Some thoughts on running a Monsterhearts One-Shot:
So last night I ran a one-shot game, with no real prep, for three players (one had played before, one had some experience with RPGs years ago mostly with D&D and the third had never played RPGs before).
It went really well. Here are some things I did to help make sure that it would, since it was only a one shot.
Making Characters: This feels like such an integral part of Monsterhearts, choosing how you intertwine your characters together, that I did not want to skip this step. I did not want pre-gen characters. I did, however, only give them a few skins to choose from. Limiting options means that A) It doesn’t take as long to go over all of the choices, and B) They are not paralyzed by too many options.
We made the characters, and it went very quickly, I just encouraged the players to dive right in and told them they couldn’t make a wrong choice with their stats or Moves, especially since it was only a one-shot.
Homeroom: With only one night to play, there isn’t a need for ten to twenty different NPCs to interact with, they just aren’t going to get to all of them. But again, setting up the people around them is an important part of binding the story together, and I didn’t want to skip it. So, I gave them five people in their class. I told them there are others, but these are the ones that are most likely to be playing major roles in the game that evening. Asked the leading questions, and we got a small cast for the night.
Setting: I did very little to establish the town, we all came up with places as we needed, but only really had three or four that just kept getting re-used. There were a lot of clandestine meetings in the ravine in the park, for instance. I kept this part to a minimum because they could invent places as they needed them.
What I did do was give them a singular place in time, that night was prom and that event was what the game centered around.
Motivations: Monsterhearts gives some great motivations normally, but they can take a slow boil sometimes and I wanted them to dive right into things. I got three scraps of paper, and wrote down a secret on each, and handed them out randomly to the players in order to provide a motivation for them to be acting on that day. The Witch was given “You have a magic ring, and you know that if you can kill someone at the stroke of midnight it will let you live forever”, the Ghoul got “You’ve never been laid, and if you don’t before midnight tonight you are going to die, for good”, and the Fae got “Someone tried to run you over with their car last night. You don’t know who, but someone is trying to kill you”.
Admittedly, these could have been a lot less specific, and more open-ended, but that I think was a result of coming up with them on the fly. The point, though, is that it gave them each a jumping-off point for the one-shot to start the game off running.
Big Mistake: In our haste to get things going, we actually forgot to highlight stats for everyone, and XP growth was a lot slower than it should have been. At first I thought it might be a good thing, because it was one less thing for new players to worry about with the mechanics of the rules, but I quickly realized that the big problem with that is that it meant it wasn’t as meaningful for them to offer strings to one another for XP to do things they wanted. Luckily my players went with it as though XP was still important, but it could have been a lot less successful than it was.
Simply put: Don’t forget this step. The characters need to be able to push each other, and offering strings back is one of the most important ways they do that.
Game:
The game basically ended with the witch in the parking lot accidentally injuring the Ghoul’s girlfriend with a gun she got FROM the Ghoul’s girlfriend, getting beaten to a pulp by the Ghoul, going darkest self, and then shooting the Fae’s prom date and draining his soul for immortality (targeting the Fae’s boyfriend because the NPC he got pregnant at bible camp asked the Witch to kill him)
Summary:
I would do pretty much that same things I did the next time I run a one-shot, and recommend others do too.
Let the players make their characters but don’t give them tons of skins to choose from. Either a limited pool, or hand 2-3 skins to each player. Emphasize that there is no wrong choice.
Only a handful of NPCs, but let the players make them still. It binds them into the story.
Give players story prompts for their characters, don’t build a plot. Most one-shots are set-up with more railroading than normal to keep players confined to a short story. Instead of building a road for Monsterhearts though, instead accelerate the beginning but give them the room to make their own mess of things.
Give them a defined deadline in game, and make it very soon. My game lasted from after school to midnight of the same day.
Don’t railroad, just Intensify time limit and motives.
I hope this is helpful for some people.
