I have been pondering for a while how to add mechanized character drama to my solo games. In regular games, a lot of character drama can be covered by players simply talking to each other. Obviously, that won't work in a solo game. To remedy this, I decided to take Robin D. Law's DramaSystem (found published in the game Hillfolk) and hack it into something more amenable to solo play.
DramaSystem is organized around several concepts:
- Emotional Desires
- This is a character's basic motivation. Characters can have more than one emotional desire.
- Fraught relationships
- Most emotional needs (respect, affection, ect) cannot be met without help from another person. Therefore, characters attempt to get other characters to meet their emotional needs. However, much of the time people are not willing to meet the emotional needs of others. If someone you dislike wants affection from you, they're going to be disappointed. This is the basic source of drama in the game.
- Dramatic poles
- This is a story mechanic. In many works of fiction, characters are torn between the kind of person they aspire to be and their character trait most likely to prevent them. For example: Just ruler vs Tyrant.
The game is structured around "petitions." Each scene, a character will approach one of the other characters and try to get the them to satisfy the petitioner's emotional desire. The receiver of the petition chooses to either grant or deny the petition. The game uses a system of tokens to make sure that characters sometimes grant petitions and sometime deny them.
So what needs to change to make this into a solo game?
The original rules of dramasystem rely on the players to decide what character petitions which and when it should be played out. Players simply declare that their character should do a dramatic scene with another character. This won't work for a solo game. I've solved this by assigning a risk die to each fraught relationship.
For those not familiar with the concept, the Risk Die is a dice mechanic introduced in the game Blackhack. It is intended to represent a diminishing resource. It works like this:
You assign a die, for example a D8, to represent how much resource you have. Each time you expend the resource, you roll the associated risk die. If you roll a 1-3, then the die type moves one step down the dice chain (such as from D8 to D6). This reflects the fact that you are now closer to running out of the resource. If you roll a 4 or higher, then the die type remains the same. If your risk die for a given resource is a D4, and you roll a 1-3, then the risk die is said to fizzle, which means you have now run out of the resource entirely.
So how is this used to model drama? On a 1-3, a dramatic scene happens related to that fraught relationship. The result of the scene determines whether the die type goes up the chain or down the chain
The most important part is the setup. Make a list of PCs and important NPCs. Make a mind-map showing how they relate to each other.
For each important character, write down an emotional desire, note who is the target of their emotional desire, and why the target of the desire won't meet their desire. Finally, assign a risk die to the fraught relationship. PCs should probably be the target of at least two fraught relationships.
Periodically roll the risk die associated with each fraught relationship. If the result is higher than 3, nothing happens. If the result is 1-3, then the character associated with that fraught relationship will approach the target of their desire and attempt to get that person to meet their desire. Usually this will take the form of a conversation. If the petitioner gets what they want, raise the risk die by one step. If they don't get what they want, lower the risk die by one step. If the character rolls a 1-3 on a D4, then they take some dramatic and ill-advised action in pursuit of their emotional desire.
I haven't figured out how to make dramatic poles work in this system
In play tests so far, this has worked well at providing a steady stream of low-level character drama. However, I've realized the system is not complete. As written above, the system provides no incentive to resolve the conflicts. the character's risk die tend to just move up one step, down one step, up one step, indefinitely. This isn't such a problem for unimportant characters, but it's and unsatisfying way to handle important relationships.
Feel free to comment if you have any ideas on how to complete the system.
