The Beginner Boxes are said to be played by 3 - 5 players. Now I want to introduce my son (11 yrs) into FFG Star Wars through single player sessions with a custom made character and said Beginner Box.

Are there any tips how to play the Beginner Box scenarios with one player only? Maybe by granting him more starting XP? A droid NPC companion? How would you scale the adversaries? He wants to begin as a bounty hunter and then slide into force sensitivity because he loves both the Mandalorian series and the Jedi Fallen Order game. Should I grant him the force exile career on top? I'm reluctant to build him a 500 XP char from scratch, because I also want him to progress during gameplay. But I also want him to be survivable. How many XP would be adequate for this endevour or are there other strategies to achieve this goal?

I did this with my son, though he was around 17 at the time. It wasn't a big deal, you just have to scale things back a bit (reduce the number of stormtroopers in a minion squad, etc). He did run 2 PCs though, the smuggler guy as his main one, and Twi'lek shooter as the sidekick.

I would not grant more XP, or even do the custom character thing, I would just use the pregens. The main reason is decision-overload...he won't know what to do with all that extra stuff, he'll still be working through what's on the page, where the skills are, etc. It's hard to make character decisions when you don't know how the game works.

I did run this for a larger group, also with pregens, but I knew some were interested in creating their own PCs. So at the end when everybody gets on board the ship, that's where I broke session one, had a PC generation session, and then started the new session with the new PCs running up (also escaping from the Hutt). The new PCs took over and dropped the pregens (now NPCs) off at the next starport. It ended up being pretty seamless, and the players got a chance to see how the game works before making character-generation decisions. And a couple of people liked their pregens so much they just stuck with them anyway.

I would suggest a mix of your idea (a bit more starting xps) and whafrog's idea (scale back the number of minions in each group). Give his character enough xps to purchase some skills outside of the characters specialization, and maybe top out the number of minions in a group at 2. For a tougher combat, a Rival with a 2-minion group should keep him busy, but save that until he has enough experience playing the game.
And just for fun, the module "Friends Like These' has information on Mandalorian Humans. Just tossing that out there.

Give him 2 companions.
One Alien Species he likes a lot but won't play himself (Chewbacca) for fire support or Pilot and one Droid (R2D2) with mechanics and computers or medicine.
His Char can concentrate on the interactive parts (combat/social) and get help from his buddies when needed.

I've ran Escape from Mos Shutta, twice with different solo players, one with a pregen character (the Twi'lek I forget her name), the other with a custom player character. It plays just fine either way, though you will want to scale back some of the minion groups, and I recommend that Trex has no minion support at the end, unless the player has made a really strong combat character.

I would suggest you give the player an NPC companion, that you RP and eventually once the player start getting the hang of the dice, you start letting him roll for this character so he gets to roll more. One word of warning, do not let the player use this NPC as a crutch, always digging for answers when they are unsure of what to do. Though if the player forgot a story detail you can always have the ally chime in and remind the player, "don't forget about docking clamps, we need to unlock those!"

There is no need in my opinion to give any extra XP before you start playing, however if the player really wants to discover he is force sensitive in the confines of the beginners game itself and not future sessions, you could always give him 20 XP at the midway point instead of the 10XP it suggest in the adventure so he can buy a universal specialization that grants force rating 1. That is if he decides not to just buy it with his starting XP when he makes the character.

One thing that I really like about the beginners games, is that they work really well with player made characters, most of the times I've ran or played them it has been with player made characters, so you guys shouldn't have to much of a problem with it. Make what you wanna play and jump in and have fun!

You can always use the pregens from the FaD beginner game. Lightsaber is pretty strong if you don't throw multiple minion groups on him.

The game's totally doable with just 1 player `1 GM (that's how I ran it). Here's my suggested mod-takes (based on my experience

• definitely let him control 2 characters. Try to arrange it so that one of them's either the droid or the wookie (i.e. one of the pre-gens that doesn't speak common). That way he only has to speak for 1 person during the town-exploration sequences.
• Be lenient on the creative allowances. When a player is going solo, they don't have the benefit of asking other people for help. And I've found players get a lot more investment if they have more wiggle room to do their own thing (When solo) than if you try to help them out with advice.
• Read that beginner game front to back and be familiar with it (at least to the point where you know what the beats of the adventure are). The booklet says "play and learn", but that really only works if there's 2+ player characters. When it's 1 solo character, it'll be more taxing on your part - so being familiar ahead of time is a good idea.
• And yeah, go easy on the player. Especially since he's a rookie. 😃