Elegy for Lonely Fun
Elegy for Lonely Fun
I got the Holmes blue box for my twelfth birthday in December of 1980. Carter was on his way out and Reagan was on his way in and I didn’t know or care about either because I had just been handed a boxed set with a few metal figurines and a set of dice that were such bad plastic they came with a crayon to fill in the numbers. Literally.
I was the GM from day one. Natural leader? Not really. But on the island of misfit middle school boys? Maybe so. I was the scrawny weird kid who moved here from Buffalo and I was still trying to affect the Boston accent. Badly. I was the GM because I was the kid who read things. It was me, plus the only black kid for miles, and the kid we’d now call autistic but then just called ‘eccentric’, and the dropout-fuckup kid who stole his father’s Hustlers and sold them to the neighborhood misanthropes. We sat in my basement next to the (of all things) coal stove my asshole father installed, and explored dungeons I’d drawn on graph paper with a mechanical pencil during study hall. Stranger Things captured this so precisely it was like watching security footage of my actual childhood. Except Stranger Things had an actual girl in it. Those were the true aliens in my growing up years.
D&D saved my life. Maybe literally. Definitely psychologically. Middle school is a meat grinder for weird kids, and my alcoholic, addicted, misogynist, antisemitic, emotionally abusive narcissist father made it 1000 times worse. The game was the one place where being the kid who reads things was an asset instead of a liability. I published my first TTRPG in college. In 1989. I’ve been running games, designing games, thinking about games for forty-five years. I built Iron Brothers Games. This is my home turf.
I’m writing this because the game that mattered is dying, and the things replacing it don’t understand what it was.
Also: get off my fucking lawn.
(Also, let me clarify: Yes, D&D the brand is bigger than ever. The hobby rakes in way more dollars than ever before. Both true. Both conflate with the game. The game is not the brand, and not the hobby.)
Part of the job for the Dungeon Master (Game Master, if you prefer) was getting the game world ready for the next session. This act has a name, a term of art: Lonely Fun™. I’m not making this shit up, I swear.
Here’s something non-GMs never groked: the game wasn’t just Thursday night. The game was Tuesday night, alone at your desk, graph paper and mechanical pencil, stocking a dungeon.
Room 7: four goblins, a cooking fire, 12gp in a clay pot. Room 8: empty, but the floor is wet. Water is seeping from somewhere above. Room 9: the source. A cracked cistern, ankle-deep water, and something in the water. Something that explains why the goblins in Room 7 won’t go past Room 8.
The Lonely Fun term comes from old RPG forum culture, and it described the GM’s solitary prep as a distinct pleasure. You were building a clockwork world… You’re God. A little toy fantasy world with internal logic, causes and effects, a sense of place that rewarded your players. The goblins don’t go past Room 8 for a reason, and the players are going to find that reason, and when they do, they’re going to feel that specific thrill that is not surprise (surprise is passive, something that happens to you) but discovery. Discovery is active. You find something that was already there. “I didn’t know that was here” followed immediately by “oh, that’s why it’s here.”
The lonely fun was never actually lonely. It was a conversation with your future players, conducted in graph paper and monster placement. Gleeful. Imagining their faces when they opened the door to Room 9. You were anticipating the moment one of them would say, “Wait. Ohhh, that’s why the goblins wouldn’t… oh shit.”
The anticipation of Thursday is what made Tuesday worth doing.
I mourn this Lonely Fun. I mourn the passing of an age. Maybe I’m just that crotchety old fuck? As my kids say now “Unc”. (God, really, I’m a fucking meme now?)
Covid killed the gathering. Not temporarily. Permanently, for a lot of groups. The pandemic taught everyone that you can just stay home, and for a significant fraction of the population, permission to stay home became preference to stay home. Cuz, for most of the Millenials, Gen Zs and definitely the Alphas, we’d just rather not talk to anyone. Ever, apparently. So phew, Covid was a welcome get out of jail conversation free card.
But more. Remote work dissolved the boundary between “at work” and “not at work.” My friends don’t have schedules anymore. They have availability fluctuations. “Thursday at seven” requires five adults to simultaneously exist in the same fucking Marvel Universe timeline, which requires five adults to have actual predictable schedules, which requires a world where work ends. Work never ends. Thanks, Obama Peter Thiel. It just gets quieter momentarily and then a Slack notification goes off and someone has to “hop on a quick call.”
Political extremism also has made “come to my house” fraught. Thanksgiving tables shrank. Friend groups fractured along tribal lines. The casual social trust that let you invite four acquaintances into your basement eroded. (If you think this doesn’t apply to TTRPG groups, you didn’t watch the hobby’s culture wars in real time. That happened.)
I confess: I will not have anyone to my kitchen table to play D&D who voted for Trump. That might make me intolerant, or it might just be the tiny hill I die on. Maybe both, but suck it.
Then, throw in a helping of generational social anxiety. I have kids. I watch their generation. Making a phone call is literally a fucking trauma event. Showing up at someone’s house is an expedition requiring days of psychological preparation. The idea of sitting in a room with four other humans and pretending to be an elf, out loud, with your voice, while people watch you, is paralyzing for a cohort raised on text-based interaction.
Add in: Instant, immersive, high-dopamine, zero-investment entertainment. When I was twelve the entertainment options were: three shitty TV channels, hazing my younger siblings, a bike, and whatever was at the library. That’s it. That was the competitive landscape for D&D, and D&D won easily because D&D was better than everything. Now? A thirteen-year-old has access to more high-quality entertainment than any human in history has consumed in a lifetime. Baldur’s Gate 3 alone delivers a hundred hours of branching narrative with voice acting and cinematics. Netflix has more content than you could watch if you started at birth and never slept. Every one of these experiences is available right now, solo, on the couch, no coordination required. No reading required. No rulebook. No actual cognition required.
And then, worst of all: the algorithmic feed. The infinite scroll that’s always available, always exactly calibrated to your dopamine receptors, never requiring you to leave the couch or communicate (much less coordinate) with another human being. Same disease I diagnosed in Cargo Cult Civilization. Why would you go to Dave’s basement when TikTok exists? TikTok doesn’t cancel on you. TikTok doesn’t need you to drive across town. TikTok is never awkward. (It literally makes you dumber, however. Really.)
So here we are. The in-person thing collapsed. Restaurants are closing. Theaters are closing. Third spaces are closing. Bowling leagues are a punchline about the 1950s. The specific social configuration that made TTRPGs work (a handful of people, in the same room, at the same time, regularly) requires conditions that barely exist.
But thank you, Jurassic Park. Life Finds A Way. Three things grew in the wreckage.
Virtual tabletops said: “You don’t need to be in the same room.” Roll20, Foundry, a dozen others. Play from your couch. No driving. No scheduling around geography. VTTs are a $100M+ category now. Foundry won the community poll in 2024. The tools are gorgeous. Dynamic lighting, animated maps, 350+ game systems supported, thousands of community add-ons. The presentation layer for TTRPGs has never been better.
Digital game tables said: “No, wait, come back to the room.” The Arena, CraftyKobolds, Board (the Mirror fitness founder’s $15M pivot into connected play), Pixply (a rollable LED mat on Kickstarter). Hardware plays, $500 to $7,000, betting that the social magic of sitting together is worth preserving. Gorgeous 4K touchscreens in handcrafted hardwood. The bet is correct. The magic is worth preserving. You can feel it when six people lean over the same glowing surface.
Solo RPGs said: You don’t need anyone! There are 80,000 members on the subreddit. I think there are like 1,200 to 1,500 professional-grade solo-first games. Plus 5,000+ journaling and Wretched-and-Alone titles on itch.io. Someone called it a Titanium Age. There’s Ironsworn, Starforged and the Mythic GM Emulator. An entire cottage industry of oracles, prompt tables, yes/no engines, random generators has grown. Here’s where the solo player rolls a d6: “Does the guard believe my lie? Yes, but…” The reason is both sad and simple: scheduling. You can’t get five adults in the same room at the same time. But, you can get one adult and a notebook.
But.. Le Sigh: the same forces that grew these three categories simultaneously killed the lonely fun.
The lonely fun was subsidized by Thursday, the actual game night.
Tuesday night stocking the dungeon was fun because Thursday night was coming. Your hours of toil as GM had its own rewards, sure. Worldbuilding is nifty. But! On game night, you got to watch people react to what you built. You’d see the moment of discovery on their faces. Take away the game, and the prep becomes writing letters to someone who stopped writing back.
Why spend eight hours keying a dungeon when the players for game night have canceled for the fourth straight week? Why map fifty rooms and stock them with goblins who have reasons for being where they are when the group chat has gone quiet and Dave got a new job and Sarah’s kid has soccer and Mike just… stopped responding?
Sooo… the worldbuilding stream that every platform in this space depends on is drying up at the source.
VTTs are prettier display cases. Digital tables are $3,000 frames. The lovingly painted picture that’s supposed to go inside is the dungeon, the living world, the thing the GM painstakingly populated during the lonely fun. It isn’t getting made. Cuz no one is at the table.
The demand for play has grown immensely since the lean years of the 90s and Oughts. Stranger Things and Matt Mercer did wonders for the industry. VTT adoption is up. The solo subreddit is booming. The digital table market is projected at billions. Yet… from what I see, the supply of quirky, weird, half-assed, beautifully flawed authored worlds is collapsing, because every GM-written world requires a GM who sat down on Tuesday night and did the lonely fun, and that GM is busy and the fun-return-on-investment is lower and lower.
In my highly opinionated view, the industry’s responses to this collapse are, uniformly, asshattery.
VTTs say: “We’ll make prep easier.” There are gorgeous drag-and-drop maps, and vapid pre-built encounters, and “asset marketplaces.” (Blech, why must we financialize literally fucking everything?) VTTs are great, except the problem isn’t difficulty.
Approximately 300 million published adventures say: “We do the prep for you.” Paizo and Wizards ship meticulously non-offending 300-page hardcover bibles. They shrink-wrapp the lonely fun and yuck, it’s all cardboard-flavored store-bought tomato. The moment the party does something the author didn’t anticipate (which happens in exactly 93.5 seconds, because that’s the point of these games) the GM is back to freestyling. Which is worse, when you have to ad-lib and not fuck up the 300 page canon. Published adventures are taxidermied. Looks like the right animal, lacks beating heart.
AI DMs say: “No, I am your DM now.” You type what you do and some LLM tells you what happens. Infinite content (as longs as your token budget holds) with zero latency and no scheduling. This is AI Dungeon. Also, this is possibly the dumbest possible application of generative AI, seriously. The worst. Today these tools make worlds with no causal history, no internal logic, no reason anything is where it is except it happens to look vaguely like a dungeon-shaped bunch of words learned during model training. The goblin is in the room because the token probability distribution put it there. Ask “why?” and you get a hallucinated post-hoc rationalization that doesn’t connect to anything. If you’re lucky, you might get surprise (“I didn’t expect that”) but with zero discovery (“oh, that’s why it’s here”).
Solo GM oracles say: “Be your own GM.” Ya roll on a table and consult the Mythic engine, and then interpret the result. It’s totally on you to make the rando roll make sense. This is the most honest of the four responses, because it acknowledges that somebody has to build the world. But it puts both jobs (world-authoring and world-exploring) on the same person. You’re supposed to figure out what’s behind the door and then pretend to be surprised by it. The cognitive load is enormous, and the discovery is fake at best and exhausting at worst. You’re pulling a rabbit out of a hat you packed yourself.
All four get the same thing wrong: they are trying to fix the authoring problem. Make authoring easier, or do it for you, or replace it with generation, or force the player to do the authoring. Fail whale.
What might work? Simulation.
An executable dungeon. A dungeon that runs. Goblins move. Why? They’re hungry. And the fungus spreads because it’s dark and wet. The door to Room 9 is barricaded because the thing in the cistern is getting bigger and the goblins can hear it at night. A world with internal logic that produces state without a human author. A world where lonely fun does itself. The sim ticks forward, agents act on utility functions, the graph evolves, and when you open the app on Wednesday morning, the dungeon has news for you. (Probably bad. Roll initiative.)
I’m tinkering with this and calling it Sim of Holding. “Dwarf Fortress, but legible.”
The architecture is event-sourced. Everything that happens in the dungeon is an append-only log of timestamped events. The current state is always derived, never stored. The monsters are agent-based mobs with wants, has, fears, and dispositions. They pathfind against a directed graph. They react to perturbations: player actions, environmental changes, the arrival of a wounded dire wolf seeking water through a barricaded door. That dire wolf wasn’t designed. It fell out of graph traversal and agent needs and topology constraints. Nobody scripted it. Emergent behavior.
Then, you can ask why. “Why is the door barricaded?” The event log answers. Follow the causal chain: the cistern cracked at tick 12, water seeped into Room 8 two days later, the thing in the cistern grew for nine days straight, and the goblins heard it scraping against stone. They barricaded the door at tick 26.
The sim doesn’t replace the GM. Rather, the sim handles complex and time consuming world-running. The GM’s creative act shifts from authoring to interrogation. You can still stock the dungeon if you want. But Sim of Holding also gives you another approach: set initial conditions, inject perturbations, and ask questions. The dungeon answers. The GM asks what the simulation produced and chooses what to foreground. Not interpret, but transmit. No freestyling required.
For the GM running a group: the dungeon ran between sessions. It has new state. The world moved while you weren’t looking. You didn’t have to prep, you just… ask questions.
For the solo player (who can’t get anyone in the room): the dungeon pushes back. You don’t decide what’s behind the door. You open it and find out. You didn’t pack the hat, so the rabbit is real. This is discovery, the core experience of play, preserved, without requiring a second human.
For the digital table (that gorgeous $3,000 Arena with the 4K touchscreen): this is something actually worth displaying.
I’m fifty-seven. I’ve been doing the lonely fun since the Holmes blue box. That’s more than four decades. I’ve prepped more dungeons than I can count. Graph paper, then Campaign Cartographer, then Dungeon Draft, then Foundry modules. The tools got better. (I guess?) The fundamental act never changed: one person, alone, imagining a world for others to discover.
The act was beautiful. I loved it. I still love it. I can’t not love it. There is a quiet joy in stocking Room 9 with the thing in the cistern and imagining the moment your players find it. That joy is real and I’ve felt it a thousand times.
But the social economics of that joy have evaporated. The gathering is disappearing and the motivation to prep goes with it. So I’m building a dungeon that does its own lonely fun. It’s a dungeon with reasons. It’s a world that is indeed running on its own internal, infernal logic, and your job is to find out what it produced.
Discovery.
That’s what D&D always delivered, when it was working. That’s what mattered. The sense of “We are definitely not in Kansas anymore. I can’t wait to see what’s around this corner…”
Colin Steele writes about things he has no business writing about at colinsteele.org. He published his first TTRPG in 1989. That was before the invention of fire.