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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 9471857" data-attributes="member: 85870">Because it teaches you how to be both a player and GM at the same time --- which conceptually forces you to adopt the same kind of mindset that a "non-director" GM would take when playing Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, or Ironsworn. Why would you play a solo RPG if you were just going to write the story for your character? "I want my character to be awesome and do all the awesome things I imagine, the end." But if you apply Ironsworn's solo rules, use them along with the included GM-guide Oracles to play out uncertain areas---rather than just unilaterally deciding things in GM mode---you get a MASSIVELY different experience to just writing the story. Ironsworn solo play teaches you to leave spaces open in the fiction that can be filled via application of the rules and future interpolation / interweaving of events that have already been fictionally established. I've played Ironsworn solo exactly once, for approximately 2.5 hours. But it was (other than the moment I picked up my D&D Red Box from under the Christmas tree in 1985) quite literally the most profound, transformative experience of RPG play I've ever had. Playing Ironsworn solo ONE TIME completely UNLOCKED a new way of seeing/viewing how RPG play can work. And once I unlocked that view/mindset, it became brilliantly clear how to apply that mindset, playstyle, and purpose to group-led play using similar rulesets and principles (Ironsworn in a group rather than solo, Blades in the Dark, Masks, etc. ). One more thing --- I keep getting this sense that you somehow think that just because a player makes a suggestion about a particular thing in the fiction that the Ironsworn GM MUST, without question implement it. Absolutely not so. As a GM, your goal is to continue to challenge the players, force them to make tough decisions, force them to make decisions that challenge their character's growth. This doesn't happen if the GM is just kow-towing to the players left and right. What you do instead is make highly selective, strategic, purposeful, and meaningful changes to your GM fiction, in a deft, collaborative, often improv manner, so that the focus of play stays strongly on the action happening now.You're not playing Candyland where every card in the deck reads "You win! Go to the end of the board!". You're strategically, methodically, through game rule and principle and system, acting to move players and characters into spaces where they make revelatory decisions. Once again, try playing Ironsworn as intended in good faith. It is absolutely NOT IN ANY WAY representative of a "power trip fantasy." My character in my 2.5 hours Ironsworn solo session died of exposure and starvation trying to fulfill a quest.I can't imagine that happening in any version of D&D later than 2e.</blockquote>

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