How to Write a “One Shot”
Hello heroes! We’re getting back into the swing of things here at USP and I figured it was a great time to talk about a topic near and dear to my heart: one shots. These are self-contained adventures that have a wide variety of uses. They can be for gaming conventions, demos, palette cleansers, or a way to celebrate some of your favorite settings without the commitment of a long form campaign. I’ve run a lot of one shots over the years. My con game database alone contains over 50 adventures, and those are just the ones I could remember when I sat down to create the database this year. It’s hard to believe after seeing my performances on stream, which tend to be called one and a half shots or limited miniseries these days, but I do know how to construct a game that can be played in 4 hours or less. I promise! I have presented my general outline for constructing a con game. This is the order I tend to do things in, but as long as you put some thought into all of these bullet points it doesn’t matter what order you follow.
Idea
This is usually my first step and it is one of the most difficult to grasp. Ideas are ephemeral things that can be a challenge to summon at will, which is why I don’t tend to actively think about them. I prefer to be surprised by my ideas, sort of those flashes of inspiration that I jot down on a napkin or as a note in my phone when they strike me—typically somewhere inconvenient like in the shower or as I’m driving. That, however, is not helpful advice to people who are trying to prepare a one shot. If you do find yourself in the unenviable position of having to manifest an idea purposely, I have a few tips to get your creative juices flowing.
- Add limitations. I know this sounds counterintuitive for exploring creativity, but a limitation of some kind gives your imagination parameters to start working with. This limitation can come in a lot of forms. If I’m trying to create a slate of adventures to run at a convention I like to think of which settings I want to cover. At Origins each year I sit down and I write out a list of IPs that people have requested from me or settings that I know go over well. I’ll mark down the five days of gaming and make notes like: “I like to end the con with a Justice League game because Scott and Kyle usually sign up for that each year before they hit their flight home.” “I need at least one Titan City game on the schedule because that’s my setting and I want to sell some books while I’m at the con.” “Suicide Squad, Gotham City Misfits, and Guardians of the Galaxy all have a fun zany quality that makes Saturday night low-stakes shenanigans. I did Misfits last year so I’ll swap in the Guardians this year.” Now I know I have three games that need ideas, one Justice League, one Guardians, and one Titan City. That puts a sandbox around the possible stories I can tell. Another great limitation is a shared theme or plot element for each adventure. “I’m running five games this year and I want them all to feature dragons prominently,” gives you a place to start with your ideas. A dragon story featuring the Avengers is going to be very different from an East Texas University dragon story, but now you have something to anchor your creativity to.
- Mash-Up: Another thing I like to do for idea generation is come up with pun titles related to movies or songs and think about how that title can be reflected in an adventure. Titan City: Big Trouble in Little Moscow and Guardians of the Galaxy: The Hangover are two of my favorite scenarios and they started just with mashing a superhero team up with a classic movie of a similar vibe. You can also just mix and match toys from different universes to see how they gel. My Superman for All Seasons adventure brings over 20 paragons from across the multiverse together and it’s always amazing seeing how different properties match up.
- Characters: After I have my idea, I choose the characters I want to focus on for the story. If it’s from a licensed universe, I’ll review the cast of characters to see who my favorites are, or who I think would be the most dynamic inclusion for the idea I had. You don’t have to worry about this step as much if you’re running a one shot for your regular gaming group—they’ll probably play their usual characters. Now you decide how the characters are going to be generated. Are you going to make a group of pre-gens for the player’s to choose? Will you assign characters to your friends to make before the game starts? Are you using their existing PCs and it’s a non-issue? Whatever you choose, make sure it’s fair for everyone involved. The characters should be on a fairly even playing field, or if they are of differing level/ability/power level make sure the game is an even playing field and everyone has something important to do.
Synopsis
This is an elevator pitch for your adventure. Most conventions ask for them as part of their event organizing process, but even if this adventure is for your home group I encourage you to come up with a short and dynamic explanation about what the adventure is. This should ideally be 30 words or less (about 1-2 sentences) that drive the point of the story home for someone. Anyone who hears this synopsis should think that the adventure sounds awesome and should know generally what they have in store. This is something that takes practice, but here are a few of my personal examples to get you started.
- The Justice League is forced to play in Mr. Mxyztplk’s D&D game when they ruin his Saturday night plans.
- The Collector hires the Guardians to recover a priceless bird statue from the wreck of a Kree warship.
- Titan City 1922, Popov’s Russians are smuggling monsters into the city, it’s up to a group of misfit Titan City citizens to put a stop to it.
- Emperor Palpatine has put out a call across the Outer Rim for bounty hunters willing to hunt down a dangerous Jedi in hiding.
Plot
This is where I tend to fall down when creating one shots for our streams and where I get my reputation as a writer of 1 and a half shots, and the reason for that is a try to stuff too much plot into a 3 hour time block. It goes better when I run at conventions because those tend to be 4 hour blocks, but whatever time slot you have to work with, the important thing to keep in mind is that this is a contained story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end and it should be fairly straightforward. That doesn’t mean simple, but it does mean that your players shouldn’t spend a lot of time asking themselves, “Where should we go next?” One shots are meant to be explosive stories that can be resolved in one sitting. Don’t be afraid to trim some branches off the villain’s plan tree, or leave what you think are obvious clues—I call these clue by fours and players still spend time agonizing over them for a lot of the time. If you’re working from a plotline it should be a lot more diamond-shaped than flow chartesque. From left to right it should read:
- Plot Point 1: Thrust the characters into an interesting opening scene. This can be an in media res fight or challenge, the end of an adventure they started off-camera, or a quiet roleplaying scene to get everyone in the headspace for the adventure. Point them somewhere specific at the end of this scene, either with a mentor character—or Amanda Waller—sending them on a mission, a cry for help that pulls them somewhere, or an obnoxious imp sending them to TV land.
- Plot Point 2: The first scene of the adventure proper. The heroes arrive at the location they were pointed at and have to contend with an issue. If you didn’t start the story with a fight, this is a good place for the first fight scene, but I tend to enjoy using this scene as an investigation/roleplaying beat. The heroes overcome this plot point and find clues pointing them to 1-3 locations (generally 2).
- Plot Points 3 and 4: The heroes go to 1 or 2 of the locations from the clues and solve some sort of technical issue. This can be a skill challenge, an interrogation, a riddle, a puzzle, anything you like, but I advise against making either of these a fight. They figure out the antagonist’s end goal or uncover the danger of the story and find out where to go to stop it.
- Plot Point 5: Big fight with the antagonist or the ultimate danger. This is the only combat in some of the games I run, but it should be bombastic and intense. See https://untoldstoriesproject.com/step-4a-for-writing-super-hero-adventures-combat-encounters/ for tips on writing exciting combat encounters!
- Epilogue: A small scene for each player to close out their time with the character, usually a what does your character do now that they’ve defeated the villain or fallen to the alienation of the dread Cthulhu?
- Special Note: Should you find yourself in the position where your players have arrived at the big ending fight way ahead of schedule—I know it’s shocking to think that a one shot might end earlier instead of bleeding into 3 extra weeks of story—all is not lost. I use a technique I call “Russian Nesting Doll Endings.” Basically Plot Point 5 has an ending, and if it’s on time, that ending is satisfying in and of itself, but if it’s early, there’s actually a twist. This can be a “final form” for the boss that is triggered by its first defeat, a surprise betrayal from a trusted ally, a surprise exploding base because the boss was a load-bearing villain. Whatever the case may be, it’s an additional bit of content to eat up more of the time slot and reward industrious players who are too clever for their own good. This actually happened at U-Con this year during my Gotham City Misfits game. The players found a clever way—albeit a gross food-poisony way—to avoid the big fight in the middle of the adventure and with some hot dice rolls found themselves at Warworld with 45 minutes to an hour to go. Fortunately, I had a scene planned at Warworld in case a group ever made it there before the time slot was over. Mongul gave them the choice of fighting the Legion of Doom for the right to represent Earth in the grand melee or to take a consolation prize from his vault. The Misfits chose the vault and then proceeded to backstab and obliterate Mongul when he had his back turned. It was a blast.
Scenes
This is molded into the plot point, but I feel it warrants its own inclusion. Once you know how many plot points you have, you want to come up with scenes for each of those and you want to make sure you offer a variety of scene types. I find combats tend to take up the most time in a given game system so I advise GMs to have 1 or 2 combats per adventure and dedicate the other scenes to things like roleplay, skill challenges, investigations, and the like. The goal is to make sure there is something fun for everyone and to come up with ways for specific characters to shine, especially those who aren’t the best at beating up bad guys. Everyone comes to roleplaying games for different reasons and as the GM it’s up to us to accommodate a wide variety of tastes and personalities.
What to do When Time Runs Out
It is inevitable, at some point you will run a one shot that runs out of time. It happens to the best of us—some more often than others. Don’t worry, there are options! The easiest thing to do is to ask your players if they are willing to play the story through to the end, even if it runs a little longer than usual. This can be sort of dicey in a con situation where some players have their slots back to back, but if they’re having a good time, generally players are excited to keep playing. If you’re with your home group you can ask them if they’re willing to play one more session of the story—as seen in this month’s Titan City miniseries that began as our Thanksgiving special. Finally you can ask your players if they want to quickly summarize a plot point to get to the end scene, rather than playing out the whole scene, or if you’re players are really enjoying the investigation and roleplay you can ask your players if they’re okay with you giving an abridged version of the finale’s events. This looks a little bit like, “Thanks to your tireless investigation you and the heroes are able to track Dr. Simian to his lair and quickly dispatch him. Please give me a brief description of something that happens during the climactic fight.” I’ve had this ending a couple of times in my career and it is still fulfilling for players if the rest of the adventure was a blast to play.
And there you have it. My sure-fire way to write a one shot that will definitely end in one session and not go on to become additional adventures or commitments. Who am I kidding? This is my version of the best laid plan that goes to hell when people start having fun, and the whole point of playing tabletop RPGs is to have fun! Show up with your plan in mind, have a good time with your players, and if you need to run a second session, give yourself the grace to do so. I’ll see you next time!
For more content like this, be sure to check out our blog posts about game theory like these ones:
- Five Tips for Writing a Holiday Adventure
- Creating Player Characters for Con Games
- Inspiration (or Lack Thereof)
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