(Andrew Lang, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
OD&D Solo Play 01 - A Dance With Centipedes
This is a written log of a D&D session. However, the catch is that there was only one player during that session — me. Solo Roleplaying is such an interesting facet of the hobby, but it can be daunting to understand. However, one of the best ways to wrap your head around something is by example, and I hope that this can serve as a great example of how I run solo games. We can talk theory all day, but seeing something play out can really help you to truly grasp it. I hope that this and potential following posts will serve to help you understand the process of solo play and encourage you to give it a try, because it is incredibly rewarding (Or, at the very least, an entertaining read).
If you want to learn the nitty-gritty how and why of Solo D&D, I’ve written about it here. The system is a significantly house-ruled version of WhiteBox FMAG — a fantastic rewrite of Original D&D from 1974. I plan to discuss the system in a later post, but for now, the most impactful rule is the “stone” weight system from Delta’s DnD Hotspot, which I detail here.
Additionally, I’ve injected some italicized notes among the prose to help understand my process better.
Without any further ado, let’s dive in.
The party consists of:
Dain — Fighter 1; 7 Hp
Lisbeth — Elf 1; 7 Hp
I chose to start the characters at max health from the beginning. It’s simply for the sake of getting the ball rolling, and not having the characters die immediately. Almost everything about the characters was randomized — Stats, Names, Sex, Equipment and background(i.e. — secondary skill set). All I did was pick the classes to match stats. Having your own personal influence taken away at the start of the game can keep new games fresh.
Handing a lit torch to his partner, Dain walks down the stairs. The pair glance around at the stonework of the ruins.
“That bizarre hooded man in the tavern was right! This place is spectacular.” Lisbeth stares in wonder at the pair’s surroundings. “To think that this place is mere miles away from town.”
I didn’t choose to have two characters for any particular reason. But it shouldn’t stop you from playing however many characters you want. The beauty of a lighter rules system like Whitebox FMAG, is that there isn’t much to manage per character, so you can easily play four or five characters at once.
“Let’s keep focus. We don’t even know if there’s anything worthwhile here.” Lisbeth shrugs, while Dain presses onward.
The party proceeds through the corridor and sees two breaks in the stone walls — a 10' gap to the North, leading to a larger room, as well as a wooden door.
“What do you think? Should we open it?” Lisbeth stares at Dain questioningly.
“I see no reason not to.”
For all of the dungeon generation, I used Appendix A of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, which I talk about in the Solo Guide. For me, it gives more desirable dungeon shapes than other systems — more rooms, with fewer long corridors.
They throw open the door, which leads into a small room. Debris lines the stone floors. Lisbeth searches the room while Dain picks through the debris, finding a small pouch.
Lisbeth hears a skittering sound from Dain’s direction. She spins to see a 2' long centipede perched above his head.
The centipede drops, biting deeply into Dain’s exposed arm. Lisbeth watches in horror as Dain knees give out, and he collapses on the floor. His claymore rattles on the ground.
Lisbeth draws her dagger from her belt, and rushes to his side. The centipede skitters towards her as she impales it with her blade. 30 Xp.
Whitebox awards Xp for killing creatures by default, as opposed to only Xp for money recovered (more on this later). I think that makes things more fun, even though I prefer the latter with actual groups.
Lisbeth turns to Dain, checking his pulse, for signs of life. Alive. A few minutes pass. Wordlessly, Dain lifts his arm, holding up the pouch he found, and smiles. 200 Gold Pieces. Lis smiles back.
He barely made his save vs. death. It would have been incredibly anti-climactic for Dain to die on the second turn of the game.
After briefly resting and treating the wound, Dain and Lisbeth leave the small room and continue through the dungeon.
The opening to the north leads to a large room. The area is much more vast than the meager torchlight can reveal. The party follows the western wall, before finding a door.
Lisbeth blocks Dain from opening the door with her arm. “Hang on.” She cups her ear to her hand and listens. She hears nothing. Deciding to open the door a crack, they find a 30' x 30' room. It’s devoid of anything noteworthy.
“Seems like we’re in the clear.” Lis turns towards Dain. “We can’t risk our lives like you just did. From now on, we need to be incredibly careful.” Dain grumbles at the lecture, but concurs.
They notice the western edge of the room has two doors in each corner, with a 10' space between them. Dain and Lis each listen at one.
Ruling Listening-At-Doors was frustrating. It comes down to mitigating the outside knowledge I had from the generator. I ended up rolling to listen, then rolling the contents of the room. If the listen roll and the contents matched, great. If not, I would roll a 3-in-6 of the listen influencing it. Heard a monster, but there was none originally? 3-in-6: there is now, and vice versa. It’s not a great system, but it works. This is ignored with undead, and other silent creatures.
Hearing nothing at his door, Dain looks over to see Lis motioning to him. He approaches, and gives her a questioning look.
“I hear voices,” Lis whispers. “Two men are arguing.”
“What do you want to do?”
“We can’t afford to risk an even fight” Lisbeth checks her backpack, coming up empty. “Do you have anything we could wedge the door shut with?”
Dain does the same, similarly resulting in nothing. “I have a shovel?”
Lis shakes her head. “We’ll have to leave it. It’ll probably be fine, but I would have liked to be sure.”
I was very much kicking myself for forgetting to buy pitons when I made the characters. I decided that while they were near the room with the voices, a wandering monster roll would mean that the party would encounter the two men. Dain’s door opens to a dimly lit passageway. He leads the way down the corridor, while Lis follows behind with the torch.
They make their way through the passage, spotting a door at the edge of the torchlight.
“ ‘ello, sunshine.” Lisbeth feels a blade pressed against her back.
Bingo.
Dain whips around, brandishing his claymore. He sees two gruff-looking men behind him. One holding a knife to Lisbeth’s back, another further back, training an arrow on Dain.
“Empty your pockets, both of you.”
Dain makes theatrical gestures of turning out his entire backpack, showing his lack of legal tender. “Why do you think we’re here at all? We’re no nobles.”
Lis does the same as Dain, but pulls out the pouch from before. “Here. Take it. Just leave us alone.”
“Now, that’s more like it.” The first man takes his knife away from Lis and begins walking. He gestures to his companion. “C’mon, let’s go.” They shove Lis to her knees before walking away.
Dain looks at Lisbeth sadly. Lis averts his gaze with a sullen expression. “I did what I had to…” She turns away and begins to pick up her stuff from the floor. “But, it’s not my fault they forgot to check my boot.” Facing Dain, she pulls out a second pouch with a grin.
Dain raises an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“I put the pouch with coins in my boot. To be honest, I was afraid it would fall out of my bag, but it was convenient, no?”
“What did you just give them, then?”
“The rest of my pocket change from from before we came here. It was something like 50 gold.” Lis shifts to look into the darkness in the direction the bandits left.
The party makes it to the door, ensuring they listen. Neither of them hear anything, so they proceed into the room, which looks like a medium-sized barracks. The party stops to rest for a few minutes. It’s been almost an hour since they entered the dungeon.
“We need to consider getting out of here.” Lis rubs her shoulder and watches the door. “After that encounter, I feel like we’re pushing our luck every minute we spend here.”
“I agree. I’m not feeling great myself, and I wish we were more prepared for this endeavor.”
“I think what we really need are more bodies. We could’ve taken those bandits easily if we had a second or third person.” Lisbeth fidgets with her dagger.
“That’s a problem for later.” Dain eyes the bags of supplies. “What we need now is to get out of here.”
It was around here that I started to get into a rhythm. It’s a nice feeling when it happens, but it can be difficult to achieve. I noticed how once I became familiar with the results of tables specifically (A 13 means monsters in the room on this chart; an 8 means there’s a door directly ahead; etc), the speed of the game increased, perhaps unsurprisingly.
The party continues through a passage to the northeast, which leads to a door. Lisbeth takes a moment to listen at the door. Hearing nothing, she opens it to let Dain in.
“Lisbeth…” Dain points at two moving figures as Lis walks into the room. At the edge of the torchlight, two giant centipedes spring into view.
The party is prepared this time. Lisbeth and Dain each take one of the centipedes.
Chopping one centipede in half with a mighty blow, Dain wheels around to try and slice the other, but swings too early and misses.
Lisbeth springs to the unsundered centipede, dagger drawn. She stabs it before it can move. In a burst of rage, she stabs it repeatedly, chopping its corpse up into pieces. 60 Xp
What a difference winning the initiative makes.
The pair take a minute to recuperate after the battle. Lisbeth wipes the invertebrate guts off her dagger, while Dain searches the room. He notices two small rusted iron cases overturned in the corner. He and Lisbeth each open one with glee.
By the time Lisbeth hears the clicking sound, it’s too late.
A wire breaks upon the chest being opened, and a blade slices across her hand, leaving a nasty gash. Lisbeth curses profusely in Elvish.
Once Lisbeth recovers from the injury, in the chests, they find her case contains loose gold pieces. A lot of them — totaling to 1138. The other case contains just one thing. A fist-sized ruby, undoubtedly worth well over 1000 Gp.
The pair is in agreement: It’s time to get out.
Lisbeth takes the ruby, and Dain takes the box, Lis’ hand free to hold the torch. A door on the east wall leads out of the room. Dain throws it open to find they’ve gone in a loop, and are back in the main room from before — only about 20' away from the door the entered before. The pair scrambles as quick as possible to the other end of the room, Lis runs a few feet ahead of Dain, due to carrying less equipment.
They get to the middle of the room, when they hear a sound. A deep, throaty howl. Lisbeth stops in her tracks and whips around. Dain almost crashes into her and stares out past the torchlight. “Oh, Gods…”
A hulking humanoid figure appears, stalking into sight. Its eyes and claws glint in the torchlight. Dain lets out a breath as the werewolf steps close to Lisbeth.
“You dare tread on my ground, human?” The werewolf turns towards Lisbeth. “And you, of the elder race, how bold of you to face me…”
“Bah. I don’t have time for this. Begone, both of you.” He leans over to Dain’s face. “If I ever see you again, you’re dead. That goes double for the Elf.”
Dain and Lisbeth immediately scurry the rest of the way to the stairs, and begin the trek back to town.
Notes
There you have it. I hope this helped to encourage you to try playing solo, helped to understand some of the choices one can make, or was at least entertaining. It was interesting for me to do the write-up, too. You get to see pretty much every stupid choice I made play out in slow motion. Mainly that I should have gleaned as much information as I could in the rooms I entered, instead of just assuming things were safe.
It was also pretty fascinating how little creative liberties I was forced to take with the write-up. Besides the dialogue, all of the events went exactly as they played out at the “table.” Even the dialogue is pretty representative of my own thoughts at different points, just with a bit extra flair and characterization.
I have three parting ideas for you.
One: If you do end up doing this, taking notes is a great idea. It helps when you play in turns to track torchlight and whatnot, as well as serving as a record of your adventure.
Two: I didn’t need to use the oracle die that I detail in the intro article at all. All I did was run through the dungeon using the tables available — the dungeon generator, dungeon stocking table, and monster encounters. You really don’t need to stress this aspect.
Three: This write up isn’t exactly representative of the notes and experience. I want to dissuade any of the Matt Mercer effect this might give: Your games will be a lot of rolling on tables and reacting, and not much of the theatrics outlined here.
Have a wonderful New Years, everyone.
This blog is, and always will be, 100% human generated.