the Apocalypse put the consequence inside the roll instead of after it. Blades in the Dark made position and effect something you settle out loud before the dice land. The Resistance system, out of Rowan, Rook and Decard, turned stress and fallout into an engine that spends your character to move the story. Past the named ones there are hundreds of games with unique and creative mechanics — clocks, fronts, faction turns, oracle pairs, tables that ask you a question instead of giving you an answer — invented independently by people who mostly don’t know each other’s work exists.

Turn it all the way down and Abstractica can just hold a character sheet with three fields on it — or two sentences and a handful of tags, the way Legends in the Mist does it. Somewhere to keep track of what’s happened, who you’ve met and what you owe them. Don’t roll digital dice if you’d rather not: roll on your desk, and write the result into the editor as prose.

Turn it up and it carries all the mechanical outcomes of the game — the moves, the oracles, the dice math, the narrative clocks that span whole campaigns. Turn it up further and it answers when you ask.

This hobby has spent fifty years quietly inventing procedures for imagination. Ways to ask a question and get back an answer you didn’t make up yourself. Ways to turn a bad roll into a story rather than a setback. Ways to make a world push against the person walking through it. That work is real, and it’s scattered across hundreds of books, most of them small and many of them already out of print.

Gathering it — making it run, putting it somewhere one person alone at a desk on a Tuesday night can reach it without an evening of setup first — is worth doing whether or not anybody ever buys a license. That is the honest version. I would like you to buy one, but I would be doing this either way.

Abstractica is the first step. One table, one player at it, everything laid out and nothing to clear away at the end of the night. After that: more systems, more procedures, more of the machinery, until the distance between wanting to play and playing is thin enough to not matter anymore.

There’s no faceless company behind this. In the end Elsewares, LLC is me — one person writing the code, writing the tables, writing this page. I am building the thing I needed at ten and still need now, and the reason to sell is that selling it lets me carry on making it better.