It is impossible to "roleplay" with yourself, as the interactive storytelling requires at least two people. However Dungeons & Dragons, especially 4th edition, is both a roleplaying game and a tactical combat game. And it is totally possible to play the tactical combat part against yourself. As a DM that has two purposes: Plain fun of exploring tactical options (although it isn't quite as much fun as playing with others), and preparation of your next adventure. You want every fight to be interesting, so testing that it isn't trivial or impossible under normal circumstances is a good idea. There might still be surprises if the players come up with exceptionally brilliant (or exceptionally stupid) ideas, but a combat try-out assures that the base line is okay.

One idea I had after watching people play on virtual tables was to use a virtual table software to run these fights against myself. There is MapTools, available for free, and the commercial software Fantasy Grounds 2 has a free demo to try. So I spent some hours trying out these two. The result was that I discarded the idea of using virtual tables for myself. Both programs appear to be very versatile and powerful, but they aren't very intuitive. MapTools requires you to find and load some D&D 4E campaign framework to be usable, and then both programs require a lot of time to learn how to handle them and to set up a fight before you can actually play. I already have a piece of complex software installed on my computer for D&D, Campaign Cartographer 3 with Dungeon Designer 3, and if I find the time to really plunge into anything that complex, I'd prefer that one over the virtual table programs. As I've already created the tokens and monster cards for my campaign on cardboard, it actually is faster to play these fights through with the cardboard tokens than with the virtual table software. Plus I get practice on how to run these fights faster without forgetting anything, using the same materials as in the actual session with my players.

4th edition D&D has some guidelines of how much xp worth of monsters make an easy, standard, or hard combat encounter. One reason I like to play through these fights once is that I am often using pre-made adventures, and those are balanced for a group of 5 players. My group has 6 players, so if I play every encounter as written, they tend to all be on the easy side. Thus if I have the time to prepare well, I add a monster or two to make the encounter more challenging. That is not only more fun, but also fixes the problem that as written the encounters don't give enough xp for 6 players to level up when the adventure assumes they would level up. But more importantly going through the combat encounters once on my own allows me to familiarize myself with the various powers the monsters have. Nothing worse than forgetting a monster power in the heat of the battle and making an interesting monster appear rather dull.


What I would really like to see is a turn-based computer roleplaying game with tactical combat against a good AI using the 4th edition rules. Unfortunately WotC appears to license only horrible action RPGs like this. Which aren't really any edition of the rules at all, but pretty much generic fantasy crap. Have you ever heard of a computer game actually based on 4th edition rules?