One-Shot Adventures Are Wicked Fun

Yesterday at work I was rather bored and was surfing some Reddit to kill the time. Specifically, I was perusing through /r/dnd for some ideas for my campaign that I’ve been working on. I have missed playing D&D for quite some time now, and my increasing boredom with WoW has made that even worse for some reason.

Then I had an idea. I could see if any of my friends were up for doing a quick one-off on roll20! Only two of my roommates and one of my gaming buddies were free. But it was the perfect group size to practice my admittedly extremely rusty DMing skills. Plus, I have yet to DM with the 5e rules.

A one-shot adventure is a game that lasts for only one major quest/mission. These are generally laid-back campaigns and will be played to try something new or take a break from a group’s regular campaign.

Our One-Shot Adventure

I opted to search for some free modules online. I found that I had saved some threads for this occasion a long time ago when the popped up on the D&D subreddit. We played The Sun Goes Down with a Ruby Smile made by Remley Farr. It was a seriously fun module. Remley has made a bunch of these modules an I review another one in this post.

Basically, it was a huge murder mystery and it took a solid 3.5 hours to complete not counting that the party skipped quite a few zones in the module because of a lucky shortcut through a well. Regardless they still solved the mystery, and everyone vocally said they had a fun time. I would seriously recommend this module to anyone

We’re going to make this a more regular thing until the campaign at school starts. We’ll try to play a new module every week or two whenever a bunch of us are bored and see how that goes. Everyone really enjoyed their characters, so it may become a campaign in it of itself at this rate.

It was excellent practice for me as a DM in terms of storytelling and campaign building. I learned about storytelling and how to set the scene with great visual descriptions.

My one weakness was combat. I should have been a bit more mindful of the terrain and used it to my advantage. There was only a total of 4 encounters in this campaign each was 1 vs 3 fights. I like that set up a lot more than my usual fights of many monsters which can make combat take up a HUGE amount of time especially with the groups of 6+ players I usually run with. I’ll look for ways to incorporate this style into my actual campaign.

I love the number of tools that you get with Roll20. I don’t have a subscription and I had access to more than enough tools to make a successful campaign. Both of my friends from school said that they enjoyed using Roll20 more than playing it in person due to the convenience and tools it gave them.

I can absolutely understand that with them because generally at school we have VERY little space for all of us to get around as the dining tables we get in our dorm are tiny. We also don’t have a battle mat yet or plenty of miniatures to use for combat. We generally have to use pen and paper on maps I print off or draw out for them.

Conclusions

I think we’ll play a few more one-shot adventures before we ultimately decide to use Roll20 or not. Personally, I am fine with either way of playing. It may just be better to use Roll20 even if we are all in the same room just for the sake of convenience.

That will be something I will have to work on a bit more, using roll20. The module included plenty of maps that I could copy and paste into the game. Making my own custom maps will be a bit of a challenge.

I will post more about Roll20 in the future. Mostly new tricks and techniques for running a campaign through it. So far, the future seems bright!