If you’ve been a GM or Narrator for any amount of time, you’ve almost certainly been here before: A group of friends want to get together and play some TTRPG but they don’t want to commit to anything long-term. Or maybe you have an idea for a setting, or a character, or a quest, that you just want to try out without writing it into your weekly game. Or perhaps you have a group of people who have never played a TTRPG before and they want a light-weight introduction. Enter: the one-shot.
It seems like a perfect solution, right? A lightweight, single-session romp where a bad idea, a busted character, or a lack of experience with TTRPGs can really only do so much damage before being permanently consigned to the scrap heap. Throw in a weird gizmo, a spooky shadow, and maybe a few laughs, and you’ve got yourself a fun afternoon of perhaps slightly off-the-rails RP.
However, anyone who has actually attempted to run a one-shot will tell you there’s plenty that can go wrong. Don’t let their size fool you- In some ways, these bite-sized adventures can be much more challenging to run than any one session of a serialized campaign. There’s a lot of reasons why this is, but I’ve identified a few key sticking points for one-shot planning and execution as well as some solutions I’ve either used or seen implemented with great success.
Problem 1: Character types that don’t “fit”
Because of their shorter format, one-shots tend to be much more tightly planned than their serialized counterparts. The types of challenges the party will face, and the possible solutions to those challenges, will be much more limited and specific. Sometimes this leads to a character (or worse, characters) that don’t “fit” the task at hand: either their personality type or the way they relate mechanically to the system just doesn’t lend itself to the short list of problems that need solved and solutions that are available. This can lead to those character’s players having nothing to do or feeling left out of the action.
Solution 1: Pre-game communication
As with many character construction issues, this problem can be alleviated by some pre-game communication between the GM/Narrator and the players. This can include very broad descriptions of what the players can expect from the session (i.e. “this is going to be combat-heavy” or “this one-shot will include a lot of investigation”). That way the players can construct characters that can deliver on these challenges, and maybe more importantly, make sense in the session’s context. It doesn’t make sense to have a party of barbarians trying to navigate a court intrigue one-shot, even if they make sense in a high-fantasy setting. Alternatively, the Narrator could communicate with the players and get a sense of the characters they want to play before they start writing the session. This way, the context is guaranteed to make sense for the characters in the story.
Problem 2: Getting to the Action
Starting your party out in a tavern is great if you have hours to fill and you want some early-session RP so the characters can get to know one another. On the other hand, if you only have three hours and you’re trying to get something done, this classic intro and those like it tend to put unnecessary drag on the session, eating up valuable minutes (unless you’re running a “tavern games” one-shot, which sounds baller). These meandering intros not only slow down the first (and often most obvious) steps of the session, they also tend to set a slower, more thoughtful tone for the rest of the game- great for long-form RP, speed bumps for one-shots.
Solution 2: Skip it!
We’re here for a good time, not a long time! In one-shots I find it’s better to start the party off “mid-stride” in a situation: they already have the quest, they’re already in the middle of completing it, and stuff is already happening around them. Your players will take a minute to warm up, so don’t make it life-or-death, but give them something specific to react to right off the bat. This gives the players a concrete event to push off of, instead of an open-ended (and possibly long-winded) wind up to the main action. This has the added benefit of preventing the party from going off-the-rails early on in the session and taking the story in an unexpected (and therefore unplanned) direction.
Problem 3: Story Truncation
Since one-shots have a deadline other TTRPG sessions don’t, it’s easy to reach the end of the time limit you’ve set for the session without being anywhere close to the end of the actual narrative. This is next to impossible to plan for given all the things that go into session and time management, and it can be so discouraging when all your hard prep work is cut short by the clock.
Solution 3: Plan and Resize
The best tool you have to help solve the truncation problem is foresight. You know, sitting here before the session, that the session has a time limit. You can plan for it, and anything you can plan for you can beat.
So, first things first- under promise, over deliver. Figure out how long your session is going to be, and knock an hour off of it. That’s your actual time frame. Don’t worry- tabletop can always be made to run longer if you need it to, and ending a little early isn’t gonna chap anyone’s hide. It’s better to have something clean that doesn’t feel rushed.
Second, choose the one thing that needs to happen. One-shots are about brevity. You’re trying to tell a story in as few words as possible. A story has to have at least one thing happen in it, so choose your one thing and let everything else drop to at least second priority (if not lower).
Third, watch the clock. Having a sense of what should be happening at different points during the session will let you space out all of the truncation you need to do instead of just throwing it all at the end. Your players don’t know how long you actually intended each scene to be, so cutting them short won’t feel rushed. On the other hand, letting each scene have as much time as it wants and just heavily shortening the big, epic ending of your story will stick out like a sore thumb.
Fourth, make sure your secondary content is removable. Whenever you add something to your one-shot that doesn’t support your “one thing”, make sure it can be completely removed without detracting from the main story. You don’t need a lot of stuff in a one-shot, you just need what you do have to be compelling.
Finally, have a contingency plan. If you don’t think you’ll make time, have a mechanism in place to help quickly and satisfactorily resolve whatever final event your players are encountering. Event Actions in F&C can be a great way to do this. That said, resolving combat in a way that is both quick and feels “fair” is extremely difficult, since it inherently involves reducing the player’s agency. For this reason, I’d advise resisting the urge to have your one-shot’s finale center around a major combat, instead moving that major combat nearer to the middle of the allotted time.
Problem 4: Railroading
Given the above solution, you might wonder how such a session doesn’t end up feeling hyper-railroady. Even if you’re not cutting right to the action, how can you write a compelling and interesting story that both fits in the required timeframe and also doesn’t restrict player agency? The player’s decisions have to matter. We’re not playing a rail-shooter, after all.
Solution 4: Use a “Story Gradient”
A “story gradient” is a narrative/plot mechanism I use when writing one-shots to ensure that the story remains punchy and tight, without making the players feel like they are on rails. Unlike a story arc, with a beginning, middle, and end, a story gradient fades from “high-structure” (i.e. “on rails”) to “low-structure” (i.e. “player-led”) as the session progresses.
The first few steps of the narrative (the “beginning” in a traditional plot arc) are more or less completely on rails- so much so that we sometimes skip them (see Solution 2). These steps lead the players to something of a “straightaway”- a situation with a limited and obvious set of solutions that introduce the players to the setting and their characters in a controlled context. Once the players complete the “straightaway”, the session moves to the middle section of the gradient.
In the “middle” of the gradient, the Narrator has a series of set pieces in their back pocket that can be implemented when and where it makes sense. Think of these as scenes in a movie- a bar fight, a clandestine rendezvous, a car chase, a trailing mission, what have you. During this section, the players will choose what to do next and in what order, and the Narrator will find places and times to work these pieces into the narrative. When the players hit these pieces, it will look like the story as a whole has been planned because the story’s pieces actually have been. It’s important not to force this, however, as narrative cohesion is ultimately more important than hitting the pieces themselves. They’re just there, in the Narrator’s back pocket, to be trotted out if and when they fit.
Finally, the player’s decisions around how to handle the “middle” section of the gradient set up and ultimately yield the “end” of the gradient- the great finale. What is the great finale? The Narrator doesn’t know. This is very important, because this is how you achieve agency. Which pieces of the story have occurred and how they’ve been handled is completely up to the players, and now they are reaping their rewards (or their comeuppance). When executed correctly, this results in the feeling that the story really did belong to the player’s all along, since the story’s outcome grows naturally from their own choices. The finale is great not because the Narrator wrote a great finale. The finale is great because it belongs to the players.
TL;DR - Write a structured beginning that pushes immediate action, several movable chunks for the middle, and no ending. The ending comes from the player's choices in the middle.
Conclusion
Wow, that was much more than I intended to write for today. Some of my favorite sessions I’ve ever played have been one-shots, but man are they tricky. If I’m honest I’m still trying to get them to “click” consistently, so I’d love to hear about any of your experiences playing in or running games like these. Leave a comment letting me know what you think, what you've seen, or what questions you still have. After all, only fools and corpses don’t change their minds.
Till next time,
-Elliot P
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