Through a circuitous route, I ended up thinking about solo RPG adventures in the shower this morning. These adventures operate much like those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, where you read a paragraph or three of description and are asked to make a decision about what to do next, which tells you which page to turn to for the next block of the story.
Solo RPGs are more sophisticated than the original CYOAs in several ways. Written for an older audience, they must work harder to preserve the reader’s sense that he is master of his own destiny: solo RPGs frame your choices in relation to some kind of coherent, objective scenario, instead of merely stringing together wild swings of fortune; they often employ game statistics to help you make informed decisions about your chances of success with a given course of action; they often let you design your own set of statistics before playing, a sort of meta-decision in the story. As an attempt to automate the give-and-take of a true RPG and dispose of the need for a GM, solo RPGs, though better than CYOAs, are still largely a failure. Computer “RPGs,” though richer still in a selection of abilities and tactics as meta-story decisions, rarely employ an actual story structure any more sophisticated than the CYOA, and often lapse into a simpler one, even an unapologetically linear structure.
All three forms curtail your choices out of necessity, because the work involved in creating the adventure in the first place rises exponentially with the number of decisions the player is allowed to make in a given play from start to finish. On the small scale, a writer/designer/coder can employ tricks like feeding choices from earlier, divergent branches into the same conclusions in order to cut the work load, but exponential functions can’t be cropped short for long. And no attempt, however sophisticated, to automate a self-told adventure story can ever offer you the chance to be truly creative, since you can never be allowed to make a choice the designer didn’t think of, himself. As I mulled this continuum of sophistication in approximations of the true RPG, a metaphor popped into my head:
Solo RPGs are to real RPGs as paint-by-numbers is to actual painting.
This applies equally to CYOAs, computer “RPGs” like the Final Fantasy series, and to online MMOs like World of Warcraft. Like painting, real RPG play is a creative art, in this case a narrative art closely akin to improvisational theater, and can go anywhere the player-artists can conceive, within the limits they set themselves in telling the story. Granted, most player-artists are amateurs, and most turn out a low grade of art. But it is art, nevertheless, just as most paintings are of interest only to the artist, and only a minute fraction are sufficiently skilled to hang in the Louvre. Like paint-by-numbers, solo RPGs allow you to go through the motions of creating this art, and, like paint-by-numbers, solo RPGs let you produce something bearing a superficial resemblance to actual art: a story about a warrior-hero slaying dragons or piloting starships or outwitting assassins rather than a splotchy Mona Lisa. But ultimately, solo RPGs only let you read the story someone else has written, following a fixed set of instructions. If you want to try something clever and original, you’re stuck. Oh, you can read the paragraphs out of order in a fit of rebellion, but thinking outside the box in this way just produces an incoherent jumble, just like painting outside the lines.
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