Solo and Duo Rules

[Lord Jolly the Scribe]

I know the rules for solo and duo play are in the S&P and in the Compendium but I have neither book. I am not asking for the rules for doing it, cause I would rather buy the book than be told everything, cause I want to support Mongoose.

But the question I have is: Is it still safe to runa solo or duo game with just the normal rules? And what if I bring a new player or two into Conan, do I have to change anything to revert them back to normal or can they just start with the normal rules and not have to change anything or such? Is there major differences in the rules with just solo or duo play versus the basic rules?

Thanks again.

[rgrove0172]

The solo/duo rules simply give some suggestions on character creation and development to enable the player/pair to be effective in a wider variety of game circumstances. Wherein multiplayer groups can specialize each character, in a smaller group they kind of have to be "jacks of all trades" or have some serious shortcomings. The rules arent that big a deviation.

Yes, you can play with one guy or a couple perfectly fine in my opinion using the core rules. In only have two players at the moment, I plan to incorperate NPCs into the group as time goes by to fill in any areas that need attention.

[DaveNC]

Sometimes when we only have one or two players, we'll have each player play a couple of different characters. You loose a litttle of the "personality", but it works just fine if each person only controls two, or even three, characters. It can be cool for a person to play a scholar (or whatever class) that they might not normally play. This gives them a chance to play a class/race/combination that they wouldn't play if they only had one character.

Or we'll cut back on the number of opponents or add a few NPCs as appropriate.

[Evil_Trevor]

Actualy I prefer a smaller group for several reasons, as a G.M. if you have a larger group you can spend less time per person, nervous or new players can spend a lot of time waiting to be heard over the more vocal ones and running a complex combat scene with twelve players and a couple of dozen foes gets to be a real exercise in bookkeeping and crowd control. The party has just about every skill in the book and the enemy needs to have a small army to stand a chance. In a larger group you also run the risk of having two charcters that for some reason don't get on and that kind of inter-party conflict can become a real problem dominating the game.

Playing with a smaller group leaves more room for character development and involvement and often leads to better roleplaying.

Running for a small group (Three or less) does mean the G.M. needs to make sure they have the skills needed, or can obtain them even for a short time by say hiring an npc. and keeping the threat level resonable. On the whole I have mainly had good experiences of small groups.

One of the best games I ever ran started with only four players, I regularly run for two different groups of three players and I like these kinds of numbers. Currently I am starting an online game with three characters (just two active so far, one still sorting out a character) and that is going ok too.