5e One-Shot: pared down play for getting started quickly

Last time I ran an adventure at the local library, I was delighted to find that one of my players was an octogenarian who knew nothing about D&D but was rarin' to go. What could be better than introducing the game to someone like this?

Except.

It caused a real disconnect with the other players. Spending time bringing her up to speed was time where the others were twiddling their thumbs.

It doesn't need to be like that. At its core, D&D 5e isn't all that different than those simple Arnesonian systems. The mechanic you need to know is:

Roll a d20.
Higher is better.
Your character sheet might give you bonuses to add to this roll.

You should be able to start playing with just that. Damage rolls and hit dice and whatnot can be explained when they become relevant.

Except.

The character sheet. It's full of a lot of information that takes a bit of experience to get your head around. In this case we were using pre-gens that, unfortunately, also had great slabs of character background, turning the sheet into a wall of text. It took too long to navigate.

So, here's a quick character generation system (even quicker than the last one) that creates simple, broad characters for one-shot play. And they're compatible with 5e adventures, provided your referee has an ounce of flexibility.

EDIT: If you're interested in checking out 5e One-Shot, please let me direct you to the most recent edition: 5e One-Shot v.2!

5e One-Shot

(Exciting Colorful Edition)

5e One-Shot

(Boring Greyscale Printer-Friendly Edition)

It results in characters that look like this:

Ianto the Alluring

Doctor +2

CHA +4

DEX +2

Fighter +2

AC 20

HP 16

Long Sword +2

Longbow +4

Companion: Tujjar the Squire

Rosamund the Clever

Herbalist +2

INT +4

CON +2

Wizard +2

AC 10

HP 8

Spell Save 14

Dagger +2

Ray of Frost +6

Spells: Silent Image, Grease, Sleep

Fredegonde the Stout

Beggar +2

STR +4

INT +2

Jack-of-All-Trades +2

Armor 12

HP 8

Rapier +6

Short Bow +2

What do you think? Would you be at all interested in playing a session of this?

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S

An Abominable Fancy

Search This Blog