I DMed a short 4e solo adventure to my girlfriend on saturday. She was playing with the warlock pregen character.
It was a child's play to create the encounters and to DM in a general way.
One 1st level character = 100xp worth of monsters.
I put 4 kobold minions, than a kobold skirmisher.
Than I played with the Paladin halfling as an NPC to help her and it was a piece of cake to recalculate the "encounter levels".
She never ever played any sort of tabletop RPGs. Ok, she played WoW a lot, so it was easier to explain the roles, powers, and other mechanics to her by making analogies with the MMO. But I tell you, she had more doubts about which dice to roll than about the rules. In the 3rd combat she already figured out some efficient tactics to beat the kobolds, using powers, movement, etc.
She also had a hard time calculting all the possible bonuses like Primal Shot + Action surge. But in the rest, considering she is totally new to the game, she went just fine. I have veterans in my group that recently forgot to add the second iterative attack at level 6. She went fine. The game went fine.
The math worked just fine with the solo encounters, regarding HP loss, number of rounds to end the combat, etc. When the paladin came in, everything kept working.
She enjoyed the session as a new player and I enjoyed it as an old DM.
(Especially when they are the same negatives I saw the past few months.)
