#29: The Not So Subtle Magic of One Shots
Player Tip of the Week: Being so good at something that you have to feel bad when bragging about it later totally counts as “success with a complication”.
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I. CrashCart or The (Not So) Subtle Magic of One Shots
Last weekend, I played a game of CrashCart, a game of cyberpunk paramedics. It’s a Forged in the Dark (FitD) game where every session is a shift at work. You play beleaguered employees of a for-profit ambulance service who are just trying to do their jobs in a crapsack world. My session was glorious and the group (shoutout to Dave aka Dave Thaumavore) seemed to agree!
So, here’s five things that CrashCart gets very right about oneshots:
Pacing, pacing, pacing: Whether or not it’s a fair expectation, I definitely like it when RPG sessions are paced like a good story or movie. The problem is that this is really hard. CrashCart has pacing built into play. ** Unlike other FitD games, it uses an ordinary set of playing cards instead of dice. But by customizing the deck, the game encodes a limited number of successes that draws the bounds of the session. Smooth sailing early on? The ending is going to be hell. Rough start? That probably means it’ll work out in the end.
** Even Blades in the Dark does this to some extent. The stress economy means that you’re more likely to accept Devil’s Bargains as the session goes on. CrashCart just heaps it on an already brimming plate.Play to lose (kinda): As a function of the format, one shots let you hold characters less tightly . You get to drive them like you stole them, as the saying goes. A play-to-lose game leans into this. CrashCart isn’t a play-to-lose game but it’s definitely play-to-have-your-plans-punched-in-the-face - which is close enough. Desperate Actions are brutal in the game but to compensate, Resisting is much easier. This game sets you up for “try, fail, but still somehow succeed”.
Low Prep, Feral Story: I did no prep for this game outside learning the procedures and some daydreaming. By learning the procedure, I mean reading the rules and Stras A’s guide to running Blades one shots (which I followed diligently). By daydreaming, I mean that I asked both the players a question about their previous shift over discord and based on their answers and their character drives, I came up with a two-line idea about ten minutes before the game began. And then, everything else came through play.
One thing that I’m proud of doing is when the mission began, I asked a player a leading question: “The pick-up location of the client is familiar to you. How?” They answered: “I used to work there.” And voila, they were now the narrative authority on the matter and could do all my worldbuilding for me.Explosive endings: Our game literally ended in an explosion. In CrashCart, there’s one joker in the pack and when it comes out, the story twists. And then the joker is shuffled back into the deck. As you get to the end of the session, the deck gets smaller and smaller. So the joker keeps coming out. And keeps being shuffled back. It can start raining twists. I had just watched the Korean scifi movie Space Sweepers the day before and this is exactly how that movie worked. I think the last ten minutes had 3 twists? And it too ended with a big explosion.
On the subject of endings, a really interesting exchange marked the climax of the session and I want to share. Let me paint a picture. Both characters are almost maxed out on Stress. Their clock to get to their destination needs two more ticks to complete. The pilot puts everything on the final roll (or rather, draw of cards) and maxes out on stress (thus out of the scene). The position is Desperate. If they succeed, they manage to land the plane safely. If they fail, well, they crash. They draw their cards. They fail. As the GM, I chuckle and say, “Well, it’s a one shot so we can actually do this: The plane crashes, there’s a giant explosion, you both die. Roll credits.”
Both players seemed okay with this and the game could have ended there. But the pilot player responds, “Well, now this movie is weird because the protagonists are both dead.”
I think about it for a second and agree. So I reframe the events in a way that the second player, the surgeon, can resist the crash. They do so but now the surgeon maxes out on stress as well (now both players are out of the scene). In the fiction, the plane crashes but they both survive. Our movie’s last shot is the two paramedics waking up in somebody else’s ambulance on their way to the hospital. The pilot, battered and beaten, says, “I hate this job.” The surgeon, whose been livestreaming the whole mission, mumbles into the camera, “Like. Share. Subscribe”. And then, we cut to credits.
Yeah, that was better. Contra to the rules, I think, but definitely better.
II. Watch of the Week
It’s becoming a pattern and I can only apologize (completely un-sincerely). Here’s another video only tangentially related to RPGs. This one is about colonialism in board games. I don’t want to describe the video in more detail because I think it’s so good that you should watch it and let it speak for itself.
III. Links of the Week
Cool Stuff
After Session Zero Con, Momatoes built Across RPGSEA, a portal from which to sail the RPGSEA and discover games from the community and beyond. It’s the kind of community project that warms the salty, barnacled cockles of my heart.
On the Gauntlet Podcast this week, a book club with a twist. The host pairs a book and a roleplaying game. Everyone reads the book and then plays the game. A very cool way of building a shared commitment to theme, tone, and setting. I’d love to do something like this at some point. If you’re looking for complimentary books and games, check out the fictoplasm podcast which does exactly like that.
Articles
It’s still ZineQuest and on Cannibal Halfling, there’s another round up of some quirky zines that are worth checking out.
I’m a sucker for campfire stories about old games. On Githyanki Diaspora, Judd Karlman shares a story about a thief that didn’t exist and the magic of RPGs.
On the Trilemma blog, a neat analysis of how much to set as the goal for a kickstarter that takes into account what will lose you the least money.
Sharang Biswas shouts out a whole host of indie games on Dicebreaker.
As a part of the Approachable Theory series on Thoughty, there’s an article on the trickiness of talking about game genre: “Games need separate genres for their rules as written, for their fictional content, and for the experiences that arise from the confluence of those things with player action.”
(It’s a good read and it reminds me of a Metatopia talk on gamefeel and vocabulary and the idea of appeal factors which I had decided to write about and have not yet done so. It’s definitely coming.)
IV. Small Ads
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Thank you for the write-up! There's no better feeling in game design than hearing folks having fun with your work.
(and good luck explaining the loss of your bus to Legal Services!)
Thanks for writing this! Really enjoyed this particular issue, and your thoughts on one-shots were particularly inspiring. What an interesting hobby this would be if one-shots were the default!