On the Explosion of Solo gaming



I've started seeing an emergent trend in Role Playing Games (RPGs) of late. 

The issue with using the word “emergent" is that the algorithms at play in many platforms are geared to feeding you more of what you watch. Platforms become echo chambers. 

Solo gaming may in fact not be emergent at all. But I consume a lot of role playing media on YouTube and there are a few “soloists" that I've caught and thus YouTube desires to feed the beast.

Of the two “soloists" that have my attention, the first has more than 20,000 subscribers, the other just 920. The former is published, the latter is prolific and seems to be highly detail oriented with a lot of personal frameworks to drive the story telling in a purely randomly generated manner.

Soloing I'm told is also called “journaling." I like this framing and as one that watches a limited amount of the available content can see how “journaling" is apropos. A gamer can quickly find themselves seeking to capitalize on this content in their own gaming. Hell, I could see myself building stories from my own characters using these tools and “journaling" more Niklos backstories and “off the record" carousing in the Warhammer setting; where “off the record" is not with my friends or the games master, nothing earned or acquired available to my character in games played later.

My first Niklos Tale was not really the same thing as solo play. It was a narrative of events that took place at the “table," albeit a “virtual table." The events were driven by my choices and by dice rolls in the game. 

Journaling is best driven by random dice rolls and the results often determined, boon or bust, by tables of outcomes. Many small publishers are producing literal “tomes" of random outcome tables for all manner of RPG solo-play. I could not be more supportive of this style of table/random chance driven story narratives, otherwise the journal writer is “playing pretend" and the outcomes will tend toward “favorable" events. Nothing juices the creative mind than “killing your darlings," in my humble opinion.

Adjacent to Solo RPG play is Solo Wargaming. I've been doing that for decades and still do. I attempted a YouTube channel almost 10 years ago. I just couldn't get the production nailed down. Maybe I'll try again, inspired by this trend. I'm not after fame. Just producing the content may be enough.

Do I have favorite solo-play content producers? Since I only watch two, with any sort of regularity, bordering on random, I'll list them below:

Geek Gamers (23.2K subscribers)

Brian's Channel (920 subscribers)

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