Opinions about 4e as a one-shot game?

[ggroy]

How do you define a "one-shot"? In my eyes its a single nights gaming session, which means the likelihood of leveling up is non-existent. If the standard 13 encounters are used define what is necessary to level up, its unlikely that a one-shot will carry through all 13 encounters. This all depends on how long each combat or encounter takes.

The 1-shot games I've done in the past, were ones that lasted around 5-6 hours over an afternoon or evening.

With respect to leveling up, the players wanted to reach level 3 where they get to use another new encounter power. For such a 1-shot game, I was willing to be accommodating and leveling them up relatively quickly. (I wasn't following the guidelines that closely for leveling). Another option would have been to start everyone at level 3, but the players didn't want to do that for some reason.

 

[Voadam]

I played my first 4e game this past weekend. I was filling in for a missing player in my brother's ongoing game when they did a gaming weekend in my state after one of the players moved up here. I was playing a level 6 wizard and we started the game where they had left of in the middle of a dungeon and down a couple dailies.

I love at wills. Magic missile and scorching burst are easy to figure out and run with them for combats. After combat I'd use ghost sound to have the dead guys will me their loot or apologize abjectly for daring to oppose me.

I dislike nitpicky resource management.

I used one daily (flaming sphere) over the course of the night and a couple encounter based defensive powers in each fight but I would blow things up with fire if I could get more than one and magic missile if I could only find one target. I ignored all his summon powers and ran with straightforward things. Encounter powers were easy to judge good uses for but dailies were annoying to judge good uses. I hate playing the resource management game of guessing how many more fights we are going to have and holding back resources just in case.

Defenses and attacks were straightforward.

It was easy to focus on playing the evil joker style character (patterned after Richard from the webcomic looking for group) even in combat.

I was told the player was normally as much of a hindrance to the party as a benefit, so I wasn't worried about precision tactical mastery use of rules and teamwork synergy. I just blew things up, checked out things, and made a lot of jokes.

I felt it was a good system for a one shot and I had a lot of fun.

 

[Oryan77]

4e as a one-shot game...brilliant! Is it better to do a shot of Jack or a shot of Tequila? Cause I want to avoid whatever you guys were drinking that caused you to blow it at higher levels.

I've only played one 4e character from 1st-4th level, so I don't really have a lot to add. But what I did notice was that the other players still struggled with learning their powers every step of the way even at these low levels. I'm a fast learner so I caught on pretty quick, but the other guys seemed to have some type of confusion every session we played.

I figured that if you are familiar with the D20 rules and then pickup 4e, you would coast through it after passing 4th level. I'm surprised people with experience found difficulty. I assumed the powers would all be pretty similar to use even at higher levels.

 

[Rel]

When I say "one-shot" I'm talking about a 4-6 hour single session game. This is the kind of thing we do all the time at the various Game Days that I attend as well as GenCon.

I think that one reason this is just now dawning on me is that D&D gets played pretty rarely at such events. The relatively common sentiment seems to be that D&D is often the default game that many game groups play. So when people come to Game Days they are looking to try something new or play a game that their regular group doesn't play very often. Using this weekend's DCGD as an example, I think that only D&D sessions were PC's two 4e slots and one Basic Red Box D&D session run by Exploder Wizard. For my part, I played two HEX games and a session of Savage Worlds in addition to PC's 4e game.

 

[El Mahdi]

... Is it better to do a shot of Jack or a shot of Tequila? ...

YES!


*(That means: Why Choose?!)

 

[ExploderWizard]

I would say that it can work but the unknown nature of the players makes it risky. There is a lot of difference between playing a system for the first time and playing an rpg for the first time. If there was a possibility of someone new to rpg's signing up for my 4E game then I would consider just using the stuff from the intro boxed set and run a 1st level adventure only.
If I knew all players would be experienced at rpg's but might be new to the system I would still keep it at the heroic tier.

Now that the quick start rules are on the website a suggestion to look them over before the game might not be a bad idea. This way players could arrive with at least a hint of the very basics and some questions as opposed to starting from scratch.

 

[filthgrinder]

For the PHB2 gameday, WotC even admitted that the paragon tier pre-mades (I think they were level 11 or 12?) were too much of a learning curve for players. I agreed. When you come in fresh, it's tough to immediately get a grasp on what all your powers are, what they do, and how to use them.

I've been a DM for alot of 4e. I ran the first part of Keep on the Shadowfell twice. Then I ran a small campaign which went from 1st to 7th level. Our group decided to swap out and play Eberron with a different DM and start out at level 12. Even though we all made our characters, the first encounter was a slow crawl, and we all tried to figure out exactly what we wanted to do especially teamed up with other people. We've got some encounters under our belts now, so we've kinda got the hang of it.

Coming in cold to a high level character is tough, in any system. When you start out low, and you build up, you learn and add. Jumping in the deep end only requires more time, which one shots don't have.

WotC went with level 5-6 for the gamedays, and I would agree with that. 4-6 is probably the best level to come into a character cold for a one shot, whether pre-mades or not.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

I have not had particularly good experiences with one-shots in 4e, at least above the low heroic tier. Some of the games have been a lot of fun, but usually by avoiding combat (at which point you're only barely playing 4th Ed-- it would play about the same in 3e or in a half-dozen other systems). Others have been sorta kinda okay.

Most of the one-shot 4e games I've played or run had a lot of inexperienced 4e players-- often about half or more had never played before. For them, running at even low paragon was a big mistake on my part.

In my experience, 4e doesn't require comprehensive system mastery on the part of most players, but it does require knowing your character well. One-shots thus have the risk of producing the "first session in a campaign" confusion and inefficiency feel over and over again. Perhaps really experienced players get to a point where they can pick up a random 4e character and play it pretty well-- that certainly happened in earlier editions. I don't know, but for players who are relatively new to 4e, that's quite hard.

 

[Jhaelen]

Judging from my limited experience with 4E it really takes several combat encounters before the players know how to play their characters effectively.

For our 4E test drive we reserved a whole week - and I'd say that was about as much as is required. E.g. after the first day everyone complained that combat took too long. But this quickly changed as the players got accustomed with their powers and started acting as a team.

So, using 4e as a one-shot game may be a bit problematic unless everyone involved already has some experience with 4E and the character levels aren't very high.

 

[Rel]

It sounds like most of our opinions are pretty much in agreement. This would probably be a good time to mention that, whether he meant to or not, Piratecat's adventure design mitigated some of the learning curve issue.

His adventure design model is consistant enough that he's given it a name: Narrow-Wide-Narrow. This means that the plot starts off in a situation where the immediate course of action for the party is either very obvious or perhaps mandated (like an in-media-res start). This then opens up into whatever the central problem of the adventure is, at which point the PC's can take one of many paths. These paths lead to some kind of exciting conclusion, often a set-piece battle of some sort.

For one-shot games where you have limitations that don't exist in regular campaign play, this design is brilliant for a lot of reasons that deserve their own thread. Suffice it to say that Piratecat is REALLY good at it.

My point is that PC's style throws you right into the action, at which point you're going to have to confront the 4e character sheet. But this starting fight is also likely to be relatively easy and so picking the optimal power is probably not necessary. The game then transitioned into a more roleplaying/problem solving mode. This required a good many skill rolls, and that part the group found easy and familiar because skills in 4e are pretty darned similar to those of 3.x in terms of the mechanics. The "wide" part of the adventure also had the focus of the roleplaying shifting from one player to another, giving those not directly involved some time to read some of the powers/feats/items/etc more carefully. It looked like folks had a better handle on how best to deploy their resources in the final (cool!) battle.