I’ve been thinking about whether solo TTRPGs might be a good way to learn to be a better games master. Not just as a way of playing games on my own, but as a kind of apprenticeship, where I can practice the creative and improvisational skills that a GM needs, without having to run an actual game for other people.
The analogy that comes to mind is an assisted pull-up machine at the gym. It supports some of your weight so you can do an exercise you’re not yet strong enough to manage on your own. As you get stronger, you reduce the assistance. I wonder whether solo games, together with the right sorts of prompts and random tables, could do something similar for my improvisational muscles.
I think this might help with a couple of problems I have with games mastering.
My two problems
The first is that I simply don’t have much experience inventing the sorts of things that go into a game. NPCs, locations, magic items, clues, plots, twists, complications and so on. I haven’t really spent much time doing this, and I don’t have much confidence in my ability to come up with them.
I don’t think these things necessarily need to be very complicated. I could just sit down and write a list of twelve NPCs, for example. That would be a perfectly useful bit of practice. But I haven’t done enough of this kind of thing to feel comfortable with it.
I suspect that a good GM has a fairly large stock of ideas and patterns they can draw on without much effort. When the players unexpectedly visit a shop, they can invent a shopkeeper. When something needs to go wrong, they can think of a complication. The ideas don’t have to be brilliant or original. They just have to be reasonable, interesting enough, and quick enough to keep the game moving.
I’d like to get to the point where I can do that.
My second problem is probably more serious. I have a massive tendency to overthink and overcomplicate things.
I’ll sit down to write a character or a location, get one or two sentences onto the page, and then immediately start thinking about how to organise everything. Perhaps I need a database, or a system for classifying ideas, or a program for generating and evaluating them. Before long I’m researching tools on the internet or vibe coding a new application.
And of course I’m no longer doing the thing I originally sat down to do.
I think this is partly because I’m much more comfortable designing systems than I am inventing fictional material. So when the creative work gets uncomfortable, I retreat into something I know how to do.
The trouble is that I can spend hours doing this without producing much of anything. What I probably need is to trust myself to write something down on a piece of paper, then write the next thing, and keep going.
Why solo games might help
One thing I noticed while trying out All Night Breakfast at the Midnight Owl was that I felt a really pleasing sense of calm.
I was just sitting there, following the game’s procedures, writing things down and gradually creating a little fictional world. I wasn’t trying to design a system or work out the best possible way to organise my notes. I was simply doing the creative work, one thing after another.
And I found that I was actually rather better at inventing details than I’d expected.
That’s encouraging. It suggests that perhaps I’m not especially bad at this sort of creativity. Maybe I just need to put myself in situations where I can get on with it, without constantly questioning what I’m doing or wandering off into some other project.
Solo TTRPGs seem particularly good for this because they give you a sequence of small creative tasks. Something happens, you have to describe it or decide what it means, you write it down, and then you move on.
There’s a structure that keeps you going, but you still have to do the imaginative work yourself.
That feels like exactly the sort of assisted exercise I’m looking for.
How much help do I actually need?
Another thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t necessarily need very much assistance to come up with plausible details.
For example, if I’m trying to invent characters in a town, having a list of names and perhaps a list of professions makes the whole thing much easier. Similarly, a list of types of location might be enough to get me started describing a town. Once I’ve got a few initial details, the rest often comes quite naturally.
This makes me wonder what the minimum useful collection of lists might be for different creative tasks.
Names, professions, locations, clues, objects, relationships, conflicts, complications, and so on.
Perhaps there are only a relatively small number of categories I need to cover before I can do an acceptable amount of improvisation.
I also think there are two rather different kinds of assistance worth distinguishing.
The first is help before creating something. This is about warming up the creative landscape. A few prompts, trigger words or random suggestions can open up possibilities and give me things to think about.
This kind of assistance is particularly useful when there’s no great pressure to produce an immediate answer. When I’m playing a solo TTRPG, preparing a session, or writing a new game setting, I can afford to explore possibilities. A random prompt might take me somewhere unexpected, and that’s fine. I have time to think about it.
The second kind is help during play, when something uncertain or unexpected happens at the table and I need to respond.
This is a different problem. Here, I don’t necessarily want to open up a huge range of possibilities and spend ages thinking about them. I want something that helps me pivot, make a decision, introduce a surprise or discover what happens next.
These are the risky moments when a game can slow down because I can’t think of anything, or when I might fall back on something clichéd and boring simply because it’s the first idea that comes to mind.
A useful oracle or random table could give me just enough of a nudge to get past that moment and keep things moving.
Both kinds of assistance seem valuable, but they’re doing different jobs. One helps me explore and create when I have time. The other helps me respond and improvise when I don’t.
And presumably, as I become more experienced, I’ll need to consult both kinds of tools less often.
Procedures and generators
Something else struck me while playing the solo game, this time about how the book is organised.
When you’re following a procedure, the instructions can refer you to a table somewhere else in the book. So a procedure for creating an NPC might tell you to look at the list of names on page 27.
That’s a pretty obvious bit of book design, but I think there’s something interesting behind it.
If you have a reasonably fixed collection of procedures that you’re likely to follow, and each one tells you where to find the tables it needs, then you have a fairly convenient way of organising all this creative assistance.
It suggests that there are really two distinct things here: procedures and generators.
A generator is a list or random table that provides some detail. A name, a profession, a type of location, a valuable object, a source of conflict, or whatever.
A procedure is a description of something you’re trying to create, which might use several of those generators.
For example, I might have a procedure for generating an NPC. But I could also have a procedure for generating a little plot or situation.
That might involve creating two NPCs, putting them in a location, giving them some sort of relationship, establishing a conflict between them, and deciding on an object they’re both contending over.
I’ve now got the beginnings of a playable situation rather than just a collection of disconnected characters and objects.
And the procedure could refer out to the name generator, location generator, relationship generator, conflict generator, valuable object generator, and so on.
The interesting thing is that the same generators could be used by lots of different procedures.
So there’s almost a matrix of procedures and generators. The procedures describe the creative acts I want to perform, and the generators provide the raw material.
That seems like a useful way of organising things, both for a game book and for learning to GM.
A syllabus for games mastering
This is where the apprenticeship idea starts to get particularly interesting.
I wonder whether there’s a relatively fixed set of procedures that a GM or adventure writer needs to be able to perform.
Creating an NPC, describing a location, inventing a conflict, introducing a complication, revealing a clue, creating a situation, and so on.
Some of these procedures will be quite small. Others will involve combining several smaller procedures.
But if I could identify them, I might have the beginnings of a syllabus for learning to GM.
Rather than trying to become good at the rather vague activity of “games mastering”, I could practise particular skills.
I could spend some time generating NPCs. Then practise creating locations. Then create conflicts between characters. Then combine those things into situations. Eventually I could work up to scenarios and adventures.
The written material needed to support this might be simple. There are basically two forms:
- Descriptions of procedures — what am I trying to create, and what steps do I follow?
- Generators — lists of options and random tables that supply the details I need.
That’s potentially quite a manageable system.
And it also gives me a way to think about what an experienced GM actually knows.
What does an experienced GM have in their head?
I suspect that an experienced GM has internalised quite a lot of these procedures.
They don’t need to look up how to create a complication or invent a character with a motivation. They’ve done it often enough that the process is fairly automatic.
They’ve also internalised a lot of the material that might otherwise appear in generators. They’ve got a stock of names, professions, character types, locations, conflicts, motivations and other ideas that they can call upon.
So perhaps an experienced GM is doing much the same thing as a beginner with a book full of procedures and tables, except that more of it is happening in their head.
That would fit rather nicely with the assisted pull-up analogy. The external procedures and generators are there to support me while I’m learning. As I get more experienced, I gradually internalise them and need less help.
It also makes me think about GM style.
Perhaps a GM’s style is partly a matter of which procedures they tend to use and what sorts of things they habitually invent.
One GM might frequently introduce interpersonal conflicts and complicated relationships. Another might tend towards mysteries, strange locations or unexpected dangers.
And the procedures themselves say something about the kind of game being played. A game about investigation presumably has a different collection of commonly used procedures from a game about dungeon exploration or political intrigue.
So maybe a GM’s style is partly the repertoire of procedures they return to, together with the kinds of details they tend to generate when they’re improvising.
I rather like that idea.
Is a whole campaign just a collection of nested procedures?
Following this line of thought, I wonder whether running an entire campaign is really just a series of nested procedures.
At the top level, there are procedures for creating and developing a campaign. Within that, procedures for creating adventures or scenarios. Within those, procedures for creating situations, characters, locations and conflicts.
And then, during play, there are smaller procedures for describing things, responding to player decisions, introducing complications, resolving uncertainty, and so on.
Perhaps the apparently enormous job of running a campaign is really a hierarchy of smaller, more manageable activities.
And perhaps becoming an experienced GM is largely a matter of learning and practising these activities over a couple of years, until you can combine them without having to think very hard about the individual steps.
I find that a rather hopeful idea, because it makes the whole problem seem much more tractable.
Why I keep going round in circles
I think one of my problems at the moment is that I’m not really confident at any of these levels.
If I’m trying to do something small, like creating a character or a location, I can easily get distracted by questions about mechanics, scenarios or campaign design.
Instead of finishing the little thing I’m working on, I jump up to a larger problem.
But the larger problems are too big and complicated for me to get a grip on, so I bounce off them and go somewhere else.
And because I’m comfortable with programming and system design, those are often the places I end up.
The result is that I’m constantly moving between different levels of abstraction, never staying with one thing long enough to get much experience of actually doing it.
I spend a lot of time in churn rather than production.
I suspect this is also why my lack of confidence persists. I’m not completing enough small creative tasks to discover that I can actually do them.
And that’s perhaps the most useful thing about thinking of GMing as an apprenticeship.
If the skill can be broken down into procedures, then I can practise one procedure at a time. I don’t need to worry about how to run a whole campaign when I’m supposed to be creating an NPC. I just need to create the NPC, write it down, and move on.
I can repeat the exercise, get better at it, and then start combining it with other procedures.
Where this leaves me
I don’t yet know what the complete set of procedures would look like, or how many generators would be needed to support them.
But I like the possibility that there might be a reasonably finite collection of things to learn, rather than one enormous, mysterious talent called “being a good GM”.
I also like the idea that solo TTRPGs could provide a pleasant, relatively unpressured environment for practising those things. They give me something to do, a reason to invent details, and enough structure to stop me getting lost.
The experience with All Night Breakfast at the Midnight Owl was encouraging because I actually enjoyed the process. I felt calm, I was creating things, and I was better at it than I’d expected.
I’d like to find a way to build on that.
Perhaps the trick is not to design the perfect system for creating adventures, but to identify a small collection of useful procedures, give myself just enough supporting material, and practise them.
And, importantly, to resist the temptation to write a program to manage the whole thing.
Just sit down with a piece of paper, invent something, write it down, and then invent the next thing.
