Annoyed

>Hey lets play a quick one shot
>3 hours later people are still building their PC's

ahhhhh... I hate this so much. You wanna run a one shot then be ready to run it.

What annoys you when setting up games / oneshots?

It's almost always better to use pregens for one-shot games, unless if characters can be made in less than 15 minutes.

Character creation shouldn't take that long even for a regular game.

That's what I'm saying dude. Games should start within 30mins.

>one shot game, that is two sessions long
> add on a session 0

>3 hours
Is this hyperbole? How the fuck do you take 3 hours just to make a character?
Here I thought I was an asshole for putting off chargen until a few hours before the game

>What annoys you when setting up games / oneshots?
DMs that don't provide pregenerated characters.

>oneshot
>letting the players build their own characters
>not just coming with a set of premise characters and asking them to pick one
You fucked up, user. You deserve this.

Premake the characters or have people make characters beforehand.

Eeesh. What system?

Could be worse
>Let's do a quick one shot! IN GURPS.
Few years later characters are still discussed as we study the nature of man to make a realistic character. And timmy had to get his nuclear engineering degree because he wanted to play a nuclear engineer.

Either use a pregen like says, or use a rules-lite system good for oneshots, like MAID.

D&D 3.5 with PCs above lvl 2 with more than core available.

>implying

I've made lvl 10 characters in 5 minutes in 3.5 Lmao

>playing with characters this unoptimized

>What annoys you when setting up games
the constant looming fear that any one of your new players is "That Guy", and the resulting confrontation that follows. I will say 80% of the time the setup passes without incident, but the anxiety and fear that THIS time will be 20% is always there at the beginning.

It sucks.

>half-paladin
You ever read something and suddenly just realize the person who made it didn't have a fucking clue what they're talking about?

>not having a fast and loose setting with your friends' stand-ins made ahead of time, so that any time you and your mates want a one-shot you can just pull up Characters X, Y, and Z for a quick and easy adventure

Oh yes. In my Black Crusade game I have a player running a Blood Raven Librarian-turned Chaos Sorceror, and it is clear that hes has a very poor understanding of Blood Ravens, Chaos beyond "they summon daemons and shit" Chaos Sorcerers, the Imperium, and 40k lore in general. He's a bit of a handful...

It's like picking an appetizer, entree and desert from a menu; you CAN just pick one of each at random, but you'll have a better time if you take the time to look over and consider all your options. 3.5 has a stupid number of options, meaning that character creation can take a very long time if you're digging through two dozen books to find the perfect feats and so on.

multiclassing isn't a thing?

>character creation can take a very long time if you're digging through two dozen books to find the perfect feats and so on.
I suppose the upside to all this is that Characters in these systems are tougher, so unless you have a particularly sadistically brutal GM, you wont be making new characters terribly often.

I don't even get why people run one-shots. How do you even get invested in a setting and the characters in a single setting? You might as well play a boardgame or a cardgame.

That's what you get for playing games with chargen longer than 30 minutes, probably with the minmaxing autists this kind of games atract

Not all ideas are worth exploring to the full extent of a campaign. Best not to water something down so it can overstay its welcome and become garbage.

To this day my favorite oneshot idea can be boiled down to "play literally yourself in a 80's B slasher movie." If you can come up with a better means of exploring that idea than a single session game, I'd love to hear it.

>I don't even get why people watch movies. How do you even get invested in a setting and the characters in a single setting? You might as well watch the news or the weather Channel.

I once ran a group that was a series of oneshot campaigns, though we occasionally crossed over to 2. My players loved generating characters so they'd have a few new ones ready every week and would sometimes even swap. There was no overarching narrative for the sessions, but sometimes players would reuse a character when appropriate, calling back to their older adventures. It's a pretty comfy and laid back style of gaming, all told, and a lot less effort for the DM because they don't need to worry about keeping note straights or being fair to characters. Less investment means more wiggle room to just do amusing shit. Plus, missing or added players are no problem, ever.

You should have provided PCs.

This is definitely the ideal trade-off; longer, more detailed character creation results in more personalized and mechanically interesting characters, but the long creation time and amount of effort needed makes it frustrating to lose such a character you've spent so much time on. This is partly why such games have more prevalent healing/resurrection magic. More brutal games, or ones intended for single sessions, can get away with much quicker chargen because the characters won't be sticking around long enough for you to grow bored of them, and quick gen helps with character turnover.

I might as well but dungeon crawling is my favorite boardgame.

->The joke
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Your head

this guy is right (if you understand the joke)

this guy is right

3.5 has few viable options.
with a bit of system mastery and the online handbooks you need a very short time.

people still play that shit?

setting a date and getting players to show up
sucks being the only one even remotely interested in gaming

Not really. I mean there are some but most 3.5 players moved to Pathfinder as it's still supported and basically the same.

No it was three hours. then I left. enterd the roll 20 room at noon, I left after 3somthing. I had a pc done within 5-10mins
I wanted to run fate:core. They wanted to play 5e, I had a rouge done with 10mins after the switch, fuck knows what the others where doing.

5e chargen moves quick if you know what you're doing. It's possible for it to still take forever for newbies though, because each of the options tend to have more going on (compared to 3.5e, where there are many more choices to make and way more options, but each option is fairly concise).