Player Emulators for Solo Games?

[Drakeburn]

With the attention that Game Master Emulators are getting, I'm wondering about systems that emulate players instead of GMs. So far the one player emulator that I'm familiar with is Player Emulator with tags, though I can't quite wrap my head around how the whole thing works.

So I'm creating this thread to see what everybody's thoughts are on Player Emulators, and to find out if there are other (and maybe better) ways of emulating players in solo games.

[Vladim]

I am not aware of anything, but I haven't looked. I've read that people use oracles to do this though, giving some PCs personalities and motivations and then setting the chances on the oracles accordingly to roll for critical decisions. It seems to work quite well for them, but I don't know if something more specialised exists.

[Malkavian Grin]

I also have not looked into this, but I'd assume you'd just make assumptions based on what a character's goals and personality traits were. Are they greedy? Do they value offense over defense? How careful are they? And if unsure, just make an oracle roll like Vlad says.

[Bobcloclimar]

I've been wondering the same thing recently - I was hoping to start doing some canned adventures/dungeons solo, and was thinking a player-emulator might be the ticket toward making the experience a bit more random than me playing both sides of the screen.

 

Link to Player Emulator With Tags that @Drakeburn mentioned - I don't really get how to work it either. It seems to be focused on emulating some of the meta-gamey aspect of players having different wants/needs and stabbing each other in the back, but doesn't quite provide what I need for "how will the players approach killing the monsters and taking their stuff?"

Edited October 22, 2023 by Bobcloclimar (see edit history)

[Llyarden]

Do you want to emulate players, or characters?

The latter is doable to an extent by borrowing the rules from something like Pendragon, assigning values to aspects of a character's personality and rolling to see whether they act according to that aspect - although that doesn't really help with tactical decisions. I know there are 3pp books for Pathfinder that let you randomly determine what a monster does in combat, which you could presumably repurpose for a PC, but I don't know how well it would work.

The former...yeah I've only ever seen the player emulator people have linked before.