I’m hosting a one-shot RPG night tonight for a mixed crowd, some experienced and some not. I’m planning to run an off-the-cuff *World game where I use focused questions to solicit everything from setting to stats from the players. Everyone will just write their relevant character info on index cards.
Anyone done something like this before? Any suggestions and/or resources to recommend?
I feel like the biggest obstacle to flow might be starting with things too open-ended. Thinking about putting some menu lists together, but I also really want to see what would happen if I just crowd-sourced all the surface details.
You might consider doing like World of Dungeons and using Act Under Fire as the single core move, improvising and adding new player-side moves as needed.
One thing that’s helped groups of mine get over things being too open ended is adding some randomness. I’ve had groups write down setting ideas on scraps of paper and drawing three out of hat to build a setting with, and it’s worked really well (and created a one-shot of ecoterrorist fairies waging war against polluting wizards).
Once you have broad setting details worked out Simple World (http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/simple-world/) is a great resource for choosing your stats and working out character archetypes 🙂
You gonna let each character end up with different stats? Like player A could have Bold +1, Patient -1, and Sweet +2 but player B could have Hard +2, Sharp +1, Cool -2?
If so, sweet.
(If not, also cool. But I’ve idly wondered how well it’d work to have different stats and even different basic moves available to different characters.)
My first thought was yeah, player-specific stats for each, but as I’m making up a crib sheet to run the game, I think that might add more complication than I want. I will likely have some folks who’ve never played a RPG, so I’m thinking it would be best to keep stats consistent so everyone can track what’s happening. I’m just going to go with Body, Mind, and Spirit, reworded to suit whatever setting they choose (Muscle/Wits/Moxie for a pulp setting, for instance). The customization will come from “details” and “abilities,” which will just be player-created tags that add to your dice pool in applicable situations. Instead of +X modifiers I’m going with +dice, so you’ll roll 2-6 d6 when you try something iffy, and use the best 2 to apply to the 10+/7-9/6- scale.
Cool.
Semi-related: there’s at least one hack floating around (Big Red Letter Day) that used a die pool and, instead of picking the best 2 dice, you counted 5s & 6s as hits. 1 hit was basically a 7-9 result, and 2+ hits was a 10+ result.
It worked pretty elegantly with pick X or hold Y moves.
14 people showed up! I solicited genre/setting ideas, they voted for a mystery involving giant robots, and I split them into two teams of 7, each a crew. People had a good time, but it was a challenge to manage the spotlight. My ad hoc dice pool approach worked out fairly well, though I think in general that I prefer the more streamlined feel of rolling fewer dice. With some tweaks, I can see using this approach again.
Jason, this is a fairly old post – and you already had your game… But I wonder if something looking like the playbooks linked below (a project of mine temporarily on hold) would be giving the game a good start, in your opinion…
(I am thinking mostly of the Bond section, regardless of the other mechanics which are not fully explained in the playbooks)
http://www.daimongames.com/blademoon/download/BladeMoon-v01.1-Playbooks.pdf
Those are cool, Davide. I like how a “starting scenario” can be easily derived from some of those starting bonds. I will be keeping this approach in mind if I’m faced with a similar situation again.