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View Full Version : DM Help Estimating the length of a one shot (New GM here)



iponly
2014-04-25, 09:37 PM
So I have a great gaming group that I lucked into a few months ago and lately we've been having attendance issues which result in us playing a lot of board games and talking a lot of shop. And because of that, one day the usual GM brought out this old game called Everway which uses a tarot-like deck of cards instead of dice. I spent the entire rest of that day flipping through it. Cue everyone deciding that I should run a game in it and hey, I'm down! It seems like it'll be a fun system for a story-heavy group, which we are. The problem is I have almost no GM experience and what little I do have was (1) years ago (2) in D&D 3.0 and (3) a total flop of a campaign.

Actually, that's a really general problem, never mind that. The real problem is that this is supposed to be a one shot game and I have no idea how to figure out if an idea will fit into our usual four hour timeslot or not.

So my idea: I've sold the group on "Merchants and Mercenaries," which I'm thinking of as a one shot where the characters would come into possession of a macguffin and then act as brokers for the owners of the macguffin, figuring out who would give the best price for it and then how to deliver it to that group.

So with that basic plot in mind, I rolled up some NPCs, Everway style, which means they all popped out with five cards worth of backstory. (Backstory cards are separate from the tarot cards, but similarly open to interpretation.) Five cards of backstory means that I ended up with the owners of the macguffin, three potential customers instead of two, plus an an anti-selling-the-macguffin character, plus some crazy unethical experimentation subplot, plus the war that the setting I picked is centered around. (Not using the Everway setting, because it is basically Planescape with the viciousness removed and I find that offensively dull.) I think I can keep the experiment subplot under wraps and cut my original idea for an intro scene, but that's still five scenes to meet all the groups and one more to resolve the story. Throw in the players messing around and... well... four hours is not that long, is it?

How long would you expect a story like this to take? I can say I'm going to do a probably-a-two-shot instead and I doubt anyone will object if it goes well in the first game, but if there's any good ways to condense things down...


I want to keep all three customer groups.
I want to introduce the players to the macguffin in a scene so they can learn about it through their own investigations.
I need the antagonist type to provide fight scenes for the bloodthirsty players and I'm still worried there won't be enough fighting, even with that character added.


I've thought about meeting two groups at once (the macguffin owners and one of the customer groups, the antagonist and one of the customer groups, the two customer groups who don't want to kill each other) but I'm not sure if those are good options. Other ideas like that would be especially welcome. Advice on how not to be a total flop or advice on running Everway, also welcome.

Altair_the_Vexed
2014-04-26, 03:37 AM
...
How long would you expect a story like this to take? I can say I'm going to do a probably-a-two-shot instead and I doubt anyone will object if it goes well in the first game, but if there's any good ways to condense things down...


I want to keep all three customer groups.
I want to introduce the players to the macguffin in a scene so they can learn about it through their own investigations.
I need the antagonist type to provide fight scenes for the bloodthirsty players and I'm still worried there won't be enough fighting, even with that character added.


I've thought about meeting two groups at once (the macguffin owners and one of the customer groups, the antagonist and one of the customer groups, the two customer groups who don't want to kill each other) but I'm not sure if those are good options. Other ideas like that would be especially welcome. Advice on how not to be a total flop or advice on running Everway, also welcome.
First up, I don't know Everway, so I can't help you with the system - sorry.

One the other hand, I've been running a fair few one shots, and been blogging about it - here (http://running-the-game.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/where-i-go-wrong-short-one-off-games.html), and here (http://running-the-game.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/in-praise-of-one-off-sessions.html) - so I hope I can chip in helpfully.

If you can split the game into two sessions, then this amount of material should work... but for one session, not so much. You're right that you have a lot to get through in 4 hours, especially if you expect players to muck about off topic now and then.
For a one shot, something needs to go. Even for a two-shot, you may need to keep things tight.

Be ruthless - cut it down to the bare bones as much as you can. I think of one-games as being like jokes: you need a set up, and a punchline - anything more is just waffle.

Let's look at each in thing in turn:

Three customer groups
Originally, you said you wanted two, but the cards gave you three, and you'd like to keep them all. Can you really not cut one of them, or merge two of them? Are the players going to be able to notice the motivations of these three customer groups strongly enough to need to keep them? (With a one-shot, if players don't get to see the NPCs' actions and motives, then they might as well not exist - harsh, but true.)

Introduction of the McGuffin
It's cool to get the player involved in the show-don't-tell prcess of revealing the McG's powers, but this could be one of the longest, slowest scenes. If you can keep this short -like, the PCs see the McG do its thing straight away, and can immediately understand why that's important (it heals the dying, it opens a portal to hell, or whatever it does) - then they get to draw their own conclusions about why that's significant, and why it needs to be kept safe, etc.
I'd suggest that this becomes your opening scene - the owners are discussing the party become brookers, the McG does its thing for some reason, the players get to see it and think about it for themselves. You'll be able to have the owners explain, too, if the players aren't getting the point.
Lots of TV shows do this with their Plot of the Week.

Fighting the antagonist
Fights take a long time in some game systems - better to have one memorable one, than a few throw-away fights.

---

It's a bit hard to advise further without knowing what the McG does, and why the antagonist doesn't want it to be sold.

If the McG does something that needs to be stopped, you can have an action scene around that - solving the puzzle key to lock hell back in the box, or whatever it might be.
Maybe one of the buyer parties wants to steal it rather than buy it - you get a new scene right there, full of action and conflict, and you've got rid of one of your buyer parties.

Anyway, good luck! Hope it goes well.

iponly
2014-04-26, 12:58 PM
It's a bit hard to advise further without knowing what the McG does, and why the antagonist doesn't want it to be sold.

I was being a little vauge becaue I don't know if any of my group reads this forum- at least one of them reads the comic, so it's possible. And they know my usual usertag. But hey, spoiler tags exists for a reason, right?


The McG is basically several boxes of illegal valuable crafting ingredients. The players are unlikely to go so far off the tracks as to try and use the items themselves because we have another campaign to get back to and none of them have their own smith's workshop or the like. The antagonist is just the local magistrate trying to prevent smuggling. (Of course, the magistrate is ex-army in an area where the army is 99% warrior-mages, so when I say 'just', I don't mean 'not dangerous'.)

The three customers are basically the three alignment options- the totally good option with minimal reward, the neutral option with a valuable but uncertain reward, and the evil option with a big immediate reward. Of course I'm presenting them as groups with their own motivations, not "NG, LN, NE: pick one." but it'd be a bit odd to only offer the original two which were the neutral & evil options. I've thought about merging the magistrate and the LN group, but the good & evil options are both from outside of the area and the magistrate is unlikely to work with either of them.

As for the system, Everway combat lasts exactly as many rounds as I want it to as there's no actual HP type stat and the 'dice' are cards open to interpretation. That's why I'm worried about making the bloodthirsty guy happy-- one big fight at the end will mean he's antsy/bored for most of the game. I was going to throw in one smaller fight after the second customer group, so the breakdown would be something like this:


Meet the Macguffin
Meet the Magistrate
Meet a customer group
Meet a customer group
Fight NPCs based on whoever you decided to meet first (short combat)
Meet a customer group
Players spend a while arguing about what to do (I know my group, this is going to be at least a scene's worth of time.)
Deliver the Macguffin, deal with consequences of decision. (longer combat)


I'm worried they might try to fight the Magistrate in the second scene (a good argument for either merging the magistrate's intro with the LN group, or providing another small combat with a random urban type encounter during that scene) and I'm worried they might want to go back and forth between groups and I'm worried they might come up with an intricate end plan with a ton of setup that involves more scenes. I can try to prevent going back and forth via "being watched, here's how to contact us" type conversations and I can crash intricate plans via "and then XYZ unexpectedly breaks down the door!" but if I merge the magistrate into another scene, the beginning goes a long way without combat.

Maybe I should just ask for an early start/late end? I'm usually the one who has to leave early, so we could probably get an extra hour or two if I plan to stay at a friend's nearby or something.

Airk
2014-04-28, 09:21 AM
It's not easy. Estimating how long something will take is something that frequently eludes even very experienced GMs, because at the end of the day, you can NEVER predict when your players are going to spend hours debating the best way to sneak into the unguarded enemy camp, or whether they'll IMMEDIATELY intuit the villain's weakpoint before you've even had a chance to distribute any clues. It's positively eerie. Sometimes it's like you have a table full of idiots, and other times it's idiot savants. ;)

Here are some tips though:

Cut stupid things short. If the party is arguing about something that's fundamentally irrelevant, or is having trouble deciding on a course of action, just lean in and say "Guys, it's a one shot. This decision doesn't matter. I'm going to move things along."
Have "bonus"/"droppable" content. These are more or less the same thing, but from different angles. An example of "bonus" content is the villain pulling a lever with his last breath and laughing "N-now... the bomb I've planted beneath City Hall will go off...<cough> <dies>" and the PCs have to race to stop this new issue. "Droppable" content is the villain having a secret escape route that he can use to get away. Both of these are useful for on-the-fly timeline adjustments - if the party is ahead of schedule, the villain pulls the lever/makes his escape, and if you're running out of time in the session, the villain doesn't do either one. Having 3-4 things that can be included or omitted based on time will help you manage things better.
Be CAREFUL with the amount of fighting. I'm not familiar with the system you're using, but in a lot of games, a fight can easily chew up 30+ minutes, and when you've only got 4 hours, losing a big chunk of it to a throw down that's not even really that important to the plot can be a bad idea. Obviously, if Everway combat resolves fast and easy, this is less of a concern. (Also note that fights can make excellent droppable content.)
Consider doing a separate chargen session. You don't have all that much time, so getting chargen out of the way ahead of time can give you a lot more wiggle room. Pregen characters can work well for this too, especially if the player's aren't familiar with the system.