So I ran some One on One Adventures...

[Libertad]

...and the results were not pretty.

Aside from Scarlet Heroes for the OSR, one-on-one gaming is not very common option in published books.  Even more so with Pathfinder, where the core dynamic of the game changes if you have just one PC.

To remedy that situation, Expeditious Retreat Press published a series of adventures.  As of today there are about 16-18 for sale.  Eleven of them are wrapped up in a large compendium book.

After the end to a very satisfying Solo Heroes game with Raineh Daze, I still wished to continue what we have, although my creativity was on a slow burn by this time.  So I decided to try out some of these published adventures.

The adventures are all class and level-specific, with challenges and encounters had particular synergy with specific classes.  You wouldn't run a Barbarian PC through a murder mystery.

Raineh wanted to be a sneaky drow exile, Gaussavin'ithra Barrighym, using the Nightblade class from Path of Shadows.

Of the Compendium adventures suitable for Bards/Rogues/etc, Gambler's Quest jumped out the most at us.  The opening scenario was intriguing; the evil nobleman Lord Kent is behind the recent raids on some towns, where orc and gnoll war parties absconded with their local heirlooms and tomes.  And said nobleman is holding a gambling tournament at his keep, Castle Blackstone!  Gauss is hired by the town to infiltrate the place as a prospective contestant, using the opportunity to steal back the heirlooms and possibly uncovering some other secrets of Kent's in the process.

Even though the adventure was sized for Rogues levels 2 to 4, the adventure set-up leaved much to be desired.  The idea was that the PC would sneak around into restricted areas of the keep when she got some free time between tournament rounds.  Disable Device and Stealth were of prime importance, but there were several encounters which just gave the middle finger to this.  The gnoll and orc raiders are disguised as castle guards, and at least two of the heirlooms are in their barracks.  As part of boxed text said the gnoll/orc lieutenant would automatically spot the intruding PC and enter combat.

Now, Raineh was lucky to have some nightblade tricks to entangle her foes, but the fact was that these monster leaders had a level in Fighter as well as heavy armor, making them really hard to fight even one-on-one.  I genuinely don't see how a level 2 Rogue is meant to complete this adventure.

The majority of traps, from scything floor-blades to poisoned darts, are not keyed off of Reflex saves, instead using an attack roll with very high bonuses (+8 to +10).  There are some potions of cure light wounds as stealable treasure, but given that rogues don't have healing spells ordinarily and the adventure's on a four-day time limit until the tournament ends, a wand of cure light and Use Magic Device are pretty much required for the PC to recover between encounters.

By the time Gauss fought and lost against the orc leader, she fell.  If a PC falls in battle, they're instead captured and thrown in the dungeons, from which they can escape.  The truth of the matter was that Lord Kent wanted to spy on the PC as a potential protege, as the stolen heirlooms he stole point to a hidden point of a legendary dragon-slayer and the staff she wielded.  So when she was captured, Lord Kent offered to let her go if she worked for him.  The gambling tournament was still going on, though.  Raineh won.

Synopsis: This adventure has some good potential, and it's a shame that the underlying story of Lord Kent and the staff are beyond the scope of the book.  The rival gamblers all had good personality traits, and the halfling assassin Sariah Redshift (one of Lord Kent's right-hand women) actually makes for an interesting rival for Gauss considering their talents.

But the adventure's weak points are in its set-up.  Virtually every door in the "restricted areas" is locked and requires a Disable Device check, making parts of Gambler's Quest a boring dicefest.  The mandatory monster encounters need to be changed to allow for surprise attacks, or nerfed into standard monsters of their kind.

From then on I didn't use any of the published adventures (the other thief ones are much higher level), and in last Saturday's session I made up my own story as Raineh grew to like Gauss and wanted to see where things went.

[Raineh Daze]

Think you grew to like the weird dark elf faster than I did.

Summary from a player PoV: sure, you get to roll a lot. But... what the fuck was in the designer's head? You need to explore, and every dore is of course locked. You OPEN said door, and you better pray the inhabitant is elsewhere because there's no clues who lives where until you open things. Good luck if you open onto a barracks of guards with no way to reroll a failed check. Let alone the angry melee guys hoarding the goals (I don't think playing an actual rogue would help with nobody to flank)

As for the traps... dart trap if you look around to learn about your fellow gamblers: attack melee, con poison. Explore non-inhabited rooms at night, AC-attacking axes. Head towards the boss's room, attacked by golems. It's like the designers took the 'rogues are good against normal traps because of reflex saves' idea, and decided to make that benefit totally irrelevant in a trap-heavy rogue adventure. Presumably, you'd do better with an armoured tank with disable device ranks.

In order to not utterly die due to the sheer volume of 'open door' rolls, we switched to bell curves. Did not really help.

[Libertad]

Actually, the "golems" are animated objects.  They can be bypassed with a certain code word written into their armor which can be spotted with Perception, and they only animate if you try to go further.

Still, they're immune to sneak attack and have 36 hit points each, so they're meant to be a "you're fucked if you don't run away" trap.

[Raineh Daze]

Actually, the "golems" are animated objects.  They can be bypassed with a certain code word written into their armor which can be spotted with Perception, and they only animate if you try to go further.

Still, they're immune to sneak attack and have 36 hit points each, so they're meant to be a "you're fucked if you don't run away" trap.

Worked out they were weird.

Doesn't stop them being a random beefgate.

[Libertad]

I made a house rule where once a door is Disable Device'd, Raineh could go through said door without a roll in the future.  That did much to save her sanity.

Switching to bell curve rolls has been a god-send.  Poor Raineh was plagued with a score of low d20 rolls the second session, to the point where it was hard to believe that Gauss really was a skilled thief.  On a 3d6 it's much harder to roll three 1s than a Natural 1 on a d20, and with high ranks in thiefy stuff it averaged out to regularly performing acts of grace and guile.