Most tabletop RPGs are meant to be played by more than one person — someone’s gotta be in the GM driver’s seat, after all. This makes them useless when your buddies aren’t around. But Oddfish Games is working on a solution — an engine that promises to convert ANY multiplayer tabletop game into a single-player experience. Sound impossible? They’re making it happen.
It’s called the Radiance Adventure Engine and the crowdfunding campaign opens today. The RAE acts as its own GM, generating a random sequence of story events through a card deck. It uses a four-act narrative structure broken down into eight Adventure Stages. At each stage you draw Story and Detail cards to create the specific scenario, then decide what your character or characters should do next. The Radiance Adventure Engine can also be used in a multiplayer format, allowing the GM to quickly generate scenarios by drawing cards (or in their absence, someone else can draw ’em).
I should remind people that Oddfish is also the inventor of an RPG engine that allows players to involve their cats in a game. Sky’s the limit!
You can get your own copy of the Radiance Adventure Engine through a $50 pledge to the campaign. Pledge $80, and they’ll also give you a copy of How To RPG With Your Cat in case you missed it. Other additions at higher tiers include bonus RPGs from Modiphus 2d20 and Savage Worlds.
The campaign for the Radiance Adventure Engine will be open until October 12. The product should begin shipping next February. Visit the Radiance Kickstarter for more info.
I can understand how videogames work as a single player but a table top being single player is a concept that I felt like is going to work. So this project is up to something as they are trying to make the impossible happen.
82 people had backed this and they are 4000 dollars away from their goal. With 28 days to go I think their goal to be funded is attainable. So there is a demand to make board games playable by a single person without the need of a Dungeon master.
A must-have for any novice to Dungeons & Dragons who keeps getting owned by their more seasoned gaming buddies. It is possible to self-educate in the art of tabletop role-playing games.
I am having doubts when they have the confidence that this is going to work for all existing table top games. A lot of Table tops have unique mechanics so I can they say it will run for all rpgs when they have different set of rules. I wont waste my money supporting this, it is too good to be true.