The Idea

This is something different, normally I pitch campaigns, this time I want to do something different. This would be three one shots that all come together at the end. I would put together three groups of two players, maybe three players, and take them through the opening part of the race. Let them get to the tower, but when you can see the tower, that is when you end the session. Then you get all three of the groups together and let them fight over and all the way up into the tower.

The trick for running this will be timing. It’s pretty unlikely that all the groups would arrive at the tower at the exact same time. In fact, I think in the one shots you’ll have to be keeping track of timed elements to figure out who makes it to the tower first. Of course, getting up the tower won’t be easy, and you can do things to delay the first group more than the other groups. Then that last session, you have the groups arrive at different times, tell people to start at different times. So if one group was fast, they get there and get an hour to get as far into the tower as they can. Or maybe half an hour, then the other groups show up. Of course, now that the first group has cleared the tower to a point that makes it really fast for the other groups to catch up with them. Now it’s a question of, will any of them survive to the top. Will they work together or will it all fall apart?

So that first session, what would be the plan for that? I think that it should be about finding where the Wizard’s Tower is. create a general map of the lands, and create some points of interest, different ones for each group that they have to get through. One should be focused on combat, give them a number of small missions and then a clue for where the tower is. The next one could be about puzzles and riddles, again getting a clue for where the tower is when they complete it. Another could fall more into skill challenges, and you guessed it another clue. I think that three things would be solid for a one shot, you want them to do enough and lose some hit points, spend some resources, but not have so much to do that you’d need two or three sessions leading into it. The wizard’s tower is magical, so it can get hidden anywhere, so the whole race, I think, makes sense to take place in a day or at most two, so that the players are a bit resource poor leading into the final session.

Then that last session, we’re going to be staggering when people arrive to the table, like I said. The fastest group will do the job of clearing part of the tower. And then it can be a free for all as players and groups try to make it to the top of the tower. I would make this session as crazy as possible. Make nuts puzzles with high checks for things like dexterity and strength. Give really open ended challenges and just see what the players decide to do to solve them. Let PvP happen if the players want it to happen. Or they can work together. Because when they find the top of the tower, there will be a giant monster for them all to fight or get devoured by. I’m thinking like how it’s a monster in the vault in Borderlands that you need to fight. Let them spend resources and just have a blast with it. Who knows, maybe no one will make it to the top.

Challenges

Now, I think this could be a good game to run. However, this is a very challenging game to run. You need more buy in from the people playing in the game. In a normal campaign, you can pivot a little as you realize what the players are really looking for in the game. But with this, it’s going to be harder, the game is almost on rails, though stuff like picking which spot to checkout first is going to be up to the players. If they fight the other groups, that’s going to be up to the players. But this would be more coordinating. How I’d probably do it is that I’d run the first session on the way to the tower over a single week and then that weekend, Saturday afternoon, I’d plan to meet up at a local FLGS that has food and drinks and make an afternoon and into an evening out of it.

Timing everything up as well is going to be interesting as well. I think that getting 30 minutes off of another groups time makes sense, so if one group is really late, they start an hour later than the others in terms of making it to the tower. Now, you could have everyone arrive at the same time, but it’d be kind of fun to have the groups show up to that last session at a staggered times to kind of create more of the feel of what happened in the game. Again, that makes it a bit trickier as you are trying to coordinate times.

Would You Run This Game?

Even for me, this game is a hard sell to run or play in. I like the concept a lot, but of all the people I have ran D&D for locally, I don’t know that I have enough to pull off a game like this. I’d really like to do it with nine people, three groups of three, and I could maybe make that work, but getting schedules to work together, that’d just be tricky. Even for six players, three groups of two, that is tricky. And I thought about this maybe at a con setting, but to commit to two sessions of a single game is a lot for a lot of players who really want to just get to trying as many things as possible.

How about you, would you run a game like this? Would you play in a game like this?

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In a Halloween game, you’re obviously looking at a few basic ideas. You either are going with a monster situation, so something like a vampire, Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, or zombies – the classics, or you might be looking at a cult, or you might be going with something more twisted and sinister, but it isn’t going to be a story about picking daisies in a meadow somewhere. The story ideas are going to be a bit more grim, a lot of the time. But before you go making the darkest D&D game possible for Halloween, we get to our first point.

If you think about D&D as a movie, what sort of Halloween movie do you want this to be like? Are you going to go with something dark and gritty like Repulsion, see my Halloween Movies Post for what it’s like, or something that’s a little bit more off the wall like Repo! The Genetic Opera or Cabin the Woods? Both of these are fun things, and you can go quite goofy with the latter. But it depends on the feel that you are going for. So, as you’re planning picking which type you’re going for will determine a lot of other things.

From here a lot of your game building is going to be fairly similar to a normal one shot. Think about what sort of encounters you want, keep them varied, do combat, social, investigative, even skill challenges. Try and focus the theme down more so onto the game that you are going for. Also, plan out some more description than you might normally. The more you can describe, the more you can set the theme for your game. If you’re going for something that’s more serious, set it with description that demonstrates how the world seems off.  Plan this out ahead of time, because it’ll be tricky to do it all on the fly and it’ll be one of your bigger tools to use.

When it comes to the actual session, there are things you can do to reinforce the scene. If you normally play in a well lit room or during daytime, move it to a darker location or at night. Running the game outside can even be fun. But, for example, if you are playing a Gothic style of vampire game, play at a table light in a room that is primarily lit by candle light. Just have enough light that you can see the player sheets. Music is also going to be nice and easy to create the feel that you are going for. It can either be ambient noises like a woods if you are hunting down werewolves in a dark forest or it can be be organ music for when you come to the vampires castle. It might be cheesy, but if that’s the type of game that you are going for, it’ll work out just fine.

That’s how I’d run a one shot for Halloween. I wouldn’t recommend doing it at a convention, unless you have your own room where you can control the atmosphere, a big convention hall just won’t work.

But what are some ideas, because that’s what I really like coming up with:

Dracula’s Lair

Your players are a team of vampire hunters who are pretty skilled at what they do. They’ve managed to figure out when the vampire lord Dracula lives. It’s a pretty straight forward murder Dracula game. What I’d do is create it into a house of horrors, the castle that Dracula lives in. Start with the players getting social interactions with some villagers who can help them find a “secret” entrance into Dracula’s lair. Then once in the lair, have Dracula show up and taunt them, throw Renfields at them, other vampire spawn they have to deal with, and traps and puzzles they have to figure out. None of the combats/challenges should be too hard, but the players shouldn’t have a chance to rest. Make it about resource management for them, and let them figure it out as they go along, and then allow creative solutions to problems.

The Last Night

A zombie outbreak has happened and only pockets of nomadic people are still around. The adventuring party has banded together and is being forced to defend a small tent town from a horde of zombies that is coming over the hill at them. Another game idea where you’re trying to keep enough resources in reserve in some ways, but I’d probably borrow from my Pride, PrejuDICE, and Zombies game where there is one head zombie. The players have to make rolls for the army of humans or for themselves to take out a large horde of zombies, but mainly, they are trying to take out the necromancer who is controlling the zombies. But if rolls are going poorly enough, have some way to track if the zombies are getting closer to the civilians or not. Lots of women and children in that group will probably mean that the players try and stop the attack. So dealing with the horde is a skill challenge whereas dealing with the necromancer or head zombie is going to be straight up combat. You could also make this on the road and the players being harried by zombie attacks as they try and keep the civilians safe and make it to a safe zone.

Love Bites

A werewolf is madly in love with a village boy and they enlist the adventuring parties help to get the boy to notice the werewolf and possibly agree to become a werewolf. This game is clearly on the sillier side of things, but it would be a number of quick quests that the players can do. Vary them up from collecting a certain flower or weapon that is lost deep in the woods, finding a master poet to write a poem for the werewolf to give to the boy, fight through a band of goblins to keep the boy safe while they are out hunting in the woods, etc. Find a few of those and make them fairly absurd how the players have to do it so that the game has more of a lighter feel to it.  Maybe even hold off on the werewolf reveal until a few minutes into the game when the players have already agreed to help. They shouldn’t attack the werewolf because the players have agreed to play in the game, and you can also create PC’s for them to play who aren’t going to be apt to kill the werewolf as a monster.

Have you ran a horror through D&D before? How did that work, would it work well for a Halloween game?

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Why were you rolling the die?

If nothing bad was going to happen, there was no reason for you to roll the die there. You aren’t in character spending time rolling the die over and over and over again. I’m guilty of this as a DM sometimes, not having any real pressure on the players while they make the die roll. So there has to be a better way to make the die rolls matter.

How do you do that?

There are two ways that you can do this. The first is immediate consequence. To stay with my previous example, you roll the die, you fail, the guards patrolling the estate or the town come across you and now you’re either running from the guards or you’re fighting them. It gives a threat of real punishment for what has happened and for failing the roll. It’s very straight forward.

But what if there’s an important map that the characters know for a fact is in that estate. They run away, they come back the next night, they fail again, they run away, they come back the next night, and the cycle continues and it gets pretty boring. We want to avoid that bit of boring in our role playing games.

So the other option is to, as the title suggests, fail forward.

What does that even mean?

Failing forward is the idea that you still get to unlock the door on a failed roll, but it comes at a cost. So you get into the house, but you startle a cook who screams. Now your plan of sneaking around the house slowly and avoiding all the guards is shot. You’re in the house, so you better use your opportunity, but this is going to be more of a smash and grab than a cat burglary.

Failing forward is a great concept to use because it can create a lot of interesting situations. In my example with the cook, do you kill the innocent cook who was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, because the cook screaming means the damage is done already. But I’ve also managed to keep the story moving forward. Instead of trying the same thing over and over again either without consequence or on different days and the game gets stuck in a rut, now things are moving quickly. In fact, by failing forward and having the cook scream, things have to go even faster and the players need to be even more creative.

Maybe the rogue and monk make a run for the map while the wizard and fighter stay behind to deal with any guards who might be coming to their escape route. Maybe the wizard decides to cast charm person or suggestion on the cook to get them to say that they had just seen a mouse, which is why they screamed to try and defuse the issue. Either way you’ve ratcheted up the intensity of the scene and made the best laid plans of the players go by the wayside, but you didn’t grind the game to a stand still.

Making sense thus far? The next question that I would have had is, how do you keep the pressure on without it turning into the scenario where the guards show up and you get into a fight?

That is true, we want to avoid that, otherwise, we can just use that option. If your group loves combat or doesn’t mind having those combats, definitely you can go with that option. However, if you want to change things up, there are some things that you can do.

When failing forward, I’d strongly consider using a skill challenge to show the timing of what is happening. A skill challenge is where the players try and get a certain number of success before they end up failing and having the guards, in this case, swarm them. My rule of thumb is that the players need to get twice the number of players successes, so six successes for three players, before they get the number of players failures, so three for three players. To continue with the crunchy bits for a bit, you then set a difficulty check for the players to beat using their abilities. Maybe the rogue wants to persuade the cook to lie and say it was a mouse, the player then rolls their persuasion. If they succeed, they get a check mark on the success track, if they fail, on the failure track. Then it goes to the next player, and the next player cannot roll persuasion for their check. So everyone has gone around once, they have two successes and a failure, it’s back to the rogue, the rogue can’t roll what they’ve rolled the previous round, so persuasion, or use the skill that was previous rolled, so the fighter who rolled strength to knock down a locked door. And you continue like that until the  players either succeed or fail.

So, why might you do it this way?

First and foremost, it allows you to skip combat sometimes. It means that you get to do something different than the normal three things in a lot of RPG’s, either exploring, role playing with NPC’s, or fighting. It allows you to use skills that you wouldn’t use normally.

Example:
Player: I worked for the city, so I’m going to roll history to see if I remember the blueprints that were on file with the city. I’m trying to see if there’s a faster route that we can take.
DM: Sounds good to me, roll that die.
Player: 14
DM: You just succeed, and remember that there is actually a servants hallway that runs between some rooms that will let you out right next to the study.

How often would you use history otherwise? Or how often would someone think to look for blueprints? It’s a creative use of a skill that really only comes up in research capacity or trying to remember things and gets to be used in an action sequence instead.

Also, it allows everyone to stay more involved in the story and story telling. Live the above example, the players are having to be creative and are actually creating story elements for the world. This has a real anything goes vibe to it and that can lead to a ton of cool moments.

Skill challenges also can move faster than combat. The action is always focused on the players, so the DM isn’t taking turns and rolling for the five guards to show up. Once the players are in the mindset of thinking about everything they can do and coming up with crazy ideas, a skill challenge will fly by. As a dungeon master, this is where you are going to have to let things go a little bit more loosely. You won’t have been able to plan and lay out this estate in such a way that you’ve thought of everything the players will do. You’re going to want to say yes a lot, or yes and but/and.

Example:
Player: I worked for the city, so I’m going to roll perception to see if I remember the blueprints that were on file with the city. I’m trying to see if there’s a faster route that we can take.
DM: That sounds more like a history check to me, so why don’t you roll that instead. Since you worked for the city you’d be trying to remember what you’ve seen before.
Player: Okay, I got a 14
DM: You just succeed, and remember that there is actually a servants hallway that runs between some rooms that will let you out right next to the study.

That’s an example of what I mean by yes and but/and. They got to see if they remembered anything about the blueprints, because that is cool, but perception just didn’t make sense for the player to use with what they said. So swapping out for history probably means that the player didn’t have as good a bonus on their roll, but made sense for what they were doing.

What are some downsides?

This isn’t say that there aren’t some downsides to a skill challenge. The main one being is that players will suggest one thing, like my example with wanting to use perception with the blueprints, and when they can’t, then want to pick another idea that they can use perception with. It makes sense because they want to do something where they are likely to succeed. So you can get stuck with someone who is trying to figure out how animal handling can be used in this estate because they have a plus five in animal handling.

Solution for that issue is a timer of some sort. Either, they have to have something ready to go by the time it comes around to them or it’s an automatic failure, but that seems harsh, so if they are taking too long, put them on the clock. Give the player 30 seconds to come up with something, it might not be the most creative, but it’ll keep the game moving and everyone engaged which is what we’re always shooting for when we play RPG’s.

The other, tied into this, is analysis paralysis. If you can do everything, how do you pick which skill to use. What is going to be better, the ones with the higher numbers obviously, but using acrobatics isn’t going to be as cool so maybe you should try and use animal handling, but how would that work in the situation, and maybe the person after me is going to use athletics, so I should use that, and the person before me did something really cool and I want to do something really cool too so what is the coolest thing that I could do? Yes, that is a horrible run-on sentence that no one should ever write, but that’s kind of the point. That’s how the brain of someone who can’t decide what option to choose is working, they are stuck with too many options.

If you see someone getting stuck in a loop of not knowing what decision to make, how can you help them to keep your skill challenge moving along? There are a couple of different things that you can do. One is to use the timer. That will likely get a them to throw out something, but might end up making them feel like they are getting stuck doing the boring option. The other is to help them by soliciting ideas from other players or from yourself as the DM. If they are taking a while, toss out a bunch of options for them to pick from, and by a bunch, I mean three at the fewest, and five at the most. That’ll either give them something to pick or give them something to jump off of and get them out their run-on brain loop.

So back to the main concept of this article, failing forward. There are a lot of reasons to do it an to use it in your game. The main take away from this should be that failing forward allows your story to continue and progress while the setting up consequences down the line. You don’t end up getting stuck, but there’s still a cost for the players. It buys time for you as the DM to come up with that cost, and it keeps the players more engaged in the game.

Do you have any examples of failing forward? If you do, let us know about them with one of the ways below

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