Blog Buddies: Burn After Running
It's time for anoter round of Blog Buddies! This month's guest is Guy Milner, author of Burn After Running, a blog about running RPG one-shots, and participant in Unconventional GMs, a group that plays and records one-shots online.
Hey Guy!
A while back you reached out to me to let me know about something the two of us have in common: a love for one-shots. We haven't had a chance to play in the same game together yet, but as I've had the chance to read over your blog, I'm noticing that we also share a diversity of game tastes, and we both enjoy playing games with a large pool of players. So let's talk about it!
For folks who aren't familiar with Burn After Running, I'd describe your blog posts as concise, whether that be a review for a game that you played, or a structured adventure for a game you're planning to run or have run in the past. I appreciate this; your writing respects my time as a reader and provides a lot of options for folks who might be looking into one-shot play.
We also have a few differences: I'm not against running trad games, but I think your tolerance is much higher than mine. You've also got a history of rpg games that I don't have: you've been in the hobby for longer, and have had a lot of time to hone your skill.
What I want to talk about today is the Two Wolves Inside Me: the wolf that desires connected stories with development that slow-cooks the plot, and the wolf that wants to include as many people as possible at my table.
My social scene is rather large; there's a lot of interested players, but when it comes to GM-ing games that lay outside of D&D, it's hard to get folks interested in running the damn thing. I certainly don't mind being a GM! I get to be a player every once in a while, which is nice for learning more games that what I can read. That being said, to accommodate for my local group, I find that it's easier to accommodate a larger group of players if I host one-shots. Since I'm devoting a good chunk of my free time towards this, this means that I'm spending less time devoted to a lengthy campaign, although there are many many times where I'll read a rulebook and imagine what a story slowly built over time might look like.
I'm curious if your preference for one-shots stems from the same place as me, or if you have any other reasons for why you dedicate so much time to them!
When I run one-shots, I'm also a personal proponent of pre-generated characters. I've talked about my love for pre-gens in the past, and while I don't think you need pre-gens for every game, I'm really interested in playing around with a number of different systems to see what I can do to create more time for gaming simply by providing players with pre-gens right off the bat.
For example,I recently ran a MASKS one-shot in the Spiderverse, with pre-written spider characters and a hard-framed opening scene written out to establish why they're all working together and what some of the biggest stakes are. I hard-framed the beginning to get the group into a conflict as quickly as possible, and in 3 hours we managed to navigate two fights as well as a slower scene where the characters struggled with an older hero who conflicted with a bunch of their ideals.
I'm really appreciative of your PbtA One-Shots blog post in this regard, even if I'm not following all of your recommendations! (I particularly disagree that you can't do pre-gens for PbtA games - I think it just depends on the game.)
I know that occasionally you'll provide pre-gens in your one-shot resources, and I know that you occasionally play one-shots. Do you have a preference for pre-gens, or do you consider them occasionally necessary? I'd be curious if there's any strengths or weaknesses about pre-gens that I haven't considered.
I think you and I more closely align when it comes to running more complex games as one-shots! I resonated with the tips you shared for running system heavy one-shots. When I play games like Scion 2e or Rotted Capes, it's easier to have the character created ahead of time, whether that's a character made by the player or myself, because it means I can write an adventure that will allow them to shine. I also love handing some of the rules over to more experienced players, or players that like to read rule books, to lighten my own mental load.
In contrast, for more generative games, I feel like there's some strong truths that I have to make clear before the players start coming up with character ideas - for example, I recently ran a game of Sunset Kills, in which I told my players that their characters should all be teenagers or younger, and asked them to come up with reasons for them all knowing each-other and hunting monsters together.
One way that I think I'd love to play with one-shots in the future is to run a number of one-shots that are all in distinctly separate systems, but are connected through setting, timeline, or plot. I've done a more long-form version of this in the past, with both my Monster Squad and Galaxy Squad Campaigns, but I haven't managed to condense my themed sequences into a series of one-shots yet.
I'm toying with the idea of one-day trying to pull together a group to play around with CAMPAIGN.FRAME, which is a setting I designed to unite a number of disparate games into one story by positing each different game as a video game, which the players will have to navigate in order to keep their city in one piece - if you're familiar with the TV show REBOOT, this will probably make a lot more sense. I know at one point we were kind of talking about putting together a bunch of games under the same theme, and I'd be interested if there's any themes you'd like to explore, or if there's any groups of games that you think might be fun to play in succession.
After all this rambling, I think these are some questions I have for you.
- What is it about one-shots that keeps you invested in them? How do you balance the benefits of one-shots with the lure of the slow-cooked story?
- What makes a good pre-gen? Are there some games where you'd consider pre-gens inadvisable or unnecessary? Why or why not?
- What are the biggest shifts you have to accommodate for when running one-shots that have predetermined scenes vs one-shots for games that are more improvisory in nature?
- What big experiments are you interested in pursuing using one-shots? What are you dreaming about?
I really look forward to hearing your thoughts, and when you reply, I'll re-blog this post with a link to it!
