Most TTRPGs require a group of committed participants, building their play through interactions. But not all games ask players to interact with others -- some, like those included in Variations on Your Body, are designed to be played by one person, alone. These solo RPGs are unusual and fun, but they also provide a tool for exploring identity, making them more than just games.
Variations on Your Body is a set of four small games from developer Avery Alder designed to be "played in the margins of your life." Teen Witch teaches teenage girls how to cast spells. Brave Sparrow asks players to believe they could be more than human, and that the way to find out is to interact carefully and bravely with the existing world. In Universal Translator, players focus on how they are translating other people to make them easier to understand, and finally, Good Bones centers on skeletal memories and the power in physically supporting a body.
Because these games are meant to be played by a single player, the mechanics are anything but ordinary. Instead of rolling dice or exploring maps, players collect feathers they run across on the path, journal or anoint themselves with strange liquids. These aren't games about leveling up a character in any traditional sense, but rather about trying to change the self. Careful observation becomes more important than stats, introspection more important than armor class.
Solo, real-world RPGs are rare -- most games want full parties to play and rely on story-crafting being a collaborative process. The internal focus of solitary play allows the games of Variations on Your Body to tell stories about the self. The games explore the ideas of belief leading to change -- of players believing they are teenage girl witches or sparrows in order to become them. While such change may not strictly be possible, the pursuit of these goals is the point of the games. Alder asks players to "start with a fiction and explore it until it becomes real."
Variations on Your Body could feel irrevocably weird and unapproachable, but Alder's unique mechanics mix seamlessly with vivid descriptions of fantastical realities. The rules for casting spells or practicing the ancient rite of confluence of brain and bone read equally well as goal for play or poems.
Solo RPGs offer a chance for anyone to play, whether they're living alone, in quarantine or just want to use the act of playing to understand themselves better. By removing other players and allowing an individual focus, Variations on Your Body doesn't just allow more people to access real-world roleplaying games -- it provides a way for people to explore their own identities. Alder describes how Variations on Your Body draws on her difficult relationship with her body and how these games of escapism -- of wondering if players are really sparrows or aliens or teenage girl witches -- can actually bring players back to their bodies.
Variations on Your Body is a beautiful collection, worth reading even if it's never played. But solitary roleplaying also opens up a whole new realm of play for a much wider audience than traditionally has access to TTRPGs. Beyond all of this, Variations on Your Body can provide a way for players to grow as real humans into their bodies.