Dungeons And Dragons Single Player
Narcisa Flierl
To Hell and Back Again takes a single character from level 1 through 3 which (after levelling to 4th at the end) makes the solo PC roughly the equivalent of a 1st-level party and ready to take on the first chapter of Descent Into Avernus.
While I own a few hardcovers, I highly recommend using D&D Beyond for solo play. Having all of the resources available on all my devices, and having everything linked together, meant that I could play for as little as 15 minutes and squeeze in a little D&D. So, I had one tab open with the adventure itself.
One advantage of Warlocks is that their spell slots recharge on a short rest, which I had to do every 3 encounters or so, and made more sense story-wise than finding the rare opportunity for long rests in Descent Into Avernus.
In my playthrough of Descent Into Avernus, I picked up various NPCs, each lasting a few levels before they faded out of the story. I thought this worked well and was really fun trying to figure out who might make a good buddy and what their motivation was. I mainly just used the stat blocks, but I did try building one of them as a full PC with the Character Builder but found that a stat block felt more appropriate.
As I mentioned, I had read through the adventures before playing them, which I think works great. Where it falls down a bit is with player knowledge, and things like secret doors and other exploration components get a bit tricker.
In To Hell and Back Again, the choose your own adventure style was a big improvement over the more typical presentation in Descent Into Avernus, but overall the Exploration and Social Interaction pillars do suffer a bit more than Combat in solo play.
For me, Combat was super fun solo, with every turn having lots of decisions for both the PC and the monsters. The three big things that made it great were using theater of the mind, figuring out how to run the monsters with my DM-hat, and discovering some tooling that helped run the encounters themselves.
The other slack I cut myself was to allow liberal retconning of any social interactions. This was actually pretty enriching since I was able to backfill in parts of the story where things might not have made a ton of sense at the time.
After giving myself a week off to decompress from the To Hell and Back Again/Descent Into Avernus campaign, I will definitely be playing another solo adventure soon (probably Curse of Strahd with a Paladin).
Though typically played with four to six players and one dungeon master, D&D works perfectly well when played with one player and one DM. In fact, this style of D&D offers many advantages over the traditional group-based game. Don't be afraid of the potential awkwardness. Ten minutes in and it just feels like D&D.
Let the player play two characters, a main character and a sidekick. You can use sidekick rules from either the D&D Essentials Kit or from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything or you can just let them roll up a normal character but treat them as a sidekick.
Sidekicks work best when they are mechanically simpler to play and have capabilities that shore up gaps in the main character. A bard, cleric, or druid works well as a sidekick to a fighter, rogue, or barbarian. A fighter or paladin works well as a sidekick to a wizard, warlock, or sorcerer. Work with the player to build a team between the main character and the sidekick.
Sidekicks work best when they're mechanically simpler. Stick to ability score increases instead of feats and choose simpler subclasses so the mechanics of the sidekick don't take away from the capabilities of the main character.
During play, it works well when the player runs the sidekick mechanically but the DM roleplays the sidekick. This gives the DM a great avenue for continued roleplaying and a vehicle to give the main character information. It's great fun to play this way.
Ensure you run with fewer combatants in combat. A larger force of monsters can quickly overwhelm two characters if you're not careful. If you're running a published adventure not intended for a single character and sidekick, ensure you reduce the number of monsters in combat encounters significantly. Aim for an equal number of monsters to characters and adjust as needed. See my article on balancing encounters for one-on-one play for details.
Playing D&D one-on-one is a fantastic experience. Any initial discomfort at the perceived awkwardness and intimacy of the game quickly goes away when both of you realize you're just playing D&D. Find a player, whip up a simple adventure, and try out some one-on-one D&D.
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Dungeons & Dragons may be the right choice for your solo RPG adventurers because of its focus on heroic fantasy mixed with the apparent deadliness of low-level play. I think modern D&D works well for solo play because of its narrative focus and hardy player characters, especially at low-level. OSR systems are great, but a 1d4 wizard with a single spell has an abysmal average life expectancy adventuring on their own.
Choosing the setting for your solo game is almost as important as choosing your rules system. I see the dichotomy as two ends of a slider. Do you want to explore an already-established and robust world setting, injecting your player character into settings you want to explore? Or, are you more interested in the focus on your specific character and their exploits? The setting is of a much lesser concern.
Like normal Dungeons & Dragons, you will have a better time if you diversify the type of challenges your player character faces. For things like overland travel, I have two lists for each biome/environment type. One is a random encounters list, and the other is a random dressing list. The former has random creature groups to encounter and the latter has primarily non-creature obstacles and minor interests to help pad out play.
Keep the story loose so you can capitalize on a flash of inspiration when it happens. A good idea should always trump your oracle rolls and random tables. This is also part of focusing on the fun to keep you engaged and excited to play D&D as a solo RPG. A fun premise or realization that strengthens the weave of your solo play story is worth a hundred random rolls. So, trust you gut on random rolls. If you struggle to interpret story rolls, roll again for better inspiration or go with your best idea in the moment.
Or you could let your PC die. You could change them to a revenant/undead and have them wake up a day later, or create an adventure where they have to figure out how to jailbreak themselves out of the afterlife.
And of course, you can look at what NPCs are in your game. Why not upgrade one of them to new PC status in a very Game of Thrones style of storytelling? The point is not to cheapen the tension in your game and fudge the game rules, especially around death.
For example, you want to add your PC and potentially your sidekick to the PC list, family, friends, rivals, and enemies to the NPC list. The tension between your PC and background NPCs should be added to the Threads/Story Beats list. As for the Unresolved Treasure list, I find it very useful to keep all the non-useful gear picked up during adventuring in one place along with its expected resale value. That makes it easy when playing Solo not to need to skim my character sheet or session notes every time I have an in-game shopping opportunity.
You can learn more about those principles in our Practical Settlement Design feature. You will also want to fill in some nearby adventure locations, important NPCs, and points of interest to investigate. All that information is broken down in detail in our Fast D&D Campaign Starter.
A completed journal is also a nice memento of your time spent with a specific player character or game world. And for the inspired, it makes for a good outline tool to draft your own RPG-based story, novel, or play.
For example, when you reach a new random settlement what do you need to know about it and in what supplemental resources will you go to find that out? How will you determine the occurrence of random encounters and what type of monsters are included? Are you going to track resources, how? What will you use to track time spent and travel, what about in-game resources like rations and ammunition? How do you determine where an adventure location or POI will appear on the map?
Take the time to set a mood by choosing your lighting and having some thematic music ready. Also try grabbing a miniature or piece of art to represent your player character and place it out of the way, but still where you can see it. I use noise-canceling headphones with music when I play solo RPGs and I cannot recommend it enough as a helpful way to avoid distractions.
I also recommend stocking yourself up with refreshments to avoid running back and forth for drinks and snacks. Also, use the restroom before you start playing. Take care of anything that might cause you to get up and leave your play space.
I found it best to approach starting a solo RPG session in the same manner I would as a Dungeon Master for a typical session of D&D. RRF readers will know that for me, the successful kickoff of a D&D session comes down one thing: a purposeful start. Here are three easy ways to help you start playing your first session of D&D as a solo RPG.
If the GM Oracle is the engine of solo RPG gameplay, then questions are the fuel that makes it run. Try to avoid assumptions and when something pops into your mind ask a question. Be curious and use the tools at your disposal. The more you ask the more you will learn about the adventure, the characters, and the world they live within.
Is this a Points of Light Setting? The safe places of the world are few and far apart, which means traveling between them is a dangerous ordeal. Outside those havens are all sorts of dangers and when anyone needs something beyond the boundary of their little safe haven they call an adventurer.
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