Help Needed: 1 DM 1 Player. How to challenge and not outright kill?

[Matafuego]

Hello everybody!

Well the title almost says it all. I'm playing some 1on1 games with a friend, I am the DM, and I'm having quite some trouble during combat encounters since most things that can prove a challenge to him are extremely deadly and "campaign finishers".
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind characters dying but when there's only one character it's the end of the game...

Any advice?

(On an unrelated subject... although maybe not quite, the player is an epic level duelist and when he's fighting defensively he has an insane ac!)

Thanks a lot!

 

[Priest_Sidran]

It might sound hard, but give him a few NPC's

I ran a one on one game for a long time, and the harder challange is making him stay within the context of a balanced game. It is hard to fight the urge to give him something which will balance him out with the ickies your throughing at him, but it is a necessity.

A single added NPC of his level or lower by one would help balance the danger of killing him every combat. At least if you fudge sometimes in his favor on your dice rolls. The other thing is that if you somehow do kill him, let it stick, most players would be let down by a death but it builds a more wise player in the end.

A neat trick when making NPC's is give them a back story which creates new adventure hooks, that will not make the PC a backup character. A good way of doing this is to get the NPC into a fix, and have the PC help them get out of it. The PC would take charge in this case, and the NPC would still be relegated to the background.

The More NPC's the harder it gets to run the game, and keep track of everything. Another method (if the player is not a new player) is to let them make and run more than one character at a time, which saves you (as DM) the trouble of running more than one NPC.

 

[Merkuri]

Giving him an NPC is also a way to avoid TPK'ing. As long as the PC dies first you can say that the NPC managed to get his body and run away, then raise him later. And if there's no feasable way to get him raised (not enough money, or no caster available, or not believable that the NPC could grab his body) you could make the NPC into a PC and keep going that way.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

That was my answer.

Let the player control 4 PCs (a party). If the PCs are all strange classes or tricked out with 10 strange feats dial back the difficulty and eliminate things that bog the game down and in return simplify the monsters a little.

DS

 

[Quartz]

As a alternative, you could make the campaign RP heavy, and have the combats ones where the player will shine. That is, if he's RPed well, he'll have allies etc whereas the opponent won't. See 'Aphonion Tales' in the Story Hour forum for something similar.

Also, solo RPing encourages a rounded - rather than focused - character, so encourage him to multiclass, even if that means rebuilding the character. Your player has an epic duellist. Instead of being Rog 10 / Du 10 or Ftr 10 / Du 10, make him Ftr 4 / Mk 4 / Bar 2 / Du 10. A few levels of Bard would not be inappropriate, too.

Tailor your adventures: the character is a duellist, which means city adventures and politics. Further, as an epic duellist, the character probably runs a duelling school. Plenty of contacts, plenty of plot hooks.

 

[takasi]

I have a solo campaign going on MapTool. The player gets 40 point gestalt with any sourcebook and during his travels I introduce a 32 point DMPC. Most of the encounters are core and it's worked out ok so far.

Remember that he's going to level very quickly.

 

[blargney the second]

I ran a 1on1 for my girlfriend, and encountered the same problem. I solved it by giving her a warforged dog ally: simple to run, easy to roleplay.

 

[Matafuego]

Thanks for the quick replies!

To point out a few things:

The campaign IS heavy RP'd. He's one of the players who enjoys the most outside combat and that's the main reason we're having these 1on1's.

He is multiclassed. Don't recall right now but he's Swashbuckler / Fighter / Rogue / Duelist. The player is not a powergamer (I'm not even sure he's familiar with the concept) and enjoys a lot the RP moments as well as combats. The combats he's good at there's no problem at all... the combats he's bad at... well... It's boring for me and for him to trash him and I guess there should be some challenging encounters, otherwise the game would get boring quickly.

I think I will go with the NPC road. He made some good friends in the last game so maybe they will join him for a while.

Thanks a lot for the advice guys and keep them coming!!