It happened. The party died.
For anyone curious about how that happened narratively, the party returned to the dungeon, lit torches, and beelined for where they encountered the Scarlet Minotaur before. No longer there, they continued checking the room, then opted to leave the room in the direction they could hear a faint breeze.
Winding through this labyrinthian tunnel, they found another exit from the citadel. Turning back inside, they encountered a very hostile pair of ettercaps. Before they could do anything about it, their priest was dropped and quickly bled out. Before the rest could save him, the fighter went down as well. The thief and wizard opted to try and save them, dropping one of the ettercaps in the process, but ultimately succumbed to the ettercaps’ bites.
Party chose loyalty over individual survival and died for it.
Oh no! … Anyway! I’ve been itching to try some other solo gaming approaches, but I didn’t want to simply leave this hanging. I’ll come back for Scarlet Citadel some day, more likely with a group of players than as a solo activity, but now I have an ending to this adventure, even if it’s a bad ending.
That said, I did want to reflect on a few things from this experience, which is why I’m writing this post in the first place. How to handle rounds when using SoloDark’s recommendation of torches lasting 10 rounds rather than a real-time hour led me to two realizations.
The first is that I wasn’t playing RAW when it comes to rounds and random encounter checks. Despite having read this portion of the book multiple times, I still forgot in the middle of things that random encounter checks are only X number of crawling rounds, not combat rounds. That mistake can lead to insane dogpiling. (Which I can’t actually blame for this session’s TPK, though it admittedly didn’t help previous game sessions.)
The part where I was playing RAW and decided that isn’t best is that SoloDark only says that light lasts “10 rounds” without that explicit distinction between crawling and combat rounds. This would/could result in torches going out mid-combat. Now, that’s not intrinsically a bad thing, and the core rules even give guidance on attacking the light during combat. But from a mechanic-swap/alternative rule angle, it doesn’t seem consistent with the intent. After all, the rough math in this way of tracking torches would be 10 rounds = 1 hour or 1 round averages out 6 minutes. When a combat round is more like 6 seconds given the trends of other games, that math doesn’t math out well.
So, going forward in solo play of ShadowDark, I’m going to treat torches as lasting for 10 crawling rounds. This is probably what other people have done already, but this seems like a good place to codify that decision.
Another thing that I want to do differently is move away from running a party of equals to running a group of hero plus hirelings. Trying to avoid metagaming when running a party, or otherwise fragmenting “character X would know this but character Y wouldn’t” is simply a lot of work. Work isn’t a bad word, but I’m naturally inclined to being heavy on the role play side of things, and that’s leading to a lot of conversations with myself that don’t map out to actual game progress. If I were using my game as means to writing stories (like John McGowan has done), then this would be just fine. That’s not really my aim for solo play right now, so I think simplifying my party will be a boon to my play.
The last thing I’ll comment on here is the matter of trying to run a pre-written adventure/dungeon rather than something randomly/procedurally generated. I love procedural generation. The first thing I set out to do when I was taking a C-programming course in college was use it to build a dungeon generator suitable for the roguelike games I was playing at the time. (Angband forever!) I’ve put together some World Map Generation Tables and put them to use in Rolling a World here, even. I very much want to do more of this in solo play going forward. While I’m not looking to do solo play as a means of story-writing, I’m very much interested in solo play as world-building.
But I digress. There’s certainly a challenge in playing pre-written adventures/dungeons and knowing what’s in the room as the referee/GM before the characters would know. I’ve seen some perspective advice about this on the ShadowDark Discord’s SoloDark section. The main idea I took from that conversation was: The book tells you what’s supposed to be there, but you don’t know until run time and an additional rolling of dice if it’s what’s actually there. I’m not sure yet what the actual implementation would be here, but I imagine a basic “is this detail the way the book describes it?” question for the simple SoloDark oracle would do the trick. If you have experience with running pre-written materials in a solo capacity and have found something that works, don’t hesitate to respond in the comments.
With that, I think I’ll call it a post. I haven’t decided what I’ll do next in SoloDark, but I am intending for the next session to happen sooner than later because it turns out solo play is actually a blast in its own right.