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Then come on over to Of Stars and Strife, a world that anyone can be apart of! This server is for creatives who want to create a living, breathing world! The world itself is very work in progress which is why i hope to invite creative people to build upon it! EDIT: here's a proper link

So... hello world!

You’re seeing us in your beginning-most stages. We just started development of this game a couple of days ago, but we’re already so excited for where our journey will take us!

Here’s what we (and you) know so far:

We don’t have a name yet! We’re not “Unnamed Discord RPG” just to be cheeky, we’re just still in the thinking stages for that one.

We’re going to be a play-when-you-want RPG hosted on Discord!

There is going to be so much world-building.

At the 2021 Origins Game Fair, I experienced one of the best convention one-shot RPG sessions I’d ever played in—as well as the worst—back to back. This gave me a unique opportunity to compare and contrast what went well in the first session and what went awry in the second, especially in light of my experience as a tabletop RPG professional responsible for developing one-shots as well as demoing RPGs for convention play. Over the last ten years, I’ve run open and VIP tables at large flagship conventions like GenCon and Origins, regional cons such as AcadeCon and Con of the North, and local mini-cons on college campuses and at my own home. Over the years, I’ve also made my fair share of mistakes that I hope you can learn from.

Although there are many aspects to consider when planning and running an RPG one-shot at a convention, I think that focusing on three elements of the session will give you a solid foundation and yield the best payoff per hour of prep spent. These three essential ingredients are: 1) exciting and accessible pre-generated character sheets, 2) a scenario that is optimized for one-off play, and 3) excellent player management at the table. In this first part of the three-part series, let’s take a deep dive into the first ingredient: pre-gens.

The Purpose of Pre-Generated Characters

Pre-generated (pre-gen) characters refer to character sheets that have been built prior to the start of a session. They’re intended to let players adopt an exciting persona and dive into the action quickly. They’re also the main way for players interface with the rules of the system. Finally, they can be custom-tailored to suit the story, setting, and expected challenges of the scenario, offering exciting moments of payoff when a player figures out that their particular character is the solution to the problem at hand.

The First Rule of Pre-Gens

First and foremost, the character concepts embodied by the pre-generated characters should intrigue the players and get them excited to step into that role for the next several hours. You can start by designing characters that you’d be glad to play, but also think back on the different types of players you’ve played with over the years and consider what kinds of character concepts would appeal to them. (If you’re new to roleplaying games, the gamemaster section of the core rulebook should provide an overview of who to expect and what they enjoy.) Tropes and archetypal characters can help you offer pre-gens that are familiar and easily approachable, while subverting tropes and mixing together unexpected classes, species, and backgrounds will surprise and delight players who want to try something new. You might also want to work in some character options from the newest available sourcebook, as those options are more likely to be fresh and interesting to players.

Just as different players appreciate different aspects of roleplaying games, it’s important to offer a diverse range of pre-generated characters to appeal to players from various backgrounds. Is there a character that will thrill the player who loves engaging in combat? What about players who delight in social interactions, exploration, or problem-solving? If classes are a part of the system you’re running, are you including a mix of essential classes, fan-favorites, and a few more esoteric options? Consider also what diversity you’re offering in terms of the characters’ gender, age, ancestry, and appearance, if you’re not letting players choose those details themselves.

Emphasis on Pre-Generated

Typically, conventions schedule RPG sessions in blocks of three or four hours at a time, but character creation is time consuming. If players have to build their characters when they sit down, that means less time to spend actually playing the game. Generally speaking, most convention-goers do not expect to spend a quarter of the session creating characters or worse, learning how to create a character for the first time. This is especially true of sessions where you offer to teach the rules to new players. If you want players to bring their own characters to the scenario, specify that in the session description ahead of time, but also be prepared for players to ignore the session description or forget their character sheet in their hotel room.

I’ll make an exception for systems where character creation is fast and straightforward, i.e. when the rules are all there in front of you, and it’s just a matter of checking off a few different boxes or circling a few descriptive words. Powered by the Apocalypse games feature playbooks that are designed this way, if you want to look up some examples of what I mean. (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, and Night Witches all feature playbooks.) This kind of character creation lasts maybe 20 minutes, with another 10 minutes at the outset to explain and guide the players through the process. Many indie roleplaying games offer other systems of rapid-fire character creation that are suitable for a convention time block.

In the same vein, I recommend that you avoid doling out large chunks of XP that will need to be spent during the session. Again, your players may be unfamiliar with the leveling-up process, and choosing between a vast array of character options is going to be overwhelming for anyone unfamiliar with the system, and potentially time-consuming for anyone who is. If you’re planning to a game that features power progression, my advice is to create different versions of the pre-gens at the various power levels you expect them to play at. If you really want to showcase progression in the scenario, keep things simple by letting players choose from a small range of meaningful but self-explanatory options.

Prioritize Accessibility and Ease of Reference

Nothing brings a game to a screeching halt like having to flip through an unfamiliar rulebook to locate the precise wording of a feat or spell that is central to how a pre-generated character is expected to function. Character sheets are how players interface with the rules of a system, so it’s important that the rules they’ll need most often are right at their fingertips for them to read on their own. I can’t count how many times I’ve played in games where the GM hands out character sheets that assume players have character options memorized even when the GM has advertised that the session is friendly to new players.

Players should not be forced to rely on asking the GM how their character works or referencing the rulebooks at the table. (This is different from looking up a specific rule or condition that was unlikely to come up.) You can make an exception to this guideline if you have enough copies to go around or you set the expectation that players will be bringing their own books to the table (but again, it’s possible or even likely that your players didn’t read that part of the event description or forgot their book in their hotel room). Consider also your audience—if you’re running an introductory scenario, avoid building characters whose mechanics are overly complex, but if you’re running an expert- or epic-level module, you can potentially rely more on players having a solid rules foundation and a higher tolerance for complexity.

Including page references is an absolute minimum, but better yet, print out all the necessary reference materials for your players, including (and especially) the writeups for feats, spells, talents, special abilities, or anything else that makes that character function differently than the baseline. System reference sheets that cover the basics of combat or other commonly used systems are a great addition to the newbie-friendly table. This does mean taking extra time to collate the necessary writeups and extra ink and paper to print them up, so consider whether buying or making laminated, reusable reference materials will be a worthwhile investment for your table.

Finally, accessibility also means making the character sheets easy to read. Be generous with the font size, and don’t go too wild with elaborate fonts that look pretty but are difficult to read at a glance. The use of color and good graphic design principles can go a long way toward helping players navigate their character sheets quickly, so keep your eye out for nicely designed fan versions of character sheets or—if you have the desktop publishing chops—consider designing your own.

Craft Characters Suitable for the Scenario

If you’re putting together custom pre-gens for your convention scenario, you can build or select characters especially well suited to the story, setting, and challenges of that adventure. For example, if your scenario is primarily combat-oriented, make sure that every character has combat capabilities so that no one feels left out for a majority of the time. If you’re running a game that revolves around investigating a mystery, make sure that all characters have some capacity to search for and act on clues. The basic principle is that you want as many players as possible to be engaged with the game for as long as possible—the less downtime they have, the less reason they’ll have to scroll through social media instead of playing the game they signed up for, and the more likely they’ll enjoy their experience and find the session worthwhile.

With regard to story and setting, pre-generated characters are a simple way to give your player stakes and personal investment in the tale being told. Does the NPC villain that features prominently in the scenario get mentioned on any of the character sheets? If not, why not? What kind of ties do the pre-gens have to the locations they’ll visit or the cultures they’ll encounter in the scenario? How might the characters’ backgrounds, ideals, flaws, and bonds complicate or facilitate their journey in interesting ways? Personally, I try to strongly tie each character to at least one encounter or major NPC in the scenario. Most folks will enjoy spending some time in the limelight or having something deeply personal to their character come up during the scenario.

Items and equipment are an easily overlooked element of character sheets, but they can do a lot for worldbuilding and tone-setting. To the extent that you have room to provide more details about the items being worn and carried, specific items will be more interesting than generic versions. Compare the different milieu evoked by listing a “stone hammer,” “obsidian arrows,” and “bone-and-leather drum” versus plain-old “hammer,” “arrows,” and “drum.” If you are including special or magical items and can give a brief history of the item’s provenance or previous owner, you’ll engage the players’ imagination more than if they are given any old “longsword +1” or “masterwork blaster pistol.”

Critical Hits and Fails

A word to the wise: don’t wait until the last minute to begin building your character sheets. Even if you know a system well and have access to digital character-building tools, there are still a lot of options to parse, especially if you’re creating characters of a higher level. Keep in mind that you’re not just creating four or six individual heroes—you’re building a team, so the characters ought to feel “balanced” relative to one another. Moreover, you don’t want to end up in a situation in which two or more characters are competing to make the same checks all the time, or worse, a situation in which none of the characters are able to deal with a particular challenge set before them. Even when you’re just printing off official pre-generated character sheets, it’s important to round out the team roster appropriately. When each of the characters is filling a unique role in the troupe and gets to have the spotlight at different times in the scenario, you’re also ensuring that all of your players have a chance to shine and succeed.

Finally, I always like to create one more pre-gen than the number of players I expect to participate in the session. This means that even the last player to arrive at the table isn’t “stuck” with a character they don’t want to play as. Even choosing between two characters gives the player a sense of agency in the kind of experience they’re going to have during the session. Plus, you’ll have another character who can step in if the dice gods are wrathful and you have an unexpected, premature character death.

At the 2021 Origins Game Fair, I experienced one of the best convention one-shot RPG sessions I’d ever played in—as well as the worst—back to back. This gave me a unique opportunity to compare and contrast what went well in the first session and what went awry in the second, especially in light of my experience as a tabletop RPG professional responsible for developing one-shots as well as demoing RPGs for convention play. Over the last ten years, I’ve run open and VIP tables at large flagship conventions like GenCon and Origins, regional cons such as AcadeCon and Con of the North, and local mini-cons on college campuses and at my own home. Over the years, I’ve also made my fair share of mistakes that I hope you can learn from.

Although there are many aspects to consider when planning and running an RPG one-shot at a convention, focusing on three elements of the session can give you a solid foundation and yield the best payoff per hour of prep spent. These three essential ingredients are: 1) exciting and accessible pre-generated character sheets, 2) a scenario that is optimized for one-off play, and 3) excellent player management at the table. In this second part of three, let’s take a deep dive into the next ingredient: the scenario.

The Purpose of One-Shot Scenarios

A one-shot is a roleplaying game session designed to offer an engaging play experience and tell a satisfying story within a single sitting. In most convention settings, a four-hour block of time is set aside for the game, but some “epic” sessions might last for six hours, while demos are typically designed to run for just one or two hours. With your regular gaming group, you might have a whole evening to play, without a hard cutoff point other than people’s energy levels.

I consider the play experience to be composed of two things: the GM’s primary motivation for running the one-shot, and what the players are expecting from the scenario. Are you trying to give players a taste of a game’s rules system? Are you looking to bring a set piece encounter to life with elaborate maps, minis, and terrain? Are you offering a chance to play a particular type of character that’s unusual, specialized, or high-powered? Are you trying to introduce or explore a particular setting, time period, or franchise? Or are you trying to entertain with an especially clever premise or mashup of different media properties? (“My Little Warhammer: Friendship is 40k,” I’m looking at you.) If you know what you’re trying to achieve, that can help you focus and prioritize your efforts.

Telling a satisfying story in a single sitting can be challenging, as it’s easy to try to cram too much plot or too many characters into the span of time available. There’s really only time to explore one main objective, a few obstacles, and a set of simplistic stakes. It might be helpful to treat your one-shot as if it were a single twenty-minute episode of a TV show—I often see folks try to cover the same amount of ground as a three-hou epic fantasy film, which just isn’t feasible. Here’s the basic formula I use when crafting scenarios:

When [a disruptive event happens], will a group of [adjective] [collective noun] be able to [adverb] [verb] the [noun] (to/from/at/in [noun]) before the [villain] [villain’s objective]?

And here’s that formula applied to a few different one-shots I’ve developed or written:

When a bounty hunter betrays a brutal crime syndicate, will a motley crew of scum and villains be able to capture or kill him before they become his next target? (“Under a Black Sun” for Star Wars: Edge of the Empire)

When a long-lost heir threatens to interrupt a politically crucial marriage, will a group of young samurai must choose see the match through, or call it off in the name of love? (“Wedding at Kyotei Castle” for Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying)

After a rival underhive gang kidnaps their leader, will a group of Escher gangers be able to rescue their champion and get revenge before one of them reveals themselves to be a murder-cyborg? (“Fall of the House of Escher” for Dark Heresy 2nd Edition, unpublished con scenario)

Time Constraints and Pacing

In my opinion, the primary consideration for a one-shot is the time constraint. If the game runs longer than its allotted time, you won’t have a chance to pick up where you left off the following week or session—you’ll have to rush to the ending or worse, not offer a resolution at all.

My rule of thumb is to plan on roughly one encounter, dungeon room, or scene per hour (from here on, I’ll use the term “encounter” to refer to any of these discrete RPG session elements). For a four-hour one-shot, I try to stick to this schedule:

Introductions (30 minutes): Players choose characters and unpack dice/dice trays, GM introduces rules and setting, answers questions. I try to make sure that the PCs understand their goal going into the first encounter before we hit the 30 minute mark.

Encounter 1 (45 minutes): In pursuit of their goal, the PCs confront an obstacle that might be solved with combat, social interaction, exploration, or investigation.

Encounter 2 (45 minutes): The PCs encounter their next obstacle, one more challenging or with higher stakes than the first. There might be a major twist or reveal at the end of this encounter.

Break (15 minutes): Bio break—let people use the bathroom, get a drink/snack, check their phone, or simply stretch their legs.

Encounter 3 (45 minutes): The PCs encounter yet another obstacle, and they might glimpse opposing sides of the dilemma or fully grasp the stakes.

Final Encounter (1 hour): This is the climactic encounter in which the PCs make a decisive choice and/or face their hardest challenge yet.

I typically have an extra encounter or two in my back pocket in case the PCs breeze through one or more or the earlier encounters faster than anticipated, but these encounters can be left out without hurting the players’ enjoyment or understanding of the overall plot.

Pacing refers to the rate of movement or progress. In RPG terms, pacing refers to how quickly the PCs move from encounter to encounter or experience the story. Bad pacing can make for an unenjoyable game—players might grow bored if they are progressing through encounters too slowly, or they could feel dissatisfied or confused if they are moving through encounters too quickly. You can also affect pacing through variety: a one-shot that’s solely combat, investigation, or social encounters can blur together or feel repetitive, so include a mix of the different types of encounters that feature in the game’s rules, as well as emotional highs and lows (juxtaposing comedy with horror, for example). But take care when stringing vastly different kinds of encounters together. Not having appropriate transitions between encounters can feel jarring, so if there’s a little bit of travel or if time passes, make sure that’s communicated to the players. Give the players time to react to big events and talk among themselves, and once the conversation has run its course, that’s your cue to move on to the next encounter.

It takes some practice and experience to get pacing right, but you can look to your players for signs that the pacing is off—are they tuning out and checking their phones? Chatting among themselves trying to figure out what’s going on? Remember, you can always “fast forward” using narration to get to the next bit of action or excitement (but beware taking agency away from the PCs—you shouldn’t skip over any major decisions that could affect the story). From a logistical perspective, if one encounter runs long, you’ll need to shorten one of the subsequent encounters. If the encounters go by too quickly, however, the session will end early, which usually isn’t too big a deal at big conventions where there’s plenty to do and see (and eat), but it can be a bummer when players paid by the hour for an event.

Agency and Choice

To me, great one-shots are those with multiple possible endings, such that I can run it for different groups of players and have wildly different outcomes. This isn’t always feasible in organized play circumstances, where a shared experience is part of the point. When considering alternative resolutions, you might ask: Do the PCs pursue their original objective, or do they turn on the person who gave them the mission? Do the PCs side with one NPC or another in a dispute? Do the PCs achieve their goal by talking it out, using violence, or employing magic to solve their problems?

Agency is “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power”—in games, that translates to the idea that the PCs can affect the game or the game world, whether for good or ill. Unlike most novels or TV shows, games are an interactive medium, so giving players some choices that matter will help them feel invested in the story.

The worst one-shots are those where the players don’t have agency and their actions don’t matter—the NPCs are too powerful or the PCs too weak to make a difference, or the PCs’ efforts turn out to be futile. One-shots that feature many long, scripted narratives in which the GM is basically telling the story without the players’ input can be indicative of one-shots with little player agency. In these moments, there’s no opportunity for the PCs to interject or act unless they—gasp—interrupt the GM, which many players will not feel comfortable doing. Cut scenes have become less popular in video games over time, and many players skip them altogether. Avoid cramming your one-shot full of cut scenes—think about where in your story would benefit the most from one deep, evocative description, and use it there.

When creating dilemmas and offering choices, one of the biggest considerations are stakes: what will or will not happen if the PCs fail, as well as what will or will not happen if they succeed? Choices should have consequences: rewards or punishments, treasure or injury, fame or infamy. Decisions don’t always have to be an either/or choice. They might be a question of methodology (how the PCs achieve the outcome), or a matter of degree. What matters is giving your players a say in how the story unfolds. Designing a scenario that takes player agency into account and offers meaningful choices and multiple resolutions are much more likely to engage players emotionally and make your one-shot a memorable one.

Let the Pre-Gens Shine

If you followed my advice and carefully crafted your pre-generated characters to suit the one-shot medium, those can be your guiding stars for designing your scenario. Try to match up the skills and capabilities of the PCs to the challenges offered, so that you have at least one sneaky character if the mission calls for stealth, one bruiser character for combat, one investigative character for discovering clues and solving mysteries, and so on. If the PCs come from different backgrounds in the world, try to make those backgrounds matter to the dilemma at hand or the choices offered. If your game features scheming and backstabbing among the PCs, those backgrounds can potentially put them at odds, as can conflicting motivations or agendas.

Once you’ve figured out what your four-plus encounters will be, return to your pre-gens and check whether they’re capable of tackling those challenges as a group. Ensure every PC will be able to contribute something to every encounter, and let them bring something extra to one encounter that can be their moment to shine.

Critical Hits and Fails

One spot your one-shot can crit fail is right at the beginning—if the players don’t know what they’re supposed to doing, they’ll flail around until they find something concrete to pursue, raising the risk that they’ll try to do something or go somewhere you haven’t prepared for. Create a strong and simple hook for why the player characters are involved and what they’re hoping to achieve—one that doesn’t require a ton of explanation or background knowledge. Such-and-such faction needs you to acquire the MacGuffin, rescue the princess, or eliminate the target (and in this case, yours not to reason why, yours but to do or die). You want to plunder the dungeon or raid the cultists’ lair for loot and glory. You need to get off this island/space station/planet because if you don’t, you’re all dead. If you need to provide a ton of context for players to understand the scenario, simplify the plot down to its essence or save that particular scenario for a mini-campaign, where you’ll have more time to get into the weeds.

Another area where your one-shot can go awry is if you’re trying to make the game system do something it wasn’t meant to do, or emphasize a part of the game rules that isn’t well supported. If chases are really challenging to arbitrate in that game, either simplify the chase rules (at the worst, narrating them instead of trying to mechanize them) or avoid chases altogether. If you want to include psionics in a game where psionics are rare and work totally differently from regular magic, either make sure players know that up front and study the rules ahead of time, or avoid psionics in the first place. More egregious examples would be using a game that’s mostly a combat simulation to run intricate social intrigues. If you find yourself homebrewing rules for your one-shot, ask whether you’re making the game more accessible or more complicated. Players typically need some reminding how the normal game system works, much less how something they’ve never encountered before should function.

One place where your scenario can roll a critical success is with physical props. If you prepare relevant handouts, print off maps or terrain, or provide standees or miniatures, you’re adding an extra tactile experience to your game, which can provide novelty and engagement. Handouts could be representations such as illustrations of certain rooms or NPCs, in-universe artifacts such as mission briefings or newspaper clippings, or even small trinkets from your local thrift store to represent important artifacts. If the MacGuffin is a special necklace that needs protecting, how cool would it be to have a physical representation of that necklace on hand for one of the players to wear? If the PCs will be attending a masquerade party, you can enhance the immersion by providing some cheap masks for them to wear while they roleplay. (If it’s something a little silly, dive into it with gusto, and your players will likely follow.) I always think of the enormous “Treasure Island” diorama that gets set up at Con of the North every year, complete with minis and pirate ship and resin water, which looks like an absolute delight to play on and is not something I get to do at home. And some of the clubs take over entire rooms and decorate their space to suit their games, creating an immersive and unforgettable experience.

A few caveats: Regarding text-based handouts, just make sure they’re brief and to the point (journals with multiple entries or a collection of letters are often too much for a one-shot). If hand-outs are going to need to be deciphered, figure in plenty of time for the PCs to work out the solution and discuss the implications among themselves. Along those lines, be sure to give yourself extra time to set up or tear down any maps or minis or terrain, and consider how you’ll transport them to the convention (including through airport security) and how you’ll store those items between sessions, if you’re running the one-shot multiple times.

Even if you aren’t writing a one-shot scenario from scratch, you can use these suggestions to improve how you run published adventures. If there are too many encounters, figure out what you can change to cut the scenario down to fit in the allotted time slot. Add choice points or dilemmas if the module is overly linear. Adjust the pre-gens to be more usable, and figure out ways you can make those lengthy read-aloud boxes part of the action.