D&D 5E [Play Report] Large Party One-Shot

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We restarted our monthly "beginner-friendly" D&D campaign at my local comic book store today. We had 8 players show up on time ready to play! 3 or 4 had played D&D before, the rest were new. I thought I would share a few of my experiences and observations.

Part 0: The setup

I took a couple of ideas from an earlier one-shot thread to heart — plan an opening and a finale, budget roughly an hour for each, and have a flexible mid-section that can expand or contract as necessary.

I had a stack of pre-gens which players sifted through. I like the one-page pre-gens that Wizards makes available, because they write up a description of the character in natural language. I invited players to copy these over to character sheets if they wanted to. I asked everybody to spend a few minutes trying to visualize their character, and to make sure they could get behind the ideals, bonds and flaws of their character.

I asked everybody to introduce their character — name, race, class, Ideal, Bond, Flaw. Then I asked how their character knew the character to the left of them. (I've done this with random tables before, but this time it was just whatever the player thought of.) These connections tended to be fairly simplistic riffs on the obvious class or background of the character, but they were a nice way to introduce the PCs.

I did a very quick question-and-answer session with the patron, making sure not to use one of my NPC voices, to encourage us to stay in "prologue" mode and not get too caught up in a long interaction scene with the patron. This is a place where my games can sometimes get bogged down, and I didn't want to start with an interaction encounter. The patron then led the adventurers to the adventure site. I had decided to bring her along so I could use her to prod the players into the dungeon, instead of spending the first 30 minutes checking the earth in front of the entrance for traps. (I've had this happen with one-shots before. My experience is that one-shot players start very slow coming out of the driveway.)

 

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Encounter 1: Exploring a ruined chapel

The first main encounter was designed as an Exploration encounter. I like Exploration as an introduction to D&D — it spotlights the idea of seeing your character in a space and imagining real, concrete actions that that character can take. It engages the skill system, without getting bogged down in the more finicky combat features and action economy. The trick is to create an Exploration situation that engages all of the PCs, instead of a "follow the leader" scenario. I used a large single room with 3 alcoves, each with a different feature. The trick was to get from an ancient temple into a dungeon 100 feet below — after the stairway had collapsed. There was a brute strength approach — climbing straight down, and then a dumbwaiter mechanism with a winch that could be repaired. The area was also littered with little clues and tricks for learning more about the dungeon beneath. Not necessary, but potentially helpful.

This worked surprisingly well. By keeping all of the characters in one large room, we were able to fluidly split the party, putting small groups to work in different areas, while keeping everyone within shouting distance. This allowed me to keep all actions in turn order, moving around the table to check in with each player on what their character was doing. This way, every player got a feel for their character's abilities, and there was enough for every character to be doing something different. The experience was helped by a creative group of players, and the experienced players stepped up in a big way to help facilitate things, without telling new players how to play their characters. (My one big request at the outset.)

My first big flaw was making the "end-game" of this encounter too prolonged. The brute force method was legitimately dangerous — my hope was that players would either reinforce the climb, or rely on the smarts method of going down the dumb-waiter, but I made the only control mechanism on the top floor so that one character would need to climb down no matter what. As a result, way more players ended up climbing down. I had probably set the conditions a little too aggressively — an easy check for every turn's worth of movement speed. I had put the first few characters through harrowing descents, with high stakes and near-death, and didn't feel right hand-waving the last couple of characters to go down.

The pros: Every player got spotlight time on their character, and there were opportunities for a variety of different skills and proficiencies to come into play. (Languages, tool proficiencies, deciphering ancient texts, athletics, acrobatics.) Characters got to interact in small groups with other PCs, helping to flesh out some character relationships.
Cons: Encounter slightly overstayed its welcome, chose not to include good mechanisms for wrapping up the encounter once players had sufficiently explored. (This may not have been as much of a problem with a smaller party.)

 

[Eltab]

When you get into a fight, encourage the players to 'team up' and figure out what they can do to work together.
Ex: Paladin (or Fighter) + Rogue. Paladin goes up to confront enemy and smack it. Rogue can dart in, get his Sneak Attack, duck behind Paladin. Tough-armored Paladin can take a hit (probably won't even get hurt) and dish out some hurt in return, whether the enemy tries to follow the Rogue - opportunity attack - or stands still for a duel.
Ex: any squishy artillery (Wizard, archer Ranger) and a Cleric. Cleric stays in between the 'glass cannons' and the bad guys. Everybody gangs up on one enemy, who should go down fast. Repeat until you get to the toughie who is trying to smack down the Paladin.