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| Ker Nethalas: Into the Midnight Throne by Mischief Maker 07/04/2025, 6:39pm PDT | ||||
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| With my new board gaming hobby I've found solitaire board games, when they're good, offer an entertainment quality that videogames lack. But as I descended further into the hobby, I came across something both horrifying and intriguing... solitaire tabletop RPGs!
The big 4 are "Four against Darkness" (the first, and apparently requires 20 expansion books before it gets good), "d100 dungeons" (the most detailed yet the driest), "2d6 dungeons" (the smoothest-running, but also the most limited), and the one I got, "Ker Nethalas: Into the Midnight Throne" (The Goldilocks of crunch, theme, and accessibility, and totally playable with just the base book). I mean how could I not with art like this? 
So 4th of July weekend I finally had the time to sit down with my physical RPG book full of excellent art to learn the rules of a brand new RPG that I can play whenever I want, no need to work around other players' schedules! But alas... this is my breaking point. Roll dice, find a table. Roll dice, find a table, roll dice, find a table. Repeat 10 or more times. THEN finally make some kind of decision. There is nothing about this game's experience that wouldn't work just as well if not better with a computer doing all the random table busywork. But even then with a computer running everything... you'd realize the game basically plays itself. I also recently got the solitaire dice game "Set a Watch: Swords of the Coin" and while at its core it's just rolling 12 dice and using them to take on a line of monster cards, I have so many choices for how to allocate and rearrange my dice. Uncovering the wrong enemy card can throw my whole plan out the window, leaving me to scramble and formulate a new plan. But the actual execution of my strategy is simplicity. I got a dice that rolled a 7, an enemy has 7 hit points, I put that dice on that enemy and it's defeated. Ker Nethalas is the opposite. I come across some necromantic horror and my choices are just hide, fight, or run away. But if I choose "fight" I'm doing the opposed d100 dice roll, if I succeed I roll damage, then run the damage through a seperate table to filter the number of actual health points the enemy loses. If I miss, I roll a d10 to determine the enemy's defensive reaction. When it's the enemy's turn to attack I roll a d6 to determine the enemy's move, followed by all the previously mentioned dice rolls. When combat is over I roll for loot, which can be multiple different dice rolls against multiple different tables. And then after looting I'm gonna roll to scavenge like I do in every single room. Maybe the scavenge will be good, maybe it'll hurt me, but there's never any reason NOT to scavenge when finishing a new room. Complicated RPG rules are worth slogging through as part of a big group activity with friends laughing and fighting over all those rules minutiae. But as a solitaire activity it's just busywork. TL;DR Solitaire boardgames have complex decision spaces, but carrying out those decisions are easy. Ker Nethalas gives me very few actual decisions to make, followed by tons and tons of tables and dice-rolling to determine the randomized outcome of that one decision. I'm disappointed, but also kinda relieved. |
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Ker Nethalas: Into the Midnight Throne by 07/04/2025, 6:39pm PDT  |
