Solo TTRPG Review: Notorious
Notorious by AlwaysCheckers Publishing
So I'm going to be playing and reviewing solo TTRPGs in case you haven't noticed that yet. Now this is just an impression I have from the game after playing through it once, maybe some of the experience or ease of play changes on multiple playthroughs. These are all my own opinions and should not be taken as fact. With those out of the way let's get started -
Notorious is honestly both confusing and straight forward to play. The rules themselves are relatively simple and would seem easy to follow. But the amount of searching, scrolling, flipping you have to do to bounce all around this book to find what you need made a simple session take about 8+ hours for me to run through. The bulk of this game operates on a loop of Exploring and Destinations, both or which are right next to each other. Awesome, super helpful. However you need to scroll down to pages 64-66 for when you encounter leads and the target which then send you up to pages 36-38 to make them and back down to 66 to generate the showdown. Then once its resolve go up to page 17 to see what you add. If you are wanting to interact with anyone during the course of exploration or destinations you will have to go back up to pages 14-21 to roll for the reactions of speak, attack, recruit, threaten and then roll again to see what happens or is gained/lost. And its not like a one time scroll up or an occasional thing either, I had jumped around in the book so many times I was starting to have the page numbers memorized to just jump to them in the PDF. That shits rediculous!
Yes I understand that as a Solo TTRPG there is going to be some more work involved because you take on all the roles. But I shouldn't need to be traveling more miles on the pages of the book flipping around than I am on the damn planet trying to hunt down my target. It honestly started to make the game not as fun anymore, and I would occasionally just narratively resolve the issue in the journal entry rather than having to traverse it one more time. I think a lot of my issues with this game could be resolved with redoing the order of the information with a layout refresh. The aesthetic of the layout is on point, the vibes the game produces matches exactly what you want from it, and the simplistic to follow rules allow for a greater depth of play then you'd first anticipate they could. But damn, ya'll made me work hard to play a game in a genre that I already love.
My suggestion to anyone wanting to play Notorious is to do so BUT to print off the pdf and reorganize it into an order that makes it easier to play. Pull the reaction pages and have those nearby together for resolving things. Pull the Exploration and Destination pages out and put them in front of you as that is where you will live most of the time. Pull the Lead and Target pages out and set them to the side for when you need them. Heck have your planet page nearby to in order to reference for the factions, and have the species and personality pages over with the Lead + Target ones. Learn from me and save yourself a single session turning into an 8+ hour ordeal.
With that little rambling over with, I’m JustKay your regular DM Dalliance on the web and I’ll see you next post.