I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to make art and having an internal debate about whether or not I am an “artist”, and what that may or may not mean to me. This has led, as it necessarily should, to David Lynch. In 2025 I finally got around to finishing all of the media surrounding Twin Peaks and like I do when I find a piece of media that grabs my attention, I spent weeks reading more about it and looking into the people involved. David Lynch was an artist through and through, there can be no debate about that, so he was the perfect case study for me. He also wrote and spoke prolifically about his creative method. He was an evangelist for Transcendental Meditation, which is a branded piece of pop meditation that costs a lot of money, but at the root of it all, he just appreciated the meditation. This is good news for me, who practices the free kind of meditation where I quietly direct my focus throughout the day.
Anyway, the big revelation for me that connected between David Lynch and solo-play RPGs, was the idea of “catching the big fish”. That’s the way Lynch talks about finding creative ideas. He meditates and goes deep, deep, deep, down into his mind, and hooks a big idea. His whole schtick is that the biggest ideas are the furthest down. And once you catch that Idea, you have to stick with it.
I have ideas all the time, but usually what happens is I get passionate about them, and then they meet with the reality of my busy schedule and I have to let them go before I can do anything with them. This is partly why I stopped writing games – I had a lot more free time during 2020 to sit on my couch and work through weird ideas than I do now. But if I wanted to grab that big fish and hang on for the ride, I needed to remove some barriers.
Back to RPGs. Mothership is a very rules-lite TTRPG that I have run and participated in on a few occasions. I love the vibe (Alien is my favourite movie of all time), and it is dead easy. There is an app for Mothership that allows you to instantly roll a random character. Anytime you do something in the game, the app tracks your changing stats, used ammunition, elevated stress, and health. It removes the need to flip around the book. As a GM, I still want to know how those mechanics work so I can play with them, but I can bring fresh players to the table, get them to open the app, and immediately start playing. The mechanics themselves are also simple. It’s a D100 system where 00 is good, and 99 is bad, and doubles are a crit. You have stats and skills, but that’s the gist of the system boiled down to nothing.
So, I experimented with using the mothership app to run my own journalling RPG sessions. I came up with the idea of a story I wanted to tell (that’s my big fish), and I used Mothership to answer some questions along the way. Whenever my character interacted with the world, had a dilemma, conflict, or other challenge, I rolled the dice. This gave me dynamic direction for how to proceed. I ran a few games like this and found that it was a good level of friction for me to play a structured game, while also hanging on to the big fish. I wanted to expand out a bit further and play some fantasy settings, or other genres that didn’t quite fit into the horror/stress mechanics of Mothership, so I simplified the game into a genre-less 1-page zine (found here if you’re interested - but as this blog points out, you probably don't need it).
My game, Storyteller, uses that same D100 system, gives you a few extra points for stats and saves, and then asks you to pick 3-ish skills out of thin air. I didn’t want to write a thousand optional skills, so I just said “pick 3 things that you are probably pretty good at” and those things will give you a bonus. I found that in a few different settings, I still wanted to incorporate some extra elements, so I found a few random tables online for rolling terrain on a hex grid or determining the size and makeup of a settlement that I encountered. These tables varied from game to game, and every time I played I had to go looking for something else – no one book had everything I thought I would need.
I had an epiphany that has occurred to me before, but it once again reared its head. This is all just window dressing. For me, the big fish is usually a “vibe”. It’s rarely a specific character and story arc. More often it’s a setting and a place – a feel. When I am following that fish I am feeling and experiencing, as much as I can, the texture of an idea. It is something I want to feel viscerally and emotionally. So, then why was I looking around as if others knew what that texture was? I can cobble together some tables and concepts that get close to the truth, but never quite get there.
I have a new approach now, and I can barely tell if I’m still playing solo-RPGs, or if I’m just doing unnecessarily complicated creative writing. I come up with a concept – a world, a setting, a vibe. I imagine a history – loosely, because I really want to explore that kind of thing in detail in the game, if it comes up. Then I write my own tables. I got a few cheap spiral bound notebooks with removeable pages, and I just go to town. I write D6 tables for anything and everything I can think of – and the things that go on those tables define what kind of place this is. There is no mechanical trigger for when these tables must be consulted – I do or don’t as I feel. I found that looking for supplemental information was a barrier from following the fish. Creating my own answers to reference was a part of the exploration, and it actually helped me go deeper. Every game I play requires new tables and ideas, and that’s part of the process. There is no one game book that captures them all.
So, now I’m just writing stories and using my own made-up tables as I go and determining what happens with a percentile die. I still don’t know if I’m an artist or not, but I’m really enjoying my time with solo-play RPGs now.
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