Thank you sir. I fret that these sort of posts (which are, of course, a disguised low-status way for me to offer GM and player advice without quite being seen to be doing so) will be a little dull or preachy and so I'm glad if I have been able to leaven the format a little.
My thought reading this was just incredibly plebian, which was: "I wonder which games he's trying to run as a one-shot?" Because I struggle with this just as deeply for particular games, and not for others. Great write-up!
Oh, it would be fair to say that, when it comes to screwing-up one-shots, I'm very ecumenical. The most recent example was the Ubiquity Engine version of Space 1889 but I've failed at running games as diverse as Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Traveller, Clockwork and Chivalry, Liminal, Star Wars (WEG and FFG), Alien, Casting the Runes (a Gumshoe engine game). The full list includes many, many systems and settings and I only list here the ones that I still twitch involuntarily when I recall how bad they were. Funnily enough, your comment prompts me to recall that there does appear to be a consistent thread between those few games that I have managed to finish in a single session that were not hopelessly clunky, and that is that they were almost all quick pick-up games where I had an idea and ran it either the same day or very soon after coming up with it. There's no consistency in the mechanics involved. A couple of them were run using Mothershp, one was Don't Walk in Winter Wood and another was set in the London criminal underworld in the mid-18th century using an ultra-rules-lite 2d6 system sort of stolen from Venger Satanis' The Outer Presence. If pushed for a recurring feature, it was that I was struck by a single MacGuffin or even just one or two scenes, and went ahead and ran the game with perhaps only those small elements in mind. I couldn't wander too far off-piste because... there was very little piste to begin with.
New to Substack so just catching this. I definitely have felt this many times with Dming one shots. All of your points are so valid. Iām about to run a one shot and itās a new game system for us to learn so I made sure we did a session zero to just go over game mechanics. That is out of the way at least.
This was a really cool exploration of some factors that make one shots difficult to run. Makes me want to write something on how to approach them š¤
Thank you sir. I fret that these sort of posts (which are, of course, a disguised low-status way for me to offer GM and player advice without quite being seen to be doing so) will be a little dull or preachy and so I'm glad if I have been able to leaven the format a little.
My thought reading this was just incredibly plebian, which was: "I wonder which games he's trying to run as a one-shot?" Because I struggle with this just as deeply for particular games, and not for others. Great write-up!
Oh, it would be fair to say that, when it comes to screwing-up one-shots, I'm very ecumenical. The most recent example was the Ubiquity Engine version of Space 1889 but I've failed at running games as diverse as Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Traveller, Clockwork and Chivalry, Liminal, Star Wars (WEG and FFG), Alien, Casting the Runes (a Gumshoe engine game). The full list includes many, many systems and settings and I only list here the ones that I still twitch involuntarily when I recall how bad they were. Funnily enough, your comment prompts me to recall that there does appear to be a consistent thread between those few games that I have managed to finish in a single session that were not hopelessly clunky, and that is that they were almost all quick pick-up games where I had an idea and ran it either the same day or very soon after coming up with it. There's no consistency in the mechanics involved. A couple of them were run using Mothershp, one was Don't Walk in Winter Wood and another was set in the London criminal underworld in the mid-18th century using an ultra-rules-lite 2d6 system sort of stolen from Venger Satanis' The Outer Presence. If pushed for a recurring feature, it was that I was struck by a single MacGuffin or even just one or two scenes, and went ahead and ran the game with perhaps only those small elements in mind. I couldn't wander too far off-piste because... there was very little piste to begin with.
New to Substack so just catching this. I definitely have felt this many times with Dming one shots. All of your points are so valid. Iām about to run a one shot and itās a new game system for us to learn so I made sure we did a session zero to just go over game mechanics. That is out of the way at least.