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

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I suppose at low levels, you will need to use mostly Minions and occassionaly a regular monster as a kind of "boss".
At higher levels, you might want to use more low level monsters.

Avoid abilities that make it impossible or very hard for the PC to act, as Firelance mentions.

Consider the option of the player running two characters or at least being aided by NPCs. I would still suggest the player controlling those NPCs, otherwise you end up playing with yourself a little too often (Attack rolls between DM controlled creatures is pretty... boring overall. Even for the DM.)

 

[Blackbrrd]

Btw, characters that aren't usually perceived as being strong, like the "I hit you, now you can't see me" Warlock are really strong in a solo adventure.

 

[Nathal]

Thank you for all the advice!

 

[UngeheuerLich]

We played with 3 people for some sessions without a controller and it was fun and it worked without adjusting a single encounter (KotS)

What we did however is roll stats (very well)

As a result, both or ranger and the cleric can do melee and range (better in melee). And the fighter is durable and good at attacking.

You have to be a bit careful with character choice, but i consider 2nd edition and 3rd edition worse for solo play if you don´t like playing a cleric all the time.

The key difference is healing. You can be hurt a lot during an encounter but you only use three surges to heal up again. (If you need four of them it is critical).

If you want a good game, just use minions a lot and a regular enemy is the elite (or solo actually). Also avoid too open terrain instead use damaging and difficult terrain a lot. (A fire can serve as the controller). Oh, and consider reducing dungeon width to 1 square in general (or ne and an half).

There are still some classes to be avoided, like warlord. Maybe allow him to self buff and it also works. A bard would work quite well (as in earlier editions) Just make him valerous and take nice multiclass feats.

Edit: Use minions on both sides, but consider fuging rolls (or not rolling at all), so you can up and down the number of enemies at will.

 

[Nathal]

I wonder if there's any demand for solo adventures? I recall something like that existing in 2nd Edition, maybe 1st, but can't remember for the life of me if I dreamt it...

 

[Rothe_]

Couple of additional things that might work:

If you want a single hero, you should try to make the single PC more powerful than normal in solo play. One way to do it is to make a "gestalt" character.
Essentially a simple way that would be to make a character who gets double the amount of powers from each level, and gets all four basic multiclass feats for free and give the PC two "swaps" for each feat. At paragon tier, let the PC do both paragon multiclass and paragon path simultaneously. At epic, I think you don't need to do anything more than normally.

This way, he can either play a single class with more powers, or two classes with decent variety in powers.

For HP, double up the PC's hp or let him take hp from both his main class and mc class. Perhaps even triple hp if you want to use a lot of enemies.

For combat, you need extra actions for the solo hero. There are couple of good ways to do it.
1) Give out extra AP and remove ap usage restrictions (maybe allow one ap per turn).
2) Give an extra standard action each turn (but disallow movement with that action, so that running away is not trivial). Stun and Daze would not remove the extra action(just cut out the normal set to one standard from daze, or all the normal ones for stun)
3) Give the PC an extra turn each round.

I prefer 2), perhaps in some kind of combination with 1).

Extra feats could also make sense, perhaps a few extra ones only since the mc feats would be taken in any case.

For this kind of PC, you could probably make a normal NPC (with PC rules) as a sidekick, so you'd have the equivalent of 3-4 characters.

One of the characters should probably have healing powers, but the sidekick as a healer makes it possible for the PC to choose his focus freely.

 

[Herobizkit]

However, it is worth mentioning at this point that 4E has very good NPC ally rules. They're simple enough that the player(s) can control them in addition to their own characters without getting lost in a sea of power cards.

Could I get a book and page ref for this? I am intending on starting a solo campaign with 4e and would really like to know how to make this easier for myself and my player.

 

[Siberys]

DMG2, p. 27 - Companion Characters

 

[Herobizkit]

DMG2? There's a DMG2?! Come ONNNNN....

Ok, so I'm late in the game. :X

 

[Nytmare]

It's been a while since I last ran my son in his solo campaign, but here are the guidelines I set up for myself as best I can remember:

Power Level - Instead of coming up with ways to bump up the base class and/or tone down the monsters, I started him off at 4th level and only threw him up against things that were under his level. Having to do the math never made much sense to me when you could just adjust the scale.

Healing - Healing potions, healing potions, healing potions. There were too many early adventures where I screwed this one up and didn't give him a way to access his healing surges. Oddly enough, Brother Samael, the cleric, was his favorite NPC.

Allies - I had a rotating stable of different NPC allies and, in general, had at least one running with him at all times. We had one big arc where there were three of them with him for a while, and one short adventure where he got separated from the group and was off on his own. I tried looking at it from the point of view of He-man episodes. There was almost always a group of people working with him, even if most those other people were just running ahead to take care of other tasks, or getting captured by the bad guys, or...Orko. Encounters varied wildly depending on which ally was with him, most notably when the ally was a leader.

Encounter Makeup - This is going to depend entirely on what class your wife ends up going with, and whether or not you have allies running along with. Lots of bad guys are dangerous if there's no controller, status effects are dangerous if there's no leader, etc.

Combat - Even though I only rarely controlled more than one good guy NPC, I still didn't want to hog all the die rolling time. I streamlined the sheets I was using so that everything was checkboxes and tick marks and damages for all NPC on NPC action were static numbers.​