For those who use pre-published material, how do you adjust it for Solo play? I stumbled upon Long Crusader's site the other night, and his posts on playing Solo D&D inspired me to give it a whirl. I have a LOT of pre-published modules i would love to play around with, but adjusting for solo is a challenge.
I tried "boosting" the PC a bit. I played a session in D20/3rd Ed (since I had a number of short adventures for it), and "cheated"--Gestalt character with "reserve points" option. Well, like many of my solo games, he didn't even make it through the first session.
There's other games besides D20 I want to play with (looking at you, Call of Cthulhu), but I'm leery due to the inherent fragility of a single player in such an environment. Any advice?
http://thelonecrusader.com/the-mythic-player-emulator-reversing-the-role-of-mythic
http://thelonecrusader.com/the-mythic-player-emulator-reversing-the-role-of-mythic
Thursday, January 12, 2017
For those who use pre-published material, how do you adjust it for Solo play? I stumbled upon Long Crusader's site the other night, and his posts on playing Solo D&D inspired me to give it a whirl. I have a LOT of pre-published modules i would love to play around with, but adjusting for solo is a challenge.
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Scarlet Heroes. :) It's expressly designed to make one character suitable for going through an adventure meant for 4 or 5. The Fray die is genius and could be easily translated to other systems. Plus it's very customizable if you want to bring in classes or abilities from other sources.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of emulating the player and the method he outlines! I messed around with something like that using a chart of "moves" once.
At the Lonely Crusader website, the dude has a document that has a couple of ways to make a single character more survivable.
ReplyDeleteYou have to ask for it, though. I'll send a link when I get home.
Andrew Prince I already got it, it's designed for 5th ed, and is basically a variation on Gestalt/resource points, which I was going to do anyways.
ReplyDeleteI usually run parties through published adventures to avoid having to make any changes. I have run single characters in the past, but they've always been several levels higher than the average character level of the module., and usually had a good selection of spells (with extras on scrolls) in order to make up for the lack of other classes.
ReplyDeleteCall of Cthulhu is going to be deadly no matter how many characters you run. But as long as you stay away from adventures with lots of combat with cultists and lesser horrors, you stand a decent chance of reaching the final encounter.
I prefer running single characters. There are several quick and dirty ways to make a lone hero tougher. In d20 you could just multiply the hitpoints by four and double the damage the character deals. Or you could implement some variation of the fray die. Or multiply the characters hp by four, keep the normal damage but let him make four initiative rolls (reroll doubles) to let the char act four times in a round at different initiative counts to simulate a party. So many possibilities.
ReplyDeleteAnother possibility, I found a chart and put it in an ezine that shows CR values and numbers for 5e for solo characters. It's somewhat based on using # hit die as an indicator of level. So, with a character that is level 1, you want to stick with the 1 hit die creatures and NPCs which if I remember correctly are CR 0 and 1/8. The CR are built for a 4 person party.
ReplyDeleteI put it in 5e x 5 ezine #1 on RPGnow/drivethru which you can get for free.