Recently, my friends and I ran a Tabletop RPG Oneshot based in a world created entirely for this oneshot. One of the major problems we encountered was that my plans for the story ran far longer than expected. Instead of the oneshot lasting for one session like the name suggests, it lasted for three. This isn’t as much of an issue as I’m making it sound, but it has become a recurring problem. Each of the sessions ran for around 3 to 4 hours, half of which was spent on combat. My inexperience as a DM, the person organizing the oneshot, became very evident here, as the combat dragged on much longer than I expected.

To solve this, I ended up shortening the later combats by lowering enemy health and the number of enemies from what was originally planned. The non-combat sections worked a lot better in my opinion. Since I had a limited amount of written descriptions, I often had to describe and improvise environments on the spot, which actually worked out well for me. I do believe I could have done a little better with my descriptions, but that’s more a sign of my inexperience rather than a critical issue.

In addition to my three players — A, JJ, and Julian — I also had a friend from another school, Tonsun, who watched us play through the oneshot because he was awake at the time and was curious. This turned out to be very lucky because the last session ended up taking far more time than the other two. A had to go to sleep, so Tonsun ended up playing A’s character during the final stretch. Tonsun, being more experienced with Tabletop RPGs, helped me with advice on how to run combat faster to counter my inexperience.

Overall, it was a very fun experience that I really want to do again. I especially enjoyed the interactions between characters and the worldbuilding we created both before and during the oneshot. However, I know that I need to streamline combat to make it faster and less time-consuming on my part next time. One solution I’m considering is to make future oneshots or campaigns more focused on the story and character interactions rather than on combat. Combat would be extremely simplified, allowing more time to engage with the world and its many characters.