Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 184 - Preparing One Shots

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Robert Nores wrote in asking how I prepare one shot adventures so in this episode I give you some general tips and walk you through how I would prepare the free adventure A Fistful of Flowers published by Paizo. #DMtips #dnd #Pathfinder #OneShot Resources: A Fistful of Flowers at the Paizo Store:  https://paizo.com/products/btq02d8f?Pathfinder-Adventure-A-Fistful-of-Flowers Taking 20 Podcast Episode 128 - DMing at Conventions:  https://taking20.podbean.com/e/ep-128-dming-at-conventions/  Hold Music:  GLITTER BLAST Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. If you're writing the one shot that'll be played, keep plots and puzzles ridiculously simple. Now isn't the time to pull out the runic-based polyalphabetic substitution cipher puzzle loosely based on the tabula recta. Save your evil puzzle-making skills for longer campaigns. longer campaigns. Thank you so much for listening to the Taking 20 podcast episode 184. Tips and tricks for preparing one-shot adventures based on the way I do it. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Horses. In college, I helped take care of a horse who loved spending time with one other horse when they were resting. I guess you could say they had a stable relationship.

We have a pod... We have a podcast. That's right, we have a podcast, ladies and gentlemen. Oh man, let me tell you. I have been waiting to unveil this podcast for years. This podcast is called Taking 20 Podcast and it's on right now. Unfortunately, your host is an idiot and said the wrong thing. We have a website, www.taking20podcast.com. You can listen to past episodes and find out a little bit more about me. No pictures though. If you dig hard enough through social media, I'm sure you'll find a picture of me and then regret ever doing so.

I am hideous. I heard my mom still puts my picture down in the crawlspace of her house to scare off rats. That's why podcasting, perfect medium for me. Let me rephrase. Come by the website, www.taking20podcast.com, and I promise you won't have to see pictures of me, my radiation-caused bald spot, or me dancing the samba. Although I will admit I am a whore, and if enough people donate to the podcast and request it, maybe? Robert Norris generously donated to the podcast and asked me how I prepare one-shot adventures. Thank you again for the donation, Robert. You want to hear it? Here it go.

What shouldn't need to be said is that you need to know the maturity level of your players and make sure that your one-shot is maturity and age appropriate. If I'm running a one-shot for younger players, there are a lot of wacky voices and there's not a lot of adult themes making an appearance in games. In other words, don't throw your less mature players into like Game of Thrones type adventures. Bad times will be had by all. Now that that obvious stuff is out of the way, there are three questions that you must answer as you're preparing for a one-shot adventure. The answers to these three questions will define parameters around which you must build and prepare your afternoon or evening

of fun, role-playing, and screaming at metal dice for daring to roll too low. All the way back in episode 128, running games at conventions, I originally wrote all the way back in episode 128, Running Games at Conventions, I originally wrote all the way back in as a joke, but I just realized that was 56 episodes ago. That's more than a year. Time is getting away from me. Back in episode 128, I talked about setting up one-shots for conventions, and many of the points made there apply to any one-shot you're setting up, convention or not. For example, keep your adventure short. No, however short you're thinking, shorter than that. No, shorter than that. And then cut a little more. Cut stuff out of the adventure even if it feels like you're cutting too much. Everything, and I do mean everything, will take longer than you think it will.

If you're writing the one-shot that'll be played, keep plots and puzzles ridiculously simple. Now isn't the time to pull out the runic-based polyalphabetic substitution cipher puzzle loosely based on the tabula recta. Save your evil puzzle-making skills for longer campaigns. For your one-shot, use the 1-2-1 rule, or-50-25 rule to keep on track to complete on time. 25% of the time should be spent on the first major encounter or a couple of minor encounters. 50% of the time should be in the main story leading to the final confrontation and 25% of the time spent on the boss fight. So in a four-hour one-shot, that's an hour for the initial setup encounter, two hours for the bulk of the adventure,

and an hour for the boss fight. For three hours total, it's 45 minutes for the first, one and a half hours for the bulk, and 45 minutes for the boss fight. These times aren't wholly writ, but it gives you a benchmark to measure your progress against. If the first fight takes 15 minutes too long, you can trim one of the other sections to make up the time. Also, you need to know,

is your ending time fixed or flexible? If you're gaming at a hobby shop, you may have a hard limit of 9 p.m. that you must complete your adventure by. However, if you're gaming with your friends, you may have the ability to run a little bit longer if you need to. Finally, be ready to adjust behind the screen if you need to. Know what encounters or sections of the adventure you can trim down to save time, or which ones you can add material to if you need to stretch the adventure a bit. So in general, keep it short, keep it simple, use the 1-2-1 rule to finish on time, be flexible. There's also some other things you need to know.

How long do you want the one-shot to last? Are you preparing a one-shot for people you know, or are you preparing a one-shot for strangers? And how experienced are your players at tabletop RPGs? So let's start with question number one. How long do you want the one-shot to last? I used three and four hours as my previous example, and that's a common length for a game session. But you may have to adjust that depending on the circumstances.

You might have a group you're gaming with that wants a longer session. Many years ago, in one of my favorite nights of gaming in my life, I DM'd a 12-hour one-shot for a buddy of mine as a birthday present. He wanted a long gaming session for him and his friends, and I was happy to oblige. You might be setting up a one-shot for younger players who aren't keen on marathon gaming sessions. Anyone who's ever traveled with a young one in the car knows most of them don't like sitting still for very long.

You could be setting up a one-shot for a convention at your friendly local game store or what have you, and they only have a certain window of time that you can reserve, so that is the maximum time that you can use, and they would really appreciate it if you're done a touch early so you can clean up for the next group. Whatever that duration is, have it in mind. Three hours is my default, and it allows me to go over just a little bit if I need to. Long gaming sessions can really wear players down. Gaming the first couple hours is fun, but as the session drags on, it feels much more like a chore than fun. It's always better to leave them wanting more adventure than realizing it was too much.

Or, to keep it short and easy to remember from my dating life in the Stone Age, better one kiss too few than one kiss too many. Always leave them wanting more. Question two. Are you preparing a one-shot for people that you know, or are you preparing a one-shot for strangers? If it's a mix of people you know and strangers, treat it as if it's all strangers.

And here's why it matters. If you know the players that will be playing, you know what kind of gamers they are. Reckless or cautious. Steady, deliberate, quick to make decisions during combat, or thinkers that like to weigh options on their turns. You can adjust the number and complexity of encounters to accommodate slower or faster players that you know. However, if you're gaming with strangers, you may not know how they game.

They may be faster or slower than your average dice roller, and you may have to trim or adjust content to ensure you complete the adventure at all within the time frame. To be on the safe side, assume they're all slower than average, but have an extra encounter to slot in if you need it. Not apropos to the topic, but I tend to DM more conservatively for strangers than I do for people that I know. The people that know me, they know my sense of humor. They know I'm not intending an insult by having a bunch of the local town guard at the dungeons and donuts. Here's your little trivia fact for the episode. Do you know why cops gained a reputation of eating donuts? One contributing factor is that the ones working the overnight shift would look for places to get coffee and get a little something to eat, and the one type of

store at the time that was usually open odd hours, donut shops. There you go! One stereotype explained with a logical reason for its existence. Thank you so much for coming to my TED Talk. Stay tuned where I'll explain how 12th century immigration policies indirectly led to the California surfer culture in the 1980s. If you're gaming with strangers who may have certain aspects of a game

that may make them uncomfortable, but you don't know that, have a discrete method where they can signal that they aren't comfortable with the game. The X card is a common method where players can point to the card if the current encounter deals with, say, a phobia that they have, like claustrophobia. You don't know them and you don't know what their comfort levels are. With one of my groups, adult things like rape and children being harmed don't happen at all. They aren't even mentioned at the table. A couple of players have mentioned to me that these events make them uncomfortable. They accept that this kind of thing happens somewhere in the game world, but we don't talk about it and we definitely don't describe it and we really, really don't focus on it. Have a way for players, especially those that you don't know, to signal topics that might make the game less fun for them.

Question three. How experienced are your players at tabletop RPG? Experienced players are generally quicker to make mistakes. Experienced players are generally quicker to make mistakes. Yep, that's what we do. The longer we've been playing, the more often we make mistakes, but we make them really fast. Experienced players are generally quicker to make decisions in combat,

decide what skills they want to try, and are familiar with tabletop roleplaying in general, so they won't be as paralyzed by indecision. Now, please note, I said in general. I have a few players whom I love like siblings, but they just won't make a damn decision. It doesn't matter which Hallwake you pick, damn it, because I'm going to make sure you have a good time down all three of them. Just pick one. I am terribly sorry. A little bit of

real life bled into the podcast. Let's pick it back up. Newer players, especially those new to tabletop RPGs, may get paralyzed by the wide open nature of RPGs. What, you mean I could just go up to the bartender and punch her in the face? That's not against the rules? Oh no, it's not against the rules, but just remember, choice has consequence. And she easily could grab that shotgun into the bar and make you regret picking that fight. Your choice, though. To newer players or players not familiar with a game system, you may have to take extra

time to explain rules and help them along, so factor that in when you're calculating your time needs for the one-shot. Those three questions will drive your preparation, how much do you need to do, what do you need to have handy, and how quickly the group may move through the adventure. Oh, I almost forgot. One last tip before I get to the example. Either have players build characters ahead of time, or use pre-built characters and have them available for the one-shot game session. Building characters is so much fun and I love doing it.

I can't tell you how many of the 250 characters I'm ever going to get to play that I've built recently. But it takes forever. Pathfinder 2E is a relatively new game system, and characters get one or more feats every single level. As of this recording, there are currently... 3,985 feats according to the archives of Nethis, which contains free rules for Pathfinder 2e and is encouraged and supported by Paizo. Do you want to walk a player through 4,000 skill feats? Granted, some of these are connected to ancestries and have level requirements. All right, damn it, fine, I'll get you an accurate number, give me a second.

645 feats available at level 1. Some skill, some class, some ancestral. That's a lot to choose from overall, and if you try to build your characters at the table, it's going to chew up your entire time for your adventure. Build those characters ahead of time, or have pre-built characters for the players. Pathfinder 2e has the Iconics, and a lot of pre-written adventures have sample characters in the back. If you're gaming on a digital battle map, have the players log on to Foundry or the character tracking website like D&D Beyond or Nexus, Discord, Roll20, whatever else you're using to make sure they know how to use it before the game

session starts. It'll help alleviate simple questions like, which token am I? How do I move? Is it my turn? What's that thing right there? What's this button do? That kind of thing. For brand new players, I'll actually schedule time with them one-on-one for about 15 minutes each to make sure they can use the tabletop before the session starts. I can hear what you're thinking, and it's disgusting. I can hear what you're thinking. All of this is well and good, Jeremy, but I learn best from examples. Show me, smart man, or you all talk. All right, then.

You can't hear it, but that was me rolling up my sleeves, because I'm going to show you how to prep an adventure. For my example, I'm going to prep the free adventure Paizo gave away on their free RPG day called A Fistful of Flowers. It is free as in beer for anyone who wants it, and I'm not going to send you to some pirate site to download illegal copies. I will put a link to the Paizo store page where you can download this PDF for free. I would encourage you to read the adventure before continuing the episode. All you have to do is set up an account, add the PDF to your cart, and it will be added to your digital downloads page for you to retrieve.

Do you have it? No? That's okay, I'll wait. By the way, thank you Kevin MacLeod for the whole music called Glitter Blast. While we're waiting for them to download it, did you know that orcs reproduce via spores and budding? Yep, the baby just grows off one shoulder and drops to the ground when it's born. I have been advised by my wife to say that the preceding joke about orcs reproducing asexually

is not canon in any game system, at least not any that I can find. But if you want your orcs to reproduce that way, be my guest. I'm not the lore police. Welcome back to those who went and downloaded the adventure. Ask those that remained about orc spores. Now, there is no way I can show you how I prep an adventure without some sort of spoilers going on.

So, if you ever want to play this adventure, you may want to stop listening now, or listen to it and then find a way to forget that whatever you heard after the episode is complete. Abandon all hope of avoiding spoilers, all ye who enter here. Okay, the brief overview of the adventure is that there's an evil noblewoman named Lady Constance Meliosa who has developed a fondness for owning intelligent plant-like creatures called Leshies. She abducted one and found she wanted more and more, and now she's contracted with some shady characters to get more.

So, looking at the adventure, the first encounter is about discovering clues. The adventure, as written, asks the players to take the role of four Leshies who are trying to find out why their friends disappeared. For those that don't play Pathfinder 2E, a Leshy is a spirit that inhabits the body of a plant. They can walk, talk, cast spells, take class levels, basically are PCs that look like any plant that you can think of. Flowers, gourds, vines, even sometimes moss and fungi. They're interesting characters to play in the right adventure and the right game world.

The first part of the adventure is somewhat open-ended, asking the PCs to investigate two specific lavender leshies who went missing near a river. There are a number of possible skill checks that could be used here, so in my prep, I would have a page with a section called Encounter 1 and put the skills and DCs that could be used to discover the clues of the Leshy's whereabouts. There's a destroyed Leshy-sized vine bridge here, and the skill checks that could be made are crafting or nature on the vine, or maybe perception and nature on the near riverbank as they cross the river. The far riverbank also has a perception check. Write those skills and DCs down for easy reference or highlight them on the page of your adventure. Encounter number two is all about crossing the river.

There's a DC where you could craft maybe a bridge and make it more stable, and maybe there's survival check to follow tracks on the other side. There's also potential checks to find purple flowers along the way. Chances are you're not already running over time for this one shot, but if I were, I would either hand wave the crossing of the river and just say they did it, or reduce the DCs to make it an almost certainty. The other thing you could do to save time, by the way, is eliminate one or more of the skill checks and just give the PCs the information saying it's plain to see.

They cross the river and they easily see the medium-sized boot prints in the soft mud. Encounter number three, the abandoned campsite. Things that can be found and clues to be discovered are within this section of the adventure, so I would have those documented down under encounter three on my sheet. There's an encounter here with a pixie. Combat here is possible, but unlikely. I would have the stat block readied for a standard pixie just in case things get more stabby than I would anticipate, but more than likely this is going to be a social encounter. Social encounters can be as easy or as difficult as you want to make them from behind the screen. Glimmer the pixie has information that would make the PC's lives much easier

and directs the PCs to the next encounter. You can play her as coy or as direct as needed depending on how you're running against time. Encounter four is a hazard of a herd of grazing deer. Remember, you're a walking plant and the deer look at you and say, lunch, you look delicious. The book treats this as a trap or hazard. The PCs have the opportunity to diplomacy or intimidate their way out of it, or fight the deer, or maybe even run. To be prepared, I have the DCs documented on my sheet or highlighted in the book and the hazard stat block ready because hazards have special rules to them. If for some reason the PCs have made it a beeline for this encounter and

you're way ahead of time, you could follow up the hazard encounter with a chase scene with obstacles and DCs like running or sneaking through open fields, activating a deer lure left by a hunter, hiding in the hollow of a tree until the deer pass by, obscuring your scent and tracks using a survival skill. This would add a few minutes to your one-shot. Conversely, if you needed to shorten the time, the deer grazing could be skipped altogether. The one-shot really freeforms the chase of a person who took the lavender leshies using something known as a delayed value to determine the difficulty of finding the kidnapped... No, that's not right. They're not kids.

Leshy napper. I make a note that I'll need to keep track of the party's delayed value during the adventure and adjust DCs accordingly depending on how high that delayed value gets. Encounter number five is the town of Petalbrook. I note the DCs for intimidation, deception, diplomacy, intimidation, performance, or society to find information about the person they're chasing. Failures increase the delayed value, but eventually the PCs will need to succeed enough to make their way to encounter number six, crystals and candle wax. Eventually they find their way to the quote-unquote dungeon of the adventure, the Leshy Napper's shop called Crystals and Candle Wax, and either go in during business hours, talk to the shopkeeper, or sneak in at night and look around.

Eventually, they find the Leshy Napper and his homunculi and either capture him, whereupon he gives up the information, or they can find this evidence connecting him to Lady Constant Meliosa somewhere in his living quarters. If I were running long, I'd cut out the homunculi entirely to help the Leshy Napper and shorten that combat a bit. If I wanted to lengthen it, I'd make the homunculi more tenacious and helpful than what's described in the module. Finally, we reach Encounter 7, the boss fight. Lady Constance Meliosa is at her lavish garden and manor. There are DCs to get into her garden where a tea party is currently going on. Lady Constance has learned to create leshies of her own, and the actual fight

is with the leshies she has created. Alternatively, the PCs could enter the garden, grab the captured leshies, and make a break for it. If you're running long and need to end it quick, maybe Lady Constance only creates two leshies, or maybe three, to fight the party. But they have slightly higher to hit and a couple more hit points each. If you need to stretch it out a little bit, Lady Constance could help with a few low-level sorcerer spells like Telekinetic Projectile or Mud Pit to assist her Leshies as she flees. That's it. Seven total encounters, and I want to use the 1-2-1 rule as my guideline. That's it. Seven total encounters, and I want to use the 1-2-1 rule as my guideline. Seven really doesn't divide evenly into four, but luckily, there are three broad sections of the adventure.

Clues at the river, finding the Leshy Napper and getting information from them, and the boss fight at Melios' garden. The discovering clues and crossing the river I would lump into one big encounter, since it can happen on a single map or entirely theater of the mind. These two combined may take 45 minutes to an hour. The abandoned campsite, the herd of deer, and the town of Petalbrook could probably take maybe about an hour to complete total, since there are multiple social interactions and skill checks involved. Crystals and Candle Wax will be 30-45 minutes at least by itself. There's possibly a social encounter, a stealth encounter, and a combat encounter against five enemies. And then the Meliosa Estate Garden in which it's 4 on 4 combat as written, so figure

30-45 minutes there. Boss fights are just a little more complicated. All told, we're looking at 2 hours 45 to 3 and a half hours to get everything completed, so it seems like we're at least in the ballpark of the time frame I wanted to hit. Now that you've read the adventure and scoped out the encounters and made your plans, now is when the real work begins. If you're using a digital tabletop like Roll20 or Foundry, I'll collectively refer to them as the virtual tabletop or VTT for the rest of the episode. 20 or Foundry. I'll collectively refer to them as the Virtual Tabletop or VTT for the rest of the episode. In the VTT, you'll digitize the maps, get the grids aligned, load the monsters in the appropriate places, and prepare to throw them at the PCs. For example, on Foundry, I would create

a scene for the riverbank, a scene for crystals and candle wax, and a scene for the boss fight inside the garden. I would probably run the first couple of encounters as Theater of the Mind, though, so I'd find a free image of a peaceful riverbank, bonus points if it's got a broken rope bridge. I'd load that image into the VTT and show them to the players as they find clues and go. I use Foundry. I tend to make my notes there in the VTT, so I don't have to keep referring back to printed notes from my laptop or what have you, so I would create my notes with flavor text and skill check reference. For bonus points on Foundry, by the way, you can create buttons that prompt the players for the correct checks. If I had time, I would do that because it makes things go faster and smoother.

Since the likelihood of combat is low with glimmer at the campsite or the deer hazard, I would probably just load the stat blocks in and have them as reference along with skill DCs so the players would need to hit. I would also have bullet points of what the pixie is willing to tell the PCs. For bonus points, and if I had time, I'd load the picture of the pixie that the PCs will be talking to, named Glimmer, with their mischievous grin and pink hair. Load the DCs for the checks in and keep them handy. Same with the hazards and creatures at Crystals and Candlewax, and load them on the Crystals and Candlewax battle map. Load the map of the Meliosa Estate Garden, populate it with the four boss fight leshies, have their stat blocks available in the VTT. Finally, I'd build

the four sample character leshies in the VTT to have them available. FYI, they're named Bottle Speaker, a druid level 3, Fluff Fang, a level 3 bard who is unbelievably adorable, but don't tell them I said that, Popcorn, the barbarian who may be cuter than Fluff Fang, and Reaching Rings, the mushroom-looking rogue. If I have extra time, I load pictures for all the PCs along with their tokens and drop seven generic tokens for nobles, but obviously they're not going to participate in combat. They're more there for dressing, and they three-action flee from the combat at the bottom of every round.

If I were using a physical battle map instead of a digital one, I'd find some appropriate tokens or miniatures to represent the creatures I mentioned above. I'd still keep the first part theater of the mind, and only worry about having maps and tokens for Crystals and Candlewax and the Meliosa Manor Gardens. If I'm running this VTT at my house, I'd load up the PC that drives the digital battle map and get the table TV ready for the adventure. I'd copy the adventure over to my laptop and make sure I could access the adventure in my notes and be ready to go to town. If I were running this at a convention, though,

the only additional thing I would do is have a digital copy of the adventure with me, and if I wanted to go the extra mile, print out each encounter on a separate sheet of paper and have them ready, either stapled together or placed in a notebook in encounter order. If you notice, the one-shot is almost exclusively linear. It is much easier to run one-shots that aren't sandboxes,

because you know the order encounters will occur in, and you know what to prepare for next. That doesn't mean a sandbox adventure like a murder mystery or something similar isn't possible as a one-shot. It just means that there will be a lot more variables to deal with and you can either finish very early or run very long. That's it. If I'm preparing a one-shot, I know what duration I'm shooting for and prepare based on my knowledge of the players and their experience level. Have some ideas where you would want to trim or add content as needed depending on how the adventure is running time-wise. Prepare your players and characters ahead of time, and I'll bet you and your players would have fun doing it. A little bit of a supersized episode this week. If you enjoy the podcast, please consider reviewing it wherever you found it. If you don't have time, then at least give me a like and a

subscribe. It does help keep the podcast going. Tune in next week when... You know what? I haven't done a lore episode or a Starfinder episode in a while. Let's combine the two. Next week, I'm going to talk about a piece of Starfinder lore called The Vast. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Horses. I thought it would be a good idea to approach a horse from the back flank to try to calm it down. I'm not sure if that was the best method, but I sure got a kick out of it. This has been episode 184, all about how I prepare one-shots. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production.

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