Best scenario for a one-shot?

[johnmarron]

I'm going to be running a demo of Dragon Age at a local gaming meetup group, and was looking for suggestions for a good scenario to run in a roughly 4-5 hour time slot. I have all of the published adventures for the game, but am happy to take a look at any fan made adventures if they are good. We'll be doing character generation, so I'm looking for something that works for 1st level PCs.

I'm going to run a short game of DA for my home group as well, but plan to just use Dalish Curse for that one.

Thanks,
John

[Elfie]

The Arl's Ransom is a good 4-5 hour one-shot. I would recommend dropping the Blight Owl encounter in the interest of time and deadliness.

[ColdSteel1]

If its fan made adventures that you are looking for, try this link:


http://www.users.on.net/~jekias/GM.htm

[Deirain]

I really enjoyed using Amber Rage for a one-shot a few weeks ago. Without tossing around spoilers, I think it perfectly personifies the dark fantasy aspect of Dragon Age and it has a great mix of combat, roleplaying, and exploration encounters.

[Woodclaw]

Last month I GMed a demo myself using the plot of the Leiliana's Song DLC, with some major cut and semplifications for the sake of speed, It worked quite well.

[Brokensoul]

I really enjoyed using Amber Rage for a one-shot a few weeks ago. Without tossing around spoilers, I think it perfectly personifies the dark fantasy aspect of Dragon Age and it has a great mix of combat, roleplaying, and exploration encounters.

A big +1, it does have an amazing good mix of every type of play and it puts the characters together even if they don't know each other before hand. What I really like is it has a few of those very good moral crossroads where non of the paths are the "right" one.

[5trangeCase]

Ok, from the mention of "4-5 hours" and "character generation" I'm getting the feeling that my group is an anomaly. We usually need 4-5 hours to just generate characters, especially if its a new game. I can't imagine what it would be like if the people you're getting to play have never RPed before.

Personally, I'd make pre-made characters. I've always found that simply bickering over who gets which character can form a bond between the characters and the group. As long as the group isn't juvenile in their bickering. Pre-mades also solves too horribly oppositional characters, and if you fudge/point buy it solves the problem of some people getting annoyed about rolling low (or others rolling high). You can also engineer diversity within the group, as long as, if you include a dwarf, you make him/her totally badass. Because otherwise whoever gets lumped with the dwarf will be pissed off (in my experience).

In my personal opinion, even if you don't take 4-5 hours to create characters, you still will not have 4-5 hours gaming left once you've finished with your characters.

P.S. On Amber Rage...while it does have a nice ratio between roleplaying, combat and exploration, I've always felt that the moral choices, the dark fantasy elements in it were quite crude and heavy-handed. And if one of DA's major selling points is the moral, dark fantasy thing, this is a baaad way to introduce them.

[Zapp]

Creating a bunch of level 16 D&D characters can easily take 4-5 hours.

But a bunch of level 1 AGE characters... not so much.

[johnmarron]

Thanks for all of the suggestions. The folks playing in the demo will not be new to RPGs in general, but will be new to DA. I find character generation takes me 15-20 minutes (its mostly random, after all), so I figure allocating an hour for characters and basic rule explanations will leave us about 4 hours to play. I'd like them to get a feel for how character generation works in DA, as its one of my favorite aspects of the game. I'm used to teaching new systems and pacing demo sessions, so I'm not worried about that.

I looked over Arl's Ransom and it looks nicely contained, with a good (if basic) moral dilemma. I'll read over Amber Rage (I've only skimmed it).

John

[Woodclaw]

Ok, from the mention of "4-5 hours" and "character generation" I'm getting the feeling that my group is an anomaly. We usually need 4-5 hours to just generate characters, especially if its a new game. I can't imagine what it would be like if the people you're getting to play have never RPed before.

Personally, I'd make pre-made characters. I've always found that simply bickering over who gets which character can form a bond between the characters and the group. As long as the group isn't juvenile in their bickering. Pre-mades also solves too horribly oppositional characters, and if you fudge/point buy it solves the problem of some people getting annoyed about rolling low (or others rolling high). You can also engineer diversity within the group, as long as, if you include a dwarf, you make him/her totally badass. Because otherwise whoever gets lumped with the dwarf will be pissed off (in my experience).

In my personal opinion, even if you don't take 4-5 hours to create characters, you still will not have 4-5 hours gaming left once you've finished with your characters.

P.S. On Amber Rage...while it does have a nice ratio between roleplaying, combat and exploration, I've always felt that the moral choices, the dark fantasy elements in it were quite crude and heavy-handed. And if one of DA's major selling points is the moral, dark fantasy thing, this is a baaad way to introduce them.

When I GM a demo I always use pre-made characters (usually by me) exactly bacause I don't want to lose hours with some guy who doesn't know what to do.
Given that, the first time I created characters for DA it took me 1 hour to build the whole party. Granted, the concepts weren't very elaborated, I used archetypes as much as possible to symplify the process and give the players a easy frame of reference.

The only thing that really detracts time is spades is explaining the setting and the rules to novice players.

[johnmarron]

So, I've looked over Amber Rage now, and it looks like a great adventure and a nice intro to the setting, but its like 40 pages long. Have people actually been able to run this in a 4 hour time slot as a one-shot? barring someone convincing me that a 40 page adventure can be run in4 hours, I'm leaning towards Arl's ransom for the demo.

Thanks again to all for the suggestions.

John

[Elfie]

There's no way you could do Amber Rage in a 4-hour slot. It's fantastic, but it took my group like 5 6-hour sessions to finish the whole thing (mind you, one and a half sessions of that was just having fun at the festival).