It's About Time (in praise of campaigning)
Problem 1
Time. In this hobby we are blessed with an abundance of cool, creative, delightful, powerful and innovative games which urgently press upon us for our time and attention.
How are we to play them all? How can I ever hope to work my way through all the wonderful games on my shelf?
Solution 1
Enter the one-shot: a snappy, fast pace, easy to commit to method of satisfying the New Game Craving! A little try before you buy, a little palate cleanser between bigger campaigns, a chance to learn, a chance to address the Shelf of Unplayed Games.
Unfortunately, the one-shot introduces us to...
Problem 2
Time. It crunches, it pressures, it confines.
Much is placed on the shoulders of the Referee/Facilitator; one must strive to keep time, one must often teach the game as you play, and drive the action with sufficient pace to complete the scenario in a single session.
Much rests on the shoulders of the module designer, if your game of choice leans on those. You want a nice neat vertical slice of mechanical gameplay, the evocation of core themes, a tight premise thatâs confined and pressing enough to drive action while allowing for impactful player choices and agency...
And if youâre not using a module? or if the module isn't build for one-shots? Damn, I guess a load of that design side stuff falls squarely back onto the Referee/Facilitator.
Problem 3
Stakes. You know, something to care about. RPGs are better with them than without - this is an objective (strongly held subjective) fact (opinion).
Thereâs a general misconception about OSR type games which holds that high lethality (or the preferable âhigh consequenceâ) play means we donât or canât care about our characters. I donât need to exhaustively disprove this falacy; anyone who has lost their boy-wizard to a swarm of murderous animated parody-Warhammer toy soldiers when theyâre several sessions deep into Walgravakâs Warehouse would know how much I loved feel the loss of that obnoxious little shit.
I think this misconception comes because the Trad Games often have you spending so much time on character creation (with additional âbackstoryâ cultural expectation grafted on) so of course you care about that guy. Thereâs a whole lot of âfiguring out who my guy isâ already occurring before the character sheet ever meets the play. With OSR games, we make our character quickly and throw them into the action and we grow our investment through time invested in play and-
Aha! Tricked you. Actually this problem is also about time. We're still talking about one-shots.
It will often be much harder for a player to care about a one shot character than a character theyâve spent time with. Maybe theyâre running a âpregenâ they didnât make, maybe they rolled up a guy real fast, either way... not a lot of time spent on the character, typically lower stakes for the player. Could I have felt the loss of my boy wizard so keenly, and would I have fought as hard to keep him alive if I hadnât spent several hours playing him up to that point?
For OSR games I have found this can lead to oneshots feeling somewhat unsatisfying on the player side, and can create issues around play style if the core tenets and principles of the game assume a player is striving and conniving to stay alive. While this can vary from game to game, module to module, even the horror-OSR games like Mothership feel strongest when players walk the fine line of being eager to put their characters in nightmarish peril while trying to get some kind of (survive/solve/save) win as they roleplay their character.
Solution 2
Do something different: Storygames have an advantage in one-shot play, in that the intent is âweâre here to tell a cool story togetherâ and the rules are geared up for such. The stakes are different, and so too are levers in the facilitator and playersâ hands. We aren't worried about preparing and adjudicating a blorby world with a solid diagetic reality, we are facilitating shared authorship of events, and player agency resides in their ability to speak directly to story in ways that reach beyond the scope of their character's agency and capabilities.
When I am facilitating a one-shot "movie" in Action Movie World and we're running short of time, it is within my power to jarringly move us to a concluding scene at an improvised location without compromising the agency of the players; I can trust that the players can still hit their one liner and stunt moves of their choice and we fill in the scenery around them as they require, the agency here is less about the diagetic choices of characters than the ability of the players to grasp hold of the story pen through rules. Additionally, when a "supporting actor" dies within the fiction (one player, the "lead actor", cannot die) that player gains XP for future âmoviesâ and effectively becomes a co-facilitator for the remainder of the session, slipping into the role of a "stunt coordinator" or playing various villains; thus the system does not draw benefit from the tension of players to striving to keep their character alive, instead it incentivises "let's co-author a cool story".
And yet... I am in my OSR era now, so rather than fall back on my old ways I'd like to shout out an example of a module which sets up the referee for one-shot success: Last Voyage of the Bean Barge, by watt, for Cloud Empress. It hits all the key requirements for enabling that good-good OSR player agency, while confining the scope sufficiently for one-shot play, and provides a timer to spur action and continually up the ante until the players hit an explosive conclusion. It's a banger.
Solution 3 (In Praise of Campaigning)
I'll say this much for trad (or neo-trad) gaming: the assumed default of two-to-three hour sessions with no fixed number of sessions gives everyone at the table a lot of room to breathe.
It lets you say "hey, I'd like it if we made our characters together as a group in our first session so that we can all be surprised, and then we throw them into the action", and it gives a new group of players time and opportunity to grow to know one another and find the rhythms of play and build up the table dynamics together. It gives you space to prompt "let's talk about how your characters met and came together as a group", or to teach elements of the game as they become relevant, and for the group to ask and answer questions about the rules, or to allow them to explore some other part of the world or its characters, without needing to step in and squash that chat like you're chairing a work meeting. It gives the players space to discuss the clues they discover among themselves, and come up with bright ideas and clever strategies together (and permits me to sit back and listen as they do so).
So... now that we have all that? You better believe these player-characters are striving to live, even as they imperil themselves for gold and hidden relics. You better believe that longer term considerations about inventory management, rations, fatigue and deprivation are front of mind. You best believe that when one of them gets speared by a [spoilers: redacted] or crushed beneath the weight of a [nuh-uh, you didn't say the magic word] then everybody at the table is going to feel it, commiserate and celebrate together.
Oh yeah and also I'm not feeling the stress of having a bunch of timers and clocks running on my phone while we play, or feeling like I have to keep so many plates spinning or that I have to intervene whenever play slows...
Give yourself room to breathe. It's about time.
Giving thanks
I'd like to take a moment to shout out Evie, Kaylee, Zusanna, Mark and Gator for playing in my current Cairn 2e campaign and thank them for being a great group. I am very grateful they all signed up for an open-ended campaign with me.
I've thoroughly enjoyed the campaign so far, and without the pressures of a one-shot or limited run we've been able to take our time over everything and, in my view, really get the most out of the game system and our current adventure.