TTRPG One-Shots Require Real Skill... and I Don't Have it

Or: Why a lack of focus and a surfeit of indulgence can be a problem.

RPGs are a peculiar medium in that you can take exactly the same set of rules and an identical setting and change nothing about them at all, and yet the skills, habits and discipline needed to run or play in a successful one-shot using almost any system are radically different from running or playing in a medium or long-form game. I’ve been playing and running TTRPGs for around 40 years and yet the suite of competencies needed to run or play in a one-shot still largely eludes me. In fact, among my regular player group, it is a queasy in-joke that, whenever I advertise an upcoming game as a ‘one-shot’, this is actually a covert invitation to what will turn into a three to five session mini-campaign (at minimum). Playing in a one-shot demands a series of aptitudes or techniques that are, if not entirely alien to me, then are at least pulling in a different direction to my own inclinations and preferences.

There are a great many methods, skills, tricks and tools for running or playing games that are ‘optional’ in the sense that one can lack interest in or facility with them and not be remotely concerned that one has a gap in one’s tool-kit. Can’t do voices and accents? Who cares? Can’t draw maps? So what? But those things that are required to make a true one-shot work are also, in a lot of ways, fundamental to the hobby, and to be in want of them is to have a genuine deficiency in some important qualities desirable in a GM and a player.

1 in 6. If my ratio of successful one-shots was anything approaching these odds, I’d be thrilled.

In a one-shot employing a previously unplayed system a GM has three or four hours in which to do those things that can take hours and hours in a longer form game. One has to be able to explain rules, describe the setting, establish tone and mood and provide a satisfying three-act structure - a beginning, middle and end. And all this with sufficient clarity and brevity to allow the time and space for players to actually play. In their turn, players in this context have to be able to define their characters quickly and efficiently and stick to the plot that is offered up, ideally with a degree of elegance that smooths over the inevitable sharp edges of a game with tight time constraints. In order to do these things, the single most important quality needed is focus and the enemy of this requirement is indulgence.

I don’t have much of a problem with the explanation of mechanics if I’m running a game for the first time with a given system. Not because I have any great facility with grasping or explaining rules, but because I don’t care enough about them in the context of a one-shot to worry much (if at all). I know that there are some who would argue that this is a failing in a GM who has at least some responsibility to play the game according to a fair or objective standard as contained in the rulebook, and I’m not suggesting that I come into a one-shot utterly unprepared. Rather, I have - at best - a barely functional appreciation of the core mechanic and some of the more granular aspects of common in-game actions. Everything else is handled by providing notes on pre-gen character sheets for the particular mechanical abilities the character possesses or handing out a more general ‘rules crib’ that offers a distilled form of the rules to players. If it doesn’t fit in to those categories, then I’ll blag it. My guesswork will be informed by my intuition about systems gained over the years, but it will still be an approximation. If anyone claims that this is a failing, I’d be tempted to hold my hands up to the charge.

Establishing the setting and tone of a one-shot as a GM are things that I struggle with and this for two equal and opposite reasons, depending on the setting. For games derived from historical periods, I find settling for broad-brush descriptions (‘It’s like Saxon England/Renaissance Italy/Reformation Germany/Napoleonic France’) unsatisfying. I can rarely resist the temptation to wander off on a tangent to describe in too much detail how and why the setting is like the particular era or to introduce some historical detail or anecdote to illustrate the point. In seeking vivid plausibility, I waste time over-explaining some trivial fact or feature of the setting that is unnecessary in the context of a quick-and-dirty single session. The equal and opposite problem I have is that, where a system lacks a ready historical analogue, I feel keenly the absence of something concrete to use as a model to describe the world. The consequence is that I either strive too hard to use rather strained and ill-fitting analogies or make no attempt to offer any level of detail or subtlety about the setting. So it is that I consistently contrive to fall outside the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ when it comes to establishing the setting for a one-shot, with either too much detail or too little.

But my real problem when it comes to GMing one-shots is that I am by preference and inclination too self-indulgent. By this I do not mean (at least, I hope I do not mean) that I monopolise the conversational flow of the game as the worst kind of frustrated wannabe-novelist ‘story gamer’ - although I’ve had my moments. My deep and abiding interest at the table is the in-character improvisational interaction of players with each other and with NPCs. I am a sucker for loquacious dialogue and sideways disquisitions as players describe and narrate their characters’ thoughts, words and actions. Never mind the plot, never mind driving the action forward or reaching anything like a satisfying conclusion. ‘This’, as a former academic colleague of mine was given to observe drily when confronted with the truly silly or incompetent ‘is less than ideal’. Because, whereas in a long-form game this level of indulgence is important (and maybe even necessary), in a one-shot it is objectively bad GMing practice because it runs counter to the whole point of running a game of limited duration.

The skill - the real talent - as a GM of one-shots is being able to walk that fine line between focus on the plot to ensure the game tells a story while still allowing players time and space enough to do those things that are not strictly dedicated to that goal but which instead allow them to express something about their characters. Too far one way, and one may as well be playing a video game in which two-dimensional characters are nothing more than mechanical cyphers; too far the other, and interesting, rich and amusing characters leave 80% of the plot unexplored. Try as I might, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of one-shots I have run that have managed to strike the correct balance, and this represents a vanishingly small proportion of the one-shots I have run.

This is also my biggest failure as a player in one-shots, and for the same reason. Give me thirty seconds to offer up some pithy and pertinent character information and I’ll happily take five minutes to enter into a discussion with another character or an NPC (longer if I’m not stopped) on some at best tangential topic. I have memories (which I won’t detail here, but ask me some time) that still make me squirm with embarrassment when I recall the time my character had a long talk with an (N)PC about some footling and strictly irrelevant matter while the GM and other players waited with a greater or lesser degree of justified impatience. I re-iterate that while this is a venial sin in the context of longer form games, it is a crime in a one-shot. A failure to pay attention to context, the purpose of the game and the etiquette necessary to achieving it is a weakness when it comes to running or playing any RPG.

If pressed to offer something like a defence for myself, I would say that perhaps the greater crime at any table is the breaking of immersion. By this I do not mean those moments in any session where players will be prompted to remember some out of game anecdote or a scene or event in game that leads to the familiar litany of apposite pop culture quotes. Those are ‘immersion breaking’ but they are so entrenched in the social aspects of the hobby that it would be churlish to label them so negatively (unless it descends into ‘chuckle-f*ckery’). What I regard as truly immersion breaking is anything that, as part of the process of play, pulls everyone up short and reminds them unequivocally that they are playing a game. The classic example is, of course, the pause while someone looks up a rule. But another instance that I find grating is the forced shift of attention; the abrupt change of scene or the sudden shift of gears between discursive, meandering, character-focussed play and the screeching hand-brake turn usually introduced by the GM with a phrase like ‘The next day…’ or ‘Arriving at…’

I would plead in my defence to the charge of rambling indulgence that it is my way of trying to avoid those head-spinning changes of pace and emphasis. Of course, such shifts are necessary in a one-shot, but it is a skill in itself to be able to execute them with a degree of elegance and seamless transition. Because I lack that skill, I opt for the possibly slightly cowardly view that it is better to have a one-shot that is meandering, unfocussed and discursive and without that particular form of immersion breaking that I find so frustrating. But this is to rationalise my own lack of ability and claim some spurious justification for what is, when measured against the goal of a one-shot, an inadequacy.

Next Time: Medieval Astral Magic for TTRPGs - Part Three - Jupiter