Solo RPG

01 Mar 2025

The first few months of 2025 have been pretty solid. I managed to learn how to play Brianstorm (kinda), I read through 100 Go Mistakes and continue to study data oriented design, and I started programming in Jai after getting access to the private beta. Sure things are a little scary with my wife having a federal position and the current administration is making her life very chaotic, but she goes on maternity leave this month and gets a well deserved break from all the churn. Not to mention we are having another kid this month which is it’s own version of scary, but I am sure we will adapt to whatever challenges are thrown our way. The year of focus is off to a ripping start with some occasional setbacks to my old ways, but I’m proud of what has been accomplished thus far.

On another note, I have been wanting to get backing into table top RPGs for the longest time, but with having a kid it just makes scheduling time to play nearly impossible. I have tried playing over discord but it just doesn’t have the same impact as being in person. One idea I have played with for the last few months is trying my hand at solo role-play. It’s not a bad way to try out new systems without having the burden of teaching the new rules to a group. My latest problem however is I have too many damn systems to try out (and I have at least two new ones on the way via Kickstarter). I think what I am going to try is dedicating Sunday nights to RPGs and maybe do eight sessions to evaluate a system. The first system I think I will give a go is Knave 2E. It’s just such a minimal, no frills, system that has a lot of fresh ideas (to me at least) and I want to see if it holds up over time. From my engineering background, stripping down a product to it’s barest pieces to be as streamlined and simple as possible is challenging and wondrous.

It took 3 weeks, but I re-wrote my handmade hero project from Zig to Jai. It started out as a means to evaluate if I actually wanted to use Jai to begin with. I didn’t have a project idea and didn’t want to do AoC problems so this seemed like a reasonable approach. It was how I ruled out Rust as being an option as it took me nearly a weekend to unsuccessfully get SDL2 running in Rust. After the 3 weeks was up I was still on the fence. I liked parts of Jai and it was certainly less verbose than Zig, but Zig was a language that I could reasonably start using at work in the next few years. Who knows if Jai is even available to the public in the next 3-5 years. That being said, I thought it was only fair that I read through the entire “how-to” section in Jai since I spent 1-2 months doing Ziglings last year. I am glad I did because Jai has so much more to offer than I realized. I like the approach of the language being more data oriented and I appreciate the power the language offers without getting in the way. The meta programming is something I will need to learn over time, but I could see the potential with the examples provided. I feel very fortunate I got into the beta so quickly after expressing interest and will continue writing Jai for as long as it makes sense.