RPG with well supported One-Shots: Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games.

For those of us old guys who like to play very simple character classes and prowl around in lost catacombs for hours at a time, Dungeon Crawl Classics is perfect. They’re up to 106 official modules now, I think. There’s a lot of them. Not to mention all of the free DCC Day, Free RPG Day, and convention support modules they have created. I would say beyond much doubt in my mind, Goodman Games has pretty much cornered the market on One-Shots or self-contained RPG modules.

Dungeon Crawl Classics, which I’ve talked about before and I’m a huge fan of, is the game that I think a lot of us old timers imagine the ampersand game being if Gary and Dave had stayed in control of TSR back in the day. Admittedly, some of the DCC modules probably don’t run all in one session. Then again, how many RPG One-Shots actually run in a single 2-6 hour time slot unless they’re created for a convention?

I used to write/run  lots of One Shot modules back in the 1990s when I still had hair and went to lots of gaming conventions on the weekends. There’s kind of an art form to squeezing an entire module into a 4-6 hour time slot even if it’s written to run in that amount of time. Even the Star Wars module I wrote and ran six or seven times went differently every time depending on the players and their interpretations of their character.

The basic rule of thumb is: No plan ever survives contact with the Player Characters. My corollary was: No module ever survives contact with my time table. Some games ended up running way over, others significantly under. It didn’t matter the game, the players, the pregenerated characters- something always goes sideways. Some One-Shots are anything but.

The DCC modules I have run mostly come in at around two sessions. We had one game where the players literally ended the session out of breath from the intensity toward the end. We really enjoyed some of those old modules. A lot of those 100+ prepackaged modules were a lot of fun. I hope I get to run one again someday. (*cough* Grimtooth’s is coming. *cough.*)

Thank you for being here today with me. I appreciate you. Please embrace the things that bring you the most joy.