How to play a roleplaying game alone

Solo roleplaying is an old practice with a recent surge behind it. Here is what it actually involves, the four ways people do it, and the one problem all four are trying to solve.

A single lamp-lit desk at night with scattered notes, an open notebook and dice, one empty chair drawn up to it. — Solo play is one chair, one lamp, and a mystery that answers back.

A roleplaying game normally needs two things you may not have: other people, and a night when all of them are free. Solo roleplaying is the practice of playing without either — one player, no group, no schedule, and a session that starts when you sit down and stops when you stand up.

It is not a compromise or a practice mode. It is a different pleasure: slower, stranger, much more interior, and far better suited to horror than to almost anything else. Nobody makes a joke at the wrong moment. There is nobody to be brave in front of.

Why people play alone

The honest first answer is scheduling. A regular group of five adults is a standing logistical achievement, and most groups die of calendars rather than of boredom. Solo play has no calendar.

The reasons people stay are different from the reason they start. You can take an hour over one room. You can follow a lead nobody else finds interesting. Nothing waits for you and you wait for nothing. And because there is no audience, the failures land properly — there is no table to laugh it off with, which is precisely why the genre this suits best is the frightening one.

The problem every solo method is solving

A roleplaying game runs on a person who knows things you do not. They know what is behind the door, whether the man at the desk is lying, and what happens if you go back to the house at night. Take that person away and the game does not merely get harder, it stops working: you cannot be surprised by a story you are also writing.

Every technique below is a way of not knowing something. That is the whole craft of solo play. Everything else — the sheets, the dice, the notes — you already know how to do.

The four approaches

Oracles and tablesYou ask a yes-or-no question, roll, and read the answer off a table. Cheap, portable, works with any game you already own — and completely neutral, which is its strength and its limit: a table has no idea what your story is about, so the connective tissue is all yours.

Journalling gamesThe game gives you prompts and you write the answers. The best of them are genuinely moving and need nothing but a notebook. They are also a different activity from the one most people mean — you are composing a record rather than making decisions under pressure.

Game-master emulatorsA structured system that decides what a scene contains, whether an NPC cooperates, and when the plot turns. More texture than a plain oracle, at the cost of consulting several tables between each thing you do.

An AI keeperA language model plays the part a person would: describes the room, answers as the characters, and reacts to what you actually did. It removes the bookkeeping entirely. What it introduces is a different problem, and it is a real one — see below.

They mix freely, and most experienced solo players use two or three at once — an oracle for the yes-or-no questions, a journal for the record, and something with more imagination for the scenes.

A spread of handwritten cards face-up on a dark table beside two ten-sided dice, lit from one side by a lamp. — Every solo method is a way of asking a question nobody else is there to answer.

What actually makes a session work

The methods matter less than four habits, and people who bounce off solo play are almost always missing one of them.

CommitWhatever the oracle, the table or the Keeper says, that is what happened. The temptation to re-ask a question you did not like the answer to is the single thing that kills a solo campaign, because it quietly makes you the author again.

Ask small“Is there anyone in the house?” produces a shrug. “Is the light in the upstairs window still on?” produces a scene. Narrow questions have interesting answers.

Write it downSolo campaigns run for weeks and your memory will not. The notes are also where the pleasure is: half of solo play is rereading what you wrote three sessions ago and realising what it meant.

Let failure change thingsA failed roll that means “try again” is a dead end. A failed roll that means “you get in, but you are not alone now” is a story. Good solo play is almost entirely the art of failing forward.

What a session looks like

Roughly this. You establish where you are and what you want. You describe what your investigator does, in your own words, as specifically as you can. Something answers — a table, an oracle, a model — and you take that answer seriously. If the outcome is genuinely uncertain and failing would cost you something, dice decide it. You write down what you learned, and the next thing you want follows from it.

An hour of that is a satisfying evening. Twenty of them is a campaign, and the investigator you finish it with will have a history you did not plan.

Where this app comes in

Midnight Mythos is the fourth approach with the bookkeeping removed. An AI Keeper describes the world, plays everyone in it, and calls for rolls; the program keeps the character sheet, rolls every die, tracks the wounds and the sanity and the clues, and writes the case notes as you go. You bring a mystery or ask for one.

It is not the only way to do this and it is not the cheapest — an oracle and a notebook cost nothing and have kept people happy for decades. What it removes is the overhead: no tables to cross-reference, no arithmetic, and nothing to prepare before you start.

If you want to know exactly what happens in a session here, read how to play. If you are weighing up the AI part specifically — including what it is bad at — that has a page of its own.