Ideas for very short one-shots with new players?

[PhoenixPhyre]

As part of a charity event, I'll be DM'ing for either 1, 2, 3, or 4 games (in succession). I'll be playing D&D 5e as that's what I'm most familiar with and have the books for.

* Player experience may range from familiar to D&D? What's that?
* The total time is 2 hours. So that's either 1 2hr session, 2 1hr sessions (with the possibility of continuity between them), 3, 40-minute sessions, or 4 30-minute sessions. The exact details are up to me.
* The age range is high-school/middle-school.

My current thoughts:

* Create a bunch of basic pre-gens, probably at 3rd level and at ~9th level.
** Probably in the classic mode: Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, Cleric at the lower level.
* Create/borrow/steal a set of scenarios (a combat, a skill encounter, etc) scaled to about 40-ish minutes.
* Probably steal the maps from 4e's Dungeon Delve book (which I own) but not run the whole delve.
* Players that want to stay can, as long as there's room.
* I have spell cards for most of the classes, so those would be pre-selected to ease that.

Other ideas?

[sophontteks]

You can run the random encounters from some of the campaigns. Like I quickly set up something just rolling die from the Travelling section of Out of the Abyss and it was enough for the players to enjoy some interesting encounters. No grid. I just narrated and let them go at it. 1-2 hours is not much time and you may not want to be spending it assembling pieces onto a map. The started campaign is also pretty fast paced and may work. It starts the players with encounters right away.

Make sure you have a couple cheat sheets for the players of course, especially one that tells them what they can do in a round.

[LordEntrails]

New players are going to take at least 15 minutes to get settled. Take that into consideration. I would do second or third level pregens.

Take a look at the Impregnable Fortress of Dib, this is something like what you want to run, imo.
https://koboldpress.com/prepared-the-impregnable-fortress-of-dib/

[EvilAnagram]

I would stick to first-level pregens, honestly. New players need training wheels to wrap their heads around the system, and that means reducing the options to something manageable