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omegaghost
2019-11-03, 07:32 PM
So me and the boys were chilling out in our usual group chat the other day having nothing to do and some spare time on the weekend. We were trying to find a tabletop game to play together that everyone would like, and one guy was like "it would be cool if we ran some D&D dungeon for a couple of hours just for lulz" (we're D&D 3.5 players but that's not too relevant for the story). But I as a DM didn't have anything up my sleeve at the moment so we all just shrugged, moved on and ended up playing "saboteur".

Later I was thinking about maybe coming up with or finding a bunch of 4-6 hour modules for D&D to have at the ready on weekend evenings like this. Not necessarily just a "kill stuff get loot" type of thing, maybe some social stuff too. And then it struck me. In "saboteur" you are given a random role, only you know your role and your goal might be different from others (that's a common thing in many games: mafia, bang, secret Hitler, etc.). Wouldn't it be fun to have this same premise in a D&D game or any other TTRPG? Player would pick a character and have a goal assigned to him. Player won't know other player's goals and would have to bluff and negotiate with others to get what he wants.

So with this I've got a couple of questions:
1. Has anyone here ever tried something similar?
2. If you DM'd it - how did you go about setting the whole thing up? If you participated as a player - how did it go and was it fun? If you didn't - how would you expect it to look?
3. I thought about making this post in 3.x section because of this one but decided against it. Yet maybe someone here would also know if it would be even viable to set this kind of stuff up in 3.x?

Faily
2019-11-03, 08:36 PM
I know some people who have done Tomb of Horrors as a one-shot Halloween special, since it usually doesn't take more than a few hours. You could even make it into a competition of "see who gets the farthest before dying" and have some simple prize (chocolate or something) on hand for the winner.

omegaghost
2019-11-03, 08:41 PM
Yeah, I tried running a Tomb of Horrors one-shots. Didn't go well :D

But I mean more of some kind of multi-goal dungeon. Where for example one character needs to find a certain relic, two characters need to kill a certain dude, and one needs to sacrifice three others.