What the First 50 Waitlist Signups Told Us About Solo RPG Players
Eleven days ago, we opened the RoleForge waitlist. We expected a trickle. We got a wave.
More importantly, we got data. Every signup tells us something — not just that someone is interested, but why. What frustrated them about existing tools. What kind of games they want to play. What brought them here.
We've been reading every response. Here's what we've learned.
The Dominant Frustration: "The AI Forgets Everything"
If there's a single theme running through the signups, it's this: people are tired of AI that forgets.
Roughly four out of ten signups mentioned some version of the same frustration. They tried using ChatGPT, Claude, or another general-purpose AI as a Dungeon Master. It worked for a session. Then the AI forgot their character's name, contradicted its own story, or lost track of the quest it had just assigned.
This isn't a niche complaint. It's the defining pain point of the current AI RPG landscape. Memory loss breaks the fundamental promise of a role-playing game: that your choices accumulate and matter over time.
The frustration isn't with AI itself — most of these players genuinely love the narration quality and creative responsiveness of language models. The frustration is with the absence of infrastructure around the AI. No persistent memory. No world state. No continuity. The AI is good at its job; it just doesn't have the tools to do the job properly.
This validated something we'd suspected from the beginning: the market for AI-powered RPGs isn't limited by the quality of AI narration. It's limited by the engineering that's supposed to support it.
The Player Mix Is More Diverse Than Expected
We anticipated that most signups would be experienced D&D players looking for a solo option. That's true — but it's only part of the picture.
The ChatGPT Refugees
The largest group by far. These are players who've already tried AI-powered RPGs using general-purpose chatbots and hit the wall. They know exactly what they want because they've experienced the frustrating version of it. They want the creative freedom of AI narration with the mechanical integrity of a real game.
The Lapsed Veterans
Players who haven't sat at a table in years — sometimes decades. Life happened. Groups dissolved. The desire to play never went away, but the logistics of finding a group did. Many of them explicitly mention the scheduling problem as the reason they stopped. They're not looking for a replacement for group play. They're looking for a way to play at all.
The Complete Newcomers
This surprised us. A meaningful chunk of signups have never played a tabletop RPG. They found us through gaming communities, AI tool directories, or word of mouth. They're drawn to the concept — the idea of a living story that responds to their choices — but they've never rolled a d20 or created a character sheet.
This group has different needs than the veterans. They need onboarding that doesn't assume RPG literacy. They need character creation that guides rather than demands. They need the system to teach them what a skill check is by letting them experience one, not by making them read a rulebook first.
We'd already been building toward that. Seeing it validated in the data reinforced that it's not optional — it's essential.
The Genre Explorers
Fantasy dominates, as expected. But the demand for other genres was stronger than we anticipated. Sci-fi came in second, with horror close behind. Several signups specifically requested cyberpunk. A few asked for romance, historical fiction, and slice-of-life settings.
This confirmed our decision to build for multi-genre from the start. A platform locked to D&D-style fantasy would serve the largest segment but miss a significant portion of the audience.
What They Want Most
When we asked what mattered to them, the answers clustered around a few themes:
Persistence and memory. The world should remember. Characters should grow. NPCs should react to history. This was far and away the most-requested capability.
Real mechanics. Dice should matter. Success should be earned, not narrated. The AI should tell the story, not decide the outcome.
Accessibility. Many signups want something they can pick up without reading a 300-page rulebook. They want to play, not study.
Visual richness. Maps, character art, and scene illustrations came up repeatedly. Text-only experiences feel incomplete to players accustomed to visual media.
Solo-first design. Not a multiplayer game with a solo mode bolted on. A game designed around the solo player experience, where being alone feels intentional, not empty.
What We're Doing With This
Every insight from the waitlist shapes what we build next. The things players ask for most are the things we're building first.
The memory and persistence infrastructure was always the foundation. Seeing it confirmed as the top demand tells us we built in the right direction. What newcomers told us means we're prioritizing character creation and onboarding. The genre diversity means supporting multiple rulesets isn't optional — it's essential.
We're building this for the people who signed up. Not in the abstract "customer-first" sense that every company claims. In the specific, concrete sense that we read every waitlist response and use it to make decisions about what to build next.
Thank You
If you're one of the first wave of signups: thank you. Not just for the interest, but for the data. Every frustration you described, every feature you requested, every genre you hoped for — it shapes what RoleForge becomes.
We'll have more to share soon. In the meantime, if you haven't signed up yet, the waitlist is still open. It's free during alpha, and your input genuinely influences what we build.
More updates coming as we get closer to alpha access.