[VIDEO] Iron Valley Solo RPG Game Loop (and additional tools) for Actual Play (TTYOL Episode 1 Part A)

Playing Iron Valley: Gameplay Loop + Useful Tools

Timestamps

• 00:00 – Start of video
• 00:05 – TTRPG and solo tools used to play Tea Time with Your Orc Lover campaign
• 00:51 – Iron Valley gameplay loop

TTRPG and tools for gameplay

Game Engine

I’m not sure how else to describe it, but these drive the mechanics of the gameplay and narrative 💗

• Wandering Tea Garden
• Iron Valley by M Kirin

GM Emulators: Randomising play

The use of tables, dice, cards and more as Oracles to add randomness to play are central to solo roleplaying. Without these, you’re leaning more towards writing a novel, daydreaming, or orating an epic story. None of those are bad things, but the randomness helps make the game into a game!

• Solo RPG Toolkit
• MUNE to add additional flavour!
• (Another) Yes No Oracle

Gameplay Loop

I found that I kept stopping play because I was trying to wrap my head around what I could mechanically do next, instead of just endlessly narrating. The latter suited me when I was using just Wandering Tea Garden because it’s a solo journalling game, which does lean towards using prompts only to spark a general direction. But I wanted to play something with more mechanics, to help push the story forward. And that’s where Iron Valley came in!

But I kept tripping up on “Well, what can I do next? What should I do here?”

This may not be so obvious when I finally release the actual gameplay for Episode 1 because I also ended up starting another Iron Valley game in the same world setting, and that’s when I wrote up a flowchart that described the gameplay loop.

I. LOVE. FLOWCHARTS.

I like being able to visually identify how components interact, and using Mermaid code and Excalidraw to mock up a flowchart is super easy. I know I need to update this flowchart, so I will make a separate post with the Mermaid code included soon.

Anyway, having the gameplay loop open on my laptop while I played (or as a handy tab to reference on my mobile) made playing the game a lot smoother. Then as I became more familiar with how gameplay progressed, I relied on the flowchart less and less. ✨

What else?

🎥 NEXT VIDEO:

[Actual Play] Iron Valley x Wandering Tea Garden – Solo Roleplay Episode 1 Part B

📖More Tabletop Roleplaying?📖

• 💗 Browse all Actual Play sessions (video and written): https://patsitive.co.nz/category/writing/actual-play-writing/
• 💗 TTRPG notes: https://garden.patsitive.co.nz/solo-roleplaying/

📝 Accessibility

I’m working on making my content friendly for folk who are hard-of-hearing, low visibility, and dyslexic and anyone who can benefit from easier access. Thanks for your patience! 💖

Ngā mihi nui, Pat (Kind regards, Pat) (Mabait na pagbati, Pat)