EN World sat down with D&D senior designer James Wyatt to find out more about the new solo adventures found in Dragon Delves. Set for release in July, Dragon Delves is a new D&D adventure anthology by Wizards of the Coast with each adventure focused on dragons. When Wizards released the table of contents earlier this week, three adventures in the book (all involving metallic dragons) were flagged as suitable for solo players. To find out exactly how D&D's design team envisions solo play with D&D, EN World spoke with D&D designer James Wyatt about these new adventures and the concept of solo play in D&D.
EN World: So, I was a little bit surprised to see, when the table of contents was revealed, that there's three adventures that are flagged as solo adventures. By solo adventures, do you mean one player and a dm, or is this a true solo tabletop RPG experience?
James Wyatt: It is one player and a DM.
So, that is a relatively new concept for Wizards of the Coast. I know the Essentials Kit used the sidekick rules, but we haven't seen very many other products geared towards solo adventures. So why did the team decide to point out that there were adventures in this book that could be played with one player and a DM?
Wyatt: One of the guiding principles of this book is flexibility. We wanted it to fill a variety of holes that come up in a typical gaming group's experience. So there's the hole of the DM couldn't show up this week, and so a different player is going to grab this book off the shelf and run with a minimum of preparation and be ready to go quickly. And the extreme example of that is, "Gosh, four players couldn't make it tonight. It's just you and me. What are we going to do? We could play cribbage, but wouldn't it be more fun to play D&D like we planned?"
These three adventures can be run with a whole group just fine. But they've each got a special set of guidelines to help a solo player stay alive and to make the adventure as fun and fulfilling for one player as it is for four or five.
So what are some of those guidelines?
It's actually pretty straightforward. There's a little supernatural gift, the Boon of the Lone Hero or something like that, that gives you a significant buffer of temporary hit points so that you can survive the attacks of monsters coming at you. And we give the solo player inspiration. I think it's at the end of every long rest you take during the adventures, you get Heroic Inspiration so that you are just a little bit more on your toes and capable.
But we singled out these three adventures because they're ones that are less combat driven, have a lot of opportunity for that one player to interact with NPCs in the environment, and hopefully be a rich storytelling experience for those two players.
So we haven't seen much in terms of D&D trying to officially support one player and one DM play. Is this going to be a trend that we're going to see with other books or is this something that's just unique to Dragon Delves? Will we see more support for the style of play in future products? Is this a guiding principle that the design team intends to follow moving forward?
Wyatt: So the guiding principle that we want to follow is making sure that our books are as useful to as many players as possible and can be used flexibly in a variety of ways.
We'll see how Dragon Delves goes, how people respond to it. But I have to imagine that if we do an adventure anthology like this in the future, we'll be looking at the same sort of parameters of wanting to make sure that we are accounting for a variety of use cases, including a solo player.
One of the guiding principles for D&D in terms of combat and encounter builds is that it's built around four players and balanced around that. If you start throwing more than four players, it quickly becomes weighted towards the player side. And if you have less, it becomes weighted towards the opposing forces. Is there any internal math that you had to shift around for some of these adventures? You mentioned that these adventures are more roleplay heavy, but there does seem to be some combat encounters. So was there any tweaks that you made to the combat encounters, beyond really buffing up the player to make sure that they can take a couple of extra hits?
Wyatt: It is really mostly on the player side. The encounters should be manageable for that solo player. The math is not fresh in my head right now, but they are tweaked a little bit so that they should be more manageable.
Getting into the specifics of the adventures - can you tell us a little bit about what these solo adventures will entail?
Wyatt: So they really run the gamut, as do all the adventures in the book. The first one that we mark as suitable for a solo player is the Gold Dragon wyrmling encounter, it is very much a sort of fairytale story with a dark and sinister side to it. So that adventure features talking to townsfolk and following clues and venturing into the forest like Hansel and Gretel, and finding the evil hags' cottage made out of gingerbread and navigating that.
The second adventure involves traveling to a monastery. Again, there's a lot of interaction with the monks who inhabit that monastery and navigating a really tricky political situation that the dragon is involved in. That's the bronze dragon adventure.
The last one is the Copper Dragon adventure, which involves finding a lost verse of the Awakening song that is a reference back to Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. One of the adventures in that book was set in the same Godsbreath land and the same author (Erin Roberts) wrote the adventure. So there's a nice little tie back to Radiant Citadel there. And again, that's going in and interacting with a lot of NPCs, trying to figure out the clues to where this verse might be located, and then going to find it and interacting with the dragon in whose hoard that verse is stored.
Now you mentioned that every adventure is written by a different writer. Were these tapped as solo adventures from the start, or was this something that you noticed that these stories tended to fit within a general mold of more roleplay heavy and might be more suitable for solo play?
Wyatt: This book had a complicated life cycle, so they weren't planned that way from the start.We actually shelved this book for a little while, and then when we came back to it we said, "Okay, what do we have? What are we steering this book toward?" And that's really where the vision of trying to fill a variety of gaps in play experience was formed. And so these three were identified as particularly suitable for that mission of making adventures playable for a single player.
Any tips that you want to give the DM or the player when trying to play in one of these types of solo adventures?
Wyatt: I would say don't try to do it with a person you don't really enjoy talking to. I have played a lot of one-on-one D&D with my daughter as she was growing up. Sometimes, one of us would have several characters, but often where it would just be one character trying to do things and a class who is more versatile like a bard is often a good choice for a situation like that.
Actually we give a suggestion for the adventure where you're going to the monastery. We tell you that a monk character would be super appropriate for this adventure. For the "Copper for a Song" adventure, we note it's super appropriate for a bard.
So, I guess really embracing the freedom that you have of not having to share the spotlight as a player and of really being able to go deep one-on-one with that player and not worry about the other people getting bored at the table. It can be an opportunity and a gift as well as making the best of a bad situation when you can't get the whole group together.
Now, one final question. Since now we know that these are for one player and one DM, do you ever see a circumstance in that we would get a true solo player experience that's somehow crafted towards Dungeons & Dragons? Those are so different from what we see with 5E, but do you think there's any way that you can merge the two playstyles together?
Wyatt: I am old enough to remember Adventure module, MV1. I can't remember the title of it [Editor's Note: it's Midnight on Dagger Alley] but it had the Magic Viewer. It had a little window of red cellophane that you could use to read text that was printed with a red screen over it in the module. You could play it basically like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but the Magic viewer prevented you from reading stuff that you weren't supposed to read.
I doubt we'll ever do a print product like that again. I think that the digital environment gives us a lot of opportunities theoretically, to do curated, Choose Your Own Adventure style things that might be really cool as a Learn to Play sort of thing. But we don't have anything on our roadmap about that. Fundamentally, D&D is a game about bringing your friends together and telling a story together, and there are other games that can scratch that itch when you can't find anybody to play with you. We just hope you come back to playing D&D when you do have your friends together.
Dragon Delves will be released on July 8th.
EN World: So, I was a little bit surprised to see, when the table of contents was revealed, that there's three adventures that are flagged as solo adventures. By solo adventures, do you mean one player and a dm, or is this a true solo tabletop RPG experience?
James Wyatt: It is one player and a DM.
So, that is a relatively new concept for Wizards of the Coast. I know the Essentials Kit used the sidekick rules, but we haven't seen very many other products geared towards solo adventures. So why did the team decide to point out that there were adventures in this book that could be played with one player and a DM?
Wyatt: One of the guiding principles of this book is flexibility. We wanted it to fill a variety of holes that come up in a typical gaming group's experience. So there's the hole of the DM couldn't show up this week, and so a different player is going to grab this book off the shelf and run with a minimum of preparation and be ready to go quickly. And the extreme example of that is, "Gosh, four players couldn't make it tonight. It's just you and me. What are we going to do? We could play cribbage, but wouldn't it be more fun to play D&D like we planned?"
These three adventures can be run with a whole group just fine. But they've each got a special set of guidelines to help a solo player stay alive and to make the adventure as fun and fulfilling for one player as it is for four or five.
So what are some of those guidelines?
It's actually pretty straightforward. There's a little supernatural gift, the Boon of the Lone Hero or something like that, that gives you a significant buffer of temporary hit points so that you can survive the attacks of monsters coming at you. And we give the solo player inspiration. I think it's at the end of every long rest you take during the adventures, you get Heroic Inspiration so that you are just a little bit more on your toes and capable.
But we singled out these three adventures because they're ones that are less combat driven, have a lot of opportunity for that one player to interact with NPCs in the environment, and hopefully be a rich storytelling experience for those two players.
So we haven't seen much in terms of D&D trying to officially support one player and one DM play. Is this going to be a trend that we're going to see with other books or is this something that's just unique to Dragon Delves? Will we see more support for the style of play in future products? Is this a guiding principle that the design team intends to follow moving forward?
Wyatt: So the guiding principle that we want to follow is making sure that our books are as useful to as many players as possible and can be used flexibly in a variety of ways.
We'll see how Dragon Delves goes, how people respond to it. But I have to imagine that if we do an adventure anthology like this in the future, we'll be looking at the same sort of parameters of wanting to make sure that we are accounting for a variety of use cases, including a solo player.
One of the guiding principles for D&D in terms of combat and encounter builds is that it's built around four players and balanced around that. If you start throwing more than four players, it quickly becomes weighted towards the player side. And if you have less, it becomes weighted towards the opposing forces. Is there any internal math that you had to shift around for some of these adventures? You mentioned that these adventures are more roleplay heavy, but there does seem to be some combat encounters. So was there any tweaks that you made to the combat encounters, beyond really buffing up the player to make sure that they can take a couple of extra hits?
Wyatt: It is really mostly on the player side. The encounters should be manageable for that solo player. The math is not fresh in my head right now, but they are tweaked a little bit so that they should be more manageable.
Getting into the specifics of the adventures - can you tell us a little bit about what these solo adventures will entail?
Wyatt: So they really run the gamut, as do all the adventures in the book. The first one that we mark as suitable for a solo player is the Gold Dragon wyrmling encounter, it is very much a sort of fairytale story with a dark and sinister side to it. So that adventure features talking to townsfolk and following clues and venturing into the forest like Hansel and Gretel, and finding the evil hags' cottage made out of gingerbread and navigating that.
The second adventure involves traveling to a monastery. Again, there's a lot of interaction with the monks who inhabit that monastery and navigating a really tricky political situation that the dragon is involved in. That's the bronze dragon adventure.
The last one is the Copper Dragon adventure, which involves finding a lost verse of the Awakening song that is a reference back to Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. One of the adventures in that book was set in the same Godsbreath land and the same author (Erin Roberts) wrote the adventure. So there's a nice little tie back to Radiant Citadel there. And again, that's going in and interacting with a lot of NPCs, trying to figure out the clues to where this verse might be located, and then going to find it and interacting with the dragon in whose hoard that verse is stored.
Now you mentioned that every adventure is written by a different writer. Were these tapped as solo adventures from the start, or was this something that you noticed that these stories tended to fit within a general mold of more roleplay heavy and might be more suitable for solo play?
Wyatt: This book had a complicated life cycle, so they weren't planned that way from the start.We actually shelved this book for a little while, and then when we came back to it we said, "Okay, what do we have? What are we steering this book toward?" And that's really where the vision of trying to fill a variety of gaps in play experience was formed. And so these three were identified as particularly suitable for that mission of making adventures playable for a single player.
Any tips that you want to give the DM or the player when trying to play in one of these types of solo adventures?
Wyatt: I would say don't try to do it with a person you don't really enjoy talking to. I have played a lot of one-on-one D&D with my daughter as she was growing up. Sometimes, one of us would have several characters, but often where it would just be one character trying to do things and a class who is more versatile like a bard is often a good choice for a situation like that.
Actually we give a suggestion for the adventure where you're going to the monastery. We tell you that a monk character would be super appropriate for this adventure. For the "Copper for a Song" adventure, we note it's super appropriate for a bard.
So, I guess really embracing the freedom that you have of not having to share the spotlight as a player and of really being able to go deep one-on-one with that player and not worry about the other people getting bored at the table. It can be an opportunity and a gift as well as making the best of a bad situation when you can't get the whole group together.
Now, one final question. Since now we know that these are for one player and one DM, do you ever see a circumstance in that we would get a true solo player experience that's somehow crafted towards Dungeons & Dragons? Those are so different from what we see with 5E, but do you think there's any way that you can merge the two playstyles together?
Wyatt: I am old enough to remember Adventure module, MV1. I can't remember the title of it [Editor's Note: it's Midnight on Dagger Alley] but it had the Magic Viewer. It had a little window of red cellophane that you could use to read text that was printed with a red screen over it in the module. You could play it basically like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but the Magic viewer prevented you from reading stuff that you weren't supposed to read.
I doubt we'll ever do a print product like that again. I think that the digital environment gives us a lot of opportunities theoretically, to do curated, Choose Your Own Adventure style things that might be really cool as a Learn to Play sort of thing. But we don't have anything on our roadmap about that. Fundamentally, D&D is a game about bringing your friends together and telling a story together, and there are other games that can scratch that itch when you can't find anybody to play with you. We just hope you come back to playing D&D when you do have your friends together.
Dragon Delves will be released on July 8th.
