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View Full Version : DM Help One-shots and how to run them



arrowstorm
2016-08-09, 07:14 PM
How do you make a fun one-shot game? From my understanding some railroading is necessary because of time constraints but what else do you think would make it better since there is little chance for character development.

BayardSPSR
2016-08-09, 10:05 PM
Conceive of an RPG plot (emergent or planned) as a three-act thing, rather than as a series of installments on a long-running TV show.

ACT I: Characters and setting introduced through action; conflict identified.

ACT II: Players and antagonist NPCs act with the intention of resolving the conflict; complications occur.

ACT III: Climax! Conflict is resolved.

If you're thinking about things this way, and comfortable improvising or taking a five-minute break to plan, it's easy to control the pace and keep things moving. On the GM end, the trick is to recognize when the players have identified a conflict, and have started seeking to resolve it (at this point, begin introducing complications appropriate in number and magnitude to the time available); and when player actions are approaching a resolution to the conflict (if time is short, begin the scene that you expect to be climactic). Also, remember that the conflict isn't the thing you have planned (a war between Gondor and Mordor, for instance), but the thing the players are trying to do (transporting a ring from one place to another); the resolution you're seeking is that of the latter, not the former.

AMFV
2016-08-09, 10:12 PM
How do you make a fun one-shot game? From my understanding some railroading is necessary because of time constraints but what else do you think would make it better since there is little chance for character development.

Well one-shots are a perfect time to play characters that you simply can't play in other games. They can be all actively trying to backstab each other... They can be an all Drow Party, or an all Evil Party. There's lots of handy things that you can try that you can't. That's one of the more fun aspects. You can also play as more powerful or less powerful characters than are normally appropriate for your game.

RazorChain
2016-08-09, 11:56 PM
Often you will introduce the game with the conflict already known.

Something likes this

Operation Undtergang:

You are the best of the best the allied military has. After Nazi Germany fell Hitler fled on his rocket ship to the moon. Your mission is infiltrate Hitler's moon base and eliminate him.

This way the players already know what to expect and there will be a very little deviation from the plot.

As to how to make a one shot better I don't exactly know how to answer that question. I've run variety of one shots, my groups have often used them as "fillers" when the current GM gets tired and needs a break or when not all players can make it to play the main campaign.

This gives players the chance to experiment with characters concepts that they would not normally play or just to do something incredibly stupid as there won't be any lasting consequences.

It's also a good way to run horror adventures where people die. Like one simple one shot I ran.

The Inheritance

Setting 1920's remote country mansion. The PC's there for a funeral after their uncle lost his head in farming accident. The uncle is supposed to be buried at his beloved country mansion. During the night there is a raging storm and the uncle comes back from dead looking for his head which fell into the river and was never found. It doesn't help the uncle has an axe and is intent on chopping off everyone's head. Those who lose their head rise again as headless zombies.

Simple survival horror scenario.

Mutazoia
2016-08-10, 12:38 AM
Actually, no railroading is necessary.

You can design your one shot like an episode of your favorite TV show:

Part I: Encounter a problem
Part 2: Identify problem and devise a solution.
Part 3: Encounter a complication.
Part 4: Solve the problem.

If you look at, say, every eposide of ST:TNG they follow this formula every single time. It's easy enough to do, as long as you make sure there are a few different ways to solve the problem you shouldn't have to railroad anybody.

You can also run a published "module", if any are available for your system of choice. You can have pre-generated characters available, so you and your players can jump right into things. (Or chose a system with really quick character generation.)

You can so play yourselves. My group did this...we created RPG versions of ourselves, and then did a "day of the dead" style game where we had to survive the first day of the Zombie Apocalypse.

Airk
2016-08-10, 12:31 PM
Generally, you don't need to railroad, unless you definition is of railroading is pretty broad. You need to force a starting situation that is a more substantial call to action than the usual "You meet in a tavern..." BS. That might mean starting your narration with "You have nearly arrived at the Palace of the Black Wizard; Gargoyles leer ominously at you from the ramparts...." - but that's OKAY. If you've somehow wound up with a group of characters who wouldn't go on a quest to the Palace of the Black Wizard, you have bigger problems, and should probably ask yourself why those players signed up to play a game that you explicitly told them was going to be about a quest to the Palace of the Black Wizard. You DID tell them, right? Do that.

The other thing you need to do with a one shot is relatively aggressively elide uninteresting stuff; That's why you're skipping over the "you meet in a tavern" nonsense, and the journey to the keep, or whatever. But the same can be applied to less dungeon-y games. If there isn't something interesting to whatever the game is about happening at this moment, pause for a sec, think about where the next interesting thing is, and cut to it. This is actually a good practice for longer games too, but you need to be more aggressive with it in a one shot.

I also agree that having pregens, or at least, an idea of who the characters are before the game starts is super helpful, because then you can make sure that there ARE character building moments in there. If you've got a dwarf who believes no wizard can be trusted, it might be fun to insert a situation where there's a wizard... who SHOULD be trusted. Or a wizard who demonstrates that he's got the party's back even though they didn't trust him. But if you don't know that there's going to be a party member who doesn't trust wizards, that gets harder. Pregens mean you can easily set up interesting questions. Doing a chargen session first means that at the least you have some time to tailor the game to the characters. If you do neither, it's tougher.

I don't think there's any particular benefit to running a pre-written "module" for this, unless you're new to the game system, in which case they can be helpful.

I don't really agree with BayardSPSR's assertion that trying to use a three act structure is particularly helpful, but that may just be me. You probably DO want to think carefully about your time constraints - if you know you've got a four hour session to work with, start by shaving off 30 minutes, because you'll lose that to table chatter and breaks. Then try to feel out how long you think each 'section' of the game will take. Then shave them down a bit more. but keep what you "shave off" so you can drop it back in if needed.

ComaVision
2016-08-10, 01:22 PM
I've ran three one-off games now (D&D 3.5) with three different groups and they've all been pretty successful.

1. This was a big dungeon with three wings off of a central point. There were a few minor puzzles and each wing had its own boss at the end. None of the puzzles were "show stoppers" because they could all be brute forced through if the group didn't get it, they'd just have to fight more stuff. We played for around 8 hours and two wings got finished, so while we didn't finish the whole dungeon it still felt wrapped up since each wing was pretty independent. Two characters died.

2. This was a "travel to X location" where X location was a small dungeon (lighthouse, specifically). There were a few encounters on the way, then they had to fight their way up the lighthouse to the top so they could relight it. I knew this group wasn't too smart so no puzzles were used at all. We played about 4 hours, which seemed to disappoint one of the players but we were starting at 8 PM and that was my intended duration. One character death.

3. The group raided a tomb. This was much more puzzle focused than my other two one-offs because I had some cool puzzle ideas that I wanted to play ASAP. I had a pretty smart group for this one so that worked out fine, and I was very open to alternative means of solving the puzzles. (For the first puzzle, I had three possible solutions planned. The group came up with a different but plausible solution and I allowed it to work.) It lasted about 4 hours, which was my intended duration, and everyone enjoyed the climactic fight at the end.

Here are my learning points from these:

-Having wings like #1 takes a lot of pressure off about how long the game is going to last. In #3 I was really worried about the group would zip through everything and be done in an hour.

-Don't have any obstacles that only one type of character can overcome, unless you're going to know in advance what everyone is playing. I always had to do my planning blind.

-Be ready to improvise. Players will have their own ideas about how to solve things and may also be more powerful than you expected. In #3, I substantially upgraded the enemy in the final fight based on how the group was dealing with the other enemies. As a result, the group just barely won out and there was a lot of real tension.

-Know the people in your group. If I had ran my #3 game with my #2 group, there would have been a lot of frustration and I don't think anyone would have been satisfied with the game.

-Don't worry much about the story. You're not going to get people invested in the setting or NPCs in one session, so absolutely have the game start with the purpose already set. For #1 and #3, it was just "you heard about this place, there's probably treasure." This is a little bit different if it's in an established setting that the players know.

-Personal preference but I think one-offs should be way more lethal. There's less character investment so have death be a real threat.

Christopher K.
2016-08-10, 02:18 PM
My favorite structure for a one shot generally goes as follows(I'm going to use my last one as an example)

Prep phase: made pregenerated characters. I put special emphasis on having a human paladin in the group for one player(we'll call him H), and a simpler character for one player who takes longer to learn new class features(call him C). Additionally, I told H that when I gave the signal, his character should voluntarily wander off on his own.

Introductions: I don't name or describe pregens if I don't have to - I like players going around the table and introducing themselves. I explain what the group's current goal is and we begin gameplay.

Montage: For this adventure, the group was heading through the mountains to the high temple of their god, the god of fire and love. Say what you will about 4e but I loved the system for skill challenges(with some obvious fixes). This served as an opportunity for the players to demonstrate why their new characters are awesome and how they approach common problems while traveling.

The False Alarm: Along the road, the party was attacked by bandits. The party failed the skill challenge, so they were caught off-guard for this simple combat and stuck on a narrow mountain pass. Had they succeeded, it would've been a nicer open area for fighting, but the curvature of the path prevented the casters from having line of sight, and mountain wolves caught them from behind. This is supposed to be a "normal" fight, where there is little or no deception on the part of the GM. That isn't to say it's an easy one - I've done these combat encounters with monsters that would normally serve as bosses for dungeon crawls in the past. This establishes how a fight would "normally" go and creates an implicit status quo.

Victory, for a While: the party made it to a village at the halfway point of their journey, right on schedule. They got a bit to unwind and play around at the village's harvest festival. Every once in a while, making perception checks. (Huh. The guy running the ring toss game forgot to pick up your money from the counter when you played. That farmer asked you the same question twice. Simple stuff that indicated something was "off") This is where my players' out of game knowledge went wild.

The Strangeness: that night, the party settled down for the night, and were awoken to figures wandering the village by lamplight. Closer investigation revealed they were townsfolk.. just wandering around. The party covertly watched as the villagers wandered, sometimes rifling through crates of supplies for the festival or something. I ran another skill challenge here and gave H the signal to separate from the group. Eventually the other party members saw the brain-damaged townsfolk starting up the fair again in the dead of night.

From here, I'd given the players enough leads that they naturally gravitated to the plot. They got into a fight with the villagers, who pretty much were killed in one hit and vomited black bile. Each villager had a large open head wound on the back of their skull. They noticed the local chapel had its windows knocked out, and went to investigate, only to find H's paladin slumped against a wall, sporting a similar injury and babbling incoherently, and a dead Illithid opposite him.

(I made it this far, you guys mind if I finish the story? :P )They got into a tussle with some more villagers in the fairgrounds who were using some alien-looking device to open a portal, and when things looked bleak, H's new character rose. With no "adult" illithids present to assume control immediately, H was a liberated newborn Flayer, finding himself in a church of a pantheon served in another life. He saw the fight ensuing, and took on the mantle of the paladin he replaced - He strode out into the field of battle, and the butt kicking began.

The tl;dr version: start by establishing "normality" for these characters, and start the game with them already working towards a goal together, even if that goal changes in the game. Trim that dead weight of the characters meeting unless it's vital to your one shot.