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So, like many people with semi-stable groups, my group has a terrible time actually getting anywhere in a campaign. We get two, maybe three sessions in, and then someone's got another idea, or someone can't make it to game night, or something happens and we lose our momentum. And once we lose our momentum, we almost never get back to a campaign. So the obvious answer is one-shots, or mini campaigns built around reaching completion in a single-digit amount of distinct sessions. The problem is, I have essentially no experience with these. I've played in only one or two, and I've never actually prepped for one. Now, I'm aware of games built for this sort of gaming, specifically Tenra Bansho Zero, and Lady Blackbird. But I feel like there's a core...thing I'm missing, which might be related to my inexperience in prepping heavily planned games instead of totally winging it. Thus I'm coming to you all. I'm looking for any advice, materials, whatever that you might have(or could point me to) for getting a good brief but complete game. Thank you all very much for whatever help you can offer.
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Oct 5, 2014 04:16
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| # ? May 4, 2024 16:23 |
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This is the kind of game I usually run with my group. My basic thinking is to plan for sessions that are fun in their own right and may or may not go past that one session's events. You don't need to explicitly say "tonight you're fighting your way out of a gladiator arena and that's all", you can just have a small-scale world that the players can have fun dropping into and exploring for a while. Don't get too invested in having a concrete ending in mind, just make a fun premise that isn't too broad and let the players jump right into having fun from the first scene. I'll try to put together some actual advice rather than general platitudes later, I think this is a good topic.
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Oct 5, 2014 04:35
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Buy Tilting At Windmills' Dread, which is a horror game built around one-shot play and provides lots of good advice on how to run single games in general. But some practical advice- pacing is key. A normal campaign is paced like a TV series, or a comic. One-shots have to be paced like a movie or a novella, and mini-campaigns etc. are like a mini-series or an ordinary-size novel. With that in mind, you'd think that they'd have to be highly planned, right? Nope. If you've got players good enough to create interesting characters with plenty of built-in conflicts, you can run even lighter than for conventional stuff because you don't need as much, and even with stockish characters, what you mainly need is a scenario and a motivation. For example, I ran a Dread game built around the scenario of "strangers trapped together in haunted house", and although Dread is light on prep period, the sum total of my preparations were: 1. Drawing maps of the haunted house. 2. Writing up character sheets. 3. Putting together the basic motivation for the antagonist. 4. Pulling together appropriate music. 5. Coming up with a few setpieces. Once I did that, and narrated the characters coming in one by one and the first setpiece starting up after they introduced one another, then I just winged it and pulled out setpieces whenever they'd fit. Of course, doing this with TBZ, e.g. would require quite a bit more work because there's actual mechanical weight to it, but you can also develop sets of stock enemies or challenges to pull out and mix together as well.
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Oct 5, 2014 04:48
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My main advice is to jump start and completely skip the usual "spend a session getting the party together" crap and just go straight to "so you guys all know each other, trust each other and would fight and die for each other. Why is this? What happened?" and then start in media res with something like "alright, so you're falling out of a building" Saves a lot of time. I'm consistently amazed how long getting the party together takes in full campaigns.
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Oct 5, 2014 14:20
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The most important part for one-shots is either choose a system where character creation is dead simple, or have pre-gens. It's no fun to spend 1 hour of a 3 hour session creating characters.
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Oct 5, 2014 16:57
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A big problem I'm having, as I try to put together some pitches for one-shots, is focusing the actual concept down. Like, in my group, our campaign pitches are often more about a setting and a vague goal. You're a bunch of smugglers in the Star Wars universe, that kind of thing. Any immediate objectives are often kind of loosely cobbled together once the characters are made and have some history with eachother. But of course, this doesn't work for tight, focused gaming. So, any advice on really dialing it in, getting a solid thing to deal with and engage with RIGHT NOW, without pushing too far into railroad territory?
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Oct 6, 2014 08:40
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Yalborap posted:A big problem I'm having, as I try to put together some pitches for one-shots, is focusing the actual concept down. It's okay to have the game be more focused in one-shots or short games. Generally a very sand-boxy concept takes some time to find its direction, which may not really come together in 2-3 games. So you can take your above concept and either say: you are some smugglers in the Star Wars universe that accidentally stole the wrong cargo, and now both the Empire and a Hutt are after you right now. Depending on your players, you can ask them to flesh out what the cargo is, how the job got screwed up, and if they're going to try and sell it or just dump it. It really is better to start with a fairly focused, lean concept and let your players flesh out the parts that are most interesting to them. But unless you know your players and know that they're really motivated to find/make a plot, I'd throw them a few hooks that are immediately interesting and demand a response.
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Oct 6, 2014 14:04
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So to build on what's going on, what would be a good list of games either specifically designed for, or very well suited for, this sort of gaming? Off the top of my head, I only know of a small handful that're actually designed towards one-shots and mini-campaigns: -Tenra Bansho Zero. (I want to say other Japanese tabletop RPGs follow a similar pattern, but I only have actual play experience with TBZ.) -Lady Blackbird. -Fiasco, of course. -Dread, as mentioned. And those're the only ones I can think of. If we expand it to games that do small-scale gaming like thia well, even if they aren't designed specifically for it, I can think of Fate(especially FAE), aaand that's it. So I'm clearly missing a lot of games. I know a smattering of super indie stuff spends some time with this, but I have minimal experience with those in practice. So what games should I be looking for, to pitch some small-scale stuff with? And for that matter, any good resources, or books, to point out? I know TBZ has a lot of advice on how to run it, for instance, and Effectronica said that Dread has advice too? Any other games that go into the how of running them for these sorts of experiences?
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Oct 9, 2014 07:42
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| # ? May 4, 2024 16:23 |
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Call of Cthulhu is definitely a fun system for running oneshots. There's a Greg Stolze quote about playing Call of Cthulhu and the differences between campaigns and oneshots that goes something like "In a campaign, no I will not read the book bound in human flesh, and I'm definitely not going through that door dripping blood, but in a oneshot, hell yes bring on the evil books!" I've run oneshots in both FAE and Call of Cthulhu and they are just great. I've been trying to run more oneshots so that I can practice pacing in my games, because the stuff I plan for one session tends to spill over and run suuuuper long. I've actually thought about dressing up my play notes for the recent FAE Ghosthunting game I've run and making it into a PDF, but that's still a bit nebulous. Other fun systems for oneshots that I've seen but not played around with are 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars and Old School Hack. Then again, there's always that TG gem of Big Motherfucking Crab Truckers. But I wouldn't know anything about running oneshots in that.  Edit: I am dumb and forgot Fiasco, a game which is literally built as a oneshot.
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Oct 9, 2014 15:18
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