Well, we’ve been doing one shots this whole year since Wrath of the Righteous wrapped up. In February I reported on the first few in One Shots! Since then we’ve played (I may be missing some):
The Gaean Reach, by Bruce. A GUMSHOE game based on the writings of Jack Vance – yes, of course it’s authored by Robin Laws. I missed this one, sadly.
Firefly, run by Paul. I got to play Kaylee! Trad system, but fun.
Monster of the Week, run by me. Another Powered by the Apocalypse game, went down well. Meant to be like Supernatural or X-Files or whatnot – you know, monster of the week!
Lasers and Feelings, run by Paul. A free one-page game where basically you have two stats, Lasers and Feelings, and they both add up to 6 so one goes up at the expense of the other. Fun, but very freeform.
Fiasco, run by me. An interesting very narrative game where it’s more about building the story than looking out for “your” character. We did the wild west playset thing and everyone ended up sad and/or dead.
Nain for Reign, run by Tim. Reign is Greg Stolze’s current One Roll Engine game, and Nain is a Gormenghasty setting for it. We enjoyed this too.
Paranoia, run by Paul. Who doesn’t love Paranoia!?! I’m hazy what rules we used for this, or if we just used one of the random light systems we’ve been using for many of these one-shots. In fact, I think maybe it was Cypher System. Yes, yes it was. Good times.
Alternity Dark*Matter, run by me. We played a big Alternity campaign so everyone knew the system already. I ran the demo adventure “Exit 23” and murdered nearly all the PCs.
Shadowrun using the Cypher System, run by Paul. Everyone likes the idea of Shadowrun, no one in their right mind wants to bite off its huge rules system. (Even they have realized this and just rolled out some more rules-light engine for it.) So we did it with the Cypher System from Numenera et al, and it worked out well. I’m mildly concerned whether that scales to a campaign just because of the “one-shot” nature of the cyphers… Shadowrun is usually aggressively sim.
ICONS, run by me. Random superheroes! The heroes did quite well in beating a time-travelling enemy, Tempus Khan, from the RetConQuest adventure.
Gods of the Fall, run by Paul. More Cypher System, I missed this one.
Demon: The Descent, run by Tim. Some World of Darkness 2.0. We had fun demoning it up, but as with all WoD games it’s more like superhero combat.
Unknown Armies, run by Paul – the third edition that we Kickstarted and got an early version of! Always fun, and we all had some magick. We got to play New Inquisition agents mainly because I love the Lawyers, Guns, and Money supplement for 1e so much.
Only War, run by me. The Warhammer 40k Imperial Guard game! I used a Free RPG Day quickstart adventure. We ran out of time at the end and they got killed by Naval orbital barrage, which everyone agreed seemed fitting. IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FAR FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WAR.
Savage Rifts, run by Paul . OK, some people manage to bother with the real Shadowrun system, but RIFTS? Good lord. Luckily, there’s now a Savage Worlds version and I’m happy to report it’s very playable! We had a glitterboy, a juicer, a cyborg, and a mystic knight and we romped on our opponents (the juicer died of generally being a juicer, but not till the end).
Paul kept trying to run Dramasystem but never got enough people to show (I missed once but not because I was avoiding it). So, we didn’t get hands on that, but we got to mess with a lot of the cool new systems – Cypher System and Powered by the Apocalypse were the favorites.
We talked and said maybe we should get back to a campaign soon. So after a 5e one-shot, Paul said he’d be interested in running:
- Shadowrun using the Cypher System
- Savage RIFTS
- Dungeon World, using a Paizo AP
After some talking, the “Paizo AP” part swung us over to Dungeon World. Pauls ent out a SurveyMonkey to vote on which AP and results will be in soon. We’re interested in how it’ll play out without the “level 10+ turns to shit” syndrome of using Pathfinder itself, and how we’ll balance being player driven with having an AP plot around. Feel free and share, if you’ve done so!