D&D 4E How to Build 4E Solo Adventures?

[DanmarLOK]

I won't say it's easy but it's completely doable. You just have to get rid of the typical mindset on your story lines. I've run adventures for between 1 and 7 players going back to the original. The more players you have the more 'epic' you can get in terms of battles and encounters. The fewer players the more focused on storyline you can get.

Rogues (thieves, catburglars etc) work extremely well for solo arcs in an urban environment as do warriors (thugs, bodyguards). Rangers and druids work very well for natural environment arcs. Paladins on a personal holy crusade are also great for storylines.

You just have to move away from the dungeon crawl thinking and come up with the 'sneak past the guards and steal the jeweled eye of the idol of baphaut' or 'track down the bandits and find their lair and report it to the local patrols.' or 'seek out the prophet of dimetry in their mountaintop retreat.'

Solo adventures can be greatly entertaining, you need to focus on storyline though.

The biggest failing though is the character is essentially immortal. You can't knock them out or kill them because there's only so many times a passing cleric will see the body and rez it or they'll wake up captured and alive rather than dead. Without a support structure in the form of other party members anything that incapacitates your solo character typically should mean permadeath under most circumstances.

D

 

[sfedi]

Well, you could plan enconuters in a less deadly way.

Kind of reminds me of a Burning Wheel mechanic:

"Ok guys, this encounter is where you hold the goblin horde and buy time for the caravan to escape. If you win, you halt the horde for this day, if you fail, you end up unconscious on the side of the road and the carvan gets captured"

If they succeed, they live another day to defend teh caravan and deal with whatever adventures they have.

If they fail, then the story focuses on how they recover the caravan, or salvage what's left of it and it's survivors.

Not all encounters must end with a TPK, although it would be convenient to have mechanics for doing so. That's where rules from more narrative systems come in handy.

 

[aco175]

It seems like the formula for scaling the XP pool, 1monster/character of same level, would need to be thought about more. When you are the only one the randomess of the dice can bite you. I agree with some of the earlier posts about using certain roles of monsters over others and starting at a higher level, or speed through the first 2 or 3 levels. With fewer characters I also agree with more specilized missions.

Would the idea of having your one character act as some sort of scout or helper for another party. I have done this in reverse where the party has a npc that comes along to help at certain points, bail them out, give them knowledge, act as a scout or benefactor.

THe problem with this role for the one player is as a dm I would want to make sure that the focus is on the pc and not the npcs. Maybe have the person who hired the npc party hire the pc to go rescue the other party or have the focus be that the benefactor's kid is in the other party and wants the pc to travel ahead of the npc party and scout or soften up the bad guys so his kid is not killed.

 

[surfarcher]

Interesting thread! (can't believe I hadn't read it yet)

It occurs to me that the Fight! and We Who Are About To Die in Dragon Magazine Annual 2009 could be rather useful in solo design.

In particual Duels (p76-78) looks rather useful for designing solo combat encounters. An "Ideal" plus a couple lower minions could make things quite interesting.

Keep up the interesting discussion folks.

 

[Zaran]

I've done a solo campaign or two. Usually I have a companion NPC for them. I also halve the hp of the monsters so the fights don't take as long. Giving them higher Attributes but with the same maximum's (18 or 20 max) is good too. What I did was made sure the xp value equalled what the PC should get per encounter. This meant either only 1 foe of normal quality. 4 minions. or foes of lower level that total for the same xp reward. You can adjust the encounter to be a little more or a little less by adding and removing minions thus making the encounter level+1/level -1 .This worked out pretty well. It's basically what the DMG suggests besides halving the hp. I also made sure there ways of getting XP that didn't require combat. With one player, roleplay situations can be catered to the PC. I've done sessions where there wasn't any combat and we still had fun.

 

[FireLance]

Skill challenges also work well in a solo adventure because the PC has to get involved. Just be sure to pick skills that the PC is trained in, or adjust the difficulty of the skill checks accordingly.

 

[Colmarr]

I've been thinking for some time of preparing a solo 4e adventure/campaign based on Thief/Assassin's Creed/Splinter Cell.

The fundamental premise of such a game is that any enemy who is unaware of the PC is a minion. When that enemy becomes aware, it converts automatically into a normal enemy.

Using those mechanics, the PC could sneak around ganking minions while they're alone, but if they stuffed up and got spotted, they could very quickly end up fighting a horde of enemies they couldn't hope to defeat.

It would be wise in such a game to ensure that almost all enemies were of a level significantly below the PC (I'd suggest at least 2-3 levels). That minimises the risk of a stealth kill failing - which never happens in Assassin's Creed - and increases the likelihood of the PC being able to fight off 1 to 2 non-minion attackers if they need to.

I'm not sure how well that formula would work for a non-stealth game. At the very least, I suspect that any game in which there is only 1 PC would need to be comprised mainly of minions and traps/environmental effects that could be avoided.

 

[FireLance]

The fundamental premise of such a game is that any enemy who is unaware of the PC is a minion. When that enemy becomes aware, it converts automatically into a normal enemy.

Here's where you can mix in a bit of the skill challenge framework:

Defeating a standard enemy is a Complexity 1 challenge equal to the level of the enemy. The first three successful skill checks are to get close enough to the enemy. The last check is the attack roll. Even if the attack roll misses, the PC may repeat it until he has accumulated three failures (skill checks or misses, so a PC who reaches the enemy without failing any skill checks can miss three times before it loses its minion status).

 

[Colmarr]

Here's where you can mix in a bit of the skill challenge framework:

An interesting idea and one that would work quite well to replicate Assassin's Creed's assassinations (especially some of the more complicated/cinematic ones such as the fat merchant on the balcony).

I wouldn't use it for every enemy, because you'd get sick of the skill challenges after a while.

 

[caudor]

It appears that we will get to see how WotC handles the solo adventure. There is an upcoming solo adventure in Dungeon 173! It is called Dark Awakenings, written by Chris Sims.

The blurp states it will work as a solo adventure, or as an adventure for DM and one players.

This should be interesting.