What makes a good one-shot?

[Morrow]

I’m planning to start a new D&D campaign. The idea was spawned from too much time mulling over the Psionics Handbook and Call of Cthulhu d20. I started thinking that something mixing mystery, politics, psionics, and mind-shatteringly alien elder gods might be fun. Maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to begin would be to put together a one-shot as kind of a pilot to let potential players decide if their interested. Unfortunately, although I’ve played in a number one-shots, I’ve never run one. So what makes a good one-shot? Any tips about preparation, staging, what to do, and what to avoid would be great.

Any thoughts about planning for the transition from the ‘pilot’ to an ongoing campaign would be helpful. It occurs to me that some things that make good one-shots may not lend themselves to ongoing campaigns. For example, one-shots seem to work better if the players use pre-generated PCs that the DM has built specifically for the adventure, but if you’re starting a new campaign nobody wants to have a character made for them.


Morrow

 

[FullTinCan]

Half-Orcs!

I have run about 10 one-shots, and the overall factor that makes them fun is either

1) A stupid half-orc being run by an excellent role-player.

2) Lots of intra-party intrigue, note passing etc.

Other than that, make sure that you have at least 1 combat every 3 hours, and give people a chance to go out on a limb.

 

[Gospog]

Episode 0?

Run your one-shot, use pre-gens, but have it take place 10 years before your actual campaign will take place.

It's kind of like running a prequel to your own campaign.

When the PCs in your "real" campaign hear about "history" from 10 years ago, they will have a lot more interest! They helped shape that history.

Note: 10 years is just the first number I thought of. Set it whenever you like, just keep the PCs involved, that's the secret to ANY good game, one-shot or otherwise.

Good luck, and have fun!

 

[Katerek]

I agree with Gospog here. I have done something very similar before and it worked great! I also killed off the pre-gens, but that was part of the story.

 

[Zaruthustran]

one-shot fun

Here're a few ideas:

Let people know that they're playing in a one-shot, so that they feel free to let loose and have fun.

Keep the action moving. Don't let the players make decision by commitee. Ban "table-talk" during combat.

Speaking of combat: keep it SHORT.

Find a way to discourage dawdling. If the one-shot is in a cave, then make it so that the cave is slowly flooding and the players have to escape before it fills up. Or poison the players, so that they have to find a cure within 48 hours. Or stick them on a luxury super-yacht that just struck an iceberg and is slowly sinking. Anything to prevent the players from taking a "well, let's just rest here to recoup our spells" kind of path.

Keep it focused. Present the players with a clear goal or challenge (even it's not the "real" challenge). Within 5 minutes of the start of the session, everyone should know what the Big Deal is. This works nicely with the point right above about dawdling. Here's a classic: "We've come to this mansion, a storm started, the bridge is washed out, weird things are starting to happen. We have to survive the night/weather the storm, and hopefully figure out what's causing the weirdness."

Take cues from one-shot movies: Night of the Living Dead, Air Force One, The Towering Inferno, Evil Dead, Titanic (after the iceberg), Aliens, Run Lola Run.

Also take cues from sitcoms and 1-hour dramas. Most of these shows take place over a short period of time, such as a single day or even a single work shift.

Not that a one-shot has to be a single night. But keeping the time period short makes the one-shot more focused, more memorable, more intense, more fun.

-z

 

[MeepoTheMighty]

Re: Episode 0?

Run your one-shot, use pre-gens, but have it take place 10 years before your actual campaign will take place.

It's kind of like running a prequel to your own campaign.

When the PCs in your "real" campaign hear about "history" from 10 years ago, they will have a lot more interest! They helped shape that history.

Note: 10 years is just the first number I thought of. Set it whenever you like, just keep the PCs involved, that's the secret to ANY good game, one-shot or otherwise.

Good luck, and have fun!

While in the middle of running RTToEE, I ran a one shot using the related adventure in Dungeon... I don't recall the name of it, but it was the one that involved rescuing/killing a girl before she could give birth to a Chosen One of Tharizdun or something. I ran this shortly before the characters in the other campaign were about to encounter the cultists, and set it to happen around 20 years before the events of RTToEE. It was pretty fun.

 

[madriel]

Start things off with a bang. Literally.

Play in real time. If they have one hour before the bomb goes off/basement floods/candles burn out, set a timer. When it goes off, they'd better be done. It makes for a really intense experience. Seeing the minutes tick away can get the adrenaline going.

Make the pre-gens first level. Make them use their wits and skills rather than fancy spellslinging.

Don't use random traps, you want to keep people moving. If you use any traps, just put it on the drawer the key's kept in, for example. Give them a chance to spoil ambushes (a creaking floorboard or a window is open that used to be closed). Keep the combat light, so they don't get too beat up. Throw patsies at them that used delaying tactics.

To segue into a campaign, keep something back at the end. Have the big bad villain behind it all turn out to be somebody's patsy. Have the strange grimoire disappear. Give them a final mystery and a clue to be followed up.

Tie it into the campaign characters backstories. They inherit the mansion or their mom begs them to find out why their uncle disappeared after babbling about a book.

That's the best my sleepy brain can come up with at the moment. Good luck.

 

[Morrow]

Re: Episode 0?

Some great ideas here, thanks! The prequel idea is great and the advice about starting things off with a bang and establishing a time limit are very helpful. Anyone else have any thoughts? Any anecdotes about truely memorable one-shots?

I knew I should have included something about Piratecat or the Book of Vile Darkness. That would get some discussion going!

Morrow

 

[EOL]

Re: Re: Episode 0?

Some great ideas here, thanks! The prequel idea is great and the advice about starting things off with a bang and establishing a time limit are very helpful. Anyone else have any thoughts? Any anecdotes about truely memorable one-shots?

I've had a couple of memorable one shots. One in particular took place over the christmas break a few years back, lots of old friends were in town so I told everybody that I was going to run Keep on The Borderlands using D&D basic rules and characters rolled using a straight 3d6 with no switching stats around. Then everyone chipped in 2 bucks into a pot which would go to whomever died the least. It was very nostalgic and also enormously enjoyable. Because the D&D Basic rules are so simple people could role up a new character in less than 5 minutes and jump right back in. There were three TPK's in all and the guy with only five deaths ended up getting the money, but everyone agreed that it was great fun.

So the advice would be that one-shot's are fundementally different than campaigns and you should have fun with that difference.

 

[Squire James]

They also tend to work better if the tone of the adventure is completely different from your normal campaign (though not so different that you as a DM don't like it or can't handle it!).

For instance, after a year or so of "serious" adventures, I ran a one-shot where the PC's were hired to babysit a 50 year-old elf (still a kid due to elf lifespan peculiarities). The kid was unusual in that (1) he was a hemophiliac, so the slightest scratch could be life-threatening, (2) he was a 2nd level magic-user under 1e rules, so he had a 1st level spell and 4 cantrips to play with, and (3) the local mayor hired 10 orcs to kill him.

The 2 PC's who showed up created a thief and an illusionist, which pretty much killed my thoughts on the one serious combat I had planned for the adventure. We had a blast. The kid, with his Creak, Groan, and Moan cantrips and a cellar without lighting (neither of the PC's had a torch, both were human) managed to convince the characters there was a horrible undead monster in the cellar. One PC found out that Healing proficiency is good in a party without Clerics, especially if they're trying to keep a hemophiliac 50 year-old elf alive.

Illusionist: "I make an illusion of a dragon to scare away the orcs."

DM: "There's no good way of telling if you've seen a dragon before, so roll a d20. The higher the roll, the better the idea you have of what a dragon's supposed to look like."

Illusionist: "Um, I rolled a 1."

DM: "A man-sized bipedal pink dragon with green polka-dots appears near the orcs. They fall down laughing. He turns to you and introduces himself as Puff."

Illusionist: "Isn't he supposed to be silent, and under my control?"

DM: "That's how it's supposed to work, yeah. Pretty strange that it worked differently, isn't it?"