For the last two years around Christmas-time, I’ve been putting on a special type of game for my players. I take a one-shot scenario and advertise to players. Once I have enough people signed up, I’ll split them into two groups and run it twice. The two groups then take different routes through the same scenario and end up in similar, but not identical, places.
It’s fun to watch groups grab onto different parts of a scenario, or when they make the same choices. It’s also really the only time I drop the veil behind my GMing and just straight up discuss the craft of running a game with my players – the groups tend to want to know what the other group did, and the discussions around that can open up some good discourse about the act of GMing. Normally, I wouldn’t entertain questions about ‘what if we’d have done it differently?’ because I’m often just following the players’ actions. I’m not considering ‘alternate realities’ or other ideas.
But with these games, I’m happy to say to players things like ‘oh yeah, that happened because when I’m running and I only have two hours left, I know it would have muddied the end to engage with that thing, in a longer campaign, I’d have done it differently’ or ‘Oh yeah, the other group missed that but that meant they found this alternative thing’. The fact of its opening up these discussions got me thinking about how sometimes, re-runnning the same scenario can add a load of things to your plate.
It’s far from for everyone, I will admit. I’m aware some people struggle to get one group up and running. And I think if you just run the same scenario over and over, that’s kind of lazy and unstimulating. As someone who worked on the convention circuit promoting one specific adventure over and over and over, I can tell you it’s not always the easiest to maintain enthusiasm. That and some games don’t really lend themselves to it. By the time I’m a fifth of the way through a long campaign, there’s pretty much no way it’s going to look like any other game I’ll ever run. The players have moved the local politics in such specific ways that it becomes impossible to just introduce the same elements.
But for one-shots, it can be really interesting to challenge yourself to deliver the same game to multiple groups. Here are the ways it can teach you things.
It Teaches Design: As you run a game over, you can see places where both groups trip over the same parts of a scenario, allowing you to more easily separate where you made mistakes as a GM in the moment and where the fault is in the scenario design. So it allows you to make observations going forward on not only your in-action moments of GMing, but also your prep skills. You learn what makes a smoother experience for player progress.
It Teaches Pacing: By accounting for how the different groups kept on the plot and how much the went off the expected script, you can learn about what sorts of areas drive players and a plot forward, meaning you have a greater understanding of the sort places you can choose to take your foot off the gas when in a regular game, or where you might need to drive a game forward. One of my recent games was the Pirate Borg scenario ‘The Curse Of Skeleton Point’ and while the first group went on a bit of a pointless detour in a belfry that served no greater purpose and meant we had to run late, the second group instead got explore parts of the plot that told more about the NPCs that they were interacting with and still got time to finish the scenario satisfyingly.
It Teaches Refining: Don’t like how it went? Change it slightly for the next group, see if it improves. Tinker with the scenario, add new elements to see if that works. I’ve got a couple of games that I’ve been tinkering with over a 15-year period, and they’re better experiences for players now than they were. Both started life as Call of Cthulhu games. The first ‘It Lives Between’ has slowly added elements as players have made different choices. In the first, it was very deadly and mostly focused on horror on the beach in the 50’s at night time, but now has a whole extra element involving radio waves and other entities that exist. The second, ‘The Decaster House’ jumped from Cthulhu to Dread and became more about the player characters than the plot itself. These were choices I learned to make because I began to understand how to deliver the same story in a purer way. I’m more experienced in the field now, so revisiting the same idea for a new player base was really useful.
It Teaches Group Dynamics: If one group has players more interested in character acting and another with more of a focus on looking after the plot, while in another group two players are interested in their characters being at odds with each other over solving what’s happening, then the variety of play opportunities and character combinations can really work to teach you how you can lean into different players tastes in an ongoing campaign.
You can’t just deliver the same story twice here; you have to instead lean into what you have on the table. When I ran ‘The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse’ for two Cthulhu groups, the first group were all quite friendly right from the beginning. The story became about the mystery, being four women, some in other minorities as well, in their twenties, trying to prove themselves and solve the mystery. It culminated in them committing a crime to stop the horror, the story of a group of outsiders going outside the lines in order to save a community that might not trust them. When I played the second version of the same game, the group were a far more socially tolerated group, but they didn’t trust each other. Once things started going off in the weird house, it became more of a ‘will they even support each other’ situation, with the story of them coming together to survive, with a crowning moment being one player literally performing horrific and life-saving action on another character they didn’t much like, but was damned if they were going to let die. In each scenario, I was leaning into what each group was interested in and how they’d play.
It Teaches Evolution: It’s also worth mentioning that the more often you run a game, two things will start to happen. Firstly, you’ll become less easily surprised. You’ve lived so many of these things, it’s gonna be easy. That scenario I ran over and over for cons? I can confidently say that I can run that scenario better than 95% of people running it. That’s not arrogance, I just know it backwards.
The second thing that will happen is you’ll slowly realise that the idea of having an idea of how ‘it is’ supposed to go’ is really not a good thing. As you run the game over and over, you’ll start to value people who, in fact, derail the game totally for something memorable; instead of escaping and living to tell the tale, they’ll stay and blow up the entire map, themselves included. This understanding that whatever happens in an RPG, it has the potential to be ok because it was never really going in a pre-determined direction is a level that I hope everyone is able to achieve. This process really does help you see that in all it’s glory.
Until next time, may all you games be fun, no matter how many times you run them back.
Creative Commons images: AMPEugenie’s Time is fading away, Undevicesimus’s Jolly Roger and Jakub Jagoda’s The King in Yellow.
