Oh dammit, I’m back here again. I swear, I’ve lived through the last 24 hours so many times I’m starting to feel like an anxious woodland rodent! Yes, it’s the same day. No, I haven’t just been stuck in this tower so long that I’m confused! Every single night I reach the end of what ends up being an oddly cinematic day, I stand within the ruins of my tower, I stare towards the horizon, and JUST as I reach the edge of tomorrow, I wake up in my bed! The lack of progress is maddening, to say the least. I should never have let Reynauld; that homunculus, learn a little chronurgy magic.
Hello and welcome back to the fifth entry in a series of articles we’re calling “TTRPG Essentials”, each of which focuses on welcoming you into the robust hobby of tabletop roleplaying games. If you want to read the articles that preceded this one, you can find them here.
Last article we focused on different styles of synergy between the dual forces of tactical mechanics and involving roleplay across multiple systems, and how finding the right mix between the two can be paramount for the play experience of your table. Today we’ll be looking to the strengths and weaknesses of varying campaign lengths, as well as identifying and describing several systems that are best for either campaign or one-shot gameplay, all in the hopes of providing you and your table with a few new options for the future.
Let’s get to it.
Definitions
Before we leap straight into describing any strengths or weaknesses, we should probably identify and define what exactly one-shot or campaign play looks like.
In campaign play, the aim is to tell a story across a multitude of game sessions, wherein characters grow and change, live and die. This is the shape that most ttrpgs take in the public consciousness; the sprawling D&D campaign with treasured characters and memorable losses and gains. If you’re looking to other media, this is your Lord of the Rings, your Star Wars/Treks; any media that follows a narrative arc across multiple episodes, volumes, films, games, etc.
In a One-Shot, the gameplay hews far closer to that of a singular event or scenario. The characters might be pre-made or lovingly crafted, but this game is designed to be their one great outing. Characters might be more or less powerful than usual, depending on whether or not the game is designed as power fantasy or meat grinder, but the experience will be especially curated. This is your “One Last Job” in heist terms; offering a singular but memorable view into the dizzying heights and nauseous depths of a world, of a system, etc. If you’re looking to other media; this is your HEAT, your Friday the 13th, your The Raid; any piece of media that begins an ends with one entry and typically concerns itself with one singular event, location, or struggle.
Tailor Made
With those definitions out of the way, lets talk about how certain systems are more tailored for one of these two gameplay experiences than the other, some examples of specific systems, some inherent strengths and weaknesses of each form, and how the borders between both previously discussed forms of TTRPG aren’t as clear cut as one might assume.
Jack of All Trades, Master of None
Alright, let’s get this one out of the way first. As discussed in previous articles in this series; there’s a reason why Dungeons & Dragons holds such a sizable chunk of this hobby’s public persona.
D&D is designed to be a unique flat playing field; one that can support varying degrees of investment, whether that be time, focus, creativity, or just plain money. Hasbro money helps quite a bit here; as it’s ensured that there are a bevy of campaign and setting books for tables interested in crafting their own bespoke experiences, boxed games to provide new players with minis, maps, pre-built character sheets with full art, and “user-friendly” app that ensures that player investment need only be as deep as a player wishes.
As a result of this corporate design ethos, D&D is whatever you need it to be, it’s just not going to offer you anything beyond what’s on the tin. The table that wishes to explore D&D can do so in either One-Shot or Campaign form, but it’s whatever you make of it and nothing more. Luckily, we have more interesting options.
Pathos Is Earned (Great for Campaign Play, Less So for One-Shot)
You’re a monster. You’re an idiot. You’re just… trying to survive another night. You have friends, you have enemies, you have those that you keep close but cannot truly trust with the deepest chambers of your soul. You’re supposed to meet up with people tonight and determine your next move, but part of you is just so tired. You want to give up, but then you think about them; your reason to keep going, and so you make the decision. You’ll do this again; just one more night, until the next one.
If there’s another game that captured the public eye for a time, it’s Vampire the Masquerade. A game about inhabiting the role of a predatory creature of the night that struggles with their humanity just enough to inspire pathos. You suck; but also you’re aware (in more than one way). Games driven by this sort of desperate pathos are, in this writer’s humble opinion, best experienced in campaign play.
CAIN by Tom Bloom (think Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, with a little bit of Law & Order: SVU thrown into a blender) exists as another example of this sort of pathos-central experience, as well as Paint the Town Red by SoulMuppet Publishing (For those of you that want to explore a different sort of vampiric narrative). All three of these games have extremely different gameplay loops, but they all hinge upon the struggle between human and something else within your character. These sorts of struggles can feel too massive to experience over the course of one night, but over the course of several play sessions, each of these systems will tease out qualities of your characters in little moments of discovery and conflict.
The character you start with, that you lovingly built, will surely be someone else by the end of your table’s campaign, and so systems like flourish in that sort of long-form gameplay.
A Night to Remember (Systems Best Experienced in One-Sitting)
The walls, the floor, and your legs all shake as the trailer rattles across the rails. You know why you’re here. You’re running. To where, you don’t know, just that you need to keep running. That’s the same reason you’re all here, isn’t it? Clutching your instruments and tools of the trade like they were made of solid gold. You’re not looking for Big Rock Candy Mountain any more, you’re just looking for one more sunrise. You can feel it though, even more than the trailer or any part of your corporeal form; tonight is the night it all comes crashing down around your ears. You heft your instrument, tapping the wood with a shaky hand that grows steady from the familiar movement. If tonight is your last night, all the more reason to go down playing.
Let’s talk about another extreme: Those games that are best experienced in one sitting. The games you’ll be talking about for days, weeks, maybe even years to come. These TTRPG’s are events just as much as they are games. A system that lives and breathes as a perfect example of this (and definitely inspired that little narrative excerpt above) is Last Train to Bremen by Caro Asercion.
In this GM-less game, four players inhabit the roles of four doomed musicians trying to welch on a deal they made with the devil. This game presents itself as a one-act play; wherein players are expected to “don the roles of playwright, director, performer, and audience member alike”, and as result offers a gameplay experience like nothing else in the TTRPG hobby.
Another excellent example of a TTRPG perfectly -oned for one-shot gameplay, is PSYKERS by Mega Corp; wherein players inhabit the roles of escaped test subjects with incredible powers on the run from a powerful Megacorporation. Both the ease of character design and the system itself hurtless players through its encounters, ramping up lethality and horror in equal measure as it inexorably draws towards a very bloody and very spectacular end.
Both systems offer an unforgettable experience, the heights of which would be difficult to maintain over any amount of time longer than one play session, but you’ll surely be talking about that one session for quite a while.
Designer Terror (Games with Pre-Determined Campaign Lengths)
With both the extremes and the middle of the road examples given, we should take a moment to discuss a genre that does particularly well when it takes lessons from both of the extremes; Horror. Horror is unique, in the sense that it requires less momentum in its narrative, and more an inexorable gravity. To achieve the tallest heights in this genre, time must be afforded to build both investment, and dread. It also serves Horror gameplay best if there’s a finite and understood end, or if the narrative revolves around a singular location or mystery.
One of the best examples of this, is Mothership by Tuesday Knight Games. The pre-written scenario materials for this game stand in a realm all their own, allowing for extremely modular terror.
Each Mothership pre-written scenario is, in effect, an isolated horror story, fixated upon an individual location, an impossible piece of technology, a horrifying phenomena; a psychotic lifeform, etc. As a result of this, each can exist perfectly as their own little one-shots, even if you might decide that they all occur within a shared universe of terror. Two excellent examples of this are Another Bug Hunt (Sold by many as one of the single best intro experiences for Mothership), and BLOOM (plant-based body horror baybeee).
Sometimes, Store-bought Is Fine
We’ve done a lot of talking about the strengths of the extremes of one-shot and campaign play, but what about the strengths of the extremes of character creation? Many systems, regardless of the intended length of play, offer variable options when it comes to crafting your playable avatar.
What’s the best option? Well, that depends on a couple of factors and starts with a conversation with your table. If you’re planning on playing out a one-shot scenario over the course of one 3-4 hour session, do you want to take valuable time out of that building your character? Similarly, if you’re planning on inhabiting the role of a character for a campaign that might stretch across months of play sessions, don’t you want to take a little more time in getting to know them first?
Certain systems offer answers and adjustments to ease this process, whether that means streamlining or expanding the character creation experience, or by offering pre-built character creation packages, or characters pre-written from toe to tip.
Another factor to consider, is your GM/DM. Do they plan on, or revel in customizing the narrative to your character and their backstory? Do they plan on absolutely wiping the floor with the next hapless mook you place in front of them?
As always, it comes down to the most valuable tool in the TTRPG toolbox, Communication.
Talk to your table, you’ll get your answers to all these questions and more.
How I Learned to Love the TPK
So we all agree that sometimes it’s fun as hell when a character dies in a particularly climactic (or anti-climactic) manner, right? That character you spent time realizing into aa real person with hopes and dreams is suddenly a smear on the wall whilst their friends stare on in abject horror. The pre-written character that you built up through interactions with the other characters, dies in the arms of someone they’ve only known for about an hour, and it hurts.
On the surface, there might initially be feelings of disappointment, frustration, or even more extreme emotions. This isn’t a bad thing, and honestly it might as well be expected in any game that expects you to get invested in a character that can die after one or two runs of bad luck. However, there’s a strength in accepting that even the most seemingly pointless death might actually serve the narrative or craft it into something far better than it was before.
A good GM should always plan for character death, specifically early death, as nobody wants to ssit down for an expected 3-4 hour session of ttrpg gameplay only to barely get a third of that.
For a long-run campaign, the solution might be having a pre-written NPC to hand to the player to temporarily inhabit for the duration of the session, after which they can craft a new character to join the campaign.
For one-shots, the solution can be as simple as grabbing another pre-written character, or in the case of several of the systems described above, character creation might be streamlined enough to allow the rapid arrival of a replacement, or the player might be granted the opportunity to inhabit a new role with new gameplay opportunities and/or stewardship over the narrative.
Desperate Lives Need not Be Short; Flames Need not Burn Forever
Finally, before we finish up this article, it might be good to cover the rare and wonderful experience of transforming one type of play experience into the other. Let’s provide one example of each.
In the horror section of this article, we talked about how Mothership has some truly excellent one-shot scenarios, but would it surprise you to know that some players of Mothership decide to string several of these together? It definitely transforms the experience, as you send the survivors from one horrific scenario to the next, now grizzled, forewarned, and forearmed for any new threats. When coupled with several of the larger experiences found in Gradient Descent and A Pound of Flesh however, it can start leading into a world that begins feeling all the more alive for the union between the two extremes.
Another example would be deciding to transform the end of a along-run campaign into an event, sending off each and every character with a singular curated experience. A synergistic example of this could be something like ending a Cyberpunk Red (R. Talsorian) campaign with a session of CBR PNK (Emanoel Melo) , representing the PC’s reuniting years later for one last job. A chance to get one last look in, before you move on to your next game.
Final Thoughts
All in all, and like many of the extremes within the TTRPG hobby, both One-Shot and Campaign play offer unique experiences and lessons that can endlessly inform the other. The event game, the legendary campaign, they’re both examples of just how memorable this hobby can be. As long as you keep to those three tenets of observation, communication, and adaptation, there’s no reason why you can’t explore everything the TTRPG world holds in store for you.
UP NEXT IN ESSENTIALS: PICKING YOUR SECOND SYSTEM
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