u/Warpig_Gaming

The question I have is, how much do you wonder/worry about your solo game reflecting a typical session of the given system with live players? In this case, in a system based around exploring a mystery rather than dungeon crawling combat/stealth, how do you square the circle of revealing a mystery you're inventing on the fly and do you worry you're "playing it wrong"?

Further context, I love CoC. I love how the percentile based skill system doesn't make me feel like I'm cheating when I assign a DC#. I love the concept of cosmic horror and horror role-playing as I feel it is very relevant to my own life and experiences (don't get me started, I'll be here all day). When I first picked up the 7e starter set, it came with a choose your own adventure style solo game attached, which I'd never seen before and have now come to believe is standard for Chaosium. It's what got me down the rabbit hole to playing solo in the first place.

However, I am also a forever DM and I like running games for others. My game group doesn't get the concepts of investigation and constantly seems to dungeon crawl into the investigations, usually getting them killed/insane. So the only time I can really find an enthusiastic group is at the cons where I run gaming for others. So I want to make an authentic experience and I want to explore that in my solo games, but I worry I'm getting too "solo" to really grasp the player at table dynamics of the system.

So how about you? How do you like to run investigation based games solo? Do you ever worry that solo play is tampering with your ability to run/play games with others?

Hi all. I'm working up a game for my group based around decending into the bowels of a tower formally occupied by a mad alchemist. As this alchemist (Ral-Sar for a placeholder name) made a group of Manimals (like MCC but for DCC) he would have also experiment with others and gone horribly wrong. I want my players to find a nightmare monster in a shallow pool at the bottom like Justin Long's character in the movie Tusk.

They will be all 1st level, I'd like the fight to be winnable, but a challenge. I'd prefer it to be inspired by the creature in the film, but not mostly immobile. Any suggestions you have, or especially crazy stuff to stock the dungeon with would be appreciated. No AI, please.

Hi there. I'm working on a location crawl and I'm looking to find some app or program I can use to render dungeons/towns/outdoor spaces for mapping. It wouldn't be seen by the players, more of a behind the screen way of me to keep track of locations and their contents. I'm not super talented, though I can use a straight edge and graph paper, and I want something relatively easy for a novice. NO AI is an absolute must, and cheap to free would be best.

What do you recommend?

Hi all. I was thinking about how one could go about running a game of CoC off the cuff, with little to no prep time. Is it possible? What tricks do Keepers employ for such situations? Are there any good resources for this? Is there like a dungeon crawl esque type game for CoC (investigation crawl, maybe?).

Edit: Thank you for all your insights on this. The general concensus seems to be that, conceptually, it doesn't work well to play a game off the cuff. I was posing this question as a sort of meta-analysis on the nature of investigative games and how they fundamentally differed from more action/combat oriented type ttrpgs.

I'm actually surprised nobody mentioned solo play as a potential starting point for a spontaneous game. CoC was the first system I ever solo played consistently (I preferred the percentile system as it felt harder to "cheat" by giving myself easy DCs). Of course, solo resources make for a fairly randomized game, which probably feels a lot different from a traditional session.