Hi guys, I'm a GM, except that I don't always have a large group of players to work with. I most often am Game Mastering for my little brother, and him alone. The core rulebooks do a very good job of helping you balance out encounters and adventures to be suitable for your player characters, but I do think that there is a lack of support for situations where you have a single player. I have tried using encounters with a CR set to the character's level, but I find that these often, especially at lvl. 1, are too overwhelming for the character. One solution I found works well is using encounters with a trio of kobolds, a dire rat, or a couple goblins, but this gets VERY boring after the second encounter. Is there a happy medium for this sort of thing? How can I introduce cooler encounters without killing the player character?
I know there are a whole bunch of 1 on 1 adventures by Expeditious Retreat Press designed specifically for this. But I've never played them myself, so I can't vouch for their quality. Maybe give some of them a try?
Not all battles need to be to the bitter end. Devise some kind of system for devising when the monsters lose morale and say eff it. Some of the enemies can decide not to die, flee, and live to fight another day.
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Drop the CR to 1-3 below the character's level, depending on how challenging you want the fight to be. In the beginning this means lots of kobolds and dire rats, yes, but with only one player sharing the XP he should level to 2 and 3 pretty quickly and the assortment of monsters widens up considerably once you hit CR 1-2. You could even just give him non-combat encounters to earn XP for the first level-up.
Be sure to keep a lookout for traps and monsters that require a specific type of ability to combat them. Avoid those kinds of monsters entirely, or just use those that are appropriate to your player's class. Don't throw lots of DR monsters at monks, don't throw swarms at characters who don't have area attacks, and so on. Since the game is designed for a four character party, it expects a certain level of versatility in abilities that a single character won't have, so you have to adjust for that.