[D&D 3.5] Solo game with a brand new player--is this the right game for us?

[Ron Hammack]

Background

I've been roleplaying on and off since 1983, mostly D&D in its various incarnations and mostly (80% of the time, I'd say) GMing. I'm currently without a gaming group, having moved all the way across the country a few months back, and honestly, I haven't been trying very hard to find one due to my long-standing dissatisfaction with the D&D rules and the way most people play it.

Recently, my girlfriend and I were talking about roleplaying--she had the red-box Basic D&D set when she was a kid but never actually played it; her only real roleplaying experience was a single (pretty disastrous sounding) Shadowrun session back in college. During this conversation she expressed a somewhat guarded interest in playing D&D--to paraphrase: "If you decide to look for a group I'd like to try it out, as long as you guys didn't mind having someone at the table who didn't know what they were doing."

I told her that if she wanted, I could run a solo game for her to give her an idea how the rules work and help her decide if she actually liked it or not. Interestingly, she seemed very surprised that it was even possible to play an RPG with just a GM and a single player, but we agreed to give it a shot. A few days later, we found a nearby gaming store and she picked out a set of dice, and a few days after that we sat down to make a character for her.

Character Creation

Character creation was a blast. It took the better part of an evening, and featured a mix of game mechanics, creativity, and occasional side conversations that made it feel almost like a game session itself.

What Went Right

* Kym picked up on the game mechanics very quickly. This didn't come as much to a surprise to me, as she's a scientist and a very logical thinker, but it was nice to only have to explain things once for a change. What was more important to me was that she had the right attitude (in my opinion) toward the rules; I cringed inwardly the first time she said, "that doesn't seem very realistic", but was relieved when she followed up with, "but it makes sense to do it that way in a game."

* She was very enthusiastic about coming up with a background and personality for her character. We'd decided that for our first session I'd just run her through a simplistic dungeon crawl, mostly just to give her a feel for the mechanics. I figured we'd get the rules out of the way first, and work on the roleplaying later. But from the moment she rolled her stats (I gave her the option of rolling or point-buy; she decided rolling would be "more fun") she started thinking aloud about what a character with those stats would be "like", and as she refined her character concept, she started looking through the game mechanics for ways of representing it.

We spend most of the evening brainstorming ideas for her character's background--I say "we", but it was really just her coming up with ideas and me asking a couple of pointed questions to help her refine them.

What Went Wrong

* I wasn't expecting her to be so into the background stuff, so I wasn't at all prepared to help her with it. Specifically, since all I was planning was a basic dungeon crawl, I didn't have any specific setting material prepared. She seemed a little frustrated that there wasn't a setting for her character to fit into--there was no "from" for her character to be from.

Now, this is something that's been frustrating me lately about GMing D&D, the idea that the GM is solely responsible for the setting. When I was younger, I liked that a lot; I liked creating intricate, richly detailed worlds for my players to explore. But as I've gotten older I've begun to realize that not only is there a lot of effort involved in doing that, it's often a lot of wasted effort. I could make a really cool city three kingdoms over, but then I'm either stuck hoping my players end up going there, or I end up railroading them into doing so. I don't like either of those options, so for the last couple years my approach to GMing has been to present the illusion of an intricate, richly detailed world to my players and filling in the actual details one step ahead of them. But even that's not particularly satisfying for me, because it often means I have to find ways of "stalling" the players so I can decide (and stat out--a time-consuming process in D&D) what happens next.

What I wish I'd done during char-gen with her was to have a conversation like this:

"OK, so where is your character from?"
"I don't know, where can I be from?"
"Well, let's make some place up. Pick a name for the country where you were born and tell me one significant fact about it. Then I'll tell you one significant fact about the place and we'll go back and forth that way until we've got enough details that you have a good feel for where your character is from."

I wish we'd had a conversation like that, but instead, since I was still locked into "the GM is in charge of making everything up" mode, I just copped out and said "Well, this is just an example game so it doesn't really matter where you're from."

Our First Session

We finally got around to playing a couple days after char-gen. Compared to sessions I've run in the past, this one was very informal. I'm used to running games sitting around a large table, all the players facing me, with big stacks of books and dice and miniatures surrounding me. This time, we played at a coffee table; Kym sat on the couch while I pulled a big comfy chair up to one end of the table. We decided not to use miniatures (both because we don't own a battlemat and because I didn't think we really needed them for the small-scale encounters I was planning on running), so the only thing on the table were her set of dice, her character sheet, some scratch paper, and a laptop with a copy of the SRD and the adventure notes on it. (I didn't bring my D&D books with me when I moved; part of the reason I ran a D&D game as opposed to another system is that I know it well enough to run it without any books.)

I mention the physical surroundings because they were different from what I'm used to and they made a surprising impact on the way I ran the game. I've always been a really "nervous" GM. I get twitchy during sessions, flip through rulebooks a lot, and often end up getting up and pacing around the room as I run things. (All those players sitting there staring at me, waiting for me to entertain them, it's no wonder I get nervous!) With this session I was far more relaxed physically, which led to me running the session in a more relaxed style--improvising room descriptions rather than checking my notes, etc.

The adventure itself was a pretty cheesy, virtually plotless dungeon crawl (a slightly modified version of the free WotC adventure  "A Dark and Stormy Knight").

What Went Right

* Despite having virtually no previous experience, Kym displayed very healthy roleplaying instincts. Her choices sprang from her character's motivations, rather than just her desire to "beat the dungeon", and what was particularly important to me as a GM, she was willing to tell me what her character's motivations were. A lot of people I've played with in the past have been reluctant to tell the GM what their characters want, probably because they're afraid that it'll make it easier for the GM to screw them out of it. It was very refreshing to run a game for a player who wasn't suffering from "post-killer-DM-syndrome" for a change.

* She asked very good questions. Since this was a learning experience, I'd stressed the importance of asking questions at any time. But while I was expecting more rule-related questions, the things she asked gave me a lot of insight into her (newly-forming) gaming style. The one that really stuck in my mind was, "OK, so I just took 3 hit points of damage; what does that look like?" This indicated to me that while she understood the need for abstraction in the rules, she still wanted more specific descriptions on top of that--this is something I'd like to encourage in her, as a lot of the players I've had in the past were more interested in the numbers than in what those numbers were supposed to represent.

What Went Wrong

* The adventure sucked. Or, more accurately, her first character was way more interesting than I'd expected him to be, and it seemed a shame that his first adventure was just a hole in the ground with some monsters in it. I'd picked it before she made the character, because it seemed like a good way of getting through a few combat encounters in an evening and giving her a taste of the rules, but after seeing the character came up with, I should have come up with something better for him to do.

* This is the big one for me: Kym seems to have picked up on the "the DM is the boss" attitude of D&D very strongly. There was a moment where her character was fighting a couple of goblins in a narrow hallway. We were interrupted briefly (the cats were knocking stuff over in the kitchen) and when I came back and sat down I said "OK, so you were charging down the hallway and swinging your sword at the goblin?" She replied, "Not swinging, thrusting (and here she physically pantomimed a sword-thrust), there's not much room to swing a sword here." I thought that was cool, but she immediately got this "ooh, I shouldn't contradict the DM" look on her face.

I didn't think much of it at the time, but looking back on it, it really bothers me. I'm sick to death of games where players feel like they need the DM's "permission" to do something as simple as narrating their characters' attacks; I don't want to be responsible for turning Kym into one of those players.

The Point of All This

She had fun. I had fun (despite my misgivings later). We're both interested in continuing roleplaying together, most likely just the two of us (we don't know any other gamers in the area, and she has kind of an erratic schedule anyway). But I don't know if D&D is really the right system for us. I don't have enough experience with other systems (just about everything I've played over the past two decades has been either D&D or "D&D in space", "D&D with moody vampires", etc.) to be able to say "this system would suit us better."

I'm looking for a game that allows and encourages active creative input on the part of players, rather than just turning into yet another game of "guess what the DM wants." I just don't know if I should try to adjust my GMing style in order to get this out of D&D, or if I'd be better off looking for another system.

And either way, where do I start?

(For anyone reading this far: thanks! I didn't intend for this post to be so long-winded.)

[xjermx]

That sounds like a pretty awesome experience.  I'm glad that it seemed to work well for both of you.

I'd like to volunteer that Shadow of Yesterday would be a fine answer in my opinion, or Donjon for that matter.  I mention these two for a few reasons.  They are somewhat D&D like:  You don't have to reinvent any wheels in order to kill nasty orcs with swords in either system.  They both allow for more easy creativity:  In Shadow, the system is conflict-resolution, and so in practice, a player and GM can go back and forth in setting stakes for the conflict, giving the player a great deal of say in how it works out.  And Donjon because, well, if the player gets successes, they get to narrate facts.

Whatever the case, good luck.  Bottom line is that you guys continue to enjoy yourselves with the gaming!

[Ron Hammack]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've glanced over both of those systems a bit in the past; I think I'll give them each a closer look.

Out of curiosity, how well do either of those systems lend themselves to one-on-one rather than group play?

[xenopulse]

Honestly, that's exactly the type of dynamic my wife and I developed Beast Hunters for.  It is, at its core, a two-player game that gives a lot of control to the player and focuses on the creativity of narration in conflicts.  I'm working on a demo version, so if you're interested, you can check our web site (see sig) and see when it shows up (or send me an email and I'll let you know).

I tried doing it with D&D, both with my wife and my kids, and I just couldn't get it to work that way. Maybe someone else had better luck in that regard.

Also, let me second that The Shadow of Yesterday is a wonderful game and might well suit your purposes.

[xjermx]

I watched "Chronicles of Riddick" (again) last night on DVD.

I mention that tangential detail for one reason:   while watching it, I kept thinking about how the only system that I knew that would lend itself to such play was Shadow of Yesterday.

Now, I'm not saying that your game is, or needs to be anything like Riddick, but what I am trying to say is that you can set some expectations for tone and such, and that TSoY can make it pop.  Everything else that I've played in the past as one-on-one play has seemed somewhat lacking, from a system perspective.

If you haven't seen it - you might also check out Capes.  I was introduced to a "lite" version of it some time ago, and it has some excellent elements, though I'm not certain whether its a viable two person game or not.

Xenopulse - I'll have to check out Beast Hunters!

[Andrew Cooper]

Hey Ron!

I'm glad you and your girlfriend had fun.  I've always liked playing with my wife but am a little hard on myself in my mental after action reviews just like you.  I mean, you want her to like it and every little thing you didn't do quite right just sticks out in your head afterwards.  My advice, don't sweat it.  If she's brand new to the game one session isn't likely to establish any habits that are too bad unless it was a really dysfunctional session.  Yoiu sound like you did okay to me.

As to different games you might try solo with the significant other...

Don't try Capes with just 2 people.  If you find another person that wants to play, definitely give Capes a spin.  It's a great game but the dynamic of the mechanics just doesn't work well with only 2 people.

The Shadow of Yesterday is a good choice.  It's flexible and still very familiar feeling to experienced DM's.  It gives more power than traditional games to the players so some of the stuff you said you didn't like would end up being non-issues in TSoY.

I'll throw out Trollbabe as an option.  It's a great 2 player game.  In fact, it almost seems designed for that kind of play.  I admit that the name trollbabe and the whole concept is a little cheesy but in practice it is a really cool cheesy.

FATE is a nice free game and a good choice too.  Once again, it has a familiar feel.  Also, NPC's are stupid simple to stat up in FATE so your style of staying just a little ahead of your players is very easy to pull off in FATE.

If you want a really, really simple system, check out The Pool.  You can make a character in about 5 minutes and play in not much more time than that.

Hope you and your girlfriend keep it up and have a good time.  Where did you move, by the way?  Not being nosy, it's just that there are people on this forum from all over and if you are looking for a group you might find a connection if people know where you live.

[Caesar_X]

This is a nice thread, I'm glad you had fun introducing your girlfriend to a new game.

I'm sick to death of games where players feel like they need the DM's "permission" to do something as simple as narrating their characters' attacks; I don't want to be responsible for turning Kym into one of those players.

You know, I wouldn't trip over that.  I recently ran Cat for a group of complete non-gamers, and there were a few hesitations.  But it's easy for you and I to push that off on years of GM-fiat.  I think that with non-gamers it's more a matter of not wanting to "break" the rules.  People are used to playing games with very clear rules and the table will punish those who don't follow them.  So getting permission to narrate something cool can be very empowering for a new player, and it sounds like Kym experienced this several times.

She replied, "Not swinging, thrusting (and here she physically pantomimed a sword-thrust), there's not much room to swing a sword here."

Dude, she is learning how to roleplay!  How cool is that??

[BabbageCliologic]

I'm looking for a game that allows and encourages active creative input on the part of players, rather than just turning into yet another game of "guess what the DM wants." I just don't know if I should try to adjust my GMing style in order to get this out of D&D, or if I'd be better off looking for another system.

And either way, where do I start?

Great post. I really liked how you listed what went well and what went no-so-well.

As for a game that encourages active creative input, there are several that have system-specific ways to do this (and those were mentioned above).

However, you could take it totally out of the system-issue and just state "Hey, I want a creative game. How about this, we use tokens to change stuff about the game as it goes. I'll modify any game rules on the fly and if we don't like the rule change, we'll think of something else. Here's your 5 tokens and I'll take 5. If you play a token and what you want to do is REALLY cool in my opinion, I'll give you a token back. You can also use the token to reduce/max damage or auto-hit/auto-miss for your PC/an NPC. How's that sound?" Then, reward her creativity EVEN IF YOU DON'T AGREE with it, to get her to be creative. Not too much, but also not stingy, either.

You can then play ANY system and just modify the rules as necessary. This is sort of a mix of the Bennie system from Savage Worlds (my recent game experience) and some other stuff that I read online.

Whaddy think?

/BC

[Nev the Deranged]

There's always Universalis, for a game that distributes both the power and responsibility as equally as is possible, yet still allows for different levels of experience and comfort with gaming to contribute equally. It sounds like Kym has plenty of imagination, and a good sense of the, for lack of a better term, Shared Imaginary Space. No reason you can't unleash her full creative potential with a system that makes it easy to add, change, and refine both the setting and the rules on the fly.

Hero's Banner is a great one-on-one game, if you want something a little more structured. Especially if either or both of you have some more literary background and would enjoy the both the setting (which is partially defined but leaves plenty of room for customization) and the mechanics, which really push the roleplaying and drama aspects more than the "swing at the goblin. now the goblin swings at you. keep fighting or run away?" kind of thing that dungeon crawls tend to turn into.

Your posts are great at pointing out what's important to both of you in this process, which is cool. Keep us informed on your and Kym's continuing adventures in gaming!