Continuing from part 1.

Actors get the luxury of experiencing different lives. At a much lower cost, RPG does that at an arguably more immersive level.

As far as solo RPGs go, the immersion is even higher than fiction-writing. Specifically, it's more chaotic and psychologically involved than the act of writing heavily engineered top-down plotted storytelling.

If I know how to pull it off, it can be vehicle to create thought experiments, the kind philosophers deploy throughout ages.

It may also work for coming up with scenarios for fear rehearsals, something I increasingly have problems with.

Speaking of knowhow, I unconsciously asked myself what does it mean to have fun in this medium. It is about reaching sweet spot of flow in the cross section of skill and challenge? I doubt so; that's what action games are for.

Is it about surprise-generation? Not likely when I'm the one responsible for creating scenes out of prompts. But an LLM game master might do it.

How about running into interesting conundrums? Perhaps, but I haven't experienced it yet.

If I don't know what make things fun here, then I can only discover it by trial and error.

One of such attempts was me trying to figure out the right level of detail in the course of the game. Despite having watched how conventional RPGs do it, I'm not sure about how intricate to be when I run into a creature, for instance.

Should the game be all about actions, doing one thing after another, going from places to places, but stay light on details? Or go real slow, every detail scrutinized for realism?

There are probably reasons for either approach, I just don't know what those are yet.

I suspect the style I would adopt as a game master (to myself) may be disastrous for most conventional table top players. That, or it may attract the most ardent fan-base.

I wonder if it's a good idea to publish the journals of my solo sessions someday. It may read like a textual version of a livestreamed-game.