Could you play D&D by yourself - is it a good thing?

[Bullgrit]

Most of the guys in my game group seriously role play their characters. I don't mean they're great thespians or get all into the depth of their characters, but they pretty much don't metagame -- they strictly play their characters.

I've seen each of them intentionally make bad decisions because such a decision was in character for their PC. There's one memoriable situation where a character was Wisdom drained down to 3, and the Player totally played the low wisdom to the hilt. Some characters actually came to non-lethal blows to keep the "drunk" character from really screwing things up.

And as I've DMed a lot over my 30 years of D&Ding, I've played a lot of NPCs on adventures with the PCs. I'm very able to play the character without the metagame knowledge that a DM always has.

While reading through the AD&D1 DMG recently, looking over random dungeon generation, I got to thinking, "Could I run a character through a dungeon crawl, honestly, without a DM?"

The fact that over the years I have run far more NPCs than PCs makes me think that I could run a character through a dungeon crawl without "cheating." And thinking of the other Players in my game group, I think they could too. But would it be fun?

I think I could grab any dungeon-crawl-type adventure off the shelf and run a DMPC or group of DMPCs through it (so long as there was no real social interaction needed -- I wouldn't want to set there and have a conversation with myself, that would be weird).

But then I got to thinking: "Is this a good thing?"

Is it a good quality in a Player for him/her to be able to completely separate the Player from the Character? Should a PC be strictly a separate being from the Player, or is the game better when the PC is an extension of the Player?

If on the adventure, the PC picks up a potion. You, as the Player and DM, know what's in the flask, good or bad. Could you make an honest in-character decision on whether to taste the liquid? Does knowing what the flask contains reduce the play experience for the Player?

Bullgrit

 

[Garthanos]

can you have sex with your self?

 

[Dragonbait]

can you have sex with your self?

If you are flexible enough, yes.

 

[Oryan77]

Could you make an honest in-character decision on whether to taste the liquid?

You could always let the roll of the dice determine what the character would do when you aren't sure if you'd be honest in your decision making.

I just think playing by yourself would feel like nothing more than a bunch of mock combats. It would be exactly like playing chess by yourself. A big part of an RPG is the interaction with characters, and as you said, you just can't do that by yourself without needing to be thrown in a mental institute. So the game would turn into a hack-n-slash game with problem solving scenarios that you already know the answers to.

can you have sex with your self?

Sex? I thought he was talking about DMing by himself. Did I just totally misunderstand his post?

 

[Cadfan]

I'm presently running two games.

One game is a standard D&D game with a lot of new players. Its 4e, and we only meet for short periods once a week, so we tend to have combat days and talking days. The group spends a fair amount of time interacting with one another and not with me. This could never happen without multiple people.

The other game is a game just for my wife and I. "At the table," so to speak, we do nothing but combat. We've torn our way through the H modules, and we're working on the P ones. I run the monsters and two characters, she runs the other three characters in the party. Roleplaying occurs almost exclusively through informal, verbal bluebooking, but for whatever reason, probably because of the fact that she and I are more on the same wavelength than a bunch of different people all in the same game, our characters are much more alive to us than the ones in the other game.

It wouldn't be too difficult to take the sort of interaction we've attained with our characters in the latter game and achieve something akin to it solo. I've even played the very rare computer game where a character or two felt alive enough to me that I mentally imagined that other chapters in that character's life. Its really, really rare that a character becomes that alive to me, but it can happen.

 

[kitsune9]

Well, I would say that when I was a kid, only because I didn't have anyone else my age to play with who knew what D&D was, I would play D&D by myself. It passed some lazy days by, but these days, there's no way I'd consider spending my time doing that. For one, my wife would just murder me brutally if she saw me killing time that way. So, I think that answers the other question, it would not be a good thing.

To address the other concern on keeping player knowledge separate from character knowledge, I think you would for the most part know how to do so and keep it realistic in what your character knows. For situations that would come up where it's not so clear cut, then Oryan77's suggestion to let dice determine the outcome, particularly if you feel you won't be honest, is an excellent suggestion.

Happy Gaming!

 

[diaglo]

i run a playtest of all of the adventures i make with a set of pregen NPCs.

just me rolling dice.

that isn't really playing so much as it is testing the mechanics of what may or may not work with decent odds.

and then i run the same adventures with my groups. with the modified stuff i found during my initial playtest.

sometimes it ends in TPKs ... which is clearly my fault for having knowledge of the best course. and sometimes it ends with a spin i hadn't taken into account.

either way. D&D is meant to be played with others.

otherwise you could just play it online.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The group spends a fair amount of time interacting with one another and not with me.

I really like it when that happens. I am a very lazy GM.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I've done it. I'm not proud of it but I've done it. I played a group up from 1st level to around 5th or so to learn the rules of 4e, 4 fights per level I think. There were 5 PCs in the party and I made up replacements when one died.

Their names were:
Kinesh (human fighter), Morten (dwarf cleric), Vetune (human ranger), Gildun (dragonborn warlord), Black Maggie (halfling rogue), Hate (tiefling paladin), Mystery (tiefling warlock) and Scoria (human wizard)

 

[TerraDave]

You mean using the random dungeon in the back of the DMG, with your tweaked out ranger, at some point in the 1980s?

Thats crazy talk.