A quick thumbs up for The Grouch Couch. This guy's content is simply solo role playing heaven. Lots of ad vice, lots of actual plays, lots of tips and tricks. It's all kinds of awesome.
Story Telling
As you will quickly realise, I am no story telling savant. Being able to keep a consistent, coherent story going over multiple threads, characters and overarching theme is really hard.
I'm currently using Google Drive to capture my stream of consciousness thinking. It's really useful to use tabs for subjects such as NPC's, podcast scripts, history of my setting, in fact anything I think of that I want to remember or refer to at a later date.
I'm up to over 50 tabs so far, and imagine it will grow into the hundreds eventually. They all help me to try and keep continuity across an ever more complicated story line. But in any story telling, it can be incredibly boring for the reader or listener to have information dumps, or exposition, thrown at them. I'm sure we've all read or listened to books where we've been front loaded with information that doesn't move a story forward or tries to justify something happening that otherwise might seem out of place.
Good exposition feels natural and woven into the story through dialogue, action, or discovery rather than a long info-dump. But the storytelling principle of 'show, dont tell' lets readers experience the story through actions, dialogue, sensory details, and behavior instead of directly explaining everything. It's something I first heard about when reading Stephen Kings bible on writing, called...'On Writing'!
I highly recommend it for Games Masters, even if they don't think they're the next Brandon Sanderson or Joe Abercrombie. It describes his experiences as a writer and his advice for aspiring writers, a lot of which is translatable to the kind of story building GM's and more importantly for this blog, the solo player.
I make no claims that I achieve this in my own writing or the solo play. In fact, I am still a beginner at solo play, and for any one interested in the craft of what solo play is I highly recommend them checking out the links over to the right. Trevor Devall of Me, Myself and Die was the first person I saw who took solo role playing to a place I didn't think possible. Tale of the Manticore is the audio eqivalent. And now I am trying to emulate them, using Shadowdark.
Whether I succed or not remains to be seen, but I'm having a blast finding my way, developing my narrating skills as well as the technical aspects of producing a podcast.
The Solo Game Loop
As one example of how awesome the Grouch Couch is, theck out the link above where Turk shares his expertise. Using the mnemonic START, it really is self explanatory to learn what he calls the solo game loop:
Scene Trial Action Resolution Transistion
I wont try to explain it here, Turk does it way better than I can. But check out the video and be prepared to learn!
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