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So... pacing. I am running up into a wall that is driving me crazy - for the life of me I cannot pace a game to save my life. Games I write as oneshots turn into 5-6 session campaigns. The campaign I started has been plagued with long breaks, and in the 4 months and 4 sessions of play (roughly 9-11 hours) since we've started they have yet to move past the same in-game day in a section of an adventure I thought would take a maximum of two hours. One of the above sessions was a blast, apart from folks showing up late and thus forcing me to retcon what was happening twice in short order - the players engaged, they came up with a fun plan, and things were actually accomplished. The most recent session did not go well. Literally nothing of note happened for the campaign, despite knowing that moving a story forward is preferable to stupid foreshadowing I wasted about 45 minutes of play on something that won't come into play for literally months (in-game and out) of play. HELP. How do I plan manageable adventures? How the flying gently caress do you run a oneshot in something that's not Call of Cthulhu / Big Motherfucking Crab Truckers?
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Aug 27, 2014 17:40
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 07:38 |
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inklesspen posted:Your question might be better asked in the GM Advice thread; this thread is about writing adventures for other groups to run. Nope, my question is specifically as pertains to writing adventures, specifically writing an adventure to be run within a certain period of time. When I get home tonight I'll see if I can't link the adventure I've written for reference. My most recent session is a perfect example. I wrote an adventure for FATE Accelerated, came up with four pregens with various degrees of completeness as one of the selling points of FATE is being able to add in detail to characters on the fly, and started running after explaining the game mechanics. In the two or so hours we played, the players only managed to interact with one NPC and got through exactly one encounter, a 'combat' against a possessed library maze. The majority of the session was spent in combat against the library. FATE Accelerated is billed as a fast-running system, I can certainly understand intellectually how it speeds things up, and I'm familiar with game recaps and actual plays of similarly-styled games and systems. My problem is that no matter how I believe I'm simplifying my design and writing, no matter the more simple systems I move to game in, and no matter how I analyze my past work I cannot for the life of me write a oneshot.  I've run three oneshots as a GM, only one of which I wrote. Two were Call of Cthulhu adventures where the entire game could be summed up as 'bad poo poo is in [place]; characters enter [place]; bad poo poo happens; survivor(s)/no one leave(s)'. One was a Big Motherfucking Crab Truckers game where all I wrote were three short groups of bad guys to harry the Crab Truckers, it's such a simple system it really doesn't have any mechanics for failure. What are some tips for adventure design when you're aiming to write a convention scenario or one-night 3 hour pickup game? Because I have written a half-dozen attempts and they've all either crashed and burned or taken months to complete, and it is really starting to bug me that I can't fix it.
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Aug 27, 2014 18:42
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