At the 2021 Origins Game Fair, I experienced one of the best convention one-shot RPG sessions I’d ever played in—as well as the worst—back to back. This gave me a unique opportunity to compare and contrast what went well in the first session and what went awry in the second, especially in light of my experience as a tabletop RPG professional responsible for developing one-shots as well as demoing RPGs for convention play. Over the last ten years, I’ve run open and VIP tables at large flagship conventions like GenCon and Origins, regional cons such as AcadeCon and Con of the North, and local mini-cons on college campuses and at my own home. Over the years, I’ve also made my fair share of mistakes that I hope you can learn from.
Although there are many aspects to consider when planning and running an RPG one-shot at a convention, focusing on three elements of the session can give you a solid foundation and yield the best payoff per hour of prep spent. These three essential ingredients are: 1) exciting and accessible pre-generated character sheets, 2) a scenario that is optimized for one-off play, and 3) excellent player management at the table. In this second part of three, let’s take a deep dive into the next ingredient: the scenario.
The Purpose of One-Shot Scenarios
A one-shot is a roleplaying game session designed to offer an engaging play experience and tell a satisfying story within a single sitting. In most convention settings, a four-hour block of time is set aside for the game, but some “epic” sessions might last for six hours, while demos are typically designed to run for just one or two hours. With your regular gaming group, you might have a whole evening to play, without a hard cutoff point other than people’s energy levels.
I consider the play experience to be composed of two things: the GM’s primary motivation for running the one-shot, and what the players are expecting from the scenario. Are you trying to give players a taste of a game’s rules system? Are you looking to bring a set piece encounter to life with elaborate maps, minis, and terrain? Are you offering a chance to play a particular type of character that’s unusual, specialized, or high-powered? Are you trying to introduce or explore a particular setting, time period, or franchise? Or are you trying to entertain with an especially clever premise or mashup of different media properties? (“My Little Warhammer: Friendship is 40k,” I’m looking at you.) If you know what you’re trying to achieve, that can help you focus and prioritize your efforts.
Telling a satisfying story in a single sitting can be challenging, as it’s easy to try to cram too much plot or too many characters into the span of time available. There’s really only time to explore one main objective, a few obstacles, and a set of simplistic stakes. It might be helpful to treat your one-shot as if it were a single twenty-minute episode of a TV show—I often see folks try to cover the same amount of ground as a three-hou epic fantasy film, which just isn’t feasible. Here’s the basic formula I use when crafting scenarios:
When [a disruptive event happens], will a group of [adjective] [collective noun] be able to [adverb] [verb] the [noun] (to/from/at/in [noun]) before the [villain] [villain’s objective]?
And here’s that formula applied to a few different one-shots I’ve developed or written:
- When a bounty hunter betrays a brutal crime syndicate, will a motley crew of scum and villains be able to capture or kill him before they become his next target? (“Under a Black Sun” for Star Wars: Edge of the Empire)
- When a long-lost heir threatens to interrupt a politically crucial marriage, will a group of young samurai must choose see the match through, or call it off in the name of love? (“Wedding at Kyotei Castle” for Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying)
- After a rival underhive gang kidnaps their leader, will a group of Escher gangers be able to rescue their champion and get revenge before one of them reveals themselves to be a murder-cyborg? (“Fall of the House of Escher” for Dark Heresy 2nd Edition, unpublished con scenario)
Time Constraints and Pacing
In my opinion, the primary consideration for a one-shot is the time constraint. If the game runs longer than its allotted time, you won’t have a chance to pick up where you left off the following week or session—you’ll have to rush to the ending or worse, not offer a resolution at all.
My rule of thumb is to plan on roughly one encounter, dungeon room, or scene per hour (from here on, I’ll use the term “encounter” to refer to any of these discrete RPG session elements). For a four-hour one-shot, I try to stick to this schedule:
- Introductions (30 minutes): Players choose characters and unpack dice/dice trays, GM introduces rules and setting, answers questions. I try to make sure that the PCs understand their goal going into the first encounter before we hit the 30 minute mark.
- Encounter 1 (45 minutes): In pursuit of their goal, the PCs confront an obstacle that might be solved with combat, social interaction, exploration, or investigation.
- Encounter 2 (45 minutes): The PCs encounter their next obstacle, one more challenging or with higher stakes than the first. There might be a major twist or reveal at the end of this encounter.
- Break (15 minutes): Bio break—let people use the bathroom, get a drink/snack, check their phone, or simply stretch their legs.
- Encounter 3 (45 minutes): The PCs encounter yet another obstacle, and they might glimpse opposing sides of the dilemma or fully grasp the stakes.
- Final Encounter (1 hour): This is the climactic encounter in which the PCs make a decisive choice and/or face their hardest challenge yet.
I typically have an extra encounter or two in my back pocket in case the PCs breeze through one or more or the earlier encounters faster than anticipated, but these encounters can be left out without hurting the players’ enjoyment or understanding of the overall plot.
Pacing refers to the rate of movement or progress. In RPG terms, pacing refers to how quickly the PCs move from encounter to encounter or experience the story. Bad pacing can make for an unenjoyable game—players might grow bored if they are progressing through encounters too slowly, or they could feel dissatisfied or confused if they are moving through encounters too quickly. You can also affect pacing through variety: a one-shot that’s solely combat, investigation, or social encounters can blur together or feel repetitive, so include a mix of the different types of encounters that feature in the game’s rules, as well as emotional highs and lows (juxtaposing comedy with horror, for example). But take care when stringing vastly different kinds of encounters together. Not having appropriate transitions between encounters can feel jarring, so if there’s a little bit of travel or if time passes, make sure that’s communicated to the players. Give the players time to react to big events and talk among themselves, and once the conversation has run its course, that’s your cue to move on to the next encounter.
It takes some practice and experience to get pacing right, but you can look to your players for signs that the pacing is off—are they tuning out and checking their phones? Chatting among themselves trying to figure out what’s going on? Remember, you can always “fast forward” using narration to get to the next bit of action or excitement (but beware taking agency away from the PCs—you shouldn’t skip over any major decisions that could affect the story). From a logistical perspective, if one encounter runs long, you’ll need to shorten one of the subsequent encounters. If the encounters go by too quickly, however, the session will end early, which usually isn’t too big a deal at big conventions where there’s plenty to do and see (and eat), but it can be a bummer when players paid by the hour for an event.
Agency and Choice
To me, great one-shots are those with multiple possible endings, such that I can run it for different groups of players and have wildly different outcomes. This isn’t always feasible in organized play circumstances, where a shared experience is part of the point. When considering alternative resolutions, you might ask: Do the PCs pursue their original objective, or do they turn on the person who gave them the mission? Do the PCs side with one NPC or another in a dispute? Do the PCs achieve their goal by talking it out, using violence, or employing magic to solve their problems?
Agency is “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power”—in games, that translates to the idea that the PCs can affect the game or the game world, whether for good or ill. Unlike most novels or TV shows, games are an interactive medium, so giving players some choices that matter will help them feel invested in the story.
The worst one-shots are those where the players don’t have agency and their actions don’t matter—the NPCs are too powerful or the PCs too weak to make a difference, or the PCs’ efforts turn out to be futile. One-shots that feature many long, scripted narratives in which the GM is basically telling the story without the players’ input can be indicative of one-shots with little player agency. In these moments, there’s no opportunity for the PCs to interject or act unless they—gasp—interrupt the GM, which many players will not feel comfortable doing. Cut scenes have become less popular in video games over time, and many players skip them altogether. Avoid cramming your one-shot full of cut scenes—think about where in your story would benefit the most from one deep, evocative description, and use it there.
When creating dilemmas and offering choices, one of the biggest considerations are stakes: what will or will not happen if the PCs fail, as well as what will or will not happen if they succeed? Choices should have consequences: rewards or punishments, treasure or injury, fame or infamy. Decisions don’t always have to be an either/or choice. They might be a question of methodology (how the PCs achieve the outcome), or a matter of degree. What matters is giving your players a say in how the story unfolds. Designing a scenario that takes player agency into account and offers meaningful choices and multiple resolutions are much more likely to engage players emotionally and make your one-shot a memorable one.
Let the Pre-Gens Shine
If you followed my advice and carefully crafted your pre-generated characters to suit the one-shot medium, those can be your guiding stars for designing your scenario. Try to match up the skills and capabilities of the PCs to the challenges offered, so that you have at least one sneaky character if the mission calls for stealth, one bruiser character for combat, one investigative character for discovering clues and solving mysteries, and so on. If the PCs come from different backgrounds in the world, try to make those backgrounds matter to the dilemma at hand or the choices offered. If your game features scheming and backstabbing among the PCs, those backgrounds can potentially put them at odds, as can conflicting motivations or agendas.
Once you’ve figured out what your four-plus encounters will be, return to your pre-gens and check whether they’re capable of tackling those challenges as a group. Ensure every PC will be able to contribute something to every encounter, and let them bring something extra to one encounter that can be their moment to shine.
Critical Hits and Fails
One spot your one-shot can crit fail is right at the beginning—if the players don’t know what they’re supposed to doing, they’ll flail around until they find something concrete to pursue, raising the risk that they’ll try to do something or go somewhere you haven’t prepared for. Create a strong and simple hook for why the player characters are involved and what they’re hoping to achieve—one that doesn’t require a ton of explanation or background knowledge. Such-and-such faction needs you to acquire the MacGuffin, rescue the princess, or eliminate the target (and in this case, yours not to reason why, yours but to do or die). You want to plunder the dungeon or raid the cultists’ lair for loot and glory. You need to get off this island/space station/planet because if you don’t, you’re all dead. If you need to provide a ton of context for players to understand the scenario, simplify the plot down to its essence or save that particular scenario for a mini-campaign, where you’ll have more time to get into the weeds.
Another area where your one-shot can go awry is if you’re trying to make the game system do something it wasn’t meant to do, or emphasize a part of the game rules that isn’t well supported. If chases are really challenging to arbitrate in that game, either simplify the chase rules (at the worst, narrating them instead of trying to mechanize them) or avoid chases altogether. If you want to include psionics in a game where psionics are rare and work totally differently from regular magic, either make sure players know that up front and study the rules ahead of time, or avoid psionics in the first place. More egregious examples would be using a game that’s mostly a combat simulation to run intricate social intrigues. If you find yourself homebrewing rules for your one-shot, ask whether you’re making the game more accessible or more complicated. Players typically need some reminding how the normal game system works, much less how something they’ve never encountered before should function.
One place where your scenario can roll a critical success is with physical props. If you prepare relevant handouts, print off maps or terrain, or provide standees or miniatures, you’re adding an extra tactile experience to your game, which can provide novelty and engagement. Handouts could be representations such as illustrations of certain rooms or NPCs, in-universe artifacts such as mission briefings or newspaper clippings, or even small trinkets from your local thrift store to represent important artifacts. If the MacGuffin is a special necklace that needs protecting, how cool would it be to have a physical representation of that necklace on hand for one of the players to wear? If the PCs will be attending a masquerade party, you can enhance the immersion by providing some cheap masks for them to wear while they roleplay. (If it’s something a little silly, dive into it with gusto, and your players will likely follow.) I always think of the enormous “Treasure Island” diorama that gets set up at Con of the North every year, complete with minis and pirate ship and resin water, which looks like an absolute delight to play on and is not something I get to do at home. And some of the clubs take over entire rooms and decorate their space to suit their games, creating an immersive and unforgettable experience.
A few caveats: Regarding text-based handouts, just make sure they’re brief and to the point (journals with multiple entries or a collection of letters are often too much for a one-shot). If hand-outs are going to need to be deciphered, figure in plenty of time for the PCs to work out the solution and discuss the implications among themselves. Along those lines, be sure to give yourself extra time to set up or tear down any maps or minis or terrain, and consider how you’ll transport them to the convention (including through airport security) and how you’ll store those items between sessions, if you’re running the one-shot multiple times.
Even if you aren’t writing a one-shot scenario from scratch, you can use these suggestions to improve how you run published adventures. If there are too many encounters, figure out what you can change to cut the scenario down to fit in the allotted time slot. Add choice points or dilemmas if the module is overly linear. Adjust the pre-gens to be more usable, and figure out ways you can make those lengthy read-aloud boxes part of the action.
If you missed the first part of this series, read more about crafting exciting and accessible pre-gens here, otherwise continue on to the next essential ingredient of great convention one-shots, which is excellent player management at the table.
