Solo D&D Stuff

While going through old binders of my 40 years of RPG notes, characters and "stuff", I got the urge to run some solo campaigns of my own.  I am still going through that stack of 200 issues of Dragon magazine I got when Anne went out of town last summer.  I still far prefer the simplicity of the D&D to AD&D (Old School) rules.  Starting with 3.0, the endless lists of Feats just hurts my head.  Sure it's fun in a Munchkin game where a character is a stack of cards with funny buffs and penalties, but a D&D 3+ character is a stack of 20-30 things, each with verbose, rules-lawyered rules.  I like the Old School days where, if it's a DEX challenge, you make a DEX check.

I have a medium-sized glassine envelope with a mini character sheet and little slips of paper for the important junk they picked up.  It would still be nice to have a deck of cards with the full spell descriptions, and such things exist, but you only get one of each spell, and I have a folio of a few dozen characters.  In any case, I don't bog myself down with rules and exact count of in-game minutes.  

I find that I like the alternate character classes that would always show up in old Dragon issues.  Even though they each class adds a page or two of clunky bits.  I have two parties of "odds and ends" characters including a Chef, a Scribe, a Smith/Fighter, a Myrikhan (NG paladin), a Jester, and others.  Other characters were the starting characters from classic modules and tournament modules, but now they have evolved and become my own people.  

I have group of 4 orcs who started off in the Caves of Chaos and helped my other guys wipe out the kobolds there, then figured they couldn't go home and wanted to see more of the world anyway.  Some old Dragon article had a set of rules for using the basic humanoids as PCs, and even if it contradicts other rules (like the Book of Humanoids), that's fine since different cultures in different parts of different world could naturally have different rules and limiters.  They are an interesting bunch, currently a Fighter/2, Shaman/2, Witch Doctor/1 and a Thief/2.  That rule set had a table to roll for quirks, and my guys (who already have infravision but wither a bit in daylight) have Keen Smell, Keen Hearing, and one guy has an Iron Stomach (+4 save to ingested poisons).  Yeah, yeah, I guess those all count as Feats or Advantages.  They naturally added odd behaviors to my group, like arguing with each other, being really cautious about traps, really good at ransacking rooms looking for hiding places, and the one guy can smell trogs from 100' away; I think the regular PCs wish they would leave, but they're all misfits who play a part.

I have been running mixed batches of characters in old modules.  They have a knack for sacking the first few rooms then deciding not to go back and do the dangerous levels.  Those bums.  I keep trying to convince them it's worth it, but the holy guy gives away his extra money and the orcs have never had so much gold to waste on things.  Why should they go get their heads smashed if they don't need to?

I don't really care where the modules are actually located in the Multiverse.  My guys are loosely based around the Village of Hommlet (haha, remember THAT place?), and any of those little abandoned keeps or ruins could be off any road 10 or 20 hexes away.  Sure, that place from that module is supposed to be in Greyhawk, but goshdarnit there's one just like it up the road and over the hill.

One thing I get a kick out of is when it's time to look for the loot.  As I read the descriptions of rooms, traps or loot, I give each one a ballpark difficulty and roll d20s.  That trap would be a 16 for the humans, but maybe just a 12 for the orcs.  Then some other feature would be spotted by the myrikhan (NG paladin) on a 15 but nobody else would get more than a chance of 9.  And they often enough fail anyway, and I have to let that hidden pouch or scroll case go undiscovered.  That's the way the cookie crumbles.  In some loot rooms, it may list 5 things, so I roll 5 dice and the group finds number 1,3 and 4, but failed to spot the others.  That's fair.  They pay 100 gp (and more or less a week) per level for training and have a guy who will identify potions for 10 gp each and items for 100 gp each; it helps keep the wealth down. 

Here you can see the tablet with the adventure on the left, then my action journal, the main page of PC stats and the chips and dice.  The full PCs are in the glassine envelopes below the journal.  About those chips, that's the main action area.  This was my team of 5 main PCs (yellow chips) with a spirit dog summoned by a magic whistle (number 5), plus a guy we just rescued (number 7) and the 4 orcs (white chips 11 to 14) who have been helping the past few days, with the last foe (blue chip) being a giant spider-thing.  This started as a big ambush wit 16 spider-people and 3 clerics, but we lured a few of them around dark corners and ambushed them but did finally rush in with the last 10 around that big red die, which was a pillar in a temple.

Among all the combat and action rolls, if someone rolls a roll I call it a fumble and roll a blue d6, on a roll of 1 to 4 they are out of action for that many rounds and I deduct one from the dice each round until they can act again, 5s and 6s are ignored for those.  They also tend to fall back and another team member tries to take over the spot.  The blue 6 means the character has been poisoned, little white dice track bad guy HP.  I also use tiny red dice for things like being affected by a fear spell, which had just happened a few encounters before this one.  It's an odd mix of rules and fudge factors.

My other party is also theoretically centered around Hommlet, so when they find scrolls, interesting weapons, or odd ingredients they can bring those to the Chef, Scribe and Smith, who are semi-retired from adventuring.  I have a whole set of tables for each one outlining how they get XP from the quality and information content of those items.  So the adventurers bring in weird crap, get help analyzing it, and the semi-NPCs get XP for doing what they should have been doing all along.  A Scribe has no place in a dungeon.  Let the big guys in armor find the Things.

At some point, I was going to add a few new buildings to the map of Hommlet, and my 12 PCs and semi-NPCs will have had a significant hand in expanding the classic village.

I also went through old folders and queued up a bunch of my old dungeons and encounters and want to start writing them up, now that things like OSRIC and other OSR core books have bridged the licensing gap so well.  I just have to be careful not to use any of the creatures or items which were not released in any of those licenses.

I have a few short one-off encounters that I could easily put together with core descriptions and drawings but separate stat blocks for OSR, FUDGE/Fate and Risus/etc play.  I even found the first full module I wrote and sent to TSR back in '82.  It's awful, looking back at it now, but it could be fleshed out with its areas far less random with themes, purpose and logic.  And I found my longest solo campaign, which would now qualify as a hex crawl, where two brothers reached F12 and C10 and are building castles side by side which sending out patrols to secure the surrounding lands; it even had pages of little log entries for what was found or built each day.

So, it is quite possible to run classic games solo.  Oddly, I am less likely to cheat a roll at solo D&D than on solo board games or card games.  I had a tournament stock character die a few nights back.  Fair enough, he had his run: he's still in my folder of history, but it's time for the other guys to step up.