Mail Room: Solo (Cepheus Engine)

Solo RPG Campaigns for the Cepheus Engine is an interesting solo play product designed for the Cepheus Engine or any Traveller-like RPG, but one could really use it for most any RPG given a little tweaking. This is what I love about OGL gaming, you get so many cool and different ideas and new concepts out here your mind is blown once you do a little digging.

This is also why nostalgia is an inherently regressive force, if all we do is put older games on pedestals and worship them like idols, we become afraid to change them, improve them, and try new things. Endless reprints of older games where they are judged to be "how faithful they are" to older editions does not create an incentive to streamline, improve, or try new things.

M2E Traveller and D&D 5 ultimately are nostalgia plays, but they strike a good balance between keeping things how they were, and improving things that obviously needed to be improved. Basic Fantasy is also another game that says "we are keeping the OSR feeling" but simplifies a lot of the concepts to more modern concepts, and that works very well.

To me, Cepheus Engine and Labyrinth Lord are a lot alike, they work towards compatibility and creating an OGL base from which new things can be created. And thus, Solo RPG Campaigns for the Cepheus Engine has been created to fill a niche, how does one person play these inherently social games?

Solo: Solo Play?

Solo creates a lightweight structure around the host game's rules, and presents a method of advancing story-lines for a group of characters. Once person plays as a group of characters, a complete party, so this puts an emphasis on having a rules system where characters are simple and ultimately disposable. I would not play this in a game system took 4 hours to generate each party member, so having lightweight characters is a huge plus. I could play this with a retro-clone such as Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, or even Mutant Future if I wish.

Group Conflicts

Think of the group dynamic here as "characters in the cast of a movie" such as Alien, The Thing, a war movie, or any other film where the action focuses around a group of characters working together to solve various problems and work towards a goal. Inter-group conflicts based on personalities and relationships in a huge thing here, and Solo provides a system for creating and managing these conflicts, and handling them during play.

This is an interesting choice, since it tells the solo player "you are not fully in control of the party" and generates those interpersonal conflicts for the team during play. So instead of 4-6 players creating the inter-party dramatic moments, the system does that and the player needs to imagine, resolve, and deal with the consequences.

Plans and Outcomes

The driving dynamic behind Solo is the concept of plans and outcomes. You don't turn-by-turn play here, you play a meta-game where you present the group with a situation, rescue the princess from the tower surrounded by orcs, and you make a plan to resolve that situation based on your party, how you approach the situation, and if your plan is risky or not. Based on the plan you assign a difficulty and resolve the plan with a success roll and a later consequences roll (modified by various factors).

If your plan works, the princess is rescued. There may be consequences afterwards, such as losing a party member or equipment, injury, or other good and bad outcomes. That is rolled for afterwards on a second table.

After that, the player comes up with two options for the next course of action, and picks one. That becomes the next plan and the process is repeated. All this is written down so it creates a journal of play as you go, and this helps cement your plans, options, and outcomes into something that is enjoyable to read over later.

Do the Rules Still Matter?

An obvious question is if you are going to ignore turn-by-turn play, do the rules even matter? Well, not exactly. The characters you create will have skills and abilities that are important for how you make plans. The rules system you are using and the internal logic still matter. If I was playing a D&D type game where clerics and turn and dispel undead, that fact (and having a character able to do this) is an important thing to know if a situation ever comes up where I need to create a plan to deal with undead. If i have a character with a mind-reading power, that can be used in my plans. If I have a pilot or mechanic, that is also something I need to know.

In the turning-dead example, this system also assumes you have a basic familiarity with how the game works and what that internal logic is. It helps having played the system and knowing some of these things when situations are created, plans are made, and the resolution decided upon. If in Traveller, missiles in ship-to-ship combat worked a certain way versus energy weapons, knowing that, how they are defended against, and how basic ship combat works will give you more information on creating, resolving, and running plans with the Solo system.

That said, while I own and know a lot of complicated RPGs, I would prefer to play this with simpler ones since the systems and rules I need to understand and keep in my head are much easier to manage. if I can master a game mentally, the plans and consequences and factors that affect success are much easier to know and give me a richer experience since I know how everything works together.

Where is the Roleplaying?

That is a good question. The system has a concept of 'fortune in the middle' that is interesting. In traditional games, they do a 'fortune at the end' sort of roleplaying outcome system, you sneak down a hall, roll stealth, do the guards spot you? You go from area to area and situation to situation at a very low level. Fortune at the end means you roleplay moment to moment depending on the outcomes of individual tests, and the sum total of those tests and the situation determines how the situation comes out - at the end.

In Solo, they turn this on its head and abstract the scene - you don't need to map out a secret base and play through turn-by-turn, you plan, resolve, and the outcomes and random charts tells you the outcome - you then fill in what happened during the mission with our imagination and make it fit the outcome. Fortune in the middle means, the end result is determined based on a pass/fail roll modified by several factors and your party's capabilities (and how the plan suits them), and you roleplay what happens in the middle of the action - you make up what happened inside that secret base based on the eventual outcome rolled.

You need to turn on the ship's reactor, but evil bug aliens infest that deck of your ship. You make a plan, bust in with a force of marines in the front door and attract attention, while two technicians sneak in the back of the deck through the air shafts. Risky plan, but it has a good element of deception and distraction. The potential for accidental death and destruction is high. 

You succeed, but the consequences say you lose a random member of the plan. Maybe one of the technicians is ambushed by a stray bug in the airshaft in a heroic last stand to distract the bugs and let the other technician complete the repair. You make up the middle and "roleplay" what happened inside the event.

And two options present themselves after, either clear out the bugs, or proceed towards the falling space station in the gas giant's gravity for a rescue...

As you may see from the example, the characters in Solo should be disposable, like the members of a horror or action movie cast, since they are ultimately resources used to tell a story. Depending on the risks taken, you could and possibly will lose characters during a game.

Can I Sill...Play?

This is an interesting question. Can you still...play? I mean, break down and play out a combat, make individual skill rolls, and use the rules as they were intended to be used? For me, I would say yes. If you really want to have a starship battle "on the board" and you want to play that out, I say go for it and used the results of that action to cover the pass/fail and potentially the consequences phases of the Solo system.

If there are no meaningful consequences, like your ship escapes unscathed, I may still say "roll for them anyways" to figure out if something unexpected happens. If your ship takes a ton of damage - that is the consequence - but you may still roll if a good consequence is called for as well. I would replace a negative consequence with the heavy damage though, as you don't want to double-up on a bad situation already with a second ruling just because the dice say so.

Looking Forward to This

This was a product that captured my imagination, given my current player-less situation and me being a lifelong fan of roleplaying games. This also prompted me to invest in the Cepheus Engine games, including the modern rules supplement, and got me interested in the system.

I am hoping Solo helps me fill the void here, if just a little, and it gives me some moments of fun as I work through my loss and rebuilding the love I have for our games.