I've not played a lot of solo RPGs, but I've read a few (loads if you include play-once Fighting Fantasy). One of the issues that I have is that the game becomes predictable with each play through. The story itself ends up being a series of encounters that don't have a bearing on the game. You play them in any order but the story itself is too generic to hold my interest.
I've seen some ways to reduce this; the best was that the NPCs motivations are rolled separately each game. You might end up with a librarian who wants to kill you. Those sorts of motivations are great but they are difficult to chain together.
That's where a flowchart comes in. Not a nice simple looking thing that you can analyse from a distance but a mass of boxes, lines and letters where you get a sense of where you are but it's very hard to see your way to the end without following it through. The contents of the boxes would have little codes that would represent drawing NPCs from a stack and each arrow would have die roll numbers (or be a straight choice). This way, you could build chains of events together in a flow. New adventures would be new flow charts.
The main benefit of a system like this is that the flow chart is made by a human and therefore can be crafted to have story arcs, high points, low points and so on.
What do you think? Feel free to do it out loud.
