So, running a one-off linear, is it a good idea, is it a bad idea?
Ummm, I don't know, but I have some thoughts. Like most things, I expect that handling them well would be good, and doing them badly would be awful.
Pros
- Don't have to play your normal character.
- Can play 'above you level' e.g. Have an adventure for 5th level characters.
- Don't have to worry about setting continuity, can happily throw around major doom if you want.
- Don't have to worry about getting a group together in the Bar in the weeks before hand.
- Can enforce whatever style of party you like (e.g. one of each colour elf).
Cons
- No character development, after a one-off you won't get XP, and won't get to bring your one-off character into mainstream play.
- Not really clear who gets to play. There is a vague aim to give everyone equal charactering opportunities, which only works in the long term, by it's nature, a one off linear will probably not see equal monstering to charactering time.
- Uses up what I can only term 'imagination space', there's probably only really room for one linear on the plane of Song per few years, wouldn't it maybe make sense to save it for a canon adventure?
- Could possibly dilute from the main game. If people are only going to TT a few times a month, isn't it better to get them to the real games?
- You could use a far nicer rulesystem or more original setting.
I see one offs as a chance to do something I wouldn't do in a TT linear because I don't think the system/setting supports it. I'm not going to blow any shiny ideas I have for actual TT linears on made up things in the holidays (its possible I'm not even going to run any, ever, although I'd like to). Is this a special page for talking about TT linears only?
- I think my intent is to look at TT one-offs, non-TT one offs, the various events between the two, where it's sensible to draw lines and things like that. I'm not convinced that running one-off linears in TT world without current PCs would be either a good thing or a bad thing. --Snapdragon
Surely out-of-term events are the ideal time to be experimenting with the system? Either in terms of rules changes which are minor but have the potential for disastrous consequences so no-one wants to try them in a linear with consequences, or more drastic paradigm shifts of a sort I'll try to convince everyone to do once I've worked out what they are. --Adam
- Possibly, but that's what I'd bill as a 'playtest' rather than a 'one-off'. To get most use out of system testing as you describe, I'd imagine running lots of small encounters, with breaks between to discuss, rather than an entire linear or interactive. --Snapdragon
- Depends what you're testing. If it's "we're going to futz with the amount of mana mages get and experiment with a couple of new calls", you're right (although, tbh, I'd have thought you could do that better at a weapons practice). If it's "we're going to use a completely different system in which combat is resolved not through who hits who but through a complex codified tactical game played out in the inter-character dialogue" you'd probably want a whole linear (or whatever) to experiment with it. Of course, I'm not a TT player, so I'm not limiting my thinking here to things which necessarily bear the slightest resmeblance to treasure trap as we know it. --Adam
- Trying out new calls and mana doesn't really work at weapons practice, I think you want to frame the event as 'playtest' rather than 'weapons practice', so people are in the right sort of frame of mind. I can see that you might want to run a whole linear to playtest a massive paradigm change, but it'd really be the very last thing you do, after running through ideas online, in discussions, and in short encounters or groups of encounters. Some issues with the linear-as-playtest is that it probably won't be as varied as you might like (ok, we'll try that again, as elves), and that it won't be as suited to providing useful feedback (trying to recall how encounter 1 went 2 hours later is harder than recalling 5 minutes later). Of course, this could all just be semantics, in which case it's probably no use at all.