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DM Yourself
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This book is not authorized by or affiliated with Wizards of the Coast LLC
Cover illustration by Gary Noble (after David A. Trampier’s classic PHB frontispiece)
Interior illustrations by Gary Noble & Tom Scutt
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this document or portions thereof in any form whatsoever
Copyright © 2020 by Tom Scutt
DriveThruRPG edition November 2020
Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 3
Why play Solo?................................................................................................................................... 3
Why DM Yourself? ............................................................................................................................. 3
Why use 5e?....................................................................................................................................... 4
Why only one player character? ........................................................................................................ 4
Which Adventures does this work with? ........................................................................................... 4
Character Creation (or, How to Prepare for the Adventure)................................................................... 5
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Increasing the PC’s Power.................................................................................................................. 5
Safeguards and Rebalancing the Action Economy ............................................................................ 5
Lowering the Adventure Difficulty ..................................................................................................... 8
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Default Behaviours ............................................................................................................................ 9
Roleplaying Tips for Character Creation .......................................................................................... 11
Navigating the Scenario Document (or, How to Read the Adventure) ................................................. 13
Skim reading vs. deep reading ......................................................................................................... 13
Where to start and what to skip (and when to come back to it) .................................................... 15
Avoiding spoilers (but not getting hung up about them) ................................................................ 17
Using flashbacks............................................................................................................................... 17
Playing Solo (or, How to Play the Adventure) ....................................................................................... 19
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The Immersion Table ....................................................................................................................... 19
Exploration, dungeon maps and simulating fog-of-war .................................................................. 24
How to DM Yourself ......................................................................................................................... 26
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Minis vs. Theatre of the Mind .......................................................................................................... 28
Making Binding Decisions ................................................................................................................ 30
Using Hindsight ................................................................................................................................ 32
Logging time and resting.................................................................................................................. 33
Secrets, traps and puzzles ................................................................................................................ 34
Scaling enemies ............................................................................................................................... 36
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Starting the Encounter ..................................................................................................................... 37
Combat and enemy behaviour ........................................................................................................ 38
Ending the Encounter ...................................................................................................................... 40
Towns and NPCs............................................................................................................................... 41
Treasure and Rewards ..................................................................................................................... 43
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Experience and Levelling-Up............................................................................................................ 44
End of the Adventure ............................................................................................................................ 44
Appendices............................................................................................................................................ 45
A Minimal DC Oracle (for situations not covered in the adventure) ............................................... 45
References and Further Reading ..................................................................................................... 46
The Extended Immersion Table ....................................................................................................... 46
AI Combat Tactics Tables ................................................................................................................. 50
A Guide to DMing Yourself through Well-Known Adventures ........................................................ 55
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... 59
Using DM Yourself with systems other than 5e............................................................................... 60
DM Yourself Solo Character Sheet Add-On...................................................................................... 61
DM Yourself Quick Reference .......................................................................................................... 62
2
Introduction
Welcome to DM Yourself – a guide for how to play existing Fifth Edition (5e) or other fantasy RPG
adventures/campaigns solo with a single character, as close to the way they are written as possible.
The aim is to allow players to enjoy these adventures solo with the minimum of preparation, work or
additional rules, and maximum immersion. It’s going to be an exciting journey, so let’s get started…
Why play Solo?
My family and I love playing 5e, but over the past couple of years, for one reason or another we
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have been lucky to manage a session together every couple of months. Also, I am usually the GM
and I miss the experience of actually playing – so out of frustration (and a desire to make some
progress on the big pile of 5e adventures I own) I started to explore options for playing solo.
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Why DM Yourself?
Currently there are two main ways of playing 5e, or other fantasy RPG systems solo:
1) Choose-your-own-adventure style modules, written specifically for the solo player. In my
opinion, the best of these are Paul Bimler’s 5e Solo Gamebooks series. This style of solo
play is really enjoyable and I recommend giving it a try, but it tends to suffer from three
drawbacks: it is in the nature of CYoA books that they are quite short (writing branching
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narrative is intensive work), they tend to be quite deadly and unforgiving, and as a player
you are limited to the choices offered to you by the author.
2) Using GM emulators such as Mythic and Dungeon/Encounter/Quest generators, as in the
5e DMG or The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox. Again, such soloing can be very enjoyable, but
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again there are drawbacks. These adventures can feel more like creative writing exercises
than playing, and there is a lot of rolling and looking up on tables to generate every room
and encounter. This can leave the actual play feeling disjointed and non-immersive, and
the stories produced often feel rather random rather than being coherent narratives with
an overarching story arc.
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I realised that what I was after was a third way, with which I could play all the adventures I have that
are currently lying around gathering dust. This way would lie somewhere in between the somewhat
restrictive, on-rails nature of the gamebook and the free-form, sandbox approach of the GM
emulators – and unlike these approaches, very little has been written about this third way. My goals
were:
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• To be able to play adventures as close to the way they were written as possible, with
minimum rule changes, preparation or bookkeeping.
• To be able to play with a single player character, but without that character needing to be
an invincible superhero.
• To achieve maximum immersion, so that the experience recreated some of the feel of
playing a roleplaying game (rather than just reading-with-dicerolls).
• To find a way to deal with the inevitable spoilers and hidden information, so that the
player could still experience the story.
• To provide a small set of unobtrusive rules to stop the player from cheating or bending the
rules (DMing Yourself is hard!).
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Over a period of months I developed a system that I think accomplishes most of these goals. Of
course, it is not as good as playing with a group of friends, but it does provide a way to experience all
those amazing existing 5e adventures on your own. Acting as both Games Master and Player can
seem weird at first – a bit like sending yourself a Direct Message on social media – but I’ll show you
how to embrace this strange-but-rewarding dual-role and fearlessly DM Yourself.
Why use 5e?
The short, flippant answer is because it is the world’s greatest roleplaying game.
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The longer answer is that 5e has a number of features that make it perfect for solo roleplaying. In 5e
there is an ability check for just about everything. This makes it easy to remove subjective GM
decisions and judgements from the equation when playing solo. This is not to say that DM Yourself is
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just dice rolling – there is much more to it than that – but the basic 5e rules do make solo play easier
than it would be in Old School Revival (OSR) systems, where the GM has to do more of the heavy
lifting. Additionally, 5e is much less dependent on miniatures and exact combat map movement than
(recent) previous editions, and much more amenable to ‘theatre of the mind’. Again, this means it is
easier to automate enemy behaviour during combat than it would be in a system that demanded
exact grid movement and positioning.
Having said that, almost all of the material in DM Yourself can be used to solo other roleplaying
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systems if the adventures are structured in a similar way to 5e adventures (e.g. boxed location text,
numbered location maps) and they use similar mechanisms (e.g. hit points, skill tests/ability checks).
Most of the rest can be relatively easily adapted. More detailed advice on how to use DM Yourself
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with other systems can be found in the Appendix.
Why only one player character?
I experimented a couple of times with trying to run a normal party of four PCs through an adventure
playing solo, but I found it was really unsatisfactory. You already have to split yourself between the
roles of GM and player, and trying to divide your player role into four player characters ends up with
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you not really being invested in any of them. It’s hard to stay immersed in the scene, and difficult to
keep track of things when you’re constantly switching back and forth between characters – and as
those characters level up the sheer number of decisions and permutations of possible actions can
slow the game to a crawl.
A single player character on their own can be problematic too, but most of those problems can be
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solved by using a Sidekick (as described in the section on Character Creation). This is the sweet-spot
for solo play. You have one main character to focus on and get invested in – you’re playing a single
character just like in a regular game of 5e – but they have help when they need it.
Which Adventures does this work with?
The system works best (or, rather, works easiest) with linear and/or quest based adventures like The
Lost Mines of Phandelver or Dragon of Icespire Peak. Big, open, sandbox campaigns like Curse of
Strahd or Storm King’s Thunder are more of a challenge. This is not to say they don’t work at all – I
can guarantee you’ll have more fun playing the campaign than just reading it – but you will have to
learn to live with accepting some spoilers, and the creative use of flashbacks and plot armour for if
(let’s face it, when) things go wrong...
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Character Creation (or, How to Prepare for the Adventure)
This section mainly deals with how to create a PC in the best way to allow you to re-balance
adventures (which are almost always written for a party of four or five adventurers) to a single PC.
This is achieved in three ways: increasing the power
of the PC (although not too much – you don’t want
them to feel overpowered); adding a mixture of
safeguards and checks to help with the action
economy (how many actions-per-turn your party
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has compared to the enemies you’re facing) and
to provide a safety net against poor dice rolls
etc. (giving your character a Sidekick, Plot
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Armor, and Hero’s Luck), and lowering the
difficulty of the adventure slightly by
reducing the monsters’ hp. You can
adjust the difficulty to your
preference by the mix of these
systems you choose to adopt
(see Difficulty Levels on pg. 9).
Finally you will need to write a
set of Default Behaviours for
your character. There are also
a number of general
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character creation tips to
improve your roleplaying
experience, listed at the
end of this section.
Increasing the PC’s Power
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The first thing to do is raise the character’s level in order to make up for the fact that there is only
one PC in the party. However, I find it deeply unsatisfying playing a character that is several levels
above the adventure, so we’re going to raise the character by just a single level. For example, if the
adventure was designed for a party of four Level 1 characters, your character will start at Level 2.
Next we’re going to maximise the hp for that character – so if your character normally gets d8 plus
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their Constitution bonus each time they gain a level, instead they get 8 plus their Constitution bonus.
Safeguards and Rebalancing the Action Economy
The three biggest problems of playing with a single character are that a simple run of bad luck can
easily lead to you getting killed, there’s no-one to get you back on your feet if things do go wrong,
and you can easily be overwhelmed by lots of even low-challenge enemies because they can take so
many actions each turn compared to you. There are several safeguards in DM Yourself to deal with
these issues.
The first safeguard is absolutely essential: the Sidekick. Sidekicks are the perfect addition for solo
play. They help to address all three of the problems above, and they are ideal for introducing more
