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Calypso

soloing powered by the apocalypse · By katamoiran

Suggestions for a "one shot"?

A topic by hamhambone created Dec 26, 2022 Views: 192 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 2

Heya! I'm planning on playing Calypso with a friend as co-players (single shared protagonist) about a week from now. We'll have about 3 to 4 hours.

Do you have any suggestions for how we might organize play to attempt to fit something within that time frame?

I'm thinking it might be good for me and my friend to do a bit of talking about the general premise (she has a cool sketchily drawn setting I'm super interested in, we would just choose what part of the setting we want to explore), then I could take care of creating the character mechanically (do the bulk work of choosing traits, tags, keys and edges) on my own time so we don't have to do it in session. Then in session we could determine together the scenario the character finds themselves in and frame an initial scene and start play.

I guess my primary question is if you have any suggestions for bending gameplay towards some sort of natural stopping point or conclusion that fits within 3 to 4 hours!

Developer

Oh, good question, and that sounds so fun!!! I think the prep work you're doing is really solid and a good idea. My first immediate thought on pacing to use one of the simpler alternate frames; the Beats frame is more or less how I game routinely now, whatever system I'm using -- it has seven "scenes" with specific notes to hit with one of those scenes repeatable several times if you have more time/want to demonstrate more of your chosen framing, meaning I end up with about nine or ten scenes, usually. The Point Buy frame also has a "repeated" scene you could reduce to running just once; it's more uncertain because how fast you move through it is predicated on your successes and failures, but has the advantage of being a bit less particular about what you "show" in each scene. 

Another option, more experimental, very simple, and I think inspired by Swords Without Master, would be to leverage your Motifs directly for a "snappy" and "tight" experience. Make just one d6 list (or one list each), add to it quickly (maybe even make a rule that every roll failure is a new motif). Once you fill the list up, stop adding and start playing each motif in turn as a callback, event, or re-contextualizing of the original events. When you've included or resolved six you're done. That of course relies a whole lot more on your scene framing tools and interpreting them quickly; I personally find I devote more time to setup/framing than to playing so I tend to build in a lot of tools to handle that aspect, probably even too many!

Thanks!

All good ideas! The character concepts my friend made also lend themselves well to slice of life style stories, which should help also.

That Swords without master inspired framework seems super cool and good, actually!

Developer

Yeah!!! Someone mentioned it to me and I was like... whoa. SWM is genius! The character generation (where you pick an item, image, or thing and build from it) is great, too, and could easily be used with Calypso. Oh, you might also make a prefab list of situations/events (look in the back of Six, there's a big table, like "someone taking a bath" or "a birthday party") that you have vague ideas of how you'd run and roll on that to seed your scenes. Kind of a push pull deal -- the prefab list seeds the scene & the motif list drives it.