High-Level One-Shot

[DonEsteban]

I finally wanted to use those dragon minis standing on my mantlepiece. So I recently tried to prepare a high-level one-shot adventure* for a con and failed. I found it incredibly hard to come up with something good for a number of reasons:

- Finding a suitable published adventure is hard. Designing your own is tedious and time consuming, especially statting up monsters. And then you've not even started thinking about good tactics for your monsters.
- Letting players bring their own characters carries huge risks. Mainly that they're over-optimized and break your game, or that they're broken by your game at once, or that they have different optimization levels.
- Incompatible player types. "Role players" and "power gamers" don't mesh well. This matters much more in high-level games than at 1st level.
- Pre-generated characters are time-consuming and tedious to make and hard to understand as a player. With some builds it's quite difficult to play them effectively without having seen them before. Especially with casters. Especially because some players have never played a certain class before.
- D&D-combats go on forever. Especially with characters which the players have never played before. I've had single combats last for two hours and my time frame for the whole adventure was only 4-6 hours. That doesn't leave much time for role-playing, exploring and making plans (all time-consuming activities by themselves.)
- Things I didn't even think of...

Now I don't think it's an impossible at all, but for me, being not very experienced at high-level gaming, it seems very hard and I finally refrained from doing it. What about you? Have you had similar or different experiences? How can the high-level one-shot be pulled of successfully? How can I make this work?


*For the scope of this post this means level 13+ D&D 3.5.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Be aware of what's out there, both for monsters and for PCs. This only comes with experience. If you're not very experienced in playing at this level, from either side of the screen, then you're going to have a difficult time with it. Play what you know.

When pre-generating characters, make more characters than the number of players you expect to have. I'd go with at least 50% more, but make sure at least two characters are capable of each crucial party role. For example, include both a Cleric with the Healing domain and the PH2 spontaneous domain casting variant for it, and a buffer/summoner Druid who's a Killoren using Aspect of the Ancient with the feat Magic of the Land, found in RotW. For traps include two or three of: an Illumian (Krau) Beguiler 1/ Wizard 4/ Ultimate Magus with Able Learner and Practiced Spellcaster: Beguiler; A Spellthief 1/ Psion 4/ Psychic Assassin (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/psm/20040723d) 6/ Slayer (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/prestigeClasses/slayer.htm) with Mind Cripple and Practiced Manifester; A single-classed Factotum with any number of the available gimmicks; A single-classed Artificer with any number of the available gimmicks. You want more character choices than players just to be sure someone doesn't 'get stuck with' a character he didn't necessarily want. More options for the players is always better!

There are plenty of extremely unique and fun character builds to fill any role, and most of them are very capable of filling multiple roles at once, so there should be plenty of variety for your players to choose from. However, do be sure to include a few easy characters for the less experienced players, and be sure to include spell and ability summaries and basic tips on how to play a given character to go with each character sheet. Start planning months in advance, as this sort of thing does take a lot of work, especially in the higher levels. You could even start planning for the next convention shortly after the current one is finished if you plan to do it regularly. Finish them early and play test them with your regular group!

For encounters, just be sure you throw in a mix of brutes and special abilities to give everyone something to do. The two encounters I posted here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=300111#7) are mostly designed to be difficult for one-dimensional or unprepared PCs. I made a few posts containing two possible sets of encounters (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=252566) for a specific location, one is designed around what sort of ecosystem would be found on a remote and isolated environment, the other set had, "Why are these creatures here?" as a starting point. Make your encounters make sense, and decide how they've interacted with each other and why the creatures haven't eaten each other yet.

Again, a lot of this just comes with experience and knowing what's out there. I'd never even used or encountered a Terlen before suggesting them in that set of encounters I linked, but I had read through the Fiend Folio and was aware that there's a flying extraplanar shark in a 3.0 monster book. I had to flip through the pages looking for the picture to find it again! Sometimes reading through each monster entry and familiarizing yourself with what types of creatures there are, not necessarily their stats or capabilities but just what they are, where they're found, relative CR range, and what themes they can fit with can really help you out down the road for planning varied, fresh adventures.

[DonEsteban]

That's solid advice, thank you. Would you allow players to bring their own character?

I'd love to hear other peoples' experienced with one-shot (not necessarily one-session) adventures. I'm especially interested in ideas for scenarios that make sense and are not just mindless monster-bashing. Positive or negative experiences.

[Glimbur]

I really like note cards. They can hold the abilities of one item, or one spell, or one martial maneuver, or...

Granted, once you get a stack of note cards they have to be sorted somehow. Put 'passive' or 'active' at the top, as well as the source: item, spell, invocation, etc.