One-Shot Adventures

The reason I included this as solo advice, is because a one-shot adventure is the swiss army knife of solo play.

  • Starting a one-shot adventure is a lot less daunting than starting a campaign.
  • They are structured to have a start, middle and end; that is really helpful in getting a game started.
  • You can springboard from a one-shot into a longer campaign if you want to.
  • You can try different things out without ruining a new campaign, such as trying to run an entire party solo, or figuring out how to scale encounters for a lone hero.
  • You can play back to back one-shots in an episodic campaign, without worrying about how you got from the end of one to the entry of another.
  • If you are learning a new game they often bundle a one shot adventure with a quickstart set of rules, for free.
  • Published one-shots often spotlight the best features of a game system or setting. They become showcase events.

You can see that I can make a good case for the one-shot adventure and at any time you can decide that you want to launch this into a grand campaign. You lose nothing by starting this way.

I own possibly a thousand RPGs. I can happily play a one-shot adventure in a dozen hours, and then hop to a different game, genre or style. I would have to live to about 150 years old to play them all, but I want to play a goodly number of the games I own.

3 thoughts on “One-Shot Adventures”

    • That really depends on the games you are playing. If you are just getting into solo play I would not recommend trying to run a published module or adventure.
      What I would suggest is creating a character and setting up a dramatic opening scene. Someone trying to kill you, or an Unnatural disaster such as a runaway train, carriage or plane. This will hive you an immediate problem to solve. You will also have many unanswered questions by the end of that first scene. Start to answer those and you will be creating your first adventure as you play.

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