Wednesday, August 31, 2011

One-Shots

This weekend I'll be attending the Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Science Fiction Society's Gaming Weekend. I've been asked if I'm going to be running an A Time of War one-shot at the convention, or if I'm going to be running a session of Ten Years on Terra. I'm not sure, to be honest; I have emails out to my players to determine if we can make quorum at the event. In the meantime, though, I'm drawing up plans for a one-shot.

One thing I'm thinking about is the "defending the ranch during a storm" scenario. I have the advantage that I've already drawn up the map of Clark's property, and I can easily make the interior layout of his house. I can also be fairly generous with skills and equipment.

The trick of a good one-shot is carefully balancing out the scenario so have a clear start, building phase, crescendo, climax, and victory for the PC's -- at the end of the game, the PC's success must appear to hang on the edge of a razor, and it could easily go either way. The real secret is to achieve this without actually allowing the destruction of the PC's; the illusion of danger is what they want, but at the end of the day, people have a much better opinion of your game if they walk away winners who earned it.

Of course, as a GM, you can't control how the dice fall, so you need to adjust the factors you can control. In this case, I can give myself two levers to control the game with; the side and composition of the Opposing Force (OpForce), and the weather conditions. Incidentally, in this case, I also get to control the character's initial builds.

The last two posts this week will be on Setup and Runtime GMing a one-shot, using this scenario as my example.

3 comments:

  1. First, thank you for taking the time to put this blog together.

    I am just starting my own Time of War campaign, and this has been very instructive. The campaign I'm running is much more 'Mech focused...at least initially.

    I'm thinking that I'll put something similar together so that others can see all the 'oopses' I can come up with.

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  2. Thank you for reading, and for the insightful comments you have left on your read-through. I wish you the best of luck in running your own campaign, and I look forward to hearing how your experience is alike and different from my own.

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    Here's where I've placed my blog. Feel free to drop on by.

    If yer on the forums, look for 'Trenchknife'.

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