5e One Shot: Playtest

I trotted out my new quick character generation system, 5e One-Shot, for a game at the local library. And it was a blast!

I printed out the rules and made an accordion-fold screen out of them.

Crafts Time

This screen didn't prove terribly useful—the arrangement of the narrow conference room and outsize table were such that no one could really crowd around a see it. But I think it lent my homebrew system an ersatz professionalism that made it easier for people to get on board.

All in all, it worked really well. Everyone ended up with a reasonably realized character with distinct strengths.

Some points of improvement:

Several players lined their 5d6 up in numerical order, which meant they ended up with very similar characters. I'll need to clarify the desire for a randomized spread.
The character sheets are class-based, so that they could have lots of the class information pre-printed on them. But class is the last thing you decide on, so the character sheets were useless. I need to make a universal character sheet, perhaps with class summaries presented as checkable options.
I think the name list needs more one-syllable names. Or, at least, I need to establish one or two syllable diminutives for characters with long names. I had eight players, most of whom gravitated towards knotted syllable-string Fantasy names. It was hard to keep track of, and made note taking more laborious.
I need some information about hitting second level, since that is easily achievable in one session of 5e. When the players advanced to second level, I awarded extra hit points, which worked well enough at the time. I don't want to bog things down by explaining complicated new abilities. But it's worth looking at to see if there's a pared-down approach to handing out a little extra juice.
A bit of errata here and there. Wizards definitely shouldn't roll 1d20+10+INT to hit with Ray of Frost.

Players made excellent creative use of their backgrounds in lieu of skills. We had two cobblers in the crowd. One used her her familiarity with shoe construction to examine footprints left at a murder scene. Another claimed a bonus climbing up a pyramid of boulders because of her well-constructed footgear (you're going to have to stretch to make cobbling relevant to adventuring).

Click for DM's Guild

It's hardly news that you don't need a lot of rules or complicated character builds to have a good time with an rpg, but it was gratifying to confirm that the results were still completely compatible with full-bore 5e.

We ran Treasure of the Broken Hoard, by Shawn Merwin.

I'm pretty happy with this as a module for first-timers. It's well thought out, and didn't need much prep beyond a single read-through.

It involves 5 connected mini-scenarios along a mountain range. This provides a nice variety of locations and situations, and is modular enough that there are convenient and satisfying stopping places for a one-time pickup game. It also lets the players set their pace, and provides ample opportunities to rest and heal for delicate first-level characters.

The scenarios are a little formulaic: the party arrives at a location, are ambushed by bad guy fodder, there's a puzzle to solve, but most of the treasure has already been snatched. But the elements are all solid. There are imaginative adversaries scaled to first-level play. The puzzles are varied and pitched at the right level of challenging for quick-but-not-too-quick solving. And there's some fun rewards—who doesn't want a miniature pet bear?

We made it through two scenarios in three hours. A more focused party could have made it a lot further in the same amount of time, but cares about focus if everyone is having fun?

The only conversion needed to run this adventure using 5e One-Shot was ignoring the parenthetic skill listed whenever it called for a skill check. Easy!

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

AnneNovember 9, 2019 at 6:34 PM
I'm glad this went well. The two cobbler examples are great! It sounds like the players really got into it.

The issue with the character sheets is interesting, and something that didn't occur to me reading through it. Would it be possible to make "choose your character class" an earlier decision? I know that Wizards want INT, Fighters want STR, etc, but if everyone's playing a random, slightly sub-optimal character, there's not necessarily a problem, right?

I'm also interested in your point about ersatz professionalism and player buy-in. I can sort of understand not wanting to play in a random stranger's possibly-garbage homebrew on a mess of scribbled notebook pages. Maybe a bit of design polish is the key to overcoming people's reticence to trying something a little new?

An Abominable Fancy

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