LogFAQs > #905202366

Oh, and here's an RPG question for Shadow (and anyone who wants to talk about RPG stuff, honestly):

Hypothetically speaking, if you knew someone who wanted to RP, but for whatever reason you couldn't pull a full group together, and so for the hell of it you decided to run a D&D 5e solo campaign for that player, how would you handle CR?

Obviously, at the most basic level, CR is supposed to represent the average level of a party of four adventurers (so if you have four level 3 adventurers, the ideal CR for them to fight is CR 3), so the easiest answer would be to just divide CR by 4 (so a single level 1 PC would match up best against 1/4 CR creatures). But CR also takes into account more intangible elements that make things more complicated.

For instance, a one-person party is effectively over-specialized and lacking multiple roles (a single Cleric is lacking DPS and tanking, a strong Fighter is lacking dedicated healing and crowd control, etc). They're also far more vulnerable to things like stun lock - in a group, getting paralyzed or stun just reduces the resources the party can bring to bear, but in a solo party, it's pretty much straight-up getting murdered. It also unbalances the usual turn economy dynamic (ie, the enemies get more turns per round than the player does), and reduces the damage types the PC can inflict, thus potentially creating a problem against enemies with resistances.

And that doesn't get into the problem of not having anyone around to drag your corpse to a temple for a rez if/when you die, which can make everything far more permanent when it comes to dying.

So while a CR of 1/4th the PC's level would theoretically be balanced, it might actually still be harder for that lone PC to beat that creature than it would be for a group of four PCs to beat a monster with 4x the CR (or just a group of 4 monsters with that CR).

So how would you handle that? Only set them against monsters with a CR of even less than 1/4th their level? Deliberately steer clear of all monsters with stunning attacks or resistances the PC can't oppose? Give the PC some form of extra healing item or defense that gives them an edge? Just DMPC a full party of other characters who can offset their weaknesses?

I've been pondering the idea and thinking of different ways to work around the problem (mostly as an intellectual exercise - this is the sort of stuff I think about to kill time while doing yardwork or other boring things), and I was kind of curious what sort of ideas you might have about it.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family