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.