I'm putting together my own Halloween one-shot for the year. This time, I'm running Brindlewood Bay. It's a Powered by the Apocalypse system where the PCs are a group of elderly widows—members of the local Murder Mavens mystery book club—who find themselves solving actual murder mysteries in their quaint New England town. It's basically
Murder, She Wrote with the lightest dash of Lovecraftian horror. For those unfamiliar, PbtA games require relatively little prep. The "plot" is written in real time by players and the DM.
Brindlewood Bay is particularly interesting because each adventure (or mystery, in its case) gives you a murder, a list of suspects, and a list of clues. How players discover and connect those clues is entirely up to them. There is no canonical solution. It's figured out on the fly between players and DM. I'm not going in with a single suspect in mind. The exciting part for me is watching the players hyper-fixate on something I say during RP or a random clue I throw out. I've never run anything like this before, but I'm hoping to keep it light and fun.
On a negative note, I played in that one-shot of Mythic Bastionland earlier this week. The system was neat and the DM understood the assignment. It's dream-like and unsettling. You never know what's objectively true versus hearsay, a lie, or folk magic. When solving one myth, you inevitably come across another three or four. Some impede your progress to your initial goal, others are set dressing. I found the combat lacking, but that's me with almost every D20 system. It tries to give you options, but you wind up using the same two things in every combat.
I didn't have a great time for two reasons:
- This group doesn't respect my time. The session ran for six and a half hours. Now, I've played in games that were four, five, or six hours and had fun, but I think that's the exception. Notably, none of them were on a weekday. For me, the sweet spot is around 3.5. I found myself loving @docsilence's shorter 2.5-hour sessions, too. They leave me wanting more, not itching to get away from the table. At one point, I told the group I had a hard stop in an hour. The game went on for another two hours after that. If I hear that as a DM, I'm rushing to get the player out of there.
- One player drives me up a wall. I've played with him before and found it unpleasant. I thought it was just the character he was playing, but no, it's him. No matter the setting, he plays an evil character. If you say so to his face, he'll argue. He's careless about murdering civilians, says uncomfortable things, and is generally immature. He's the only murderhobo I've played with. To me, in a heroic fantasy setting, playing an evil character goes against the spirit of the game. I'd describe his personality as "internet troll."
I could use some advice on the second point. That group wants to turn this one-shot into a full campaign. Getting out of it is easy enough. I can say I'm in enough TTRPG games right now, which is true.
The bigger problem is avoiding this guy in the future. These are all real-life friends. The group started as my high school friends and one player's brother, and has expanded to the same group plus the brother's friends. I generally like the brother's friends. One of them has become one of my favorite people. The internet troll, however, has always been someone I've tolerated.
When I set up my sci-fi campaign, I didn't self-select my players. Big mistake. I was strong-armed into including the internet troll. I'm only planning to run this game once a month (and it hasn't happened since our session 0 back in August), but that's still a lot more of this guy than I would choose. I was planning to run it in perpetuity. If I can't handle this guy, I guess that's no longer an option?
