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The one-on-one D&D script.
🕑 Added 2020-04-24 00:44:51 +0000 UTCAlmost every time I’ve run D&D for a single player, just me and one player, that player later said “That was the most fun I’ve had in D&D.”
In fact the very first D&D stream I ever did, which is around here somewhere on YouTube, was a 1:1 session, just me and my friend Gertz back when we were all still working at Turtle Rock Studios and that session, that livestream, made me think streaming D&D could really change people’s perception about the game. And it has!
Because people watching on Twitch, live, said “Holy crap, I didn’t know you could play D&D with just one player.” And that surprised me because why...what is there in the rules that says you need a minimum of 4 players or 3 or 7?
So that’s this video, what I know about running D&D with a single player. I’m not sure this is a how to do it? There’s probably a million ways to do it, and you will work out your own way, but this is what I’ve learned about it. And, like everything else in life, I’m still learning.
If you watch that stream, which I don’t recommend, it was pretty primitive. You can see most of my advice in action.
First of all...do it. You don’t need any advice, I didn’t have any the first time I ran a 1:1 in my 20s. You can watch this video and hopefully it will help, but the reality is, if you sit down to play D&D with only one player...that player is going to have a good time. Trust me.
Because they are going to get 100% of your attention. And when, in our lives, does that happen? When was the last time you sat across a table from someone for FOUR HOURS and literally just talked?
So that’s one issue, your player is going to have a good time, because they get all of your attention, because they are the star of the show, I mean, they’re the ONLY CHARACTER or at least the only PC.
Since there’s only one PC, we need to be REALLY CAREFUL about our encounter design. Remember, in 5th edition, being outnumbered puts you at a huge disadvantage. Well that means...if there’s more than one bad guy in a fight...there’s a good chance your solo player is going to LOSE.
That’s bad.
And it’s bad in an obvious way, but it’s also bad in a nonobvious way.
Obviously one solution is to just keep most encounters to 1 bad guy and this isn’t really hard. In fact the entire TONE of your game will change and become a lot more like a horror movie...you know suddenly ONE ZOMBIE is a big deal at first level! So you spend more time describing that zombie. You go into a lot more DETAIL.
And suddenly your WORLD or at least...this one show set in your world with only one PC...is one in which a single zombie or god forbid an ORC is a huge deal for a single, 1st level character.
Well, that’s really cool. That is a super cool experience, and one we don’t normally have in D&D. Now a single, low-level monster can terrorize an entire town.
So obviously we need fewer monsters. Usually just one monster.
But there’s a LESS obvious side effect. Normally, we as Dungeon Masters can sorta relax once initiative is called. Because instead of spending the next hour chewing through all the content we had prepared, we’re gonna spend the next hour rolling dice and killing monsters and this is a fantastic break for us as storytellers.
But in a solo D&D game, combat doesn’t take that long. In fact, it speeds past you. Which means you need a MUCH GREATER emphasis on roleplaying and investigation. Narrative. And that is a lot of work for us as Dungeon Masters and I have no real solution. Sometimes in life, the only trick is working hard at something for hours and hours.
I would expect your solo game to chew through content two or three or even four times faster than a party would do it. For a lot of reasons, combat happens faster. But also...you’re missing an entire pillar of roleplaying.
I think most D&D sessions have THESE three pillars;
- Exposition where the DM sets the stage.
- Roleplaying where the PCs talk to NPCs and explore and investigate and
- Combat…
All of which you’re gonna have in a 1:1 game, but there’s a fourth pillar of most sessions MISSING and that is; DEBATE!
In the absence of a PARTY, there is no one for your solo player to talk to. No one for them to plan with. Now, not having someone to argue with is great. No more players fighting over the rules!
But there’s also no new ideas, which is a BIG PART of D&D. As far as I’m concerned, if my players are ARGUING about what to do? They’re playing D&D. If they’re arguing about the RULES, well they’re probably wasting time, but arguing about What Is The Best Thing To Do, IS playing D&D as far as I’m concerned.
And you don’t get any of that in a solo game. No debate with other players, because there are no other players.
All this adds up to; your solo D&D game is going to be far more story-based than before. One of the first solo games I ran for a single player, I literally just lifted the plot of a Terry Pratchett novel because it seemed pretty straightforward. There’s a A-plot about an assassination attempt. I.e. a murder mystery, and a B-plot about golems and the two plots converge at the end in a narratively satisfying way.
This worked for a couple of reasons; first I knew the book backwards and forwards. That meant when things went off the rails, I could improvise pretty easily. Also, I wrote down my own, outline for this adventure BASED on the book, so it was mine? And I understood it better as an adventure, rather than a novel plot?
But also, it was mostly the player going around the city following leads, talking to people. I think that a lot of serial killer stories are great for this, because telling the player to just walk around the city talking to people until they figure something out isn’t awesome. But telling them they need to STOP the killer BEFORE THEY KILL AGAIN is great! Great verbs.
Same basic idea, still a murder mystery, but a mystery where the murderer is still out there and will kill again is 1000 times better for us as dungeon masters because it means there are clear verbs and a ticking clock and also escalating stakes! All of those are important!
I occasionally have folks on twitter or in the comments ask me to do a video on how to run a Mystery adventure. But...I honestly don’t know what to tell people. Go read a bunch of mystery novels or watch a bunch of mysteries until you find one you like and...rip it off. I don’t have a formula or a checklist.
But whatever adventure you come up with, it’s going to be MOSTLY: you describing things to the player, and the player exploring or walking around talking to people.
So by this point, you’re sitting there thinking “well, obviously you let the player run more than one character!”
Sure, actually yes, and this is a great scenario for that since you only got one player, they can focus on running two or three characters in a way that would probably slow a regular group WAY DOWN.
But before you jump down that rabbit hole, think about WHY you want more PCs in your solo game. Just so you can ramp up combat and include more bad guys? You don’t need to. You CAN balance encounters for one player. It just takes relearning encounter design.
And D&D characters aren’t SIMPLE. Running several of them at the same time isn’t easy and I’m also not sure it’s fun. And it doesn’t solve the problem of debate. The PLAYER is still alone, there’s still no one else for them to talk to.
What I usually do is; I give the solo player a sidekick. Usually a cleric or a paladin? Someone who can heal, buff the hero, debuff the enemy. And *I* run them. The player doesn’t run them. So their experience isn’t any more complex, but now they have someone on their side.
I don’t add a sidekick because I want to be able to ramp up combat. I add a sidekick because I’m afraid, with only one player, that if they roll under a seven 4 times in a row in combat, their character is going to die through no fault of their own.
In other words, the TOLERANCE for bad rolling is VERY LOW when there’s only one player. And bad rolling includes the bad guys rolling consistently well.
So a healing sidekick is great. If I’m running them and the player’s missed for 4 turns in a row and is about to die, I can just DECIDE the sidekick crits.
Of course you can combine a healing sidekick that YOU RUN with the player running more than one character. If you want to go that road I encourage you to check out the Retainer rules in Strongholds & Followers. So I guess that makes this an ad.
But I wrote these rules on purpose to make it easier for you to do this. The normal use case is letting players have NPC followers that can join them in COMBAT, without adding to the complexity of being a D&D player.
This is what a retainer looks like. This is Angel from the Chain of Acheron. This is an entire character. We can see their AC, but notice...not the armor they’re wearing. I don’t care what armor they’re wearing. They’re wearing whatever armor gets you to this AC. The rules just say light, or medium, or heavy armor.
If they need to make a skill check, you assume they have +3 to their roll, unless they’re using one of the skills listed here, in which case they add +5. So they’re competent at everything, and pretty good at a couple of things. No need to list all their stats and skills.
They have an ability they can use every round in combat, and then a couple of much more useful things they can do, but only a few times. Each ability shows you their bonus to hit and damage. Don’t worry about their gear or their stats.
That’s it. That’s the whole character. Notice, no hit points. No math. No bookkeeping. Just a number of boxes equal to their level. Every time they take damage, they make a saving throw. If they succeed, nothing happens. No damage. If they fail, you mark off one box for every die of damage, which is usually one. Once all the boxes are marked off, they go unconscious.
It’s simple. It’s simple...on purpose. Very high utility, very low complexity. Some folks freak out at “no hit points” but you can always just...you know, there’s a whole player’s handbook if you want to really run a second character and everything that comes with that.
This was one of the more controversial pieces of design in Strongholds & Followers during the playtest but it’s also proven to be one of the most popular, lots of people use these in their games every week and report back great success. They let players and DMs add more characters to their game, those characters can fight and help and be RELEVANT, with only a LITTLE more complexity.
I think we could rewrite the description of these rules to be more straightforward? I overexplained it, because it was a new idea, and that muddied the waters. But the rules have proven to work well, I think.
These retainers are a little tougher than a normal PC? A retainer that sucks isn’t much help. But while they are competent in COMBAT, we need to resist the urge to make our NPCs the star of the show.
I did a whole video about running NPCs before and the #1 takeaway is; don’t make an NPC who is the star of the show, in fact I think my entire running example was Edric from the solo game I ran with Gertz.
Edric was great, very characterful and Gertz and the viewers loved him. Don’t be afraid to give your NPCs a lot of character. I don’t mean Do The Voice, an accent isn’t character.
I think sometimes folks confuse making an NPC fun and characterful, with USEFUL. When you’re running for a single player, by all means, make their sidekick FUN. Lots of personality. But do not let them take over. The PC is the hero, your NPC is a sidekick.
If you give your player a sidekick, your player is naturally going to use them to try to avoid making decisions. Players don’t like making decisions because decisions can be WRONG. And they want to avoid a bad outcome. So they will naturally want to defer to the NPC. Because YOU are running the NPC and so presumably you know what the least risky thing is.
So definitely don’t do that, make sure the player understands this sidekick is theirs, they will follow orders but they defer to the hero. They want the player to LEAD.
Now here’s the secret about sidekicks. IF the player feels like “This is MY sidekick, they are my FOLLOWER” then WHEN that sidekick does something cool, even if it steals the spotlight from the player...the player will be ok with it, they’ll probably love it. As long as it feels earned.
Yes technically it’s just you, the DM, using one of your tools, the NPC, to solve a problem YOU created! And I’m sure if this is done badly, then it will feel that way.
Therefore I RARELY let the NPC give actually useful advice, or solve puzzles or unlock the next step in the plot. But IF the player has been doing MOST of the work, then absolutely let their sidekick shine.
The player in my Feet of Clay game had an opportunity to recruit a golem ally and this was huge, major plot point in the adventure. But they couldn’t see how to do it. They hadn’t read the book. They didn’t even realize it was possible.
Well we were probably three hours into this solo adventure and so when I had the player’s sidekick figure it out and DO IT, the player was like A-HAH! Brilliant! WE HAVE A GOLEM!
Even though technically it was just me using the NPC I created to solve the problem I created, because the player had been doing all the work until then, not only did they not mind that the NPC solved the next step, it FELT like teamwork to them. It felt like “My dude did that.”
I made the NPC roll, so it still felt legitimate? Not DM Fiat? That helped.
So now, maybe it’s clear that the last couple of videos have been leading to this one.
The downtime video is basically ABOUT solo play. The stuff you do on your own between adventures. My friend Wallace thought his ghoul PC MIGHT BE able to sneak past the undead in the dungeon and rescue my friend Larra’s PC. So he tried it and we played all day just him and me exploring the dungeon.
Dungeons are GREAT for this, having Wallace’s ghoul trying to STEALTH and ROLEPLAY his way through an entire dungeon of mostly undead was WILDLY DIFFERENT than an entire party killing their way through the same dungeon. Totally changed the mood and tone, everything was way more TENSE. Descriptions and details were more important.
Now, yes, we chewed through an entire dungeon in a few hours, it would have taken the party a lot longer to kill their way through and that means my prepped content didn’t last as long. That’s bad.
But Wallace later said it was the most fun he ever had playing D&D. That’s good!
My friend Zach’s druid used wildshape to turn into a spider and explore the ruins of Castle Rend in a solo session and we ran the whole thing with me using LANGUAGE to describe what he saw, and him translating that into a MAP.
You know, he’s a spider racing through a large castle, then trying to REMEMBER everything he saw later. So there should be some imperfections, things he remembers wrongly. And I thought him having to rely only on my descriptions in a very old school 1970s D&D way would produce a map with some inaccuracies, simulating faulty memory.
But as it turns out, maybe because he’s a professional artist, his map was PERFECTLY accurate. But the act of being a spider, exploring this ruined keep, seeing what was in there, trying to map it all out was a blast. Just him and me.
Gertz’s character had to sneak out of a prison camp in the UNDERDARK and find his way back to the Mundane World with just a sidekick, and the transition from High Fantasy Underworld to Low Fantasy Orc Keep was amazing. Always wondering...am I safe yet? Have I escaped yet? When will I know that I’m free?
Well, every encounter had...many fail states. No test was just pass or fail, there were always complications. Always ways to make sure that one bad roll just made things CRAZIER, it didn’t stop the game.
And I gave him an NPC who had a lot of character, but was absolutely not going to LEAD Gertz anywhere or make any decisions for him.
My friend Aaron ran Lord Kenway of Dalrath through four years of university at the Imperial College of Statescraft in Capital. It took four sessions, one for each year. It was basically a Skill Challenge, at the end of every year he made a skill check. If he earned enough successes he graduated! And earned new abilities depending on how well he did. If he rolled badly, well he had to go to summer school one semester to make it up.
Each year there was adventure, secret societies, rivals at school, romance! We did it all over Fantasy Grounds, just text, no voice and it’s...lemme tell you, it’s a lot easier for me at least to roleplaying the young princess, daughter of the Pharaoh falling in love with the barbarian prince from the black forest just over TEXT than it would have been over VOX or, god forbid, in person.
I mean, I like romance in my D&D game, though you’d never know it from the Chain of Acheron. But doing it literally just over text, for me...it was effortless. The doomed romance between the star-crossed lovers was awesome.
During these four sessions, Lord Kenway decided since he was so far from home, this was an opportunity to recruit his version of the Varangian Guard. His sidekick says, well, they got gladiator battles in this city, very popular.
Kenway says Brilliant! Let’s go meet some gladiators!
They go to the arena, they watch a few battles, and there is definitely a STAR gladiator, the dude everyone’s here to watch.
Well they find out these gladiators are all criminals. Forced to fight while they wait for a trial. And, of course, there’s a lot of MONEY to be made in this sport, and many of the best gladiators are innocent people, accused of a crime they didn’t commit. Because they looked like good fighters.
If they do poorly, they die in the arena and no one ever knows the truth. If they do well, they make everyone a lot of money...so they’ll never see trial.
Kenway hears about all this and does not like it one bit. After the games, he goes and talks to the master of the games and offers to pay the bail for the star gladiator. “You can’t afford it,” they tell him.
Well, he’s the rich scion of a noble family so in point of fact, he can afford quite a lot. He can afford so much...the guards consider it. “Which gladiator did you want to buy?”
He tells them and they’re like “Oh him. Ok, let’s see what happens.”
They bring the star gladiator out and show him the money and he IS impressed that someone’s that concerned about him. But he SPITS on the money. “By my hand or none. I’ll free myself...or die in chains.”
Well, now my friend Aaron DEFINITELY wants to recruit this dude, how awesome is he?!
Of course what you have guessed and what Aaron didn’t know, is that gladiator was another PC. My friend Austin’s character. Aaron was roleplaying his way through HIS backstory in preparation for a new campaign. Austin was doing the same thing.
Austin wanted to play a gladiator who leads a rebellion which I think there’s a movie about, and when Aaron’s character hit upon the idea of maybe recruiting a bodyguard, I steered him toward Austin’s character.
So of COURSE Austin is going to refuse Aaron’s offer, his whole backstory is about leading a rebellion against the corrupt officers who put him here!
The entire time Kenway was talking to this dude, I was texting Austin. Austin just thought, more D&D! New roleplaying encounter! Aaron thought I was just setting up a cool NPC who would show up later!
To me, that kind of play, where there are several PCs, each playing their own solo game, and they meet each other but neither of them knows the other is a PC? And then they meet up later Avengers style? That is PEAK D&D. In fact I think once the Chain wraps up we’ll try something like that.
Is that all the advice I got? Maybe. If you’re starting a new game, maybe let the player start at 3rd level? That way there’s more margin for error if they get in over their head.
With only one player, you’re gonna feel like you have to do all the talking, but remember to PROMPT the player. Don’t wait for them to chime in, explicitly ask them how they react to things. Get them reacting, acting, describing their attitude. It can’t be a monologue, it has to be a dialog, even though you WILL be doing most of the talking.
I think 1:1 games tend to resemble the ideal version of D&D, new players picture in their heads. It’s OVERWHELMINGLY narrative. It’s by definition character-based. You never argue about the rules, you spend all your time on the world and the plot and the character.
So that, a lot of people, once they play this way...they find it hard to go back, I hear that a lot.
That’s it folks, that’s the 1:1 D&D video. Very few monsters, maybe only one. More mystery, exploration, investigation, negotiation, less combat. Absolutely use a sidekick, MAYBE try out the retainer rules for Strongholds & Followers. Be prepared to chew through whole adventures in one session. Remember to prompt your player, how do you react? What do you think? What do you want to do? Use multiple fail states so one bad die roll doesn’t derail your whole game. And...that’s all I got.
Next video? I dunno, I got a lot. I think maybe we’ll start the Campaign World Tour? Where we do one video on each of a bunch of different old campaign worlds, each of which is still super cool in its own way. Also, the next Dune video should drop soon.
If you’re at all interested in the development of Kingdoms & Warfare, I livestream several times a week on twitch and we play random games but we talk a LOT about whatever I’ve been working on, including Kingdoms & Warfare but also running MCDM like...we hired a new full time artist! Grace Cheung! You can check out her art in the link below, she’s awesome and already kicking ass and you’ll get to meet her eventually once R-Nought drops below zero, preferably way below and stays there for a while. August I’m guessing.
If you like this video and you’re not slammed in these crazy times, consider picking up Strongholds & Followers. I guarantee you there is SOMETHING in here you will find useful and fun. And we got dope shirts in the store!
If you have any questions, I strongly recommend our discord, there’s a link below. Over 7,000 people are in it at any given moment, and we work hard to make sure people can hang out and have fun without a bunch of wangrods taking over.
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Until next time, PEACE! Wash your hands for 20 seconds at LEAST! OUT!
