Solo RPGs

Other than playing chess I've been dabbling again in the uncommon realm of free, pen and paper solo RPG games. Usually these either make use of dice or playing cards for randomness but for this set, it's purely just dice.

Against all Evil

This make your own narrative sees your three stat characters face off against threats by rolling dice to reduce the threat's matching stats and accumulate doom tokens per threat stat higher than their own per turn. Upon reaching 5 doom they die or they can lift their doom once (per character) by creating more story about the threat, which I suppose is a neat way of fleshing out an enemy.

Interesting idea but mathematically poor. Having characters with a range of stats is bad, where as having everyone be carbon copies of each other (and ideally excelling in the same one stat) will let you steam roll most of the time. Not recommended.

The Wizard's Test RPG

This solo only game has you as a young apprentice exploring a mystical tower, but your character is so weak and the odds of making it through the first level are already super low, especially since by design you will be revisiting the same rooms over and over until you get a set of lucky rolls. Not fun.

The Creature of Murky Country RPG

A solo game where you are hunting down a creature around town but you soon realize as you randomly wander around that there is actually very little to do as most results only have a specific character class action tied to it (which is randomly determined for the character at the start). That's fine if you luck into the right spot but most of the time everything is uneventful. Not fun.

Tindalos RPG

This solo game is set in the Lovecraftian-verse where you are a hapless fool being hunted by a hound of Tindalos. There's a bigger variety of events here but the setup mechanic of assigning various dice to your stats is ridiculous as it basically comes down to hoping you land on activities you are good at (but can still roll and fail). Better than all the above but still not recommended.

Kalia's Cleansing

In this adult RPG you character must reach a magical spring to lift a curse. A simple two-page ruleset, only needing 1d6 and an interesting game design where you can actually make some decisions and not just rely on blind die rolls makes this the best of this set, though the theme itself might be an issue for many.