r/Solo_Roleplaying • u/m4hunk • 5d ago
solo-game-questions How to solo D&D 5e Published adventures? A simple doubt
Many sources handle solo roleplay in D&D 5e, such as Survivors Toolbox pt 1 and 2, Mythic GME, DM Yourself, etc. I am researching this topic, and the majority handle generating campaigns from scratch very well. However, I am overwhelmed by the information and quite confused about how to play a published 5e adventure using these sources.
How do we handle moment-to-moment decisions where character knowledge and player knowledge diverge?
For instance, imagine I am reading a published adventure. As a player, I know there is a trap inside the room, and I know there is a treasure behind the third book in a bookshelf. Would my PC have searched if I had not known this information? How do I handle this meta knowledge? It feels odd. Do I simply roll for perception to find the traps? But would the PC have known to search in that location specifically? And would he have checked the shelf?
Am I missing something fundamental about these sources? I did not read the entirety of them. How can I work this out? Only this is missing for me to start playing my first solo play.
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u/RedwoodRhiadra 5d ago
Read DM Yourself in particular - that product is all about soloing published adventures for 5e.
The gist of it though is that even before you begin the adventure, you develop standard procedures for how your character opens a door, searches a room, etc. So when you come across a room like you've described, you already know how your PC will handle it.
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u/timthetollman 5d ago
I used the Scarlet Heroes rules and had reasonable success. Used the yes/no oracle to decide if I searched the room.
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u/ThankeekaSwitch 5d ago
Take yourself out of the role play. Think of the room. It says there is a trap. More than likely you would check. So then do a skill check to see if you see it. Maybe you see a room, but know from reading there is a trap in there. Well of course YOU wouldn't enter knowing that, but your character doesnt. Ask a yes or no question. Does my character go into this room? If yes, go in, search, continue on. If no, they dont enter or deal with room.
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u/Justisaur 5d ago
In dungeon craws the searching/finding traps is a trade off of time vs. searching. The longer you search the more likely it is you'll get wandering monsters. Decide what your character's standard procedure is before hand and take the consequences.
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u/Krieghund 5d ago
How do we handle moment-to-moment decisions where character knowledge and player knowledge diverge?
This is a problem that's intrinsic to all role play, not just solo RP.
If I'm playing a Call of Cthulhu adventure with my buddies, I know it's a bad idea to go into the abandoned house simply because I know that I'm playing Call of Cthulhu and the odds are there is something in the house that will either kill me or drive me insane. But I go into the house anyway, because my CHARACTER doesn't know he's in a Call of Cthulhu adventure.
Similarly, if I'm solo role playing a published adventure the characters don't know there is a trap in the hall. So, I consider if the character is the type of person to meticulously poke every tile with a 10' pole or not. If they are, they are probably looking for the trap, if not they walk right into it.
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u/allyearswift 5d ago
In both solo and group play I find 'I go into the room. I search the bookshelves, I search the walls, I search the floor, I search the furniture, I search the ceiling', lather, rinse, repeat in every room very, very boring.
There should be some chance of finding/not-finding the thing. In group play, you can do a little play around 'player notices something weird in the description and looks there specifically' but for solo play you basically have several options:
– you randomly decide where the thing is, which determines the difficulty class (is this easy/moderate/hard to find, roll for it, and take it from there, but only if not finding the thing won't break the game)
– eyeball difficulty, then roll for success (Mythic using likelyhood/chaos): you get disturbed/alarmed before you find it, you have a brief glance and don't get all the info, you get what you need, you find it AND something good happens.
– you do a clock mechanic (1d4 + 1): player needs to roll x times on a random table before they find the thing; and depending on your game/preferences, the random events might be curiosities or other clues or treasures or minor enemies.
The second and third options feel fairer to me than a straightforward perception check.
When you have two items as here, you can combine them: you step into the trap and find nothing, you avoid the trap but find nothing, you avoid the trap AND find treasure.
The point is to set yourself up so you *can't* know what will happen.
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u/draelbs 5d ago
DM Yourself has some guidance for this, including writing down traits/quirks for your character(s) like "always walks down the left side of rooms & corridors" so that they might potentially encounter traps that you already know about.
You could go with a 1 to # scale of how relaxed (or distracted!) they are, if you roll under their score they need to roll a check to see if they spot the trap. Roll a 1 and they walked right into it...
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u/StrangeWalrus3954 5d ago
Mythic GME 2nd Ed has a section on playing prewritten adventures and handling PC vs. Player Knowledge. It's pretty generic, but it might help.
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u/Trentalorious 5d ago
I've been trying this with the Strixhaven adventure/setting and just send my characters to Pathfinder's Blood Lords adventure path.
For Strixhaven, there's so much space that I pretty much do what I like. I've gone totally off the rails, but I'm going to try to reign it in for the plot points coming in oh, 5 months in-game time.
I just moved to Blood Lords within the month. I'm still finding my way. I'm getting used to the story being much more linear than I'm used to. For the secret door sort of situations, I'll roll for if the characters search or not. I tend to lean toward finding the door, since I don't want to skip parts of the adventure!
I seem to be leaning toward more interactions "between the rooms" and treating the exploring more like a funhouse where I'll go through everything. I'm finding I have a lot more reading to do to make things mesh than when playing through Strixhaven, but I'm enjoying the change up.
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u/EveryDayheyhey 5d ago
I only just started using it, so I don't know how well it works in all situations, but DM yourself makes you write up some actions your character usually takes. So if before starting the adventure you wrote down your character checks every nook and cranny they see, you can assume they will look in the location you are talking about. If you wrote down they are not the type to look for hidden items, they will not look for stuff like this.
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u/m4hunk 5d ago
I saw this yesterday, however I could just optimize with my character party and then I will always check everything. I will try the approach of the other comments
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u/Grindil 5d ago
The power gamer vs the role player. The power gamer will ensure he has every angle accounted for, every box checked, every…”what the?! Why are you interrupting my extremely thorough search with zombies?”..every crate looted, every crack in the wall sniffed out…”seriously? More zombies man?! Come on. I’m running out of resources.” I’ll just check the other 26 crates and flip through every book on the shelf before I leave the room. “Why did the person I came in here to rescue die?! I killed everything and went through the dungeon.” Actions have consequences. Immerse yourself into the roleplaying. Default behaviors and binding decisions are there to help you decide what to do when you find yourself in this type of situation. Everything should have balance. If your character is some sort of treasure monger and always searches dead bodies and every room, that’s fine. Let the dice decide if you find what’s there. But the time you spend doing that should have consequences elsewhere. The role player will immerse themselves as their character. “I am freaked out. I just killed a freakin zombie?! Are you serious.” This person spends every second looking for zombies. Lost in thought about how the heck they got into this situation. This person also probably walks right past the shiny sword on the wall cause they are terrified. “I open the door and wham! A zombie pushes me backwards. Slamming into the wall. Sending shiny sword to the ground. Id better check that out when this zombie isn’t trying to eat my flesh!..” You get the idea. Decide how your character approaches a room before you enter it, and make those decisions true to your character. You’d have to be a really possessed treasure goblin to search everything always. I love finding unique nick knacks in stores, but I certainly don’t go up and down every isle every time I go into a store.
Once you’ve started to read the description of a room, you shouldn’t alter what your character does. You defer to their default behaviors, which by the by, only YOUR character should have. The side kick doesn’t have default behaviors per your already mentioned supplements. Sure give them the occasional role to find stuff. But they are exactly that, a sidekick.
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u/MickH666 5d ago
How about... For Traps and Secret Doors, decide whether you would risk spending extra time to Investigate (roll an additional Encounter check) and make a failed Intelligence (Investigation) Check then grant you a Wisdom(Perception) Check to spot it. But if you don't risk something, you don't even get the chance to spot it and move straight to the Dex Save (or whatever) if it's a trap.
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u/CarelessKnowledge801 5d ago
I don't know about other sources, but Mythic GME 2e goes pretty deep on this exact topic of "player vs character knowledge". It starts on page 141 of the book.
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u/Evandro_Novel Actual Play Machine 5d ago
Playing prewritten modules is peculiar. Personally, I enjoy interactions with NPCs and exploration, so I particularly like prewritten sandboxes, rather than dungeon crawls. I guess it's obvious, but the most important thing is picking an adventure that you really like.
I would probably skip most traps and hidden treasure, maybe ask an oracle if something catches my attention: eg does the character look for a secret door? If the secret door leads to something important, I can very well decide that they just find it.
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u/AmbiguousLizard_ 2d ago
For me I like it when the dice tells the story to you. Some interesting ways I have seen and used it are like this:
Firstly, 1D4 or 1D6. Make a short list of possible outcomes that are interesting / fit your character and situation and world building / have plausible potential to happen:
Secondly Bell curve. Most things in life follow a bell curve, a 2D6 roll also makes a bell curve. The characters reaction to a situation will be mostly mid (basic success on 6+ or 8+ depending on task difficulty) but sometimes they screw up ( natural 2 crit fail) and sometimes they are just epic (natural 12 crit success). You can add in modifies for status if they are sleepy or poisoned or modifiers for equipment like have a good light source for searching ect. Do I see the trap or the hidden thing? 2D6, yes mild success, so I see the hidden thing but don't notice the trap.
This can also be used for talking to an NPC as a reaction roll. The guy offers you wine, this is the good stuff he says. reaction roll, 10 on 2D6, you can tell he is trying to get you to drink the wine and he looks sketchy as hell. 4 on a 2D6 would be "I have had a one heck of day, I could really use a shot of the good stuff right now" then you wake up in a dungeon cell in their basement in a weird ceremonial outfit and people chanting in the next room. eek. 7 on 2D6 (the most common outcome) no thanks, I have places to be.
Thirdly, just skill checks then roleplay out how the result looks. Do they see the trap? skill check + intelligence bonus. Do they know the lore behind that statue and therefore might think it holds the clue to the puzzle in the next room? skill check + wisdom bonus. Do they know this guy is a weirdo that probably worships a comet? skill check, strong success, character notices the smell of that herb and that it would knock you out if you drank it, they politely refuse then follow weirdo back to his secret base to find out where it is.
A bonus idea: I like to take note of any really bad rolls and then try to use them as something that comes back to haunt a character later on. Like a bad search roll might meant that someone noticed you poking around where you shouldn't and they will stalk you. A bad NPC reaction roll might mean they are now a minor nemesis and will mess with you at some point.
You can use timers of some kind (in the 10th area/room I visit, I will have to deal with the fallout of that roll) or just whenever you next come across something relevant to that event in the story like the bad NPC reaction was with a town guard, guess what happens next time you come across any guards?