Solo RPG play without a game master

Solo RPG play works by replacing the game master with an oracle, and the rules for how to do that are written down, published and in several cases free. You ask a question the fiction cannot answer on its own, you roll against a table, and you take the answer as binding. Everything else follows from accepting that result the way you would accept a ruling from someone sitting across the table.

The oracle does two jobs at once. It decides the facts you would otherwise have to invent, which keeps you from writing yourself a friendly world, and it introduces the surprise a game needs to stay a game rather than becoming a diary entry. A yes-or-no roll with a likelihood attached covers most of it. A prompt table covers the rest, handing you a noun or an image you then have to fit into what is already true.

Games written for one player

The clearest starting point is a system designed for solo play from the first page rather than adapted into it. Ironsworn is the reference case, and it took the Gold ENnie for Best Free Game in 2019, with The Ultraviolet Grasslands Free Introduction by Luka Rejec taking Silver in the same category. It is free to read, its moves are written so that a single player can trigger and resolve them, and its oracle tables are part of the core text rather than an appendix.

The licensing tells you how seriously that was meant. Tomkin Press licenses Ironsworn, Delve, Starforged and Sundered Isles for non-commercial derivative works under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, and for commercial publication it releases the contents of the Ironsworn System Reference Document, its asset cards and its oracle tables under the plain Attribution 4.0 licence, along with the complete text of the Starforged Reference Guide. That is why so many solo oracles, generators and hacks look familiar: they are legally built on the same tables.

Journalling games sit next to that tradition and work differently. Instead of a character sheet and a resolution system, they hand you a deck, a set of prompts and a record you keep. They finish in an evening and they teach the habit the longer games depend on, which is treating a random result as a fact you now have to explain.

Solo modes added to group games

The second route is a solo supplement for a system you already own, and publishers now write them deliberately. Single Player Mode for Cyberpunk RED, released in September 2025, is a solo play guide created with Peter Norton of HollowPonds Solo Sagas, containing rules for abbreviated combat and Netrunning along with tables that generate plots and people. The abbreviation matters more than the tables. A combat written for five players and a referee takes too long when one person is rolling every side of it, so the solo version compresses the exchange.

Pregenerated characters do the same work at the other end of the session. The Single Shot Pack, published in February 2021, collects ten pregenerated edgerunners and NET Architectures running from three floors long to nine floors long, which is a solo player's scenario library without any prep. On the horror side, the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Quick-Start Rules give an overview of the game and its basic rules with ready-to-play characters and the introductory adventure The Haunting, which one person can read and run against themselves in an evening.

Adjudicating without a table to argue with

The hardest part of playing alone is holding a standard. With a group, someone else decides whether your clever reading of a rule stands. Alone, you are both sides of that conversation, and the discipline has to come from the numbers.

Systems with graded success make this much easier, because the grade is decided before you know what you wanted. In Call of Cthulhu every skill carries a printed base value, a Hard value that is the regular value divided by two, and an Extreme value that is the regular value divided by five. A roll of 22 against a Library Use of 50 is a Hard success and the scene changes accordingly. There is nothing to negotiate.

The same principle applies to the oracle. Set the likelihood before you roll, out loud or on paper, and write the result down before you interpret it. A solo player who decides how likely something was after seeing the die has stopped playing a game.

Some material resists this entirely. A written mystery is the obvious case: once you have read the scenario you know who the culprit is, and no oracle can take that back. Published investigations are best played solo either blind, one scene at a time with the rest of the text covered, or turned inside out so that the oracle decides the culprit and the scenario supplies only the suspects and the locations. The second approach salvages more of the book. Combat-heavy dungeon material converts more easily, because the interest is in the resolution rather than in the concealed answer.

Pacing is the other thing a group provides invisibly. Four players interrupt each other, change the subject and force scenes to end. Alone, a scene runs until you decide it is over, which usually means too long. A useful substitute is a hard budget: three oracle questions to a scene, then cut, whether or not the scene feels finished. Ironsworn handles this with progress tracks that fill a fixed number of boxes, and any system can be given the same discipline with a tally in the margin of the log.

A first session

Pick a system you already know, so that no part of the evening is spent learning rules. Write one sentence of situation and one question you cannot answer from it. Roll the oracle. Write what happened in three or four lines, then find the next question inside what you just wrote.

Keep the record. The written log is the closest thing solo play has to a second player, because a session you read back three weeks later contains details you no longer remember choosing, and those details push the story somewhere you would not have taken it. Stop while you still want to continue, and leave the open question at the bottom of the page.

If the first attempt collapses, the usual cause is a question too large to answer. Ask whether the guard is looking the other way, rather than whether the campaign succeeds.