Originally posted by me over on RPGG
If this seems eerily familiar to my one or two non-bot readers out there, I actually wrote this up before the Town in a Pizza Box setting-builder post; this was the primordial ooze from which that idea sprang. The text below only slightly cleans up my brainstorming notes, which started around the concept of Scrabble-like letter tiles and quickly progressed to examining the modification of the underlying game-board to better interact with the tiles, from a solo RPG perspective.
Starting Abandoned Solo RPG Campaign #1023 last summer, I decided to try prompts from Scrabble-like letter tiles and it worked pretty well. I grouped the letters into two piles and played against myself, alternating between the two piles with high score as the only goal to help me choose between which tiles to lay down.
Making sense of the resulting mess of unrelated words, framed by some very broad assumptions about the background, led me to an unexpected but surprisingly meaty adventure hook. The first of the following two pics shows my tiles and board.
I used my tablet to host the virtual game pieces, and then took a screen-grab to take notes on. The white erased regions aren't hiding anything naughty, I just wanted whitespace to write on. The second pic zooms in on the notes I took in one of those whitespaces. For context the setting is the far future Pax Galactica framework described in the (highly recommended) Fate Space Toolkit.
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| The Universe gave me this to work with??? |
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| A glimpse inside a weird mind... |
(The 🥩 of the post) Tile-based word association is useful for prompts, but I keep having this nagging feeling that the Scrabble board itself could be pulling its weight more. Perhaps it could be replaced with something specifically designed for solo RPGs?
My first idea was to replace the colored markings on a traditional Scrabble board with RPG specific markings. Instead of “Triple Word Score” or “Double Letter Score”, certain squares on the grid would state things like “PC-NPC Connection”, or “PC backstory”, or “Important Place”. Perhaps the colored blocks could be left blank (but still different colored), the words filled in with tiles, and then each color defined randomly with a chit-draw. Finally, for this variant, I’m thinking that a number of tiles could be placed randomly, at the start, to help prevent lock-up in the middle.
My second idea was, how about just replacing the board with a gridded map? It could be a literal map for an RPG set in a rural town or on a space station or similarly “local” campaign. A more wide-ranging setting could instead employ a concept map, that shows perhaps major players and ideas with proximity implying strength of association. Regardless of the map type, a handful of letter tiles could be dropped from height, leaving those that land upright (i.e. readable) on the map to indicate not only the initial germ of a word, but exactly what in the setting (by map position) it relates to. Perhaps instead of dropping tiles, the solo player drops a six-sided letter die, one for each PC and maybe a few for significant NPCs. Each die would have a discrete color to identify to whom it belongs, and words would then be built off these with normal tiles. And if words from two different characters cross… perfect, that implies interaction.
I imagine this only as world-building or adventure design prompts, as it would be too time consuming for use as an oracle. I like the second idea more but the first idea would take far less production effort and I could be testing it today.
My first idea was to replace the colored markings on a traditional Scrabble board with RPG specific markings. Instead of “Triple Word Score” or “Double Letter Score”, certain squares on the grid would state things like “PC-NPC Connection”, or “PC backstory”, or “Important Place”. Perhaps the colored blocks could be left blank (but still different colored), the words filled in with tiles, and then each color defined randomly with a chit-draw. Finally, for this variant, I’m thinking that a number of tiles could be placed randomly, at the start, to help prevent lock-up in the middle.
My second idea was, how about just replacing the board with a gridded map? It could be a literal map for an RPG set in a rural town or on a space station or similarly “local” campaign. A more wide-ranging setting could instead employ a concept map, that shows perhaps major players and ideas with proximity implying strength of association. Regardless of the map type, a handful of letter tiles could be dropped from height, leaving those that land upright (i.e. readable) on the map to indicate not only the initial germ of a word, but exactly what in the setting (by map position) it relates to. Perhaps instead of dropping tiles, the solo player drops a six-sided letter die, one for each PC and maybe a few for significant NPCs. Each die would have a discrete color to identify to whom it belongs, and words would then be built off these with normal tiles. And if words from two different characters cross… perfect, that implies interaction.
I imagine this only as world-building or adventure design prompts, as it would be too time consuming for use as an oracle. I like the second idea more but the first idea would take far less production effort and I could be testing it today.
Anybody who has read this far… have you ever done something similar? How did it work for you? Thanks for reading!
I have never done anything like that.
ReplyDeleteI do like the pizza box town from the previous post though - very clever!
Thanks Shaun! I like it too, and unlike most of my weird ideas, I actually tested that one and to my surprise, it worked.
DeleteRandom rolls are always a bit addictive to me, so I've been trying to keep myself from bulk buying pizza boxes from restaurant suppliers, ha!