So I ran some demo games for a company at a recent convention, the Fallout RPG and Star Trek Adventures, and I’ve been thinking over the experience. The challenge I had was the games were supposed to be only one-hour-long introductions, and the sample adventures provided were all uniformly railroads. My problem with having a strict time limit is that it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to provide a full experience for the players, and so to plan in too much detail; specifically, plan some kind of exciting climax that will be satisfying for everyone. Now, of course that’s railroading, because with that as a requirement as the GM you have to try to keep everybody “on track” to get them to that spectacular climax (and on track by a certain time!), and if they go “off track”they won’t get to that special thing that you have prepared for them. So resisting this was a struggle I had in prepping for these games.

So the headspace I had to get into was, just prep something basic, and then whatever happens, happens. As long as the players get to see how the rules work, it would be a success. So I looked at what I had to work with. One of the pre-scripted adventures for Fallout had some promise – there was potential for an interesting situation involving a conflict between three different factions. There was a woman who had a secret, some Raiders who wanted that secret from her, as well as a synthetic man who wanted the same thing. The location was in a open vault in the wasteland.

So what I did was, I added a little bit more about the motivations to each of these NPC‘s, fleshed out the structure of the vault a little bit more, and decided to go with the initial opening scene of the scenario: each of the player characters had heard the sound of gunfire and shouts, and approached this area upon where they saw each other, and the open vault. Then I figured we’d go from there.

So what happened in play was the player characters met on a hill in front of the vault, where they were introduced to each other. Then rather quickly, raiders challenged them. Now, in the written scenario, the Raiders simply started shooting at them right away. I wanted to change it so that they would challenge them instead, partly so the players would have more options. But from behind the scenes, what I was thinking was this: the Raiders were after the woman with the secret; they see this group of people on the hill, and are concerned they might be after the same thing. But they didn’t know that for sure; if they could just confront the player characters and shoo them off, that would accomplish their goal just as well. In addition, this provided more options to have things go another way; the players might decide to join the Raiders, or do any number of things left up to their imagination. However, in actual play, in general the players decided simply to fight the Raiders as soon as they saw them. Combined with the initial introduction, this combat usually took up most of the hour, and I didn’t really get to see how things went from there.

There was one exception, where the players were having such a good time that they wanted to keep playing. There was no one immediately signed up for the next hour, so we could continue. This turned out to be the most fun game I got to play that weekend. Fortune favored the group, and we even happened to reach a natural conclusion to the game – the woman with the secret died, but trusted one of the player characters enough to reveal the secret to her. In fact, we enjoyed the game so much, we made plans to stay in touch and game after the con.

So one of the things I want to ask is, for short games of about one hour or so, does anyone have any tips on on how to to run such a thing, or do I have the right idea and it’s just prep some kind of a simple conflict, in some interesting location, and just see how things go from there?

My other question is a little complicated, I guess. So Fallout, which uses a version of the 2D20 system, is usually not something I would personally enjoy; it’s just not the type of game I would have classified as being my type. Yet for some reason, I quite enjoyed it. I don’t understand why, however. Normally, I find things like dealing with hit locations to be a tedious bore. Having to roll to hit, having to roll damage, and the. hit location in addition has been in my experience too much of a drag. In Fallout everyone has armor protection that varies by location, so the location actually does matter; I couldn’t simply ignore it. 

In this game, I enjoyed how much the players liked it when they did things like chop off an opponents limb, for example. So part of my enjoyment may have been how much fun the players got from it. Another element was the way Fallout used action points. This is similar to Star Trek Adventures with momentum and threat, but I found that Fallout’s use was a little more intuitive. As the GM, I got a bunch of action points per player, plus you get also get action points when you roll more successes than you need above the difficulty. Action points give you the ability to roll more dice, and to roll more damage dice, which as a game mechanic is not that unusual. But they also let you take more actions of different types. As GM I could store up the action points and then use them to really make it hurt when it counted, and I definitely found this aspect fun. 

Usually, I have been suspicious of things like action points. One of my personal issues with gaming is being afraid of having PCs fail too badly, and I think this is not something that is unique to me; a lot of games are written as if the designer was afraid of PCs failing, and often things like hero points or luck points are introduced to keep players from ever failing at all, or to reduce the significance of failure to the point where it has no real consequence. One of the things that I personally learned from my experience in the frog pool game, was about how negative I was about players failing, and that I would not let myself enjoy the game if I or other players failed significant rolls. So being able to enjoy the game when failure happened was something that helped me enjoy gaming much more. Anyway, so I was very skeptical about action points in the beginning, because I figured it was just another way to mitigate or negate failure. However, in this game, it didn’t seem to have that effect at all: you could not use your action points to save yourself. You could only use them to increase your chance of success, or increase its effectiveness. There was also an option to spend action points to add elements to the story (”there’s a hidden entrance here,” and so forth). 

Anyway, I appreciate any thoughts or feedback you have on this. I signed up to do this again at an upcoming con, but I’ve been able to arrange for two hours slots instead of one hour.