Are you one who still enjoys aspects of pen and paper roleplaying? Do you need a better game master, or just need better tools as one? RPG Solo offers you a great free way to make those decisions about the adventure that have to be made either on the fly or in advance creation of modules.
In either case, RPG Solo can help you out by letting you concentrate on the creative parts and taking care of the choices and brainstorm ideas for you.
There’s a lot of folks out there that still do pen and paper roleplaying, and those that do so using laptops instead of actual paper and ink, so you’re not alone, but even so it can sometimes be hard to find a decent game master or dungeon master or yarn spinner or whatever title the leader and creator of the game is called. In cases like that, it’s often the impulse of the group to throw their hands up in despair and perhaps even quit the group or other consequences undesired.
Enter RPG Solo. RPG Solo is a great little program that costs nothing to use, you just need an Internet connection to connect to it and use it. RPG Solo is a tool that will almost completely replace a GM or DM in any game’s group, and will help to make even the worst GM an almost adequate one by providing answers that are the most common stumbling blocks in gaming. This might sound confusing at first, and indeed, upon first loading and viewing the RPG Solo interface, one is left feeling a bit baffled and out of their depth, but the good news is that there aren’t any buttons on the interface that will ‘break’ the program so you don’t need to worry about hitting the wrong thing. Explore with impunity! I personally suggest just jumping in and fiddling with it as the best way to learn it’s functions and uses. There is a robust documentation forum, however, for those that would prefer a more traditional learning experience.
Here’s what RPG Solo can do for you, as a game master or a player trying to imitate one. You are trying to create a module or you are in the middle of one that you’ve painstakingly created beforehand when your players decide to go off in some tangent direction you hadn’t anticipated and now you’ve got to make decisions on the fly, under pressure. This is not as easy as it sounds, and RPG Solo can make it much easier by offering those answers for you, and leaving you to create without worrying about making those choices. So, if your players have decided to explore the passage you hadn’t planned for, you can determine there’s a fifty fifty chance that they will run into a monster that can kill them all. So, you hit the 50/50 button in RPG Solo and you get the result of “Yes, but…” which tells you that the decision has been made! Without a die roll and with a caveat already decided to exist! Yes, they meet a monster that can kill them, you decide on the fly, but they also find a weapon that can destroy it and the boss at the end of the module too! These decisions are the ones that we waffle over and creativity suffers for them. RPG Solo helps you out by making them for you. If RPG Solo could speak, it would say, “I am the decider!” in a heavy southern drawl.
But wait, there’s more! RPG Solo also has many other features to help you with your gaming. Stuck for an idea for the setting for the adventure you promised to have ready next weekend? Hit the “get setting” button and you’ll be given an idea, right away! You can use it, modify it, expand on it, or just get another one, whatever you decide. It’s essentially a jump start to a brainstorm! This tool could also be considered useful for anyone that enjoys writing fiction but sometimes finds that they get ‘writer’s block’ when looking for their next story idea. And it does a lot more than that! Getting Started is my favorite button, as it gives you a great sentence to kick start a session!
RPG Solo is one of those brilliant little programs that comes along and you just know you will wind up using it for years to come because it’s so simple yet useful that you’ll wonder how you ever played a single session of [Insert Your Game Of Choice Here] without it! The only problem arises when you have technophobic players that complain about you using the laptop to run the game, instead of the traditional cardboard screen and paper tomes. That’s not a problem fixed by RPG Solo but I personally suggest using strong-arm tactics like holding their level advancement hostage until they see things your way. Until next time, my friends!
[Thanks to ‘Mark’ for tipping us off about this one]
- Check out RPG Solo here.
