The Art of the One Shot

The one shot game is a beautiful thing. When properly executed it can effectively introduce people to the hobby without asking for a time commitment from them and simultaneously scratch the itch of weekly players who want to shake things up. I like that cocktail and I'm going to try and build a system with it in mind.

So here are some loosely structured ideas for what I think a system like this would need if I wanted to use it with all of my favorite old school style modules. If this game exists already, please let me know so I can move on my life and just play that.

Character Creation
This is probably the biggest deal for a system that needs to be able to run fast, and at a moments notice. I've run games where I just go ahead and make a bunch of characters that people can inject their own flavor into but sometimes I don't have the time/want people to come up with things on their own. Plenty of old school systems have quick/randomly generate-able characters but most of them also have super weak first level characters and depend on multiple sessions to get real weird and acquire all the good for plot wild magic items.

So what I'm thinking is that character creation should not only be quick and fairly easy for newbies to jump in on, but should also be a little meatier in the cool character stuff department. I want to generate characters that have a little more experience under their belt without the headache of generating higher level characters off the bat. In order to do this I'm thinking the "class" system will be focused more on the kind of adventuring the character was doing up until now. So instead of picking "fighter" the player could roll up stats and then pick a couple of things from a list like this:

-Cool Fighting Style
-Interesting Magic Item
-Specialized Skill
-Helpful Companion
-Magic

And then maybe you end up with characters like this.

Wealth & Treasure
A one shot game doesn't give us a lot of time to acquire great deals of wealth and then figure out what to spend it on. Instead it gives us an idea of what the characters were up before the adventure started. You know, the first few paragraphs of every Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser story that gives you an idea of whether or not their rich. I'm thinking it gives you a shorthand idea of what your characters have access to, if they have patrons or if they're sort of dirt poor in a gutter. I figure the more things like this that get built into the characters the less work you do as the DM.

Experience & Leveling
We've already established that there isn't really time for a systems that rely on traditional wealth/treasure acquisition curves so Leveling XP have to either be scrapped or changed dramatically. I think there could be a system for opening a character up more as they progress through the plot, without having to consult a chart to level up. Maybe each of those special powers has like a little special power inside of it that comes into play in the 3rd act. Also I'm going to start using acts to describe the flow of the adventures for this thing because it's fairly movie like already and I'm going to pretentiously lean into it.

Death & Dismemberment & Dying
I want to avoid super low survivability, but I do want characters to be affected by the environment and conflict, so I'm thinking that dismemberment, curses, hexes and things like vampirism will definitely have prominent play here. I also want something that keeps a players attention if they DO die early on. Like, maybe they start controlling an aspect of the environment/plot/NPC or whatever.

This is a sketch. I'll break each of these down into more fleshed out posts in the coming weeks.