I’ve made an “intermediary conclusions” post on my experiments with one-shots. Basically this post is only about “setting the scene”, and some of my thoughts on that.
There’s more to follow on this as soon as I’ve gathered my thoughts.
And no, I won’t apologize for writing my first post in over three months! 😛
http://partialsuccess.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/experiments-with-one-shots
In Media Res, yes! Running several oneshots at PAX East GoD, I’ve learned my lesson about “But first you have to reach the dungeon! Let’s check out the ‘make a perilous journey’ move!”
Lord, have I learned.
But yeah, there’s a fair handful of tricky issues with DW and oneshots. Like, alignments and bonds become a lot less important without an end-of-session, and you don’t get to see any of those cool 2-10 advanced moves. Been thinking a bit about possible solutions to those issues.
Eh, not that I’m disagreeing, but I usually start my one-shots with the players making a Perilous Journey move.
I hope your self-esteem isn’t nearly as bruised as you suggest – I know that wasn’t anyone’s intention. If anything, you get massive props for getting out there and experimenting. Well done and thanks for the fun!
See, the last few times I’ve done that, multiple failures on the perilous journey roll basically turned the entire thing into “Lost in the Woods”. Which, y’know, was still fun. But not exactly what I had planned!
Ben… you should be playing to see what happens… not what you planned.
Well, obviously I didn’t railroad them, because they spent the adventure getting lost in the woods, fighting ogres, lying to bandits, getting even more lost, and shoving each other into chaos ooze (Ah, evil PCs. They make it so easy.) But it would have been a very different session if I had just started them off at the entrance of the dungeon.
You can definitely run the game with some framework of what the party might be encountering. “Draw maps, leave blanks” still has the draw maps part.
Mmm. And “Exploit your prep” is right there in the “What you do as a GM” section of the rules.
It’s less “This is what I planned to happen!” and more… “This is the situation I expected the PCs to go into, and play to find out what happened when they encountered it, and they ended up not encountering it at all because they got completely lost en route.”
I don’t think “play to see what happens” means “have absolutely no plan”, in fact the rules say you’re meant to “exploit your prep” so preparation is encouraged. Just finding that balance between establishing a frame and improv-ing within it is tricky I reckon.
There’s a saying: Prepare, but don’t plan.
Preparing means to establish a framework, a pseudo-sandbox. It’s like deciding that there’s this villain X, with goal Y and a means Z to achieve Y, with horrible consequence W if the players don’t interfere.
Planning means to establish a railroad, a continuous stream of non-preventable events.
Preparation is great, planning isn’t.
This is why I like you, Kasper Brohus Allerslev, you always get exactly what I’m talking about it. Even when I don’t actually technically say it!
Prep doesn’t have to have an outcome. Prep, for me, is getting that boulder right up to the top point of the mountain so that the players can decide which direction to push it down.
I’m glad you didn’t railroad Ben, sounds like your adventure went well enough to me. Sometimes the journey is the adventure!
Any plan that isn’t flexible invariably doesn’t work, but now we’re entering the realm of semantics, and there be dragons. ;-)
Nasty Nasty Semantic Dragons
Just ran a one-shot in Fate Freeport yesterday, and my conclusions are pretty much the same here, to pitch a premise before the game.
We took a lot of time coming up with the two “big issues”, and I should have made these up as part of my game pitch as well.
But I can highly recommend doing the places & faces part of Fate in any game. That is absolutely amazing!