One-shot Dogs w/limited time.

[Tim Alexander]

Hey Folks,

I'm looking for suggestions on how people would run a Dogs one-shot given that you have a time window of maybe 2-3 hours of play available. Basically a weekly group of mine may be missing a player this week and I'm considering putting together something for Dogs. I'm currently planning on building most of the characters and leaving open a couple of traits, and of course a few relationships. We'd go ahead and run initiations for both of the characters. Obviously this misses out on the group creation dynamic, but given my short experience with Dogs I think we'll be pretty much left with created characters and no play if we start from scratch.

I'm also wondering if anyone can speak to town building suggestions in terms of finding one that resolves in a timely manner. I'm inclined to think that it doesn't much matter where on the escalation path the town sits and what's more important is how hard I'll push the town to the players, but I'd like to hear any additional input from folks. I'm already planning on prehooking the characters into the town via the generated relationships, any other suggestions?

Thanks much,

-Tim

P.S.- Vincent, this game has become my new obsession. It's an incredibly impressive piece of work.

[lumpley]

Thanks, Tim.

For con play, my plan is to make 8 or 10 characters all the way, no loose Traits no Initiations, and have everybody choose one. I'll have the "types" covered. For a town I'll create one that's at Sorcery, with a murder coming any second now, having a knot at the core that's easy to see but hard to solve. Probably an affair, a grown son, an old score to settle, some kind of mix like that.

-Vincent

[Tim Alexander]

Hey Vincent,

Looks like this won't be happening this week. One of the players in my Sorcerer game wasn't going to make it this week, so I pitched a Dogs one shot for the others. It seems I wasn't fast enough and they'd made other plans. That said, I think I'm going to do a setup for this anyhow and maybe run it as a one off for some other folks. I'll post details as it comes.

Thanks for the help,

-Tim

[Tim Alexander]

Just a quickie update in case someone references this thread later in a search that over here Vincent mentions the following:

Otherwise, about con games: the big lesson I learned at Dreamation was to take all the time I wanted during character creation. Play character creation out fully and unhurriedly. It repays you in investment in the characters, in a big way. If you have to abbreviate the town at the end, that's okay - by 3hrs 15mins you've already revealed the entire town, the players have had a couple excellent "oh ... CRAP" moments, and the PCs have begun to judge. You can spend the last half hour saying yes instead of rolling dice. Just basically ask the players what they want to do about it and have it be so.

-Tim

[lumpley]

Yeah. If you have 4 hours, definitely make characters.

If you have only 2 hours, that's harder.

If you're trying to sell the game, it's easy, make characters and play the first hour of a town, they'll be hungry for more.

If selling isn't your agenda, though, like if you want to play to a satisfying, fun conclusion ... I don't know yet!

-Vincent