I'm running The Sixfold Trial for a single player, where the player controls two characters at two levels higher than a party of four would expect to be.
I'm not afraid of the combat during this chapter (yet?) but I'm not so sure about the play. Given that all of the roleplaying of the Trials of Larazod will be split between the two of us (instead of perhaps five), I'm wondering if I should expect it to be difficult on our voices (especially mine, since I'm fond of stressful accents and I voice Thesing Umbero like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast) or if all the dialogue between two people would stretch beyond fun into work.
The player doesn't even know there's a play coming up, and I'd prefer not to spoil things by telling them and asking them, or by giving them the script before our session so they can read it. Yet I don't like the idea of handing them the script mid-game and waiting for him to read it silently either.
I'm thinking I might have one or two Children of Westcrown join (temporarily under player control -- especially because the player has no Perform) so we can split dialog more evenly, but do you have any idea of what to expect?
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Uhh the acting parts are NOTHING compared to the combat portions...I do fear that if you don't fill out a 4 man group for the actual TRIALS portion that you will have trouble.
Remember they hand out a Circlet at the end of rehearsals to one person...you could just give one to both of the PCs your player is controlling to help with Perform.
I had Janiven and Arael join the player to shore up the missing roles, and increased the CR of opponents by +1 to compensate. Having two 5th level characters and two 3rd level characters then running them as a 4th-level group helped balance out the action economy.
The player's Fire sorc had already been very, very frustrated by all the Fire Resistance of the Tieflings in the last dungeon, so I switched out the Lemures for Advanced Mud Elementals. They worked out very well.
For the Troll Skeletons, I applied something similar to the Flaming skeletons, but with negative energy reduced a die size. It was really close the whole fight long -- the player made it out without casualties, but perhaps shouldn't have, since I forgot the second skeleton's death explosion ability that may have taken out the two adjacent creatures (they were around 4 and -4 HP).
Honestly, the worst part was the Belly of the Beast -- I didn't even modify that particular challenge, unlike the Trial by Torture. Neither PC had Climb, nor did Calseinica. Arael and Janiven, which the book advises you to send with the players to shore up roles if necessary, didn't have Climb. It was a full party of characters with -1 to +0 Climb, who needed to make a DC 20 check, that had to save every round or become Sickened. The player tied a weight to a rope and threw it out, and out of mercy I decided that it caught successfully and they could attempt checks at a lower DC. I'm still feeling annoyed at that trial.
As far as the script, I decided that the way I'd do it was copy down the play, format it, and hand them over as seven files. When the play began, I instructed the player to open it -- which he immediately balked at, because he doesn't like having laptops at the table, and didn't like the idea of acting the play out after all. I was okay with that -- I halfway expected that -- but it annoyed me that through the rest of the session the player kept saying things like "so why is our ally whipping us?" and "why did we even agree to do this?".
It still wound up being a successful game -- the player got the most of his fun by making lines up on the fly to embarrass Thesing and very nearly killed him by 'accidentally' bumping the rot grubs onto him. It seems that Thesing shows up a third time in the AP, so I'm betting this will help season whatever interaction is coming up between them.
We did Sixfold Trial with a single player and 4 PCs (the party had 5 but chose to exclude one). I was surprised how well it worked, roleplaying-wise--I thought it would fall flat with only two people doing all the roles, but it was fun. We read the whole thing, plus some improv. (The Belly of the Beast nearly killed us, too. Module authors often appear hazy on what skill levels to expect from PCs.)
It's about 7 pages--you can print and/or photocopy, and it runs a lot better if everyone has a script.
I recommend being generous with Acting bonuses, especially with fewer PCs. We botched an awful lot of the rolls.
In retrospect I don't know why it worked so well, other than that I have an acting background and found it a novel experience, but it really went well--one of the few things we ran unchanged that was a clear success.