Tunnels and Trolls: Solo Play

This is probably as legacy of Tunnels and Trolls' solo adventure legacy, but everything for solo play is just easier here. With combat there is no positioning, deciding which monster does what and attacks who, no special monster abilities, no special character combat options, and nothing to decide on either side of the die roll. Just what you are doing (melee, ranged, magic, saving rolls, or fleeing) and the dice matter.

With exploration, there is no "are you standing in front of the statue" positional GM traps, nothing hidden by the referee, and if you need to adjudicate a situation - finding a trap, dodging a rolling boulder, seeing if you are lucky enough for fortune to happen, sneaking past enemies, climbing a wall, knowing an arcane piece of lore, surviving poison, running away, or anything at all - the saving roll is your answer. Come up with a test, determine what happens on pass or fail, and roll.

No referee is needed, no solo play system is needed, and this is how the game is designed.

Tests and Saving Rolls

Flying Buffalo back in the day made its name on selling solo adventures by mail, and T&T was the system you used to play them. They found a niche in the early days of the hobby and went for it, and the rest is history. D&D went down a different path - they needed a dungeon master, and their entire game was designed to rely upon hidden information a dungeon master.

"Are you standing in the doorway when you pull the lever?"

"Are you searching the room?"

"Who is first in marching order?"

You get this wonderful puzzle-element going on with great dungeons, where the players are unsure of their actions. Truly great dungeons and referees key players into danger subtly, with little things here and there in descriptions that clue the attentive in on certain doom.

"There is an oily smell to the room."

"While the rest of the dungeon was dirty, this room is perfectly clean."

"You see a number of indentations in the wall ahead of you on the right side."

Wait. Stop. This could be something or it could be nothing. This could be nothing, and in our investigation we will find the real threat -something else entirely - with further questioning. I love this style of play, and it captures the intense feeling of danger and threat that a great dungeon is supposed to provide.

This is also a part of my problem when I tried running the first Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure as a solo experience. There are many traps in that which rely on character placement, so I found myself house-ruling ability score checks to "see if they know" the obvious things I knew. It is important because player eliminations depend on these gotcha-moments like a shark in the water, so I have to roll what are essentially stupidity checks for my zero-level characters. I kid, but in a way this is how I feel - they are less heroes than they are balls in a pachinko machine.

It is a lot less fun than poking and prodding around in the Tomb of Horrors against a live referee, so I can see why in solo T&T adventures they either trip the trap on you and roll to avoid, give you a chance to detect (and have it be a directional stop), make a luck roll to completely avoid, or just deal with the trap up front without hiding anything. The next challenge is an atomic pass/fail event, and it never is something unknown.

The saving roll mechanic in T&T does this well, and it supports every ability score so you can roll heavy boulders out of the way with strength, avoid jets of flame with speed, figure out ancient runes with IQ, survive poison mushroom spores with constitution, walk right through a minefield with luck, or charm a cranky old wizard with charisma. And the ability rolls scale with level, have a chance of always failing, and cover every out-of-combat situation elegantly.

Luck is the Referee

Having a luck score helps too, it is a catch-all for solo play for so many answers. This was the case in Gangbusters too where they had a luck score, and a detective character could roll luck to see if a criminal left a clue in a room, or someone who knew the suspect was in a speakeasy at the same time the investigator started poking around there. Did a character survive certain death, like those car crash scenes at the end of 1930's black and white serials? Is there a land-line phone nearby in a world without cell phones? Is there a taxi waiting on the curb to, "follow that car?" Did the killer leave a matchbook with the name of a bar on it? Luck was the X factor in a modern urban environment, and let you trip your "Film Noir Tropes" with style and ease.

Coming out of D&D it helped us a lot to have luck answer questions, and it took a lot of pain away from the referee. Take the taxi and "follow that car!" If this was a luck roll, things were fair. If a referee denied this because he or she felt there were no taxis present, the player could feel the referee were being punitive, or there was some sort of other railroaded answer around there the players had to take.

Luck enables creativity in solving problems by enabling the player's approach with a random roll.

Same thing in T&T, this score answers a lot of the questions a referee would have to answer. Is a needed item available at a shop? Did making that noise awake a sleeping dragon? Is there a change of shifts with the tower guards happening right now? Did the rope break? Is there anything in that box? Did the key you pilfered fit the lock? Did you happen to bump into the right person at the right time? Did you walk right by that arrow trap without setting it off? Is there a ship at the port waiting for passengers to take you where you need to go? Did the thief you are chasing get stopped by the guards? Is the weather for the mountain trek good or bad? While traveling did we bump into someone helpful, find berries along the side of the road, or somehow gain an important resource?

A luck score does a lot of the work that a referee would have done, and gives a solo player quick and easy answers to all sorts of in-play questions as a "missing referee ability score."

When in doubt, roll luck and get an answer.

Solo Design

The notion of always having a referee finds its way into many of the rules of B/X, even in obscure and roundabout ways. This is sort of like operating system design, where personal computers have the notion of needing a "system administrator" account to manage the machine, versus a phone where there is an "owner" but no notion of an "administrator" in the personal computer sense. Thus when you are to install a program, bang, admin rights needed, and then on a phone or tablet - it just installs.

Because T&T had to support no-referee play, every rule has to support that concept. Though you can play it with a referee, I get the feeling the game's primary mode of play, and its primary design goal is as a solo play game.

There are a lot of hidden places in many pen-and-paper games where the rules assume, "The referee with handle this part." You will be reading through a spell and, "the referee will determine..." You go to a shop and, "the referee will determine prices and selection." You are in combat and, "the referee controls the monsters..." I love B/X, but the amount of times I have to stop and roll for "phantom referee interaction" gets tiring and slows the game down. Add to that rolling for stupidity for my characters and while yes I am playing B/X, I begin to miss a referee and wonder if the mechanics alone are enough to keep me.

Coming Home

So I keep coming back to T&T for my solo play sessions and enjoying the elegant simplicity of letting the dice handle all the referee-required wargaming and rulings in combat. Does it devolve into "a bucket of dice versus another?" Well, the same could be said about B/X, it would just mean there are more types of dice and a slower bucket procedure with all sorts of rules interspersed.

Could a B/X solo-focused game be designed? Most likely and I have not found one yet, because applying the solo-play design theory to a game is a complete rework of the rules - and a lot of B/X assumptions and structures have the DNA of a referee built into them. I feel you would be slaughtering a lot of sacred cows if you attempted such a thing, and rethinking huge systems.

So with T&T and even MSPE, I have a lot of my solo-play options covered for both fantasy and modern games. I still like B/X and my other collection of strange and unique systems, but for everyday play where I sit down to have fun, there work very well and I have a fond remembrance for them as a part of my gaming history. There was a point in time that we ran this seriously for years, and I was the referee, so I am used to the system and how it works. It does a good job and I love the game, which checks my boxes and gets me playing.