My initial misunderstanding of the section header, "Single-Player Nobilis" (see item below), continues to tantalize me. Could you somehow "play" Nobilis by yourself - that is, as a solo participant - and still have it be recognizable as a game? (Borges, thou shouldst be living at this hour!) I'm not talking about running a character through a solitaire adventure designed by someone else, but something wackier - you would play your character, resolve the action and determine the course of the adventure itself on your own. Oh, and it must be recognizably a game too, not just the writing of a story. Oh, and it should be fun for you.
Tall order, and I haven't filled it yet. The closest notion I've come up with is this:
Create a Noble, your player character. Create his chancel, his Imperator etc.(I have a very unfinished game in my notebooks that aimed to do this more formally. The intro includes the tongue-in-cheek passage, "This is a special kind of game called a role-playing game. One participant, the "player," creates a fictional alter ego he controls called the player character. The other participants become "game masters.")Start a weblog for this character. Post about his personal projects, his view of his estate, his relationships with his anchors, his code. Enable a Comments function.
Tell people about the weblog. The "Hollyhock God" arises from the player/blogger's selection among comments. Commentors suggest directions for the character's activity; the player, by posting, instantiates a plotline from the comment(s) he finds most intriguing. Commentors suggest continuations and complications; the player chooses the ones he likes. And so on.
It's sort of interactive fiction. It also has a very gamelike element. It de facto reverses the default player/GM ratio and commitment level.
This is not, of course, "single-player Nobilis," since it relies on a community of commentators/readers to assist in the direction of play. The Quest for true "single-player Nobilis" continues...
As much as there is in second-edition Nobilis, there may be even more potential to explore beyond it. One of the rulebook sections that most intrigued me is the section called "Single-Player Nobilis." This section is not actually about single-participant play, but about one-PC/one-GM campaigns. To recap, Borgstrom suggests:
It's all pretty intriguing. But one-PC/GM games make some of us, on the meta level, nervous. So the following proposal doubles the fun.o Strip the thematic content of the game down to a single focus related to the PC's character conception. (Makes sense...)
o You get to go more deeply into the ramifications of the single player's character and interests than you do in a larger group.
o You're the only two people available to entertain each other, which is a challenge.
o There is an important background/mechanics change: In single-player Nobilis, Imperators "invest Nobles individually. Imperial bodies never leave the Spirit World. Powers create their own Chancels. Each receives twice their Realm score in Chancel Points (see HogNob p. 136). The PC Power can still consult with their [sic] Imperator, but has complete autonomy in Chancel design and management." (From HogNob p. 23.)
In Double Single-Player Nobilis, there are two PCs and one GM. A single Imperator invests two Nobles. The Nobles enchancel themselves individually exactly as in the single-player rules.
During campaign prep, players and GM kick around ideas. (This is the most crucial stage.) Come up with an Imperator/Estate/theme complex that excites all three participants. The players together choose estates that fit together interestingly - or, of course, interestingly fail to fit together. Most likely there is a strong element of rivalry, but also a mutual indispensibility. Gauche oppositions like Fire and Flood would work, or Youth and Age; more whimsical pairings like Fish and Fowl or Trees and Birds are also possible.
Here's an example:
I daresay a GM and the players who came up with those characters could find ways to amuse themselves. And I'm sure any three engaged, compatible users could come up with a concept they would find at least as full of potential.The true god, Janus, invests two Nobles.
Dorothy is the Power of Irony. In her chancel all is bright, urbane, sharp-edged. She rules reversals of expectations, and rules them with cool gaze and the slightest of crooked smiles. Her hair is perfect. She despairs of her dithering twin, who looks as much like her as possible under the circumstances. The circumstances are that he, Hopkins, is the Power of Paradox. He is tousled, and seems to own no shirt or pair of pants that is not frayed - strange when you consider that, on inspection, his garments are not frayed at all. His chancel is trackless, overgrown, fecund. (And, of course, next door to the chancel of his sister.) The phrase that comes most easily to the lips of his people is, "On the other hand." Negative Capability is his estate; he rules all pairs of things that are simultaneously and incompatibly true (or simultaneously and incompatibly false).
If you ask him, he will tell you that his sister's is a crippled domain indeed, since an irony is nothing but a failed paradox - it tries to be two things at once; failing, it settles for becoming its opposite. If you ask her, she will explain, with no little exasperation, that paradox is gutless - an irony-in-training that quails before the leap it must make to fulfill itself in reversal.
The meta advantage I see is that by adding one more participant to the single-PC variant, each participant now has twice as many people to be entertained by. There should be fewer "dead air" problems. And yet the group is still small enough and focused enough to allow fairly deep play with the issues out of which the group has decided to make its campaign. (Some of the most enjoyable game-play I ever experienced was a James Bond campaign I ran for exactly two players in the early 80s. I doubt that a larger group can attain that level of mutual attunement.)