Can you play D&D with just one player and a DM?

Yes! My wife and I play a lot of D&D together and in this article, I’ll answer how to play D&D with two players! Two player D&D even has some benefits you can’t find in a large group. You can tell different kinds of stories, introudce players with a low anxiety environment, and most importantly, it’s easier to schedule and plan.

 

As I’ve discussed before, my wife and I play a lot of solo D&D together. We’re on a quest to play all core 5e classes from level one to twenty. First, 5e is definitely not designed to be played this way. However, I think you can have a lot of fun with it and encourage people to give a try. So far, I’ve o

bserved seven areas where one on one D&D is meaningfully different than a traditional group adventure. I’ll dive into each one in detail below, but here is my high-level advice:

• Use a combination of on rails adventure and very broad sandbox style goals
• Base adventures around the character’s goals and motivations
• Create challenges and rewards that force a character to use their strengths to overcome their weakness. Put social encounters in front of the barbarian, but create ways for their strength to be helpful rather than just avoiding social situations.

 

 

Adventures & Encounters

When creating a solo adventure, I’m going for one of two things. Either a very straight forward path my wife can’t deviate from (a dungeon) or a very broad general story (a villain that needs to be stopped). The biggest difference between a solo adventure and a group adventure is that you need an adventure that is clearly aligned with the character goals, so they actually go on the adventure, and one that is hard to fuck up. When I say fuck up, I don’t mean a tactical combat error, but rather getting distracted by something else and missing the thread of the plot. Don’t get me wrong, this happens in a group setting as well. However, with only one player, it’s harder for them to see what’s next because they don’t have anyone, besides you, to bounce ideas off of.

 

The benefit for the straightforward path is fairly easy to understand whereas the broad one is a bit more complex. Having an open ended quest puts most of the work on the player but means there are few dead-end ideas. The player picks what interests them and follows that path forward. This only works if are truly multiple paths forward. Take the example from earlier, the villain that must be stopped. The player can decide they want to travel to the north and talk with the goblins that live there and form an alliance to stop the dark lord. The goblins are skeptical when the hero arrives and demand the hero proves their strength and good intentions. They tell the hero that there is an Oni that lives in a nearby cave that hunts the goblins for food. The hero vows to defeat the Oni in exchange for their aid. Obviously, the DM needed to create the Oni encounter and the goblins, but the player is already invested and wants to get involved, because it was their idea. This is what makes solo D&D so amazing, the player gets to do whatever they want and are interested in. In a group game sometimes, you do what you want and sometimes you defer to the other players.  

 

Characters

Creating an interesting solo D&D character is pretty straight forward. The only big difference is you need to have certain level of complexity that isn’t required in a group setting. It’s pretty common, and fun, to create a gag character. They have one cool personality trait or thing and generally sit back during role play, except to chime in with their gag. While some groups might not like this, I think as long as the character isn’t trying to get too involved and accepts their role as one-dimensional, it actually can be a really good experience.

 

That doesn’t work in a solo campaign. Nearly all the roleplay will be centered around this character and they need to be fun to roleplay and fun to roleplay with. Now the good news is that you can take plenty of time while playing to develop your character, but I would suggest avoiding one-dimensional characters with no room for growth.

Instead, I would try to create a driven character with a goal. The goal doesn’t have to super specific, but something that drive them. For examples, you can look at the bond’s sections of a 5e background.

 

The other thing you need besides a goal is character that is complex enough that they can seek out adventures once their complete their goal. You could be playing a wizard out to make a name for themselves as a great mage of known world. You complete your quest around level 10 and are now known all over the land. Unless you want to retire here, you need a good reason to go out and keep risking your life in the face of danger. The classic reason is: You’re a good person and want to help. While I love this idea, I think it can be a little boring and limited so here are other reasons:

• You still crave more knowledge
• You aren’t fulfilled like you thought you would be and need to find something else
• You will grow board in retirement and need to keep adventuring

 

The Social Pillar

Social encounters and RP is double edged sword in solo D&D. The obvious benefit is all the players can be talking at once and take part. This means you don’t have players waiting around doing nothing because they aren’t interested in talking to this NPC or they aren’t “The Face.” The downside is that some players, can’t have a full RP conversation without passing it off another player. Think about how many times you talk to a major politician about a dangerous threat to the land in your day job? Throw in a few other factors, it’s not actually being your character, not being the scene, etc. and it makes sense that a one-on-one RP conversation doesn’t follow a real-life conversation. Hopefully everyone understands it, but we tend to observe it less in a group setting where everyone has something they want to say.

 

Here are two things I did to help facilitate conversation and skill keep exciting social situations:

• Allow “takebacks.” I think this is a pretty common thing, all kinds of D&D RP, but in solo games, I actively encourage it and will even ask my wife “is that what (character) would have said?” This is definitely player dependent, but I think most people are more likely to be stuck when in solo RP and just a little push and assurance you can take it back goes a long way.
• Use a social mini game. I created Game of Wits to allow for complex debates and social conflicts to be resolved in more engaging way than just a conversation and some dice rolls. It keeps the steaks high without forcing precise negations between a DM and player.

The Combat Pillar

Combat is definitely the hardest part of solo D&D. I run a very deadly game for both group and solo play, but if you want a narrative driven game where death is rare, you need to get creative with your encounter design. First, let’s talk about distance. Having an encounter that starts at a distance is super helpful in avoiding death. It gives your player a chance to be creative before the encounter starts and either avoid it entirely or make it easier. This can be as simple a character hearing voices approaching in the dungeon, seeing the monster at a far distance in the open fields, etc. In group play, I tend to do the opposite because the players are able to overwhelm the encounter if I give them a few turns to prepare.

 

Number of enemies is next. I generally have two types of encounters. One big bad guy or lots of small goons. Unless my wife has an ally or a useful magic item, I rarely send 2-4 medium strength foes at her. If it one big foe, the economic is generally equal and there isn’t an issue. If there are bunch of small goons, she can quickly even the odd (while taking a bunch of damage in the process). If it’s 3-4 foes, by the time she evens the odds, the damage is already done and she’s in a bad spot.

 

The last thing I want to talk about has less to do with actual combat and more about setting multiple failure states within a combat. Give monsters a reason to take a character hostage or include another goal that the bad guys are more focused on the killing the hero.

 

The Exploration Pillar

Exploration is one of the areas I’ve found solo D&D struggle. It amplifies an existing issue with exploration content, The Ranger Paradox (not really a paradox, but I like the word). Rangers are great at exploration, but they are so great, it’s trivial and don’t get to feel it. Some players get a kick out of things just working, but can also feel cheap and easy. In solo D&D, if a character is great at survival and exploration, they just do it and there are really threats or dangers. If they aren’t good at it, well there it isn’t fun and they are punished. There is a of course a middle ground where a character is good enough to not die in the wild, but also doesn’t trivialize it. This is where exploration is truly awesome. The reason this effect is more noticeable in solo D&D is because of party dynamics. A character with strong survival skills might have to drag her fast-talking city folk party members through and forest and that creature some challenges. Likewise, the fast-talking city folk aren’t punished for their lack of abilities because of their party member. There is even a benefit because this other party members gets to feel cool and helpful.

 

Based on that premise, my goal with exploration is get the character into a middle ground state.

This is great (and obvious) advice for all game design, so let me tell you exactly how I tend to do that.

• Escorting large groups of people through a dangerous environment. Even a ranger might have trouble with a group of 20 people.
• Extreme environments the character is well suited to. If the barbarian is in the cold mountains, they can use their strength and combat ability to overcome lots of challenges and perform better than a hot desert.
• A tight timeline that requires some forced marched checks.

 

Warfare or Intrigue

In nearly all my games I include some level of politics, intrigue, and large-scale conflicts. This is one area with solo D&D is pretty similar to group big and I would even say it’s better. One issue with political games with a large scale domain in a group setting is, who is in charge and what happens when the party disagrees? In a group game, you usually have three options. Each person has their own domain/pollical goals and take part in the adventures separately. I haven’t  had a group interested in this approach yet and think it’s a less common method.

 

The two more common ones I have seen are: The group works together and controls the domain together or one person is in charge and the party defers. There are obvious issues with those two approaches, what happens when the party disagrees? Solo D&D obvious doesn’t have this issue.

 

This means you can challenge your player with a complex choice that a full party weren’t agree on. Not only moral choices, but also tactical choices such as which threat or villain is a bigger concern. Should you make a military gambit? These, apparently, high stake that might divide a party can be a fun chance to offer player agency.

 

NPCs & Magic Items

One of the most important parts of a good solo D&D game is complex NPCs for your player to engage with and awesome magic items that help overcome some of challenges of a mono-class party. Magic items and NPCs can do two things and ideally both at the same time. They can widen or deepen a character’s capabilities or strengths. Let’s use a battle master fighter as an example. You could give him a +1 weapon to make him better at being a fighter, you could give boots of speed to help deal with his lack of ranged attacks, or necklace of fireballs to help compensate for no area of effect abilities.

 

NPCs are powerful because they can go both. You can give our fighter a cleric ally to overcome their lack of utility while also providing healing and supports spells that let our fighter, well fighter better. The only downside to NPCs is that they don’t make the player feel as cool and they require more work to run (whoever is running them, DM or player). Magic items allow the player to feel epic instead of their ally. The hard part is creating magic items that accomplish this. You can them our fighter a weapon that deals d8 fire damage and lets them cast fireball once a day, but I think there is a better and more engaging design.

 

I try to give my solo players a magic item that relies on their strengths to overcome their weaknesses. In the fighter example, let’s give them a flaming sword that does an extra d8 fire damage and when they crit, they can cast fireball. It’s not the best design, but I think it highlights the idea of letting their strengths compliment their weakness and not just letting them cast fireball once day. This feels more earned unique.

 

 

While NPCs don’t always make the player feel like a badass, they can be huge help to the DM. NPCs make combat easier to balance, introduce different levels of failure, and give the DM more opportunities to guide their player.

Combat is  easier because there is less variance (the HP and actions in the combat, the less variance there is). One lucky crit doesn’t mean a dead character and a disappointed player. An NPC can also provide ways for the hero to be healed mid combat or recused if things go wrong. NPCs can also offer a dissenting opinion on things. You don’t have to have this NPC give them the answers (but you can), all they need to do is point out a flaw or possible flaw in your player’s thinking. The last thing about NPCs, is they can raise the stakes. NPCs can be captured or even killed with can create drama and conflict between your character and a villain. The same thing is true a group game, but when character death means starting over and rescuing a capture PC isn’t an option, outcomes are very polarized. Related to this, NPCs give a window into the setting and lore that other player characters might fill. A dwarven merchant can be valuable ally just for the fact they speak dwarvish and know some basic legends