Hello everyone. I'm new to GMing and have only GMed a short campaign. I am currently a player in one group but also wish to GM as well. Unfortunately due to busy lives, most of my friends are either too busy or too unreliable for a second group. I have thus decided that I would like to try a 1-on-1 Game with a friend who has a very flexible schedule.

What are your thoughts on 1-on-1 games and what advice do you have?

Enjoy yourself,
Piercing Dreams

I know this method gets mocked, probably more then it should. I have been the player in this kind of campaign on a few occasions and have enjoyed myself while doing it. One thing that I might suggest is to make the game about the character, his goals, motivations, passions, etc. With a larger group things like that tend to exist at the whim of the story. But when you have 3-6 PCs all with different histories and ambitions, that can be cumbersome. When you only have one player who is, for the sake of my comments, only playing one PC, you are really able to explore the complexity of a character and how he interacts with the world.

In another 1-on-1 campaign I played the whole party. There wasn't a whole lot of inter-party interaction. I mostly spoke about the characters in third person when they spoke to each other. I played a few orphaned elven siblings, children of a fallen war hero, who were being watched over by their dwarven surrogate father, the war hero's best friend (himself a decorated war hero). It, too, was fun.

Necronomitron has nicely summed up the two principal options you have. Either go heavy on the role-playing side and really get into the single player's character, or give the player multiple characters to give them a decent chance in a more 'normal' adventure set-up. The choice should really depend upon what the player wants, and feels comfortable with.

Thanks for the advice. We inttened to do a heavy RP game based on the one character

In that case I'd suggest you have a store of interesting not-quite-as-powerful-as-the-main-hero NPCs for him/her to meet and form temporary or more lasting friendships with. That way the player will still be taking the principal role, but with some back-up to help avoid the nastier repercussions when things don't go quite according to plan (and they will; they always do!)

Yeah, I had already thought of that... though I must try not to force the NPCs onto him... that would be bad.

Usually, yes, but there is at least one kind of set-up in which you can get away with it. Suppose the PC is hired (or appointed, depending on who he is working for) to be one of a group. He doesn't know any of the others, and will have to get to know them during the adventure (quite possibly in order to figure out which one of them is the traitor in the party).

I'm not saying you should do this, just that it is one option available to you.

Thanks, I'll consider that type of option in my campaign

I'm too dependent on inter-character stuff, both playing and GMing, to pull this off. So I just giggle and talk about it being for the bedroom.

It seems like you're stuck between the rock of having no other characters to support you and the hard place of having to play them all yourself (or having the GM do it).

Having no characters to support you doesn't have to be a rock - in fact it could rock. I was thinking this recently as I was watching the first Blade movie - there are loads of movies like that about a lone badass.

Now, probably as a legacy of the old D&D days, many RPGs are built to require several characters to cover the bases that the world needs covered, but it's just a case of identifying that and figuring a way around it - extra character points, different setting, or even just a focus on what the player character does - Blade isn't about weapon-building or medical research even though those things happen - it's about starting at one side of the world and kicking every ass with pointy teeth until you're at the other side, because that's the part of the greater whole that the main character plays.