Playing D&D solo

Am I a loser with no friends? Yes.

Do I spend many a night down in my mom’s basement, crying over an open copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and a filled out character sheet? Also yes.

Luckily, I have devised a band aid for the gaping wound of my psyche: solo D&D! And amazingly the 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide has tables that can easily be repurposed for solo play!

Originally I think the DMG added in a plethora of tables to allow DM’s to “quick build” their universes. Everything from town populations to NPC attitudes has a relevant table. They also have tables for the results of player actions, and other things you might not immediately think of when designing your campaign, which would help flesh out details for your players.

But that’s why all this can be repurposed to play an entire campaign “blind”!  Randomly rolling on those tables to determine the outcome of your characters’ actions, PCs and NPCs alike, and the settings and events of the world. The DMG also contains and appendix for “random dungeon generation”, which can be repurposed to actually play a dungeon room by room, randomly creating it after every pass of the door.

I plan on starting with an empty grid for my dungeon map, and as I go through the doorways, to roll to see what kind of room I enter, and then filling out the map by placing in the room I enter. Luckily monsters can all be filled out by CR from the Monster Manual lists. Combat will have to be done either by randomly rolling for targeting and actions, or by playing both sides of the table somehow. In the end I hope to have a large filled out map of nonsensical dungeon rooms strung together, and a few characters who made it through it all.

But that’s the easy part, what about playing a whole campaign this way? Randomly rolling for towns, encounters, NPCs met, and NPC interactions?

More play testing is needed. And next time I’m crying in my mom’s basement, clutching my copy of Storm King’s Thunder that never got read, I might do exactly that.  Fortuitously, the campaign book could serve as the adventure guide, and I would only have to roll for success or failure results, or PC decisions.