Since solo games are a fairly new thing to most players, becoming much more popular with the advent of internet based gaming, I thought it would be appropriate to list some pros and cons of solo games. Pros Scheduling is simple. Rather than needing to find a time slot for 3+ hours for 4-6 people to meet up, it's very easy in solo games to just play whenever both of you want to play and have some free time. The rules don't matter a whole lot. In a solo game, the "rule of cool" is at it's peak. There's no other players who will feel shrunken by your character being overpowered or anything of that manner, there's just the one PC saving the world (or whatever the quest may be) so being all-powerful isn't a problem. Being a "special snowflake" is actually good. Players always want their character to feel unique, but there's only a limited number of character choices within the rules. A "special snowflake" character is usually one that has a homebrew bonus or choice, like a special race or power, and obviously that makes other players feel like the GM has played favorites. In a solo game, these special snowflake characters actually make a lot of sense as they are adventuring alone. It is a great place to experiment. Since both the player and the GM are designing the story together as they play, it's a great opportunity to do some things outside the box (goes along with the special snowflake point) so that you both can see if it would work well in game. If it doesn't work, then oh well, no big loss and you can both just speed along through that experiment. Cons Both the GM and the player must stay quite dedicated to the game. If either one is lax in their job, it quickly falls apart. There are balance problems. The majority of tabletop RPGs are designed around a party of 3-6 players, having only 1 means the GM will have to wing it a bit in combat and skills. For example, if the player is a Fighter in D&D, putting locked doors in the way are effectively the same as solid walls since they are unlikely to have a high skill for picking locks. The player must find a balance between following the GM's trail of breadcrumbs and going off to find their own adventure. A GM often burns out in one of two ways: either the party always does what's expected, and there's never anything for the GM to do but write up notes and read them out, or the party continually avoids the quest. The player's job is to make the GM have fun in telling the story, if the player makes the GM's job boring or overly difficult, it will die out real fast. A player is, more or less, stuck with their first character. In a solo game, there is only one character, not a party that the player can have the character retire from and rejoin with a new character if they become bored. If the original character retires (or dies as mentioned in the next point), it's very hard to continue the same story without entirely restarting. Death. Death effectively doesn't exist for the PC of a solo game. In a game with multiple players, it's entirely possible for the party at the end of the adventure to be completely different from the party that began the adventure. This is due to the fact that when one party member dies/retires, another is created for that player and joins the party, taking on the quests as normal. However, this is much harder in a solo game, a random adventurer is unlikely to stumble upon the same questline and if prior information was needed for this to be completed, the game just effectively ends (barring metagaming of course). More or less, this means that if the player character actually dies and does not have some GM fiat bringing them back to life somehow, the game dies with them. Which also means that if death does begin occurring a bit frequently, it will feel much less like an actual threat and bring down the game. Alternatives to death should be explored when designing a solo game.
