This is a quick little thing I wrote up on Reddit a few days ago. The basic idea is that you’re looking to run a game with 1 DM and 1 or 2 players. Legends & Labyrinths includes a build point system which makes it very easy to build encounters for non-standard group compositions, but very small groups pose some unique challenges. It can also be useful to have some quick conversion guidelines for published adventures.

2 PLAYERS

So if you’re looking to DM for a group of 2 PCs:

(1) One of the PCs should be a cleric.

(2) Give them plentiful healing resources. At 1st level, a wand of cure light wounds with 15-20 charges should do it.

(3) Take any adventure designed for 1st level characters and do the following: For any encounter involving multiple creatures, halve their hit points and reduce their number by half. For any encounter involving a single creature, reduce them to minimum hit points.

And that’s it. You’re good to go.

For example, consider the encounters found in the first dozen keyed areas of The Sunless Citadel:

Area 1: 3 dire rats (5 hp) = 1 dire rat (3 hp)
Area 3: 1 dire rat (5 hp) = 1 dire rat (2 hp)
Area 5: 3 skeletons (6 hp) = 1 skeleton (3 hp)
Area 6: 1 dire rat (6 hp) = 1 dire rat (2 hp)
Area 10: 1 quasit (9 hp) = 1 quasit (3 hp)
Area 12: 1 dragonpriest (42 hp) = 1 dragonpriest (21 hp)

The reason this works is because encounters are designed for 4 PCs: If you halve the number of PCs it means that monsters will generally live twice as long and have only half as many targets to inflict damage on. That means that the difficulty of an encounter roughly quadruples if you halve the the number of PCs. So we adjust for that by halving the monster’s hit points (so that they survive half as long) and halving their numbers (which halves the number of actions the monsters can take each turn).

1 PLAYER

Adjusting for having only one player in D&D is a little tougher because there’s no margin for error: If a PC gets knocked unconscious in normal play, they can be revived by other members of the party. If a solo PC gets knocked unconscious, it’s an immediate game over.

Here’s what I recommend: Start the PC at 3rd level and then run them through 1st level adventures that have been adjusted as per the above. (You’ll probably want to have them use a cleric again. Or find some other way to make sure they have access to magical healing.)

I have done very little one-on-one stuff, but this method seems to work.

I’ve talked in the past about why DRM is horrible, including personal experience with having products I’ve purchased simply stop working because the company I bought them from decided I no longer had a right to them.

Here’s another case in point: A woman had her Amazon account wiped because Amazon found that it was “directly related” to another account that had violated Amazon’s policies in the past. What policies? They won’t say. What account? They won’t say. How did they conclude that the account was “directly related” to her? They won’t say.

What they will do, however, is delete every book she’s ever purchased from her Kindle.

I own a Kindle DX. I like it a lot. I recommend it to people who are looking for a PDF-friendly e-reader. But this is why I don’t buy e-books from Amazon unless they’re DRM-free. (And even then, I make sure to archive a copy on my local hard drive where Amazon can’t capriciously delete it at their whim.)

As more and more traditionally analog content becomes digital, the long con of DRM will become increasingly urgent. As a consumer, you need to be aware of it. And you should be making your purchasing decisions accordingly: Don’t reward corporations that think they have a right to control your personal property just because they sold it to you.

First off: Looper is a really great film and not at all what I was expecting when I walked into the movie theater. I was expecting a sci-fi action movie. Instead I got an indy sci-fi film featuring outstanding performances. (It might be Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s best performance on film to date.)

Second: I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the way time travel works in the movie, with many people online complaining that it “doesn’t make sense”.

SPOILERS AHEAD

If you watch the film carefully, however, you’ll note that it has a nearly consistent handling of causality: Any changes to causality due to time travel propagate instantly, but only forwards from the point in time at which the change is made. (This is consistent across the maiming, the death, and the memories.)

The only inconsistency to this is that the movie seems to suggest that the reason the Rainman is closing loops is because he saw Bruce Willis kill his mother. That doesn’t work with the rest of time travel as we see it. However, we don’t actually KNOW that this is true. Since his mother had previous connections to loopers, it’s possible that in the “original” timeline he saw some other looper kill her. Or possibly just some transient. Or maybe the Rainmaker killed his own mother before he gained control of his powers. (One of the interesting things about the ending is that we don’t actually have any way of knowing if things turn out OK for the kid. The film certainly feels hopeful at the end, but it resists delivering any certainty.)

The film could probably have also benefited from being clearer on what precipitated the change which allowed the main character to change the outcome of his loop. (I.E., break his bonds and control his arrival.) But that’s a minor quibble which usually plagues any time travel story that isn’t based around closed causal loops.

If I was going to change anything, I’d have probably had the transient that the main character “saved” the mother from be a legitimate threat (instead of just some kook with a placard). That would have strongly suggested that in the original timeline that guy killed the mother and precipitated the child’s abandonment.

A TEST CASE

To further demonstrate what I think Looper was actually doing, consider this simple test case:

• At Point C, Future Bob travels back in time to Point A.
• At Point A, Future Bob arrives.
• At Point B, Future Bob kills Current Bob.

If causality changes spread in both directions from Point B, this would obviously cause a paradox: Future Bob kills himself, so he doesn’t travel back, so he doesn’t kill himself, so he… yada yada yada. But if we assume that causality changes only propagate forwards through time, then the situation resolves itself simply:

• At Point A, Future Bob arrives.
• At Point B, Future Bob kills Current Bob. Future Bob instantly vanishes.

The change at Point B cannot affect Point A, so there’s still a Future Bob running around between Point A and Point B. But once the change happens at Point B, causality propagates forward, Future Bob never traveled backwards through time, and therefore he vanishes.

Similarly, during the maiming sequence in the movie: You start cutting off his legs, so he crashes his car as his legs disappear. If causality spread in both directions, there would obviously be no way that he was driving a car in the first place. But since causality changes only flow forwards, we get the result we see in the film. (You can see this in the memories, too: They don’t change until something in the present moment changes the causality. Because, again, the change isn’t propagating backwards.)

The interesting case would be something like this:

• Future Bob travels back to Point A.
• Current Bob gets maimed Point C.

From Point C forward, Future Bob would be maimed. If you jumped into another time machine and went back to Point B, though, you’d see a perfectly whole version of Future Bob. (Because the causality change at Point C didn’t propagate backwards.) But what if maimed Future Bob travels back to Point B? Hard to say. The movie doesn’t show us that scenario and it could be argued either way.

Regardless, the result is a universe that looks like a complete mess. But, of course, time travel universes always look like like a complete mess. And this would be one way for the universe to “handle” causality that would prevent a paradox from ever occurring.

Couple congruent thoughts synchronistically spun themselves into my head recently.

First, Delta’s D&D Hotpost asked, “Was Module B1 a Good Design?” This revived my old argument that B1, B2, and the original version B3 are — at least conceptually — a really solid introduction to dungeoncrawling:

B1 teaches the DM how to key a dungeon. For those unfamiliar with it, the module provides a map with an incomplete key: Rooms are described, but blanks are left for monsters and treasures. At the back of the module, a list of monsters and treasures are provided: The DM is supposed to take them and assign them to rooms. In practice, this teaches the DM that:

(1) Rooms are not defined by the monster you fight in them.

(2) The distribution and arrangement of monsters and treasure will fundamentally change the gameplay of a dungeon.

(3) You can stock a given chunk of geography in many different ways (and many different times).

B2 teaches the players how to play. When you go the Caverns of Chaos, you enter a valley and the first thing you see are a dozen cave entrances: So the very first action the players have to take in the module is to make a choice. And the choice they make will completely alter the future course of events through the module. It’s an incredibly empowering moment and a really important lesson for any player of an RPG to learn.

Finally, the original version of B3 (which was very different from the version eventually published) introduced what was originally supposed to be the centerpiece of every D&D campaign: The megadungeon. Jean Wells provided the upper levels of the dungeon, but included several “empty” rooms which the DM was supposed to key for themselves. And she included a number of passages that would lead down to lower levels that the DM was supposed to design for themselves. Although sometimes crude and inadequate in its presentation, B3 would have transitioned the DM into designing and expanding their own megadungeon on the superstructure it provided.

None of these modules were perfect. But new players who worked their way through them received a really solid education in what it meant to run and play an RPG.

In the years since then, a lot of introductory adventures have been produced by the RPG industry. And the interesting thing about most of them is that they take a very different approach: They try to simplify and carefully curate the first experiences of new players. They spoon-feed the GM and hand-hold the players.

Which brings me to the second thought, this one from the Psychology of Video Games: “How Game Tutorials Can Strangle Player Creativity.” In this essay, Jamie Madigan discusses a psychology experiment which demonstrated, in brief, that:

(1) If you take a toy with many different functions which are not immediately evident and introduce a child to it by “spontaneously” discovering one of its functions, then the child will experiment with the toy and discover its many different functions.

(2) But if you take that same toy and introduce a child to it by saying, “This is an awesome toy. Here’s how you use it.” And then demonstrate one of its functions, the child will spend less time playing with the toy and discover fewer of its functions.

(Madigan’s discussion of the study is excellent. I recommend clicking through the link and reading the whole thing.)

The application to roleplaying games should be almost self-evident: Introductory scenarios should be robust (so that new players don’t become stymied or lost). But that robustness should not take the form of hand-holding or railroading. If you want to introduce a new player to roleplaying games, then you need to embrace the Caverns of Chaos: You need to show them twelve options and say, “The choice is yours.”

Because, ultimately, it is that power of choice which makes RPGs special and exciting and worthwhile.

… is that it is a gentle (yet utterly awe-inspiring) reminder of the vast scope of our universe. It is a planet nearly the size of the Earth so far away that it is rendered as nothing more than a pinprick silhouette upon the surface of the sun. And that, in itself, suddenly lends a humbling perspective to our own distance from the sun and the vast size of that celestial body of fusion and flame.

It is a sight which is literally mind-boggling. Looking at that tiny dot of Venus, our brains simply cannot process the reality of what we’re seeing: Regardless of what the rational side of our brain may be capable of appreciating in that moment, our eyes nevertheless refuse to interpret that black splotch as a planetary mass.