2 Player adventures?

[derbacher]

Greetings and felicitations. My very first question type post! Woo hoo!

I have recently moved to a (very) small rural community, and needless to say D&D players are outnumbered by cows about 6000 to one! I have found two players who are dedicated and very into the game, but I have trouble coming up with adventures that are appropriate for a two-person party. Most (OK all) of the published adventures are for 4 or more players, and are of a difficulty level that kills my players in about 20 minutes of real time. My own home-grown adventures tend to err on the side of keep the players alive, but aren't very challenging (at least by my standards). My questions and options are:

Published adventures:
1. Cut the number of creatues (and treasure) in half .
2. Replace and rewrite the encounters with challenge ratings of half the average party rating. This would seem to meet the EL for a four person party. (i.e., a level 2 party of two would be able to handle EL1 encounters as well as a level 1 party of 4).

Home brewed adventures:
1. Pretty much the same as above, but designing the encounters from the beginning at half the EL rating.
2. Let the players run more than one character. (Not my favorite option, as characters then tend to read ech others minds!)

Am I on the right track here? Anyone with any advice, or the location of any good two person adventures for comparisson?

 

[Steverooo]

Have you considered Gestalt Characters? Maybe a Fighter/Rogue and a Cleric/Wizard, for instance? Or a Ranger/Rogue and a Fighter/Druid, if in a wilderness setting? The HP will be lower, but the ECLs should be nearly the same...

 

[Fenes]

I say, see what your characters can handle, then tailor the encounters to their abilities. With two player characters it is easy to design encounters which do not rely on CR, but take the actual stats and items into acount. I run such a campaign myself, and I don't care about CR, ECL or such, I just look at the stats to see how challenging something is.

 

[Ry]

I've always found that adventures written with 1 PC in mind are EXCELLENT with 2. When there's only two, they typically stick together anyway, and the roleplaying jumps up a notch (while the need to endlessly hire NPCs goes down).