How do you run a one-shot con game?

[Simplicity]

First you find your mark, see.
A nice rich moron. A real Gulliver.
Then you hit them with your cover.
You'll need a patsy on your side to snag 'em.
It's a three person game, see...

Get into an big argument wit' 'em.
Have the patsy disagree with you.
Go on and on for ten minutes.
Then ask 'em:
"Yes, I'm certain. If I'm wrong will you buy me lunch?"

Then admit you were wrong and eat for free.
And that's how you run a con game...
It'll only work once though, so it's definitely one-shot.

 

[Glyfair]

One thing I've noticed, is that it's much easier to design a one-shot game when you are the only one running it. You have more room to be general rather than specific.

At a few Origins and Atlanticons, I ran a series of James Bond 007 adventures called "The World's Greatest Spies." I recently looked at my scenario for the first year I ran it and there wasn't a lot there. I had a list of clues to plant, locations they could choose to investigate, NPCs they'd encounter and the basic plot. How it came together depended on the direction the PCs decided to investigate. Even then, I summarized the final battle, because time had run out (no one minded, they had so much fun with the investigation).

If I had to design it for another GM, it would have looked a lot different. More would have been tied down and how it went would be up to the person GMing it's ability to improvise (investigation scenarios are notoriously hard to limit to a time frame).

One other thing I'd recommend is using one-shots to do things players wouldn't get to do in a long-term game. My "World's Greatest Spies" scenario was designed with the idea that players rarely, if ever, got to play James Bond in a James Bond game. Why not design a game where he could be played, with others at his level (John Steed, Emma Peel, the IMF team, the Men from U.N.C.L.E., Simon Templar and the like)?

 

[Evilhalfling]

I love Con games - and I always include a healthy dollup of interpalyer conflicts, and a stong reason for them not to kill eachother.

the way I budget time is 1. introductions and RP, 2. journey/investigations 3 mid point encounter - often combat, 4. throw away encounter - usually a fight that is justified, but easy to remove if time is running short. 5. Climax.

The key to promoting player interactions is a web of relationships between pregens - loves hates, rivals, spouses, shared backstory, shared goals. At least one traitor, who has reasons to change sides mid stream. As for choosing characters I offer a choice of roles, not stats -
who wants to play the mysterious cloaked carriage driver, and who the rebelous teenager ?

Strong simple archtypes are best for personalities, with depth to be added if the player wishes.
many times they resemble sitcom characters : )

 

[billd91]

My advice is to design the plot so that it's flexible that players can still make progress on it even if they completely screw up. The short con time frame doesn't really allow them to go back to the start and re-investigate or whatever from that point. Make sure there are a variety of paths through the adventure.
I ran a one shot V&V game at Gen Con 2 years ago. The players played villains all trying to figure out who killed their arch-nemesis Captain Patriot (thus taking THEIR glory). Though both groups took completely different tactics during the investigation, oddly enough, both groups came up with nearly identical plans to lure in the real culpret and take him down. I had left the plot very loosely defined with just a couple places described in my notes, clues that were generic enough that I could drop them nearly anywhere, and still I had PCs doing the oddest things (one stole Captain Patriot's body so she could start working on animating his corpse... something clearly beyond the scope of the adventure at hand, but that how she saw the character...).

 

[Qualidar]

The way that I've done it is to set it up a probable path in my head, and set it up so I could insert a climactic end encounter wherever they may be on that path. The Pulp MnM game I ran had sort of a flow chart, with three different end battles. My Bughunters game was a bit more open ended, as I felt more comfortable just winging it. If you remember back to that Spaceship Zero game we were in w/ Piratecat, he said that our group was the only one that had gone in the direction we did, and his stories about what the others did were widely divergent. That blew my mind at the time, when I was thinking of modules as more of a "Start at point A and get to point B" mentality.

Having been on both sides of the con game, I'd say the most important rule is that your job as GM is to make sure the players are having fun. If that means throwing your pre-conceived notions of where the module is supposed to go out the window, so be it.

~Qualidar~