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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5162494" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't often run one shots except on behalf of a gaming store, but yes, a 'one shot' would be the more general case of a tournament or convention game.   It sounds like you have a wildly different gaming experience than I do.  Outside of 'open dungeon crawl nights', when gaming with friends I don't even mean the term 'one shot' to mean 'one session'.  I mean rather 'a single story with disposable characters', and they are more likely to last 2-3 sessions than one.  Over the years, I've often played 'one shots' as introductions to different gaming systems, but rarely have those literally been 'one session'.  For my part, I'd be more interested in hearing your theories of stagecraft and creating timing in stories that last 4 hours than answering polls about how many combats that a game should have.  I inadvertantly created a self contained episode with the first session of a new campaign a few weeks ago.  I had anticipated that I had 6-7 hours of material ready, but do to a few unexpected turns, the players missed about a third of my material.  I threw me for a bit of a loop and I had some momentary panic over how I'd get things back on track, but it ended up working out because - without a lot of forethought - I'd structured the material into 3 'acts' which each had a natural climax.  So rather than having the climax of the 2nd act end the session, we ended on the climax of the 3rd act.My toolset and yours are going to be inherently different.  Things like 'cliffhangers' which are natural parts of how I pace my stories, are of little use to you.  And conversely, there are probably things you are doing that I don't much consider.</blockquote>

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