Soloist Help
Basics
(I'm going to assume that you know what role-playing is, and that you know what solo role-playing means, otherwise you are probably going to be mystified by this whole site.)
The main item on the screen is the large text area where you can start typing out your adventure. Underneath it are 'Save' and 'Load' buttons that will save your file to your local computer and load a saved file back again. See the Save and Load sections further below.
As you are playing through your adventure and writing it up, you will at some point want to roll some dice. To one side of the text area (or below it if you are viewing it on a mobile browser) you will find a set of Dice Roll controls. It should be reasonably obvious how to use these, but the full details are given further below.
You might also want the help of the Oracle. This acts as a rather simplistic game-master. You ask it a Yes/No question, and it gives an answer. It is a way of adding some extra randomness to your adventure. Again, you will find the full details about using this further below.
Save
The Save button is quite simple, and if you have ever downloaded a file you will be familiar with how it works.
When you click the button, a dialog will pop up asking you what you want to do with the file. The exact options will depend on what browser you are using and what your browser settings are, but you should be able to save the file either to a folder and filename that you chose yourself (it will default to the name 'save.txt'), or it will save the file to your Downloads folder, under the name 'save.txt'.
Load
The 'load' controls are a little more complicated, because of the nature of browsers and their security. You must first click the 'Browse' button, which will let you select a file from your computer. This should normally be a file that you previously saved (if you try to upload any other kind of file it will try to load it, but will give you a warning). The name of the file will be displayed next to the Browse button. You can now click the Load button to actually load this file.
The system will try to load any file that you give it. You can use this to upload adventures that you might have previously done manually. It will obviously not contain a game title (you will have to set this yourself), and you might need to do some tidying up of the contents.
Dice Rolls
Who would have thought that something as simple as rolling dice could get so complicated?
The first value in the set of dice roll edit boxes is the number of dice to roll. The second value is the number of sides for the dice. Thus 3D6 will roll three six-sided dice, and add the results to get the final total.
The next value, after the '+', is the Adds value. This will be added to the result of the dice roll. So 3d6 + 2 will roll three six-sided dice, total the results, and add 2 to get the final total.
The last value, 'x', is the number of times to do this roll. This is actually ajust a useful short-cut do that you don't have to repeat the same roll multiple times.
The most common use for this is probably in rolling up character attributes, as in D&D. For example, if you set up 3d6 as the dice roll, and set the times value to 6, the dice will be rolled six times, and all six results will be listed.
The 'Best' checkbox and edit box are for taking only the best dice rolls. As an example, another D&D option for rolling character attributes is to roll 4d6, and to only use the three highest scores.
Finally we have two check-boxes, 'Wild Die' and 'Wild Dice'. If Wild Die is checked, if the last of the dice rolls a 6 it is added to the score, and is re-rolled. This is repeated until it rolls something other than 6.
If Wild Dice is checked, if any of the dice come up a 6 they are re-rolled as with the Wild Die option.
Checking both these options will be treated as Wild Dice.
When you roll the dice, either using the dice roll button or one of the quick-dice, the results will be added to the end of your current game text.
The 'Multiples Roll Again' checkbox will roll the dice again if all the dice come up with the same value, and will add the new roll onto the total. This obviously has no effect if you are rolling a single dice (e.g. 1d6), and it also has no effect if you use the 'Best Of' option or either of the 'Wild' options.
Tunnels & Trolls makes a lot of use of this type of roll, for 2d6 and 3d6 rolls.
Fudge Dice
In the 'number of sides' edit box, you can enter 'F', and Soloist will roll Fudge dice instead of normal dice.
(If you don't know what Fudge dice are, they were introduced for the free Fudge RPG, and have three values: -1, 0, and 1. 2DF and 4DF are the standard Fudge rolls, and so they are included in the Quick Dice.)
Quick Dice
Under the quick-dice section you will find a set of preset dice, covering some of the most commonly-used dice-rolls in RPGs, to save you having to set them up manually.