The short adventure fallacy / Prison of the Hated Pretender play report

[redrick]

At several points in my relatively brief DM'ing career, I've tried to run characters through a very short, one-session adventure. When doing this, I generally pick a small, location-based adventure, and run it. Some of them I've built from scratch, and others have been published. I've noticed that my playstyle tends to be a little slow (lots of emphasis on exploration, interaction and character interplay), so every time I run a "short" adventure, I make the adventure shorter and shorter. Last night, I ran an OSR adventure called Prison of the Hated Pretender for a group of 6 first-level characters. "This adventure looks like it will be over in less than 2 hours," I said to myself. "No way we won't finish this."

After all was said and done, the adventurers got through the first floor (that's 3 rooms with one combat encounter), before two of our players had to go home. Once character introductions were finished (and yeah, we rolled for character relationships on a table and then let the players spend a few minutes fleshing those out, which took some time, but was fun), we had about 2.5 hours of play time. To be fair, I think everybody had a great time, and two of the new players seemed excited about coming back for another game.

(EDIT: To be clear, I found this adventure wonderful and would happily recommend it. It's free to download!)

SPOILERS BELOW


We arrived at the Prison, a stone tower in a back-plains part of the world. I started the players out a few hundred yards from the structure, so they could see the tower and the ramshackle village nearby, and decide whether to approach the tower right away, or head to the village and ask for information. This is Short Adventure Mistake #1. I want the players to have a choice in how they approach a location, so I give them a few yards to get situated. Now, the players spend some time getting closer to the tower. Do we go straight to it? Do we go to the town? Do we fire an arrow at it and see what happens? How does it smell?

We approached the tower. The mouth was an opening with a door in the back, where the throat would be. (I forgot the part about the back of the mouth just being bars, so the back of the mouth was otherwise stone.) Next to the tower was a tree that grew right alongside it. I clipped a picture of the tower to the front of my DM screen. The players continued to ponder their options. As they should! Strange screaming towers in the middle of nowhere are probably dangerous! On the other hand, things that are dangerous sometimes pose rewards, and the treasure site on their treasure map was another 8 days off. Should they open the door? Go to the village and ask for information? Try to climb the face? Climb the tree?

Somebody climbed the tree, and as he got to the top, realized that the eyes were open. He looked into the eyes, and saw some freaky looking ghostly things soaking in some sun-rays through the eye. He grew concerned, tried to climb back down, made a noise, drew the attention of the ghostly things, but escaped without injury, because the ghosts didn't seem interested in leaving the tower. Cool. This is all Part of the Adventure. That's what that tree was there for.

Back on the ground. Well, there are ghosts in the tower. They looked angry. Some wracking of brains suggested that ghosts exist and are capable of hurting people. Some transcendental meditation picked on some seriously harsh anger, fear and guilt vibes. This place might definitely be dangerous. ("Aren't we supposed to be following this treasure map, anyway? Maybe we should just get chopping." "The Gods wouldn't have put this carefully detailed structure with a single tree in the middle of these flat, boring plains if they didn't want us to investigate them. There's probably treasure inside.")

We went over to the town to ask for information. Only one townsperson seemed interested in speech. Two other visible townspeople appeared to be in varying states of severe inebriation. Sasha, the "chatty" one, told us that bandits had been hiding out in the tower, but they wouldn't last long, because the place was haunted. (This was, I thought, more or less true.) The drunkard lying face-down in the mud in a pool of his own vomit (but with his breathing clear) was investigated. "My husband, Gleb," said Sasha. Questions were asked about the other drunkard, the one just sort of stumbling around in circles. "Masha's husband, Sergei. She lives in that house over there." Short Adventure Mistake #2: Just outside every short adventure is a whole lot of stuff that can be explored, most of which only relates tangentially to the short adventure that you thought you were going to race through in an hour. This was all fun for me and the players, so not too much of a foul.

We decided to check on Sasha. It turned out that Sasha was trapped in under the floor of her hovel. Her legs had been amputated in an accident, and Sergei didn't want people seeing her. (Whoa, this was getting dark, I thought to myself a little late.) Sergei promised to bring her a chicken, but he had probably gotten drunk on tree vodka and hadn't been by in 3 days. The adventurers gave her some food and helped her out of the hovel. Earned some inspiration (D&D 5e). I was concerned that I was getting into some misogynistic territory, so, to cover my butt, she asked them to kill Sergei for her. The adventurers, mostly lawful types, declined, but they did offer to chop down the vodka tree. Sidequest. 4 new characters. At least we were having fun.

Sasha told them that the ghosts in the tower could be placated by gold. "Is that true?" I thought. "I don't remember seeing any indication of that in the other descriptions." Adventure reading is impressionistic business. Too busy imagining and being inspired to keep track of everything that's actually written down.

We went back to the tower, now armed with the "knowledge" that the ghostly phantasms would be placated by gold. Somebody climbed up the tree again, and threw a gold piece in through the eye. At first, everybody got angry at the tree-dude, but then I felt bad for feeding these people lies, and they were really excited about this gold thing, I so rolled a quick reaction check and one of the phantasms decided to swallow the gold and disappear. Gold kinda works, the adventurers decided.

More standing outside the tower. A whole lot of ideas about ways to use gold to get gold. Eventually, somebody says, "maybe we should just go inside."

Inside the tower, we discover a big magic circle. Behind the circle is a room with some more ghosts in it. They are looking at the adventurers, but don't seem to cross the circle. We put some gold in the circle, but it just gets pushed out. Damn. Have to cross the circle.

We run across the circle, and throw a lot of gold at the phantasms. Reaction roll. Some get distracted. The rest attack! Two sets of floating balls twirl around the barbarian and make him kind of sad. A faceless lady hugs the wizard, which makes him angry to the point of hp loss. The adventurers attack, and chop the ghosts to bits. Phew, end of combat. (I am not concerned that we didn't see combat until more than 90 minutes into play, though some fair critique was leveled at me that new players deserve to get one combat out of the way straight off the boat because it brings a lot of the gibberish on their sheets into focus.)

Now, we are in the museum. I tell them about the murals behind the bookshelves. Everybody checks out the bookshelves. There's nothing on the bookshelves, but there are some murals behind them. Short Adventure Mistake #3: When there's only 5 things in your adventure, you feel like you should show at least one of them off. Makes you more inclined to get a little pushy.

We finally look at the murals, and I hastily try to remember what's on them, and screw up the sequencing a bit, but it's alright, we get the point across. There's a mean dude who was in charge, he used some fancy magic to electrocute people, but then he got surrounded by stern looking dudes with holy symbols on their head and they pulled his intestines out while he watched.

At this point two of the players have to go home to walk their dog.

There's 4 people left, but one leaves to get beer, because she was really only playing because her brother was playing, and now he's off to dog-land. The 3 committed adventurers think about going downstairs, but instead they go upstairs.

There's still ghosts in the eyeball room. Quick fight takes care of them. There's a trapdoor up to the ceiling, but we decide to check out the rest of this floor first, and open that door in the northwest.

This room is pitch black (though sunlight coming in now that door is open), and it smells of overdue death. (The adventure makes it clear that this smells of something that's been dead for a very long time, which is not exactly a meaningful image to me, because my experience with leaving mice to rot behind my dresser is that, after a year or two, the smell tends to dissipate. So I'm trying to make it clear that this is a death smell that has somehow escaped the usual dissipation process, and it becomes entirely clear that I'm just trying to say, "you smell undeath.") As the sunlight reveals some gnawed on bird carcasses and overturned furniture, a voice from the corner behind the door screams, "Close the door!"

At this point, we decide that we want to see what is going on. Everybody knows that undeath is associated with evil, and we want to see this evil thing. So the cleric casts a light spell in the middle of the room and, for good measure, the wizard tries to light an overturned chair on fire. Things escalate, because the dude in the corner is not into light. There's a lot of movement and clattering of initiative dice. Nobody wants to go into the room, but the cleric does smash the door into the face of the dude as he rushes towards her to push it closed. He manages to slam the door shut, but the monk (who has come back from her beer run) ninja kicks it back open. The barbarian runs in and swings his battle axe, but is disappointed when the results don't seem to match up to his general expectations of metal penetration with such force and precision. ("You mean he's resistant to the damage?") In keeping with 5e's more lenient resistance and immunities, I downgraded the immunity to all non-magical and non-silvered weapons to resistance.

We also see that he is hunched, scrawny, has a terribly unkempt beard, and is wearing a crown of sticks and bird bones. This elicits sympathy in ... absolutely no-one.

And then everybody needs to go home. I tell them that, upstairs, they would have found a pumpkin in a bathtub, surrounded by scribbled magical signs, and a big device of gears and wheels and telescopes and stuff. They go, huh, magic device.

The end.

The lesson I've learned is that, while that adventure was fun and I still stand by it, short adventures are deceptively long. Next time I need to run a one-shot, I'm starting my characters inside a large dungeon. They won't clear the dungeon, of course, but when you've got 50 rooms to explore, there's no real concern if one room ends up going off a little funny, or if they ignore the stupid murals in room 23, because there's other murals in room 13, or if they spend a while dithering about entering are 10, because while they're dithering about entering area 10, there's still plenty of dungeon left to interact with in areas 6, 7, 8 and 9. Dungeons have a way of creating urgency. They have a few limited options, so players don't feel they need to explore the infinite possibilities of your vague, undeveloped barren plains before they do anything. They have natural boundaries, so you don't have to make excuses as to why players can't go "over there," or quickly scramble to build a whole new adventure "over there."

Whenever I run a short adventure, it takes forever because we spend the whole adventure, well, outside of the adventure.

Dungeons are really nice.

 

[Schmoe]

Hah, nice story. I don't know, it sounds like the players had a pretty good adventure. After all, it's the journey that matters, not the destination. I don't usually try to timebox adventures like that, as I prefer more of an ongoing campaign, but even then I generally have some sort of preconceived notion of where each session is headed. I've found that the games where the players go completely sideways and spend the entire time getting involved in tangents are often some of the most fun and engaging. As long as they are asking to play again, everything is good.

 

[redrick]

Hah, nice story. I don't know, it sounds like the players had a pretty good adventure. After all, it's the journey that matters, not the destination. I don't usually try to timebox adventures like that, as I prefer more of an ongoing campaign, but even then I generally have some sort of preconceived notion of where each session is headed. I've found that the games where the players go completely sideways and spend the entire time getting involved in tangents are often some of the most fun and engaging. As long as they are asking to play again, everything is good.

Haha, thanks. I think the point I was trying to make, before I got a bit carried away recapping the session to myself, was that, ironically, "short" adventures always seem to take the longest to run, and the more I trim down on the amount of "adventure" I plan, the more time it actually takes to get into the adventure. Which isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with that — as I said, I enjoyed the session a great deal, and I think most of the players did as well. The best part of adventures are almost always the parts that you don't quite plan for, and this certainly stayed true to that.

But I'm not going to worry about trying to run tight little adventures with a neat ending anymore. Because, at least for me, it's impossible. I might as well just run my next short one-shot in Rappan-Athuk.

Our previous two sessions were in another OSR adventure — The Halls of the Toad King. Just two PCs. They spent 90% of the adventure in the area of the "guest house"/prison. It was a total blast. One of the prisoners had lost his memory when he adventured somewhere he shouldn't have. Every time the PCs snuck out, got into trouble and killed a toad-person (you know how things go in the dungeon), they managed to convince this amnesiac that he had committed the crime. Before what became the final near-death combat, the rogue gave Amnesiac a dagger, and the cleric prayed to his former evil deity (recovering Evil cleric trying to go Neutral) to send Amnesiac visions of darkness and destruction. He had a better turn of phrase for it. As the PCs staggered their way back over the remnants of their failed break-in into the throne room, they found Amnesiac crouching over one of the toad-people they had killed, sobbing, and repeatedly stabbing the toad in the throat. They climbed back into their straw pallets, locked the gate, and woke up the next morning to the toad-people dragging Amnesiac away (presumably to be fed to the toad-spawn.) "That got metal in a hurry," said the cleric in recovery.

You can't plan for that stuff ahead of time. But it was, in its own way, all right there in the adventure.

 

[delericho]

Having read through your play-session recap, it looks to me like your issue is less that you have too much material, and more that you need to play in a more time-efficient manner.

I would offer two key lessons from the adventure.

Lesson One is simply Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Lesson Two is that when time is short, everything that you do should contribute to your goals.

So, if your goal is "finish the adventure", everything you do needs to contribute to that. (Of course, if you consider it more fun to do lots of character-stuff, that's perfectly fine too. But you should probably accept that you won't finish the adventure.)

One other thing that jumped out at my very clearly was that you blamed the pre-gen 'short' adventure for a lot of your troubles. The problem here is that most adventures, including short adventures, don't automatically assume you want to one-shot them. And even those that do generally assume a 4-hour session. 2.5 hours is very short, so you will have to adapt the adventure accordingly. (And the designers can't do that for you, because they can't know the constraints you'll be under.)

For instance, all that stuff you describe before the PCs head into the dungeon, and especially the time spent in the village: in campaign play, that's all good stuff. In a one-shot, however, that's absolutely poisonous. Unless going to the village takes the PCs closer to completing the adventure (perhaps by allowing them to skip some encounters), it needs to go. And I don't simply mean "discourage the PCs from going there" - I mean "remove the village entirely." If you give the PCs a choice, even a bad choice, you have to expect they'll spend time at least considering it - but they can't choose whether or not to go to a village that isn't there!

The other big issue I think you have is that the players are taking a long time coming to decisions. Again, in campaign play that's fine. But in a one-shot, you need to press them to make a decision. Don't simply let them sit for ages deciding whether to go left of right - push them for a choice!

And that's especially true of the decision whether to enter the dungeon in the first place or not. "There might be treasure in there," is already a weak reason to go in, and when faced with obvious danger, that's only more true. So give them a strong reason why they have to go in, and why they have to do so right now. "Your son is missing and was last seen heading this way", or something. (And ignore that little voice that says, "that's railroading". Yes, it is. But for a one-shot, it is perfectly acceptable to railroad the PCs into the adventure.)

Beyond that, it does sound like the adventure itself was pretty unfocussed for one-shot play - there are at least three levels, and no obvious context to allow the PCs to choose which to take.

The thing is, any dungeon adventure can be drawn out as a node diagram showing all the paths that can be taken - encounter A can lead to encounter B or to encounter C, encounter B always leads to D... and so on. For a one-shot, you need to keep the number of nodes quite small, and also the path from "start" to "BBEG" pretty short - I would normally go for 6 nodes, with at most 4 being required to complete. That still allows some scope for PC choices, but at least gives them a chance to get to the end.

I would bet that this pre-gen adventure had rather more paths than that, including paths that simply led nowhere towards the end goal. Those dead-ends should be removed from the adventure for the one-shot - again, simply don't let the PCs waste time deciding whether to take that dead-end or not.

I hope some of that helps, at least a little.

 

[N'raac]

When I think "one shot", I'm lead to "tournament adventure", which covers off a lot of what delericho notes above. So what are the hallmarks of tournament play that make it possible, though not certain, we'll get finished in 4 hours? Train of thought rambling ahead:

Well, characters are typically pregenerated, have built in hooks to the adventure and relations to one another, have abilities (eg, spell, magic items, etc.) selected for certain challenges in the adventure, and avoiding those that would derail the adventure.

The adventure typically starts with backstory provided, so we're not travelling along and fin something we may or may not want to investigate, with a few choices in how to do so. That happened before the players sat down, so here's the backstory. In the OP example, you have some reason to explore the Prison and you are standing at the entry point. There's no reason to go back to town, keep going on our journey, etc. Those choices were made before we sat down to play.

Then we move to the node issue delericho provided, and we probably have some issue of urgency/time.

I'm thinking back to those old TSR Tournament modules. The characters have fallen into an ancient pyramid, the air is bad and they have limited time to get out before they suffocate. The characters have, by various crimes, been "sentenced" to explore the dungeon and bring back the Holy McGuffin, or die in the trying. The characters are shipwrecked with no supplies, but here's an entrance to some weird old wizard's home.

Many of the modules had additional trappings added on to add more "how the characters meet", "how the characters become involved", "how the characters find and travel to the adventure location" and just more "adventure location", but that wasn't part of the one shot - it would be a distraction. The Slave Lords started out as a series of tournament scenarios and in each successive publication, was fleshed out more. But the original, 4 little module A1 to A4 series included some indications of how the tournaments/ one-shots worked. One or two had shaded areas on the map which represented areas that were not in the tournament. As I recall, Module A3 had two nine room linear dungeons, each of which had been one round/one shot of tournament play. Each encounter was faced one after the other, with no potential for retreat, rest, choosing which door, etc. etc. A4 began with the PC's imprisoned, stripped of gear, stripped of most or all spells, and freed by a rumbling earthquake. Find your way off the island before the volcano explodes or die. "What if the players rest to regain spells?" Well. after a few hours, they are wakened by an earth tremor, so they don't get enough rest to regain spells and now they have less time to find their way off the island. [Seriously, there's a smoking volcano, earth tremors and an island swarming with the guys who were imprisoning you, and you lie down to take a nap???]

One shots are different from ongoing campaigns. If you want the adventure to take 4, or 2.5, hours, then you need only 4, or 2.5, hours of material, not 10 or 20 hours of potential material and the hope the players will zone right in on what's important to complete the adventure. And, as delericho notes above, no sidebars - if it's not part of the steps in resolving the very limited goal of the adventure, cut it. That basement level with lots of flavour and interesting combat and non-combat encounters that add to the ambience, but aren't essential to the main plot? There is no basement, or the basement has collapsed and it is inaccessible.

This necessitates some railroading. If we plan on, say, eight encounters, each requiring half an hour or so to fill a four hour session, there can't be a potential for the players to instead have 16 half hour encounters (as belaboured above), and there also can't be the potential to skip past five of the encounters and finish the adventure in 90 minutes. The adventure needs to be scripted to some extent in order to fit the desired timeframe. Much more rigid than typical campaign play, much less sandbox campaign play.

 

[redrick]

Having read through your play-session recap, it looks to me like your issue is less that you have too much material, and more that you need to play in a more time-efficient manner.

I would offer two key lessons from the adventure.

Lesson One is simply Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Lesson Two is that when time is short, everything that you do should contribute to your goals.

So, if your goal is "finish the adventure", everything you do needs to contribute to that. (Of course, if you consider it more fun to do lots of character-stuff, that's perfectly fine too. But you should probably accept that you won't finish the adventure.)

One other thing that jumped out at my very clearly was that you blamed the pre-gen 'short' adventure for a lot of your troubles. The problem here is that most adventures, including short adventures, don't automatically assume you want to one-shot them. And even those that do generally assume a 4-hour session. 2.5 hours is very short, so you will have to adapt the adventure accordingly. (And the designers can't do that for you, because they can't know the constraints you'll be under.)

For instance, all that stuff you describe before the PCs head into the dungeon, and especially the time spent in the village: in campaign play, that's all good stuff. In a one-shot, however, that's absolutely poisonous. Unless going to the village takes the PCs closer to completing the adventure (perhaps by allowing them to skip some encounters), it needs to go. And I don't simply mean "discourage the PCs from going there" - I mean "remove the village entirely." If you give the PCs a choice, even a bad choice, you have to expect they'll spend time at least considering it - but they can't choose whether or not to go to a village that isn't there!

The other big issue I think you have is that the players are taking a long time coming to decisions. Again, in campaign play that's fine. But in a one-shot, you need to press them to make a decision. Don't simply let them sit for ages deciding whether to go left of right - push them for a choice!

And that's especially true of the decision whether to enter the dungeon in the first place or not. "There might be treasure in there," is already a weak reason to go in, and when faced with obvious danger, that's only more true. So give them a strong reason why they have to go in, and why they have to do so right now. "Your son is missing and was last seen heading this way", or something. (And ignore that little voice that says, "that's railroading". Yes, it is. But for a one-shot, it is perfectly acceptable to railroad the PCs into the adventure.)

Beyond that, it does sound like the adventure itself was pretty unfocussed for one-shot play - there are at least three levels, and no obvious context to allow the PCs to choose which to take.

The thing is, any dungeon adventure can be drawn out as a node diagram showing all the paths that can be taken - encounter A can lead to encounter B or to encounter C, encounter B always leads to D... and so on. For a one-shot, you need to keep the number of nodes quite small, and also the path from "start" to "BBEG" pretty short - I would normally go for 6 nodes, with at most 4 being required to complete. That still allows some scope for PC choices, but at least gives them a chance to get to the end.

I would bet that this pre-gen adventure had rather more paths than that, including paths that simply led nowhere towards the end goal. Those dead-ends should be removed from the adventure for the one-shot - again, simply don't let the PCs waste time deciding whether to take that dead-end or not.

I hope some of that helps, at least a little.

Thanks for your thoughts!

First of all, I should say that my reference to any fallacies or mistakes in the above recap are entirely references to my own fallacies and my own mistakes. What I wrote was in no way meant to be a critique of the adventure as written, and, while I imagine one could make some fair criticisms, I'd say the adventure was great. I blame not the adventure itself, but rather my preconceived notion of a "short adventure" as a good solution for a one-session game.

At the end of the day, 90% of what we did in our session was exactly what I'd want to do in any D&D game. We had several first-time players at the table, and I feel we put a damn fine showing up for Dungeons & Dragons. All that futzing around, deciding which way to approach a given room (with monsters in it!) — I love that stuff! Sidequest to chop down Sasha's husband's vodka tree? Looking for ways to get out of combat? Having partial success, but still having to fight weird phantasmal pairs of glowing balls? Having a PC feel the threat of death? (We squeezed 3 combats into that session.) Readying an action to smash a door in the face of the pathetic undead creature as he runs towards it? I'm not saying that's all stuff to go down in D&D history, but it was a good solid session and I think everybody enjoyed themselves.

There were a few dull moments (there alway are), but the only real stain on the session was that we didn't finish the adventure. And that's where I said to myself, "wait, what I am learning from this is that I don't actually want to run tight adventures that can be finished in 3 hours, and we all end up having fun even if we know that we'll never get to The End." Dropping the PCs into fairly linear set of encounters that lead obviously from one to the other is all well and good, but I don't think it's really my thing. Not saying I couldn't afford to tighten up my game and look for places to remove pointless decision points, but just in order to keep the Fun moving. Not to keep the Adventure moving. If that makes any sense at all.

Anyway, I'll admit that I mostly just brought all of you along in my own journey of public self-discovery. And, again, thank you for your thoughts, certainly something to think about all the same.

 

[Bayonet]

Interesting thread. I don't have much to add other than agree with one that I've never seen a "short" adventure fit seamlessly into the standard session length (I assume 3-4 hours is average game time?). I'm trying to build an adventure myself, and it keeps expanding beyond my control, hah.

I DID want to chime in and agree that Prison of the Hated Pretender is great, as is everything Dungeon of Signs has available for download at his site. They're free. Go get em!

http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.ca/p/pdfs-to-download.html

 

[delericho]

Interesting thread. I don't have much to add other than agree with one that I've never seen a "short" adventure fit seamlessly into the standard session length (I assume 3-4 hours is average game time?).

I think "they" assume 4 hours as standard. And I'm inclined to agree that that's a good length, although I rarely get to play for that long at a stretch any more.

I'm trying to build an adventure myself, and it keeps expanding beyond my control, hah.

I would recommend writing it first with only the barest eye for the time constraint, and then chopping it down to size in the edit. Which will hurt, no doubt (because you'll probably have to cut some good stuff), but you'll end up with something solid that should then run in the time you have.

Of course, you should maintain files of all the stuff you excise; it can then be repurposed for something else later.