D&D 4E Advice on running a 4e game for a single player

[Zaruthustran]

Make liberal use of minions (placed under the player's control). They're a lot of fun, and make for suspenseful gaming.

As a model, look to the recent Beowulf movie, or Odysseus, or Robin Hood. The PC is the big hero, the minions are his warrior buddies. At the start of the game your hero and his band will be tough, but big monsters will quickly whittle away his merry band.

To make them *slightly* more durable, give each downed minion a single death save at the end of the battle. Fail = dead, success = alive but wounded (repaired by long rest).

You can have a very fun campaign with this model (I played in and DMd just such a one-on-one campaign for a couple summers during middle school). The PC will be a real hero, head and shoulders above the common soldiers. Downside being, of course, that everyone who spends too much time with him eventually meets a violent death.

 

[FireLance]

If you want monsters that are tougher than minions, but less dangerous than a standard monster, you could have a look at my adjunct monsters.

 

[DogBackward]

I've reworked the Gestalt rules for 4e for just such a game I plan on running for a friend. It's pretty simple, and works easy for 4e;

Class Features
Chose two classes, gaining the class features of both. Things like HP, HP per level, healing surges per day, bonus skills trained and such overlap, choosing the best, while things like actual class features, automatic skills and such are both taken. Some duplicate class features should still overlap. For example, a Paladin//Cleric would still only gain one use of Channel Divinity per encounter, but would have 4 different Channel Divinity powers to choose from.

The Gestalt character counts in all ways as being both classes.

If you want, you can alow the number of Healing Surges per day gained to stack, to allow for a little more longevity.

Powers
Whenever you would gain one or more powers, you instead gain the same amount of powers from both classes. For example, a first level Paladin//Cleric would have 4 at-will, 2 encounter and 2 daily powers, half from the Paladin list, and half from the Cleric list. However, you still have the same limit on the number of powers you can use per encounter or per day. So, that same 1st level Paladin//Cleric can still only use one encoutner power per encounter, and one daily power per day, but chooses from either of the two powers when he does. At-will powers have no usage limitations, so they can be used whenever, giving that much more versatility.

Advancement
As with the above, any time you would be able to switch out one power for a higher-level power, you can choose to do so for both classes. I'd suggest you stick to just one Paragon Path and Epic Destiny, but it's easy to use those as Gestalt as well.

Balance
This is meant for a group of only one or two players, allowing a DM to use slightly more powerful encounters without having to scale them back quite so far for a smaller group, as well as allowing for more roles to be covered within a small group.

I'm figuring every two Gestalt characters might count as a single party member for Exp. calculations, allowing the group to handle more at once. It doesn't increase the power that much, given that there're still limits on actions per round.

You might wanna use a slightly higher point buy (24 or 26), to account for the increased MAD. Though that might be too much if your players decied to pick two perfectly complementing classes...

Anyway, I haven't gotten a chance to test it out yet, so if you guys could poitn out any glaring problems, that'd be nice. I notice that Strikers especially will be a bit powerful with this, given multiples of their "mark" like abilities. But then, strikers are a little squishy and such, so that should balance it out a bit, since you're not getting the possibility of a Defender's extra longevity.

I dunno, I'm gonna try it with a solo character here in a month or two, hopefully it works out. I dunno if you'd wanna try it, but it seems like it could make a solo 4e game a little more interesting; especially for you as a DM, allowing you to use slighty higher numbers of enemies.

 

[Stalker0]

In all the solo playtests that were posted, the best ones included characters that got skill training in stealth. Sneaking around allows a player to avoid a lot of problems.

 

[silentounce]

In other threads I've posted my idea about giving PCs templates to effectively make them "elite". This will effectively make him 2 PCs. If you let him play two characters like this you won't have to adjust things much. It'd be like having a party of 4 characters. I'd stick to the class templates and let the player choose one in addition to his normal class. Level advancement may be a bit more complicated. I'm planning on trying this out with my wife. I think it's better than the gestalt stuff mentioned above because all that does is give people more powers and a slight boost in defense, etc. It doesn't change things like HP and give them more actions. But that method could be useful, too. I'd be interested to see how it plays.

I'll post more later, I don't have time right now. But you should be able to figure out what I mean just by looking at the template section in the DMG. Just make sure to halve XP rewards for said PCs. They'll get extra HP, higher defenses, extra powers, an extra action point, etc. Like I said, I'll come back with more details.