One-Shot - Angry Assassins

[Judd]

I'm going to run this game next week for a one-shot with people who have never played the Riddle before:

Angry Assassins

You've heard of parties gathering in taverns to go traverse some dungeon, all possessing noble reasons to go forth and save the world.

Nope, wrong group.

The only thing this group has in common is they want this one particular person dead.

The gamers gather at the table and create the NPC they all want dead and then come up with their individual reasons why they want him so. The reasons could be personal, economical, magical...doesn't matter, as long as you have a burning, cold or stark raving passion to put what's-his-name in a box.

I will probably start the game at a Dueling Bridge, let the players take some NPC duels, to get a handle on the combat system.

Pre-made characters, let the players make their SA's.  The character sheets will say things like: The Huntsman, the Knight, Duellist, Caravan Guard, the Hired Knife, etc.

I am going to use Universalis to quickly build the world and define who it is they are trying to kill, making the game as player-driven and created as I can.


Any ideas, comments, thoughts?

[Salamander]

What a damn novel idea! I am going to have to use this one...



Edited for my moment of forgetting where the keys were...

[Jake Norwood]

Agreed. That's a fantastic idea.

Jake

[Judd]

Thanks.

It was very difficult to not just jump in and say, "You are all trying to kill the king.  You're the king's bastard, sent by the King to find out who is trying to kill him and if you kill the Queen you might have a shot at the throne for yourself.  You're the Queen's secret lover, she will give you an alibi if you have a hand in the kinglsaying.  You're the former King's guard, disgrunted at being fired for drinking.  Etc. Etc."

It is a big step for me as a GM to just step back, away from a more traditional gaming approach, and ask the players to contribute, see what happens at the table rather than forcing my idea of what the game should be down their throats.

[Brian Leybourne]

Sounds great! Let us know how it goes.

Brian.

[Valamir]

Very cool.  Please let keep me posted on how integrating the two games goes.  That sounds like a neat twist.

[Dan Sellars]

I agree this sounds like a really interesting idea and would like to know how it goes.  

I was thinking of running a little game to a couple of friends to introduce them to TROS.  This sounds like a good way to get them into it with out making it too contrived.

I think the difficulty I would find is keeping the plot going and interesting.  How do you plan on doing this?  I'm just interested as i've never tried it myself.

It definatly has possibilities.  Does any one have ideas for other scenarios that could start off like this?

Dan.

[Judd]

I think the difficulty I would find is keeping the plot going and interesting.  How do you plan on doing this?  
Dan.

If the players have made their Spiritual Attributes interesting and complicated, pacing should be no problem.

I'm not sure how exactly I'll do it.  I am putting alot of trust in my players who will be telling me what they want the adventure to be.  They could be bastards trying to kill the king or marshalls trying to capture and hang a criminal, zealot witch-hunters trying to capture a wizard.  I have no idea where this is going to go, which is part of the fun.

I think the key to this kind of game is to keep the initial concept simple and allow for interaction and circumstance to make it complicated and twisty.

[Mike Holmes]

Very My Life with Master, actually.


Not to rain on the parade here, but I think that Dan may have a point, actually. I mean, left to it themselves, the players may only look at the SAs in terms of how they pertain to the NPC in question. I mean left with only that as motive for chargen, it could get quite focused.  

I'll make a typical example:

Let's say that we decide that our bad guy is a Sorcerer who is threatening, well, anything and everything with a horde of Undead corpses. Very straightforward.

I'm assigned the The Knight, as my pregen PC. I decide that my SAs are Faith: 3-in-1 (3), Conscience (2), and Luck (2). Pretty standard. My character wants this guy dead because his actions represent an abomination to all that's holy, and his creations have been attacking and killing innocent people.

OK, so how do you complicate that? I mean, given a host of characters like this, the game starts, players ask "where is he", they find out, they go there, they fight their way to the bad guy, and they kill him. Very straightforward. The only thing that might happen is that the players might at random take SAs that conflict with each other leading to some interesting PC v PC conflict. But you can't count on that. I think that to garuntee a little more complexity in the scenario, that you have to do a little more in the setup.

What I'm thinking is something like the following. Each player has to think of some reason why he can't just go and take care of the bad guy alone or directly. Some complication to the situation that makes it so that there are some twists and turns on the way. Given that, and the Knight pregen, I might say that my character can't assault the Sorcerer directly because he's got my character's girlfriend locked up. Change the SAs to Faith(2), Passion: GF (3), Luck (2).

Now, if the characters don't have overlap, that's OK, because the scenario will stress the SAs anyhow. That is, either players will have SAs that mess with each other accidentally (or intentionally on accident) as above, or they won't care about each other's secindary agenda, which will bug the other guys. For instance, if the rest of the guys decide that it behooves their SAs to go with a frontal assault at some point, my character will balk because he fears for his GFs life. This means that the characters will have to haggle over how to proceed.

Might not be perfect, but it's an attempt to get some sort of secondary source of conflict so that its not just all one uncomplicated thrust to "kill the baddie". The neat thing about the secondary stuff is that, if time runs short, you can engineer events to resolve those parts, then quickening the pace to get to the final showdown. In my theoretical character's example, they'd stumble across the GFs prison (just as she was about to drop into that pit of acid). Side problem resolved, on to the main problem.

Just a thought.

Mike