Interview with JeansenVaars of Plot Unfolding Machine

First of all, think less, prep-less, and start to play earlier than when you feel prepared for it. I would take a safe bet that getting started is the highest most frequently repeated challenge in the solo gaming community.

A long interview with the creator of Plot Unfolding Machine (PUM), as well as SUM and GUM. Continuing the solo gaming interviews.

Disclaimer. Rand Roll is an affiliate of Drive Thru RPG.

Chat with JeansenVaars of Plot Unfolding Machine

JeansenVaars is the creator of Plot Unfolding Machine (PUM), A GM Emulator for Solo RPGs. Also the publisher of other titles, including Game Unfolding Machine and Scene Unfolding Machine mentioned in the interview.

We have the appeal of solo gaming, background of Plot Unfolding Machine, story of SUM (Scenes) and GUM (Games), favourite solo moments, solo gaming challenges and advice for starting with solo games, plus other bits.

What is the appeal of solo gaming?

Solo gaming is a very subjective and individual hobby.

It has that kind of magic where it gets you excited, sometimes more than what we can actually achieve but the hype of saying “oh wait I could play this or that, play in that world, have a character that will eventually become a demi-god” . It is a hype all solo players experienced at least once.

For some, it might still be quite social, as it is fun to explore the idea of playing and then publishing and sharing the adventures.

For others, it is that lone space where imagination can over-expand and go to places, good and bad, comfortable and uncomfortable.

For me? the appeal of solo gaming is challenging my own creativity and boosting my imagination. Training that art of improvisation and coming up with stories without planning or preparing them. I like having the spontaneity, the training and mental stimulation it brings along, making me think out of the box, including dialogues between characters, and bits of a day in the life of X character in world Y.

The idea of trying Tabletop RPG systems that I could never find a group for (or didn't want to, or have the time to), is amazing, because there are so many good games out there, with wonderful lore, interesting mechanics, and amazing artwork that inspires me!

Some of them are also deep, and in my opinion are even better played solo, than in a group, where you can get deep into the mood. Sometimes roleplaying in groups fall too much in the “silly jokes” side of things, but personally I do enjoy the “really being there” of solo roleplaying.

A big appeal in solo gaming is for me, that idea of driving a story forward. To me, unlike writing a novel, here things really happen, and we have to deal with the consequences. I know, we can re-roll here and there, fudge things in a certain direction since we're still authors, but I feel in solo gaming the idea of living the moment is there.

It happened, she said that; he failed the jump; they messed up.

We are roleplaying, and not constructing a story that is awesome as an end product for others. It is what happened, in the fiction, it is done. At most, we could play a prequel or events in another time, or in another place at the same time. That works better for me than ignoring what happened because I didn't like it enough, or others wouldn't like it enough.

In a way, this also lifts off from my burden, the idea that my games and stories have to be awesome. When things move forward, including failures, frustrations, and characters getting stuck, it is part of it. It is the idea of playing those characters in that place and time.

It is a very similar experience of that in a traditional tabletop RPG with friends: it's imperfect, it has mistakes, but it also has surprises.

How did Plot Unfolding Machine come about?

(You can find Plot Unfolding Machine on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io

Well, it all started after I traveled abroad. With the distance and the pandemics, I couldn't come back to tabletop RPGs for a while. So I started looking and found something of interest: Mythic GM Emulator.

If you check my YouTube channel, I still have my first ever sessions played over there as well as in my blog. I was so incredibly excited about this matter that I wanted to get into it, try voice, video, written, and theater of the mind playing.

I was amidst the early hype of Foundry VTT which I used for my group games, so I rapidly implemented Mythic GME Tools for Foundry so I could play RPGs in there by myself, fast and furious. The module and the YouTube video about how to play solo with Foundry peaked at an incredibly high view count, and the module got thousands of downloads in little time.

After playing quite a while, I realized I was having one issue though. Way too many things in the story were up to me. I had to ask multiple questions one after another, in order to figure what was going on around my protagonists. I wanted to play more often, and faster than what my brain could come up with ideas, and I was getting stuck or in a choice paralysis freeze too frequently.

After paying attention to what was taxing my mind the most, I realized the problem was "coming with the next scene", the big what happens now. At first, I published a small homebrew for Mythic called "The Scene Designer". It would popup ideas for what could the PCs stumble upon next.

And it is not that I was running out of ideas per se, it was that the options were too open, and it was missing a bit of the surprise that I enjoyed. I think that things shouldn't be up to me alone, and Mythic’s Chaos Factor and Altered Scenes were forcing me to figure it out, and the single word oracles left me baffled at times too. Don't get me wrong, Mythic is absolutely brilliant, but I needed an extra kick.

Next, I learned about Tricube Tales solo system, which has a clever "Scene-Skill" concept, which would prompt you to play a scene by challenging your PCs with a specific kind of challenge. I loved how this brought up the RPG mechanics back into the focus, and it felt more like actual GM emulation: “hey, my PCs have to overcome a crafty challenge ahead, before they get what they want!”.

Combining these points, and many other ideas I was bringing together, the "Scene Designer" slowly became the Plot Unfolding Machine.

Not to exaggerate the success in this niche, but it got quite the attention and so fast, I had to build on it! Yes, I like finding general solutions to general problems and I love sharing them too.

The Plot Unfolding Machine would do a bunch more things in the “GM emulation” area, but the essence of us driving the story is still there. I didn't want an AI or an actual GM driving a story I could potentially not like, rather, I wanted evocative ideas that tickled my brain so I could come up with fun stuff by myself, while feeling that the idea was not entirely mine!

PUM would do scene prompts, would answer questions in more variants, could answer general things about the context, like questions about NPCs and their intentions, or discoveries in a room, clues, or even risks and reasons for trouble.

I played around giving it more structure, but honestly, it never worked.

In Solo, it is hard to say beforehand how a game should be played, so the oracles and the tables stood as “use what you need when you need” kind of approach. Although the scene structure would remain similar to Mythic's, PUM stood to its own philosophy of solo play, where solo players are less of authors than in other lighter systems, while at the same time remaining generic for any themes and playstyles.

How about it's companions SUM and GUM?

Hehe, it was a mess I admit.

Scene Unfolding Machine (SUM) and Game Unfolding Machine (SUM) were those complementary tables I had built for myself, that were too big to be included in PUM, in order to help my brain more and more with ideas.

What is the catch? Instead of having hundreds of random tables, I wanted to have a few, easy to find and lookup, generic bunch of tables, that could trigger nice ideas in my head.

Concrete tables didn't work well for me. Finding a pot of garlic wasn't really helping my solo sessions, but "finding an object that triggers jealousy" turned out to be way more inspiring for me. One phrase of a table in GUM could give you juice to play for many hours. I brainstormed those phrases and made them so ambiguous it could spark different meanings at different times, even when you get the same answer twice.

SUM was all about NPCs and surprising events. It got good attention because of strong oracle tables, made of short phrases and synonyms, instead of words. I personally love the latest version of SUM, where you can get personality traits, conversational moods, and other very evocative features about people you don't know, without spoiling ahead. In the beginning, SUM was technically the embodiment of GM Emulation, it had tables indicating how for example did the world react to PCs choices, or what an actual GM would say about a move. But later on what stuck the most were the tables for dialogs with NPCs.

GUM was more complicated, it was so ambitious it almost took over PUM and SUM as the one to rule them all. but then, after trial and error, I shrank it back to being a supplement, a "Game Generator". Essentially, a source of ideas for setting up games from scratch, plot seeds, and the such. Many players took GUM over PUM super-fast, back when GUM was everything. I got a bit scared, but I think I could pull it off by making PUM a bit better again, and removing oracle features from GUM.

I think it was hard, I confused many of my followers and players who liked my games. I also started setting a price tag for the versions when I started getting help from a designer to make them more “publishable”. I learned a lot from these iterations. My wife helped me a lot in designing them and giving them a more polished feel as well.

The typical question: what is the difference between PUM, SUM , and GUM? I think now it is easier than before to grasp: PUM is the main one, the one with actual rules and how to play a solo game. SUM is a supplement for “scene content”, mostly NPC generation, dialogues, and world reactions. GUM is the other supplement for “game metadata”, game seeds, locations, enemies, motivations, and so on. SUM and GUM have no rules, just a bunch of very well curated tables that fit well with PUM (my) philosophy of solo roleplaying.

To conclude, different players use them different, but to me it is easy: GUM (game) to generate the game seed, PUM (plot) to play it through, SUM (scene) when I need to enrich important moments. The catch is to know what they offer so you know when to go to which without losing momentum. This is also when I developed my other tool “Play by the Writing” to recall their tables as fast as a second!

What has been your favourite moment while solo gaming?

Playing Symbaroum, using Plot Unfolding Machine, looking at the camera for YouTube, both Live and Recorded, was incredibly fun.

Viewers count? Less than 20 I bet. But it was amazing.

I pulled off some dark fantasy vibes where a rogue with his little son, a tattooed tribal warrior, and a banished witch were investigating a ghost village. Turns out the village was overrun by water, and we never figured whether the water brought the curse, or if the curse brought the water!

The scenes were all about talking to ghostly figures and following traces of seemingly unrelated events. It felt so dynamic and fast, that I was quite in the game.

Tools-wise (I am quite a tools and technology person), I changed a lot for fun, in some theater of the mind moments, I rolled dice with my hands and took hand-drawn notes in my character sheets. But later on I played a bit on Tabletop Simulator to setup some nice maps and a combat against the undead. The mood and pace was fun! I used PUM's disrupted dice mode, and SUM for talking to Ghosts! GUM setup the seeds and a bit of world building, mostly factions and their motivations.

I can't go on without mentioning a nice long campaign I had with PbtA's (Powered by the Apocalypse) Legacy Life Among Ruins on an Obsidian vault. It triggered a pretty popular video of mine showing how to setup Obsidian for solo roleplaying campaigns. Legacy is a post apocalyptic game with a sandbox philosophy. Players would do the world building. PbtA is weird, but once it clicks, it is really nice for achieving the intended mood. And since it gives pretty vague prompts, solo tools would feel the gap, so the overall effort was much simplified.

The result? An open world campaign with many locations of interest, factions, and dangers. I played characters of one family, and when I got bored or stuck, I swapped over to another family to play the events from a different point of view. When I came back to play the first family, I had so much in my head that things evolved quite naturally. This mix of a sandbox game, simple PbtA mechanics, and solo tools, just worked fantastic together. And Obsidian as a note taking tool would contain all sorts of info about the different plays.

Have there been any big challenges while gaming solo?

So many! Countless of times I almost gave up to the hobby. But somehow a few days later, something was missing.

Biggest challenge is for me, closing the loop. Finishing the stories. Getting to a fair conclusion and say “it's done”.

Starting is not a problem for me. But when the things start to develop, I tend to complicate things so much; so very easily I get into over complicated plots with multiple villains and a chain of nested threads.

I am no writer! so every next game I promise myself to keep things more simple next time. The problem is that I don't like simple things either!

For the first problem, playing to finish, I now developed PUM’s Plot Track, which work great, although I'd love to incorporate some sort of reward in them. The problem is still in me, though. Coming up with problems and starting the game is not hard, but deciding what was the answer or the reason of the problem to begin their conclusion is hard. And there's also the problem of that other shiny game that looks super awesome.

But yes, complex threads without any light at the end of the tunnel, no solution, dozens of NPCs waiting for an answer, and a plethora of possible paths to take.

Me liking Cyberpunk, as in Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, Neuromancer, and The Peripheral, is part of the problem. If you've watched them, you'll notice that they have intricate and complex plots. Multiple interests, secrets, and realistic human behavior with social and moral problems. Given that I also like political fantasy: like House of the Dragon or Dune, it gets really hard for me to keep things simple and make my games “defeat the dragon”, haha.

What advice would you give someone trying to get into solo rpgs?

1. First of all, think less, prep-less, and start to play earlier than when you feel prepared for it. I would take a safe bet that getting started is the highest most frequently repeated challenge in the solo gaming community. Yes, prep is play, but how many of us have spent hours in building and setting up a game just to stare at it? I think we should all practice getting started before ready.

2. Play what YOU like, not what others recommend. I know it is hard, many players tend to ask which games should they start to get into solo gaming. And I get it, there can be things that are hard for a “first time”, but in my opinion, playing something just because someone else said “this is the way” won't work. You have to have that enthusiasm for what you're about to play, the easy or hard is to be figured out later.

3. Try different things, but don't get stuck with “trying” and “setting up”. Many of us are tech first or method first players. We spend most of the time finding the perfect setup, optimize the space, automate the process, beautify the environment. It is absolutely part of the idea of playing solo, for sure (and if you know me, how many hours have I spent building digital tools and games to play, rather than play!), but on many of those occasions I was simply procrastinating the actual awesome story I wanted to get started, hehe.

What other solo tools or games do you admire?

One big gem is in my opinion the GameMaster's Apprentice deck. Not only for being Cards per se (which is great btw, it is incredibly portable and fast), but its biggest jewel in them is, in my opinion, the Sensorial Oracles (smell, touch, feel, hear).

Mythic GM Emulator and Tricube Tales are obviously big inspirations for me and great systems for getting into the hobby.

I have to admit, although it pains my soul and is probably unpopular, I have never read or played Ironsworn/Starforged! And I have never played any “solo” specific game. This is related to my philosophy of solo play: rather than learning one game at a time, I prefer learning “one way of playing” that would let me play anything I like later. So kind of, instead of learning Starforged, which is huge and bulky, I would rather learn a GM emulator or oracle system, and play Star Wars, Star Trek, Coriolis, Starfinder, The Expanse, or whichever I feel like. I could also focus on learning the RPG itself or get into the settings and lore themselves, rather than the solo rules of each solo game.

I know, I'm probably missing out a lot. Please forgive me, particularly because Ironsworn made it possible to attract thousands of players to the hobby.

What are your next big projects that you can talk about?

Well, going on with a lot of punch, is the PUM Companion. The app to play Plot unfolding machine. I know not everyone plays digital, but the focus is really to manage games, keep track of them, and be able to play anywhere anytime.

There aren't many solo-narrative-apps out there, so I'll try to make this one as good as I can. Most of my effort is in there right now, and I'd love to see SUM and GUM in the app to increase its value for the buck!

I have some other ideas and projects but not sure how many or which of them will see some light! To mention a few, I'd love to have a clearer formula on how to use GUM and SUM, and I'll continue paying attention to how to figure out how and when a solo adventure should reach out to a conclusion.

I am mostly a Discord person! as jeansenvaars. I also run a small cozy though a bit quiet Discord server:

My YouTube channel has a dozen of tutorials and solo sessions, although I record without editing. That means,long, slow, and heavy to watch videos, but hey, it's something!

Finally my blog has a How to Solo Tabletop RPGs guide, although it gets old faster than I can keep up with it, it also has various campaign and solo sessions I played:

Is there anything else you would like to talk about?

Thank you for the opportunity to answer such awesome questions, and a big shout out to the Solo RPG community, it is really a fantastic, cozy, safe, and comfortable place to share different opinions, ideas, and thoughts.

Not only did I get amazing feedback and motivation from the community, I also met amazing people, and could even get help to translate my games into different languages. So yes, lots of love and appreciation, I always feel very supported.