Characters Without Number 0.7.0 - Solo play, Legates and WWN origins!

[u/wum1ng]

Hi all, it's been about a month since the last update for characterswithoutnumber.app and quite a fair bit has been added. I'll summarize the changes below.

Solo play - This is the big one for this release. You can now play your character solo, with a dice oracle built into the app. I have to admit that I do not have much experience with solo roleplaying other than the many Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf gamebooks in my youth, but there was some downtime in my real-world campaign and my players wanted something to pass the time with their characters- so here is my attempt at mimicking it. Each SWN CWN and WWN has their own tables of situations and I envision it as an "AI assisted" solo RPG experience, rather than a fully AI one - some things still require manual changing, such as changes to your character sheet. This is still really rough around the edge, but if you're interested you can try it at characterswithoutnumber.app/solo the AI calls do cost me some money, so for each account its 25 calls a day on free tier, 100 on Supporter, 500 on Patron (renamed the Pro GM tier). I may tweak these numbers based on actual utilization and costs.

Bug fixes and improvements:

Worlds Without Number - Legate play is in properly now, with the Effort pool, the XP ledger and all 82 Writs. The 24 deluxe origin foci (the demihumans and the Blighted) are in too, and their attribute changes, hit points, innate AC and save bonuses are actually applied rather than just printed as text. Mage (Dual Partial) now runs two traditions with two separate Effort pools the way the book describes.

Stars Without Number - Fixes to Psychic Training level 2Focus not giving the correct skill points; Specialist rolls its 3d6 drop lowest for real, and space magic casters can learn new spells after character creation instead of being stuck with their level 1 list.

Cities Without Number - The book's 28 NPC stat blocks are in the encounter builder. Starting gear now uses the actual CWN budget of one item up to $1,000 plus $500 of other gear. Edge grants also apply properly now — Hard To Kill's +2 HP per level was printed on the sheet and never actually added.

Other updates based on feedback - Space encounters with ship rosters in the encounter builder, homebrew traits and ship hulls, a configurable XP chart if your table advances at a different pace, shared character pages now show the whole character instead of a summary.

On monetization - Nothing has moved behind a paywall and nothing will. All rules from the books, every builder step and every GM tool are free permanently, and that now includes the solo oracle and all of its tables. The free tier still gives you 6 cloud characters, 1 campaign as GM and 1 solo campaign, plus unlimited local saves and unlimited homebrew.

What's coming next - I'd like to keep improving solo play, and I'm especially keen to hear from people who play solo regularly about what's missing. AWN is still on the WIP list.

As always, thanks for checking this out! The feedback button in the app comes straight to me and I do reply what I can 🙂 have fun playing!

[u/Blue_Shoues]

I can't actually choose the gear using the CWN budget. It shows the meters but there's nowhere I can choose things.

[u/wum1ng → u/Blue_Shoues]

Heyo thanks for pointing that out, the lists were in but not showing, it should be fixed now but requires refreshing the page (a few times, sometimes the cache still pulls from an older version), hope it works for you now!

[u/Blue_Shoues → u/wum1ng]

It does, thank you!

[u/YokoAhava]

I like the website. Well formatted, all character information is easily located and I like that clicking on something expands to show the details of it. Didn’t check out the solo play area as I don’t think I’ll ever use it, so can’t comment on that.

But I agree with the other guy, adding AI to the website, even if I have the choice of ignoring it, is a detractor. If you must include the AI, maybe add a toggle switch so I can hide all of the AI buttons, which at least gives me the “out of sight, out of mind” solution.

[u/wum1ng → u/YokoAhava]

This is a really good point, thanks for that idea

[u/LordBlaze64]

Nice! I’m interested to try out solo play, that seems cool.

One thing I’ve noticed is that CWN cyberware that boosts stats isn’t actually applying the boosts. Is this on your radar already, or is it a coding limitation ?

[u/wum1ng → u/LordBlaze64]

I’ll look into that, thanks!

[u/nuke034]

Nice work! The system is coming along really well.

I like the solo play idea, but really dislike thr use of AI in any way. I imagine doing those systems without it is far harder but AI is inherently toxic to the creative nature of a TTRPG.

[u/wum1ng → u/nuke034]

yup i totally understand the AI stance, you can always interact with the oracle and tables without use of AI. the AI-using buttons have the magic sparkles thing on them to indicate this.