Guest Post Monday!

So Mutebanshee and I decided it would be fun to trade blogs and write a guest post for each other. I asked her to write a guest post about one-shots, I'm really happy that I did because she has lots of great insight and you should totally read her blog. Now I'm gonna kick back and hang on an imaginary beach because that's what you do when someone else does the heavy lifting. 

Skullboy reached out to me a couple days ago. "Mute," he said, "I'm posting a ton of stuff about one shots, and you are so smart, I really need you to tell me how to run a good single session game!"

I looked at him through the dark void of internet wires, shook my head, and replied, "No, Skullboy, you already have the session within you."

I might have left it at that, but I really like rambling on about my favorite hobby, so even though I already fixed the problem in a single, concise sentence, I decided to write several more paragraphs about the subject. Sam is already talking about a lot of system things that work well in one shots, and I'm going to leave that stuff to him. Instead I'm going to focus more on my favorite topic... improvising as a game master during a one shot adventure. 

So, stretch out your eyes and open your brains, and join me on this exploration of story telling during a single session adventure.

What is a one shot?

Okay, we all know that a one shot is a single session adventure. That's not really what I mean by the question. Perhaps the better question would be, "What is this one shot?" Because there are many reasons to run a one shot adventure. You might be trying to show off a new system at a convention where you have hours and hours to play. You might be doing a demo night at a local game store, and have only two hours to fill. You might be fascinated by a new system that doesn't fit into your current line up of games, but you will end up playing it, even if it costs you your soul (Numenera, I'm looking at you. Somehow, someday). You might just be hanging out with friends and decide to sit down for some new adventures.

I ask this question first, because the purpose of the game very much determines the tone, style, and type of game you want to play. If you are working with new people that have zero table top experience, and have only two hours to sit down and play, you want to run a much simpler game than you might want to at a convention where experience gamers are looking for new experiences. Answering this question should help getting the shape of your game in mind.

The elevator pitch

Now that you know what type of game you are running, it's time to start thinking about the setting, basic plot, and rpg system that you will run. This is the elevator pitch, and will act as your north star while making decisions in game. It's important to keep this simple, and I really like using random tables for this. A great example of a random adventure idea generator is used in Lasers and Feelings, and can come up with pitches like: "Alien Brainworms bond with an ancient space ruin to fix everything."

When you are pitching your game to potential players, I recommend including the system. So my pitch would become "A Lasers and Feelings game where alien brain worms bond with an ancient space ruin to fix everything." 

Game Prep

The amount of preparation you need to put into a one shot is going to vary widely, determined by both the purpose of the game, and the system that you are running. In Lasers and Feelings, I would do maybe five minutes of preparation, and come up with a list that looks a bit like this: 

• The Alien Brain worms are the remnant of a very powerful alien empire that once ruled the entire galaxy. 
• The ancient space ruin is the lost temple, the only place that the brain worms could reproduce. At the heart of the temple is a spawning pool where water mixes with an incredibly rare element: Element Delta.
• If the Alien Brain worms get to the center of the temple and manage to reproduce, they will once again attempt to conquer the galaxy.
• Possible Moral Question: Do the players destroy the temple and billions of years of culture, or do they find a better (but harder) way to stop the brain worms?

That's it. If I was running a grittier system like Dungeons and Dragons, I would prepare three to six encounters that I thought were likely to happen. I'd come up with something interesting to put at the center of the temple (maybe an encounter waste deep in brackish water fighting some sort of mother worm, while new born birth worms try to crawl into the character's ears), and I'd come up with a couple other encounters as well. While designing the encounters, I would always look back to the elevator pitch to make sure the encounters fit the theme and mood I was going for.

It's not your story

This is the most important rule for any adventure, but doubly so for a one shot. It's so important, that it probably should have gone up higher in the post. But if you have read this far, and only take away one thing from this guest post, it's that the adventure you are going to run is not your story.

Your job as a game master is to facilitate that opportunity for your players to tell the story that they want to tell. And that may not be the story you thought you were going to run. The last time I ran Lasers and Feelings I had my elevator pitch all set up. Lasers and Feelings is never a serious system, but I guessed there was going to be some opportunity for some serious, poignant moments. I had a couple moral dilemmas that I thought were interesting and would add some flavor to the game.

But then my players sat down to make characters, and they all decided that they were space adventurers looking for the most attractive aliens. They were out to coitus where no one had ever coitused before. At first I started having a mini panic. It was one of those, "Oh God, what is happening?" moments. But then I took a deep breath and remembered that I had a pitch.

The basic pitch of the game I ran didn't change. The threat was still the same, even the consequences if the threat wasn't stopped were still the same. But you bet that the captain of a Fleet Ship was a sexy penguin captain. During this game, my players decided to team up with the bad guys, decided three quarters of the way through that the bad guys were wrong after all, and then used a time traveling device that could have destroyed the universe to travel back in time... all to warn their captain not to sleep with an alien ooze that would leave him incapacitated for months and months. The last line of the game was something like, "you step out of the time vortex just as the ooze forms a massive penetrating shape. It raises the shape to plunge into the captain's back door, when you yell, "no, captain! That alien has an ooze transmitted disease!" You just saved your captain, the best coituser of you all."

It wasn't at all the story I thought I would be telling. Even though my pitch never changed, and the threat I had prepared never changed, the entire theme and mood did. And you know what? It was one of the most exciting games I've ever played.

Obviously if you are playing with people that don't want things to get graphic, you can tell the players at the table, "hey, we're going to keep everything pg in this game." If you want, you can tell people what sort of mood you are trying to achieve, or the concepts that you want to explore. But once you start in with the introduction to the game, it isn't your game any more. It belongs to the players, and you are there to help them make the most of it they possibly can.

This point is so incredibly important in a one shot, because it seems so counter intuitive. I know tons of Dungeon Masters that think a one shot needs to be more contained than a campaign. They want to know what every scene is going to be, and have a map of the adventure that they can rely on. And you know what? That's one style of gaming. But it isn't my style, it isn't Improvisational gaming. 

If you are going to try and map everything out, I offer this, every good GM needs to be open to player input and suggestions. Remember that players might come up with ways to solve a problem you didn't expect, and remember to be open to that idea. Every GM runs into situations where they need to improv at some point, no matter how prepared they are.

So, to sum things up, remember: Why are you running the game? What is your elevator pitch? How much prep do you need? And remember that in the end, it's not your story.

I could probably ramble on for another five pages, but enough is enough. Stop reading, and go play a single session game!

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.

Free Form Magic System

So a while back I wrote up a system for magic that didn't use a predetermined spellbook, but was instead specifically designed for improvisation and creative problem solving. I'm revisiting it now because I think it would be specifically useful for one-shot games and I'm thinking about trying to build a system around that idea.

A lot of the joy I get in play is seeing people figure out a creative solution to an open ended puzzle and I wanted to make a system that allowed for that kind of game play without having to read the description of a lot of spells.

I also want avoid one of my least favorite things- seeing someones face light up at the description of a spell and then watching it fall when they find out that the spell doesn't do what they thought it did.

The system itself emphasizes things like casting time, avoiding interruption while casting and spell components that definitely read as "fairy tale". Things like objects of sentimental value make for great spell components and tend to add some serious fuckin' whimsy to your table.

This is obviously a work in progress, but I think it could be really fun with the right type of people (fun people).

Spells - Instead of a list of specific spells. Spells are broken into families and after that, you get to make up your own awesome spells (with some give and take with the DM of course). I’m thinking you start with the ability to cast from 1 or 2 of the schools, and learn more along the way.

1. Evocation - Channeling magic to cause harm or damage.
2. Abjuration - Channeling magic as a shield
3. Enchantment - Imbuing an object with magic
4. Transmutation - Changing something into something else
5. Conjuration - Creating something from thin air
6. Illusion - Creating something that isn’t real
7. Divination - Magically sensing things, that may or may not have happened already.

Casting a Spell - To cast a spell a Magic User states the intention of their spell, the DM gives it a challenge rating based on that intent and the caster states how many rounds they will take to cast the spell, and which Spell Components they will use. Each component that you use to cast a spell adds to your dice pool (d6′s)

To successfully cast a spell the total of all the dice must match the challenge level of the spell (determined by the DM) The challenge level also corresponds to the damage, size, duration or overall quality of a spell, measured loosely and colloquially for the benefit of all involved.

Cantrip - A spell with no measurable benefit. These spells are used mainly for looking cool or showing off. No rolls are necessary.

Apprentice Spell - DC 6. d4+mods. Smaller than a breadbox. 1/5 senses. Less than an hour. Less than a hundred feet.

Journeyman Spell - DC 9. d6+mods. Smaller than a Golden Retriever. 2/5 Senses. A few hours. A few hundred feet.

Adept Spell - DC 12. 2d6+mods. Smaller than a refrigerator. 3/5 Senses. A day. A Mile.

Master Spell - DC 15. 3d6+mods. Smaller than an elephant. 4/5 Senses. A week. 6 Miles.

Failure: Spells are fickle and dangerous. Failing to cast a spell correctly, or failing to finish the spell casting lead to unfortunate consequences.

If a spell is completed but fails the check it is unsuccessful (duh). After you unsuccessfully cast a spell you roll to see if something bad happens. Roll a d6, on a 1 or 2 something bad happens (DMs choice).

If a spell is interrupted, a d6 is rolled and on a 1 or 2 and the spell deals damage to the caster equivalent to the spells strength.

Spell Components: Spells require at least one of the following to succeed. Using more than one of the components increases the chance the spell will succeed.

Verbal - Words or phrases used to create magical effect. 1d6 per round spent chanting. Any interruption in the chanting causes the spell to fail.

Somatic - Gestures or motions that create magical effect. 1d6 per round spent gesturing. Any interruption to gesturing causes the spell to fail.

Material - Reagents used to amplify the strength of a spell. Materials are rated by how many d6 they can add to spell casting. Materials can range from things like herbs or bones to objects of sentimental value. Material components must be used in conjunction with Verbal or Somatic components to achieve any results.