lovingboth | Reading

Playthrough/Review: Now what do I do?

( Game Description )

Pet death is a real possibility in this game, and it’s probably inevitable. I don’t feel positive about that.
This is a game that demands that you create the whole story, everything. You find an object related to your death. Quick, quick, think of something. And eventually, you need to tie all of these together and make a story of who killed you and how.

This will be either draining or boring or unsatisfying, or all of them. I rolled one room and bailed.

Creating mysteries for TTRPGs is a Hard Problem, and most solutions either involve ‘the GM knows but isn’t telling you’ or ‘the GM sets up a matrix of plausible events, whatever you work hard for turns out to be the solution.’

This ‘game’ has no such resolution mechanic, so you need to bring *that* to the table as well.
Combined with the harm-to-pets and some dissonances in the random tables (your character can be from the Colonial era, but the game can take place in the modern day: How the fuck am I supposed to get revenge on my murderer by scaring them to death? They’re dead anyway.) I just don’t feel like spending hours and hours licking this into shape.

I’d love to try out the ‘track’ mechanic at some point but maybe not in this game.

Current Mood: overwhelmed

mjg59

AWS had an outage today and Signal was unavailable for some users for a while. This has confused some people, including Elon Musk, who are concerned that having a dependency on AWS means that Signal could somehow be compromised by anyone with sufficient influence over AWS (it can't). Which means we're back to the richest man in the world recommending his own "X Chat", saying The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

Elon is either uninformed about his own product, lying, or both.

As I wrote back in June, X Chat genuinely end-to-end encrypted, but ownership of the keys is complicated. The encryption key is stored using the Juicebox protocol, sharded between multiple backends. Two of these are asserted to be HSM backed - a discussion of the commissioning ceremony was recently posted here. I have not watched the almost 7 hours of video to verify that this was performed correctly, and I also haven't been able to verify that the public keys included in the post were the keys generated during the ceremony, although that may be down to me just not finding the appropriate point in the video (sorry, Twitter's video hosting doesn't appear to have any skip feature and would frequently just sit spinning if I tried to seek to far and I should probably just download them and figure it out but I'm not doing that now). With enough effort it would probably also have been possible to fake the entire thing - I have no reason to believe that this has happened, but it's not externally verifiable.

But let's assume these published public keys are legitimately the ones used in the HSM Juicebox realms[1] and that everything was done correctly. Does that prevent Elon from obtaining your key and decrypting your messages? No.

On startup, the X Chat client makes an API call called GetPublicKeysResult, and the public keys of the realms are returned. Right now when I make that call I get the public keys listed above, so there's at least some indication that I'm going to be communicating with actual HSMs. But what if that API call returned different keys? Could Elon stick a proxy in front of the HSMs and grab a cleartext portion of the key shards? Yes, he absolutely could, and then he'd be able to decrypt your messages.

(I will accept that there is a plausible argument that Elon is telling the truth in that even if you held a gun to his head he's not smart enough to be able to do this himself, but that'd be true even if there were no security whatsoever, so it still says nothing about the security of his product)

The solution to this is remote attestation - a process where the device you're speaking to proves its identity to you. In theory the endpoint could attest that it's an HSM running this specific code, and we could look at the Juicebox repo and verify that it's that code and hasn't been tampered with, and then we'd know that our communication channel was secure. Elon hasn't done that, despite it being table stakes for this sort of thing (Signal uses remote attestation to verify the enclave code used for private contact discovery, for instance, which ensures that the client will refuse to hand over any data until it's verified the identity and state of the enclave). There's no excuse whatsoever to build a new end-to-end encrypted messenger which relies on a network service for security without providing a trustworthy mechanism to verify you're speaking to the real service.

We know how to do this properly. We have done for years. Launching without it is unforgivable.

[1] There are three Juicebox realms overall, one of which doesn't appear to use HSMs, but you need at least two in order to obtain the key so at least part of the key will always be held in HSMs

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

solo_knight

First Impressions: Rangers of the Midden Vale

( Game Description )

This was not created to be played solo, but there’s this solo play (endorsed by the creator) and I got it from a solo bundle, so I’m counting it as a solo game, but it looks like a good game to play with a group as well.

The solo play uses a lot of additional solo resources, so I'd have to see how well this plays with just the book rather than a lot of supplementary materials.

( Tables and mechanics )

So definitely something I'll keep around, study more, and will probably try as a solo game at some point.
I'm definitely keeping this around as a book of random tables; the enemies might or might not transfer to other settings, but the locations are definitely useful, and the list of potential enemy traits is short and to the point.

solo_knight

Playthrough/Review: Colorful Characters (Character Creation Tool)

( Game Description )

This isn’t a game in itself, though it is gamified a little, but the prompting and the ‘feels-like-a-game’ part helped me to come up with things about two characters that I was struggling with (I created a character and a general setting/situation for Combat Apothecary that I did not get to play; in that game they would have been solo, this system needs at least 3 players.).

Character Creation is not my thing. It’s not how I write. Constructs made consciously don’t come to life for me; whether that’s in books or in DnD.

The format forced me to empty my brain of any other thoughts and distractions, and to just go through one step after the next. And yes, there’s a name on the list, and an origin, but I can _tell a story_ for that, and I don’t have to worry about things like hair colour and height, which I really don’t care about at all. This is more about the *Character* than their mechanical description.

I have taken the first of these characters back into the system I’m trying to use right now (Tiny Dungeon) and was able to come up with mechanics that work for that character. Some of the traits were a little surprising, but they fit with what the character had to say about themselves and what others said about the character. This one is treefolk, so they are proficient in Heavy Melee weapons and have mastered Clubs, they know no fear (and get advantage on save tests), they’re good at wilderness survival, but they also have an eidetic memory.

I’ll create the other two tomorrow (well, one I had mostly created, the other suggests a lot of stuff due to her heritage), but knowing what they look like from the inside, I can now find better traits.

Current Mood: content

liam_on_linux

No, honest, it did.

Windows 2 was kinda ugly.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203

Windows 3/3.1/3.11 were fine.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30

Muted, boring, but you could look at it all day. And we did.

95 improved it.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2

Tasteful greys, spot colour.

NT 4 improved that a bit more.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt40

Categorised Start menu, for instance. But nearly identical.

95/NT4 were visibly inspired by NeXTstep, IMHO the most beautiful GUI ever written.

Then it all started to go a bit wrong. The first pebbles bouncing down the mountainside presaging a vast avalanche.

Windows 98.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win98

IE4 built in so Microsoft didn't get broken up my the US DOJ. Explorer rendered local content via HTML. Ugly extra toolbars. Some floating, some embedded in the task bar. Ugly gradients and blends in window title bars.

Cheap and plastic and tacky.

But that is around the time that media and gaming PCs went mainstream, home internet use (often over dialup) went mainstream, and the alternatives died out (Amiga, ST & GEM, Arm & RISC OS) or very nearly died (classic MacOS, NeXT merger, Rhapsody).

So it's what many saw first and loved and remembered.

Result, people write entire new OSes designed in affectionate homage:

https://serenityos.org/

Look at the toolbars. Look at the textures in the title bars. This isn't Win9x, this is specifically Win98.

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/i...

Specifically:

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/h...

<- textured title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/t...

<- gradients in title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/m...

<- Windows-style colour schemes

KDE started out as a reproduction of Windows 98/98SE by a team who didn't realise that what they were looking at was WordPerfect 5.x instead of WordPerfect 4.x -- as the late great Guy Kewney put it:

"WordPerfect 4.2 was a bicycle. A great bicycle. Everyone agreed it was a great bicycle, just about the best. So what Wordperfect did was, they put together a committee, looked at the market, and said: 'what we'll do is, we'll put 11 more wheels on it'."

Win98 is Win95 festooned with pointless needless Internet widgetry because the DOJ was about to split MS into separate apps and OS companies, because MS drove Netscape into bankruptcy by bundling IE free of charge with Windows.

Strip all that junk off and what's left underneath is a better UI. But the German kids writing their "Kool Desktop Environment" didn't realise.

After that came WinME and Windows 2000, which turned down the bling a bit as the lawsuit was over, but it was only a blip.

Then came XP with its "Fischer-Price" themes.

Then Vista with gratuitous transparency everywhere because GDI.EXE had been ripped out and replaced with a compositor and that's no fun if you don't use some 3D features like see-through stuff.

Then 7 toned that down a bit and everyone love it.

Then the universally detested Win8, and then that was toned down and the Start menu put back for Win10, which is roughly what UKUI and Deepin copied in China, or Wubuntu in the West.

Then Win11, as copied by AnduinOS and a few others, which for this long-term Windows user is the worst release ever. I can't even have a vertical taskbar any more. It's abhorrent.

(Content repurposed from here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626910

Inspired by this:

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and )

lovingboth

It came up recently in relation to 'gig' prices. Kraftwerk (i.e. Ralf Hutter plus three others) have a proper tour of the UK next year and Nottingham's on the list of cities.

I misread the email from the venue - the Theatre Royal Concert Hall - and it turned out that the bookings opened on Thursday last week, not Friday, but there was one 'cheapest' seat still left. It's in the top of the two circles, and pennies less than fifty quid.

Nope.

The sound would have been no problem: I saw OMD on the very back row there and it was great, and I know Kraftwerk have always used some very good sound engineers. The vision would have been no problem: it's not like they do much more than stand there and the projections were fine from at least that far back in Milton Keynes.

But I saw them in June doing at least half of what will be the 2026 show, paying £15 rather than £103 face price. And since Karl and Wolfgang left, Kraftwerk gigs are people doing things to mostly pre-sequenced tracks.

Side track: Oh, I thought I'd mentioned this bit here already. Another group performing at the one day festival were PIL / Public Image Ltd / 'what John Lydon did after the Sex Pistols'. The main arena is a sloped semi-circular shape. I was sitting happily on the slope watching the start of Kraftwerk's hour-long set when someone sat down next to me. It was John Lydon.

I do not have the words to explain just how much my teenage mind would have been blown c1977 to have the infamous Johnny Rotten, singer with the 'we barely learnt to play guitar' Pistols and the 70's equivalent of Kneecap, sit down next to me, to watch Kraftwerk.

I wouldn't get that at the TRCH.

Shelves ( Read more... )

Keyboard ( Read more... )

Opera ( Read more... )

Chair ( Read more... )

solo_knight

Playthrough/Review: Crux

( Game Description )

I may play this again, if I ever feel like preparing a little mountain-climbing lore, or if I simply have a larger table to spread out the cards and several hours during which I don’t mind being frustrated.

I like this game. I like that there’s three strategies you can use (or roll your own), I’m finding some of the rules _slightly_ unclear, but I just made a ruling and moved on.
My lack of ability to build a narrative was frustrating, and I underestimated how much time I’d need.
‘One attempt takes roughly 15-30 minutes’ which may be true, but to play a round you’ll have to set aside 2-3h, unless you’re blessed with the space to leave the card mountain untouched (cat owners need not apply). And since it’s easier to keep everything in your head, 2-3h does not sound unreasonable.

At this point you need to ask yourself whether this is worth three hours of your time, and we’re back with the climbing experience: if you’re the sort of person who can build an appropriate narrative in your head just by pulling a card that’s ‘trivial’ or ‘hard’, you’ll probably have a great time when you’re stuck indoors.
If you’re not a climber and your inner monologue is ‘big rock, must get up’ you’re missing a major part of the fun.

I don’t know whether I’ll pick this up again. I don’t mind roguelikes, so I can’t tell how frustrating this will be to play, but without a fun narrative, you have only half a game.

Current Mood: not nerdy enough

solo_knight

Playthrough/Review: Tic-Tac-Tomb

( Game Description )

I’m in the mood for some solo dungeon delving. I’m looking for a simple mechanic where I roll for what kind of challenge or treasure I can find, roll to overcome the trap/monster, loot a little, and move to the next room.

This mechanism sounded like fun, but the tables you're rolling on don't work for me at all. The room description and challenge are based on multiple rolls on multiple tables, though I haven’t worked out what the ‘Being’ table is FOR; it doesn’t get mentioned. You can ‘sacrifice an item’ as part of your gameplay, but you’re not actually given items unless you roll a double, which I didn’t.

This feels half-baked.

This game is also the reason I stated in my last post that journalling games are not the ones with the highest mental load. So far, the highest mental load for me has come from Oracles/Spark Tables, where you get a couple of words and have to find out what they mean in your game.

Description of the Room: It is an endemic trap cache, where one can unlock gauze.
Challenge: Choose dull Alchemy.

I don’t even. I am not feeling intelligent enough to make a story out of that. (

caper_est pointed out that 'dull alchemy' probably means turning gold into lead, so there is that.) I don’t want to start there. Give me a smoky Guard Room with a Sarcophagus in which a portcullis suddenly drops. ‘None Survived’ says an inscription and, for want of a better table, 1d6 = 5 Skeletons to fight.
This may end up deadly, but at least I know where I stand. Or where I got squashed.

Current Mood: cranky

green_knight

( Depth year, 20x24 project, 8 of Pentacles )

I haven't finished the font project because I needed to think about what the final form of my font collection should look like, but I have processed all fonts I acquired prior to mid-June 2025.

( Taming the Fonts, once and for all )

The lessons from this are twofold. One, working out a process that works for you will make life indefinitely easier. I haven't yet worked out processes for everything in my life, but I am working out more processes, and even when they're incomplete or insufficient, they're steps in the right direction.

I am also encouraged to look FOR processes instead of feeling overwhelmed.

But the other lesson is that while some of this probably *is* a character trait – something that will come easier to some people than others – it totally can be learnt.

Even in your fifties.

(Ugh, that sounds old.)

( Lessons Learnt )

It's a bit of a revelation for me that earlier charity bundles created a lot of cognitive load (all those games and I have no idea what they are, and I'll have to at least make an effort to sort them, and they take up so much space, and I spent all this money and never play them [ok, with charity bundles that guilt is very much reduced], but they were a moderately high cognitive load and I mostly dealt with them by ignoring them. (I downloaded the solo bundle, I haven't downloaded several others).

Compared to the last bundle: I checked it out, found a few things I was interested in, it's for a good cause. I have downloaded everything and presorted it (video games, multiplayer games, solo games (though there may be some movement when I find out I was wrong from a brief glance), 3rd party games, supplements. I will back up everything, and delete the things that I'm not interested in right away.

And something miraculous happened. I'm looking forward to eventually playing these games, even if I will probably dump half of them unplayed (for there are many many lots, and many games I *want* to play), but they're not taking up that uncomfortable mental space of 'this is too much I can't cope, argh'. Instead, I can look at this bundle, go 'I feel in control', back it up, and remove them from my hard drive for now; I'm currently working my way through the Solo Bundle, and when I have a bit more brain and hard drive space, I shall download and process another bundle.

Step by step, I'm reducing technical debt, and it feels GOOD.

Current Mood: accomplished

solo_knight

When I started soloing, I thought that I would not like journalling games much.

I thought this would be the type of game with the highest mental load; I was mostly wrong.

What you need as a player is to shed all inhibitions. The game says you’re a vampire in 1950s Glasgow? You’re a vampire in 1950s Glasgow. The game says you’re a frog in human disguise? You're now a frog. And so on.

The amount of handholding journalling games do varies; but most of them will guide you towards a certain story shape, and give you prompts enough to – at least for me – spark ideas. The dice or cards do the rest.

So far, the journalling games I’ve tried have told me what kind of story I’m telling, and while instructions to ‘keep writing until you’ve reached an end’ can sound weird to non-writers, they make sense in the moment.

Right now, I don’t have a major writing project I am working on, and everything is new and shiny, so I am playing a fair few of these – they’re low-hanging fruit. (As is this journal entry; it’s possible I’ll change my verdict on journalling games.)

Recommended if you don’t want to wrestle mechanics, if you’re looking for a single session (so far, all of mine have been <2h), and if you’re willing to delve into a story and ham it up and write with wild abandon on the first thing that comes to mind.

Current Mood: busy

solo_knight

Playthrough/Review: You are Roadkill

( Game Description )

This actually was one of the first games I played, chosen at random. On the positive side, you don’t need to know anything about solo roleplay to play this.

On the negative side, this is depressing as fuck.

This taught me something about solo gameplay; I don’t want to play it again.

Current Mood: gloomy

vampwillow

Hhumm.. Well I'm still around though not sure why. The ups and downs of life are mostly the latter and, quite frankly, I'm not sure the few of the former are worth it; it's all so much pointlessness. I keep going but my heart isn't in it...

solo_knight

Playthrough/Review:
With Iron Teeth

( Game Description )

This is a very short game of chance. I did write out the narrative, but very briefly; there are no prompts for individual cards, just for the suits.

This is a quick game – I think it took me half an hour all in all, including reading the rules and finding a miniature that looked a little vampiry – and it was fun, quick, and brainless.

This looks like it could fill the niche of short video games - you have twenty minutes before you need to do something else, you don’t want to brain, you don’t want to sink into anything meaningful, and there’s a little tension and a little strategy.

This is Indie gaming at its best. It doesn’t have to be epic, it doesn’t have to be polished, it just has to be fun.

Current Mood: amused

solo_knight

Playthrough/Review: The Disguised Frog

( Game Description )

That was unexpected. Wrote just under 1300 words, guided by the Tarot cards I pulled and the vague suggestions provided. My brain went down some very unexpected – but ultimately very hopeful – tracks.

There is, of course, a pattern to journalling games: I write out the beginning of a story, not its muddle or end (there’s always a muddle in the middle where you have to stop throwing new content into a story).

I have always struggled with writing exercises and find these games (as long as they provide enough substance and enough inspiration) extremely inspiring. Combined with the archetypes and meanings of the tarot, which I happen to know quite well by now, this was a blast.

The resulting story was weird and wonderful and I don’t know whether I shall ever write more of it and take it further, but this is the fourth game of this kind that gave me a meaningful experience.

I have not marked this as retired because I intend to play it again. Not any time soon, but this one will stay on my hard drive.

Short RPGs like this are a great way of unsticking creativity. I spend around two hours writing and rolling dice and pulling cards, there’s a definite end point, and the stakes are very low - you can’t really do this wrong.

Current Mood: croaky

solo_knight

First and Last impressions The Joyride Everlasting

( Game Description )

This is an experience I have had with indie games, video edition, (or writers, self-published) before: sometimes a creator comes up with something half-baked that makes perfect sense to them, and it works for them because they hold the other half in their heads.
Third parties will feel baffled, because this is paper thin and in shreds.

So maybe someone with an anime/superhero/mecha background can make something out of this; I cannot.

Current Mood: baffled

solo_knight

Playthrough/Review: Combat Apothecary

( Game Description )

Well. My first DNF, but after spending about 2h and not getting to the first combat while getting more and more frustrated I decided that I had too many unplayed games on my hard drive to invest any more time into an unplayable game.

( Wot I learnt, afterwards, from other people )

It's a game where you have to bring everything yourself: the character, the setting, the gameplay, the enemies… everything. You get a small matrix of 'Environ' (18 items) with entries like 'Fort, Acropolis, Kiln' and as many 'Essence' entries. ('scorch, corrupt, undead') which includes both 'ashen' and 'cinders'.

Even if the information were presented much better (there is *so much* talk of 'lore' which from context is the same as 'essence' because there's nothing else), I'd still hesitate to call it a game.

If I have to do all of the creation myself, I'd want a much more robust system with much clearer instructions.

I did roll a basic combat just to try out the system, but other than being very very confusing indeed, I also dislike how close to the edge the character lives all the time.

In my playthrough, I was supposed to fight an undead creature, which I decided should be a zombie.
My superpower is bleed.
So basically I either bend the narrative until it cries uncle, or I can't use my class feature.

So while I like the general idea and some mechanics like not knowing when you'll meet the boss – definitely a mechanic I want to try out again – I hated the combat system and the general confusion. This is more mental load than making up a game system on the fly.

Current Mood: bored

solo_knight

Playthrough/Review: Legend in the Mist - Comic Starter
( Game Description )

This took me around 1h to play, I made minimal notes. There are plenty of story hooks that I would want to play if this was *my* story, but it turns out that I’m more invested in a character that sprung from my brain, however casually in the King’s Courier than the much better-fleshed out character that a hundred other people can pick up and equally play. I had fun, but it wasn’t as intense an experience.

This is a tag-based game, and I’m not sure how well that would work for me, because you have to make up tags and then decide what advantages/disadvantages they give you, and some tags were described that I have no idea where they came from (maybe I just didn’t read the adventure well enough). I have other games using similar systems that I can play without spending $30 on them, so while I’m not retiring this yet – I’m curious and I eventually want to play through the other branches rather than just reading them – this is not a priority.
It’s made me more curious about tags, but not about this game.

I actually love the idea of introducing a new game system with an adventure you can play through in your own time and get to understand how things work.

So why did I enjoy myself while playing and felt disappointed afterwards?

Part of it is the railroady characters of the adventure. This is inbuilt in the medium to a degree – a comic means you need to draw specific moments in the story – but I’m not sure whether it goes beyond that and I will pay attention to how other games introduce their rulesets/game loops.

This is weird, because I started out really liking this, game/adventure, and the longer I think about it the less I do.

Some of that is inbuilt – there was little opportunity for roleplay, for making decisions about the character.

Normally, you’d choose your descriptive tags yourself, but I also wonder how easy it is in tag systems to evolve your character in response to events.
In the Legend in the Mist system, there is a mechanism (if you had three negative events, you abandon the tag, if you have three positive ones, you evolve it; either way it’s gone) and part of my problem might simply be that I haven’t played long enough to grow into the character.

We’ll see. I’m not sure what is going on yet, so I’ll just mark this as ‘something I want to think about again/watch out for when playing games with a similar system’ rather than coming to a conclusion about whether I like this or not.

Current Mood: confused

green_knight

I’ve not had the best, err, months.

( The not-so-great adventures of green_knight )

I've handed in my last mss, which was a mess, slept myself out, ordered a new phone, and found a few brain cells; I'll be ok and I try to do better: read DW more often, finish all the half-written entries or dump them completely and free up my stack.

One thing I want to do more of is play RPGs, but again I haven't had the spoons to actually look for a group. So I started to look into SoloRPGs to just broaden my horizons a bit.

I love DnD. I want to play DnD properly again, but even with two people, scheduling is a problem.

So I've started to play solo, and read a lot of materials, and watched a lot of YouTube, ad poked at numerous systems and came to the conclusion that if I want to get anywhere with this hobby, I need to be more systematic about it.

To avoid cluttering up this journal and make it the SoloRPG ALL THE TIME channel, I've created

solo_knight, and to avoid that feeling of emptiness I've waited until I had several entries polished and a format that I think will work.

It's a mixture of play reports and reviews, with the odd deeper delve into mechanics. Right now, my goal is to explore the space as a whole, so I am willing to play a certain amount of games that I would not have picked voluntarily – I mean, science fiction horror survival? Does not sound like fun. (Wasn't fun. Was an experience I wouldn't want to have missed.)

And I'm writing down my experiences so they don't fall out of my brain immediately, I have a modest goal of two games a month, and a stretch goal of processing all of my Indie games by this time next year. (A lot of them are one-page or close to; things I'm going to play once for a couple of hours if at all, but I also have a number of long form games, and on top of that, I have numerous proper RPG systems I'm curious about that can be played with a GM emulator, but in order to do that, I need to be comfortable with emulators first so this will keep me occupied for a while.

So there you go.

solo_knight briefly turns up, bangs on his shield, and vanishes again.

And for a bonus task when my to-do list is shorter, I'll have to see how to link the two accounts so I can switch more easily between them.

Current Mood: accomplished

solo_knight

This is a random post. Sorta. It’s more a post about randomness. I will go into more depth about individual random techniques later, but I wanted to throw this up as a master post. For me, a random element is a vital aspect of ‘play’ in RPGs. In a group, that random element can be partly other players at the table, but I am having a hard time imagining a game without a random element that still feels like a game. (Choose-your-own-adventure can be fun, but they’re different things.)

Dice. Dicess, precioussss
Very much associated with TTRPGs. DnD uses a 7-dice polyset (d4, d6, d8, d10, d%, d12, d20) and any number of extras, especially as you level up (even magic missile uses 3d4) so if you’re playing DnD, you will have at least one set of dice and a grab bag of extras.
Many solo games use D6 instead, and I’ve gotten a few sets of 3xd6 with spots on, which I find easier to read.
Mechanics vary greatly, so there’s a lot game designers can do.
If you have hoarding tendencies, be warned: shiny mathrocks are addictive.

Playing Cards
A surprising number of solo games call for a standard deck of playing cards, with or without jokers. Sometimes you remove other cards. Especially for journaling games, this gives you a mechanic of four groups of prompts. In Ice Station Zero, this was Interior/Exterior/Crew/The Other; it’s a useful pattern.

Tarot Cards
This is playing cards on steroids. You get the four suits and their meanings, but you also get pretty pictures to spark your imagination and the Major Arcana to provide additional archetypes. There are many MANY tarot decks available, as readers of my journal will know, and the right steampunk or fairy tale or wizardry deck can get you into the mood. If the illustrations are detailed enough, you may get inspiration from a background element. Maybe it’s not the ‘2 of Swords’ that matters, but the fact the character is holding two sporks. (Trash Panda Tarot).

Jenga Tower
This is a surprisingly popular mechanism in solo games. I’ll definitely make a proper post about this because I have very mixed feelings about physical towers.

Speciality Cards and Dice
I haven’t yet encountered any games that specifially rely on a custom resource, but you can get decks with pieces of dungeons, cards that determine how an NPC will react to your character, so I felt they deserved an honourable mention.

Scrabble Tiles
I haven’t seen this in a solo game yet, but The Far Roofs (currently on Bundle of Holding) uses Scrabble tiles.
Have not even read, yet alone played, and might be screwed: our choice is between Welsh Scrabble and German.

???
It’s entirely possible that there are further random mechanics that I haven’t discovered yet. If so, I will edit this post further.

Current Mood: optimistic

Ian

🪫⚰️ Playthrough/Review: Now What Do I Do?

Where are we on X Chat security?

AWS outage

🧊⛏️ First Impressions> Rangers of the Midden Vale

🎩⛩️💎 Tools and Sundries: Colorful Characters

Once upon a time, Windows looked good

What will I spend £50 on?

🎪🧊First Impressions: Crux

🥾🧩 Playthrough/Review: Tic-Tac-Tombs

My Transformation into a Meticulous Person

Solo Knight: Dear Diary (Journalling Games)

⚰️🚂 Playthrough/Review: You are Roadkill

Yeah, 'bout that

🪅 Playthrough/Review: With Iron Teeth

📓🎩🪉 Playthrough/Review: The Disguised Frog

📟 First Impressions: The Joyride Everlasting

🪫 Playthrough/Review: Combat Apothecary

🧳📟 Playthrough/Review: Legend in the Mist Comic Starter Adventure

Introducing Solo_Knight

Randomness: Agents of Chaos

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