The Problem

Recently, while designing and playing a short solo rpg for release later this year, I found an issue with the design that I could not quite get over. When playing ttrpg's in groups, I don't mind rolling dice and comparing numbers to stats and bookkeeping. This is part of the culture and brings  a lot of joy  when multicolored dice hit the table and elicit moans and roars. As a solo player, however, I began to notice that the more dice rolls I had to make the slower the game began to move and the less engaged I became.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love rolling dice in solo games. Oracles are a blast to roll on and combat needs a bit of chance injected into it. The problem for me occurred when rolling to strike an NPC and also rolling to defend against their attack. Two problems presented themselves:

1. The process first became confusing and then convoluted. I would lose track of whether I was making a defense or attack roll and to rectify this I had to add more bookkeeping to track every conflict accurately. Lame.
2. The excess rolling became a mundane and repetitive chore without any sense of flavor or excitement.

Both these issues could kill interest in a game. So there needed to be a change. 

I decided that since two rolls per round (Attack and Defense) was too much that only left one option: drop down to one roll per combat round. Of course, now I needed to remove  an entire skill (Defense) and retool character creation to account for a smaller pool of skills to spend starting points on. But! After testing the single roll per round, it felt much better. 

Now instead of:

Roll Strike ---> Hit on six ---> Assign damage to NPC 

Roll Defense --> Save on six --> Roll for injury if failed

We now have:

Roll for Strike --> (Success) Inflict damage to NPC. (Fail) Roll for injury

Much simpler and moves combat along without feeling as if anything was sacrificed.

Other Issues

The list of things being redesigned and retooled are:

• Item tables, lists, buffs and gold costs.
• Proofreading and rebalancing random encounters.
• Streamlining downtime activities between investigations.
• Rebalancing injury effects
• Changing language to match, such as terms and tense.
• Finishing/Rebalancing Final Showdown events
• And so much more to fix.....

The current playtest version can be found at the link below. Please keep in mind this is a very very work in progress document that is being changed every week. But I feel like it is finally in a place where it can be looked over, play tested, and has enough substance for critique. 

Tea Leaves and Gunpowder Schemes

Investigation Events