After I started with recording Ironsworn and find 6X6 Tales, I threw myself into the rabbit hole of affordable solo RPG on Itch.io with free / Pay What You Want (PWYW) tags. In my journey I found many interesting systems that I downloaded, both rule-lite and full game, but this one immediately catch my attention.
FPS A One Page Solo RPG is, like it said, a solo RPG module with one page ruleset created by Logen Nein, a TTRPG content creator who mainly make maps for any systems and adventures for many titles like Dragonbane and CY_BORG among others. He’s also making his own systems, mostly one page / rule-lite ones.
FPS was created for his participation in the One Page RPG Jam 2022. And as I’m sure you notice, it doesn’t stand for First Person Shooter, but rather shortened for the main 3 stats on the game which is Fight, Persuade and Survival. The game itself currently has one page ruleset and another page for a world setting called The Irradiated Wasteland, more settings to come in the future, or you can use it as a guideline to make your own setting.
To play this game you’ll need a handful of d6 dice, a deck of standard playing card Joker included, and pen and paper to track your progress and draw map (square or hex).
This is a d6 dice pool system, which means you roll many d6s and count the successes to pass an encounter. The cards then divided into some smaller decks for deciding encounters, tracking loots and character progression. Each encounter will require you to succeed challenges on Fight, Persuade or Survival depending on the encounter (sometimes the encounters give you choice of what stat you want to roll). Each stat have difficulty represented by a number of checkboxes called Hit Box, the more it has the more difficult it is.
This is also a roll-under system which means to succeed you must roll equal or under your stat. For example if you have 3 on Fight, to pass a Fight challenges with 3 Hit Boxes you need at least 3 dice with result of 3 or under.
On character creation you roll a d6 for each stats of Fight, Persuade and Survival. On a 6, define a Knack which usually a positive traits of your character that could help with challenges by adding an additional Luck die, then roll again until you get 1-5.
Luck, which starts and maxed at 10, is the number of d6s you roll to face a challenge. It represent you stamina and health so if it goes to 0, you die. You roll all your luck dice and discard all failures (results more than your stat) for each encounter. If you fail to check all of the Hit Boxes, roll again the rest of your dice until you succeed or run out of dice and die. Knacks and Loots add into the dice pool to increase your chance of success. And you can also restore your luck by resting, acquiring loots or passing encounters.
And finally Grit, which starts at 0, is your “EXP” that you can spend to your benefit like restoring Luck or adding stat (max stat is 5). You get Grit mostly by passing encounters, and use it while resting.
At the beginning of the campaign you roll for a mission or two on the mission table then add Joker(s) into the encounter deck in corespondent to the number of mission you’ve taken. Then you roll on the starting point table and go from there.
Encounters are divided into 2 categories : Obstacles, which is caused by nature like sinkhole, ash storm or hunger, and Antagonist instigated by creatures like rad ghasts, mad dogs or himan mercenaries. All of the encounter cards + the Joker that represents the mission objectieves are combined into one deck which then shuffled and drawn at random. When you draw a Joker, your mission is complete. For more than one missions add corresponding number of Joker card. When a deck is empty, immediately reshuffle the deck and you can continue to draw from it.
The gameplay is done in turns. Each turn is a day spent exploring an area represented by a square / hex. When you explore a new area you roll on the terrain table to decide what encounter you get, then draw on the encounter deck if you got one. There is a discussion about going back to a previous area but I guess you can decide for yourself what to do in that situation (it’s your own game after all). You can also spent a day staying in the area and resting, which you’ll need to do a lot. And again, when you draw a Joker, you complete the mission.
The rules are simple and concise, although there were some unclear thing (at least for me) like the condition for success and failure, and defining Knack, that I had to ask Logen himself for clarity (well, he only have 1 page to explain everything so it’s understandable if theres some misses, and he is a nice guy, BTW) and I’ve written my explanation above from my understanding after our conversation.
One nitpick that bothers me a little is the balance of the encounters. On the currently available setting (Irradiated Wasteland) the proportion of encounters that require you to succeed Survive challenges is way too much. Even in the Antagonist Encounters there are many encounters that gives the option of making Survive challenge instead of Fight or Persuade. This makes having high Survive the META for this setting. The author triesnto mitigate this by giving less reward if they choose Survive. I admit that more Survival is the most logical things to do in this setting but maybe some other setting can offer something more balanced. Now I’m interested to make one…
Also, for dramatic effect, when I draw Joker I don’t immediately end the game and created some “final challenges” my PC has to overcome. It felt more satisfying than just drawing Joker and end it there (except maybe if there’s multiple mission)
Final thought, this is an engaging solo RPG which light in rules but fun and challenging. It got me interested to play it on camera (which hasn’t happened yet at the time of writing this review) and I did a playtest on my own as I learn about the system. Did some journaling to add story and flavor into each encounter. I will put the replay on this blog sometime in the future.
Thank you Logen Nein for this simple yet fascinating game you’ve created. Check out his page in his itch.io page if you want to experience it for yourself.
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