Last week, I had the privilege of joining my friends for a birthday one-shot Dungeons & Dragons game. Most of the players were my every-other-Wednesday group (who play The Leeching Wastes campaign I’m running), but this group was originally formed from the available players of a group I’ve never been a part of before. Now, I’ve run a D&D game for everyone in the one-shot’s group before, thanks to our trip to Spain in 2023 and our desire to run a D&D game in a castle while we were there, but this was my first time playing along side one of the players and my first time to play under this GM since early 2023. It was nice to be back at his table, to be able to play a silly, goofy character, and to enjoy some light-hearted fun. And then talk with one of the other players for an hour and a half after that, which included discussions of creating a book club for the two of us to use as motivation for getting through interesting-to-talk-about-but-difficult-to-read books like Frank Herbert’s Dune (which we’ve both bounced off before). But I digress. This post is about the one-shot, my fun little character, and how I incorporated both my desire to create an interesting thematic character while still making one that will be an effective part of the mechanical side of the game. They were built as a nod to the limitations of a one-shot and as a means of maintaining a high degree of effectiveness that would, if used well, make my allies look good instead of me.

That last bit was a key part of the character’s design. I know the systems of Dungeons and Dragons super well, thanks to running it as much as I did for years, so I tend to make very effective characters. I don’t worry as much about fitting a particular character to the mechanics I build around them because, as a Forever Game Master, I get to play so rarely that I have more interesting character concepts than I’ll ever be able to play. There’s usually at least one rattling around in my head that will work for whatever I wind up building. Still, I don’t want to upstage my fellow players or steal the spotlight the entire time. I’m a pretty direct, decisive person, which means that I tend to take over as the party’s leader or strategist since I’m not afraid to try things, fail, and then try something new. If I build a character with strong, combat-dominating abilities, this proclivity towards action and decisiveness makes it more difficult for other people to shine.

One thing I’ve been trying in the the two more “regular” (planned as weekly games but much closer to monthly in practice) is playing a character who is there to just sponge up damage (and be enough of a threat that he can’t be ignored) or playing a spellcaster who doesn’t take any major damage-dealing spells. The former hasn’t worked out super great in terms of not winding up in the spotlight a bunch, but there’s extenuating circumstances there because I’m one of the few players who is consistently present (there’s a large potential pool, most of whom just don’t show up anymore) and I’m good at driving situations right towards the fight our encounters-style game is build to have every session. The latter, support spellcasting, has mostly worked out aside from one situation where I discovered that a spell I took was incredibly powerful in the situation we were in and used it many times to great effect because it was just too funny to not do that. It worked even better this time around, since I made my bard a support spellcaster, and even when so far as to specifically pick a few spells meant to make the birthday person extra powerful (which never really came up, unfortunately,) on top of the usual compliment of support spells.

It was a fun build that only really worked as well as it did because we made our characters at seventh level. I’m sure playing this character at lower levels would have been fine, but they would have had a few levels before they actually became as effective as they were in the one-shot. The concept behind their build, beyond getting my bard access to all of the spells I wanted them to have, was that they were an older pirate, an advisor-type to the younger crew of pirates made up of the rest of the player characters. They’d sailed with other ships and gained a wide variety of skills they’d use to help the rest of the group succeed at their chosen profession of piracy. Which is why it made sense for them to have as many buffs as they did, since their whole job on the ship was helping everyone else learn the ropes or do better at their chosen tasks. And, because they were an old crusty sea dog, I got to talk in a pirate-y accent all evening, which was a lot of fun for me. Really, the whole concept just worked perfectly with being a bard geared toward making everyone else do better. I mean, Adri could attack and had an offensive cantrip, but they weren’t going to put up anything near the numbers the rest of the party could put up as a monk, a barbarian, and a fight/warlock built around low-accuracy but high-damage melee combat, but it meant they could hang and have something to do on the turns they weren’t healing, buffing, or doing weird battlefield control stuff (Vortex Warp is, hands-down, one of the best spells in modern D&D in my opinion, at least in terms of its combined fun and effect).

Thanks to my character’s supporting role, I never showed anyone up. I got my cool moments, such as fetching an enemy that had tried to flee for help while we were taking out one of the Three Captains on the cruise liner we had chosen to infiltrate, getting the NPC we decided to adopt out of harms way during a subsequent fight, helping to recruit that NPC to join our pirate ship, and then using my one fourth-level spell slot to turn them into a Giant Ape for the last fight that turned out to be a reveal that this was all a game (a delightful false heist that ended in a fancy cake and presents made up of all the magic items we’d looted along the way) funded by the sibling (one of the other player characters) of the birthday person’s character. All the other players got theirs as well, by soloing one of the other bosses for most of the fight, dealing incredibly large amounts of damage with every swing, or by unleashing a hail of blows that also did a huge amount of damage, and I was there to keep them hitting with a nice Bless spell for the first fight and alive during the second fight with some well-time healing spells. I’d have done more in the second fight, but I had to keep our adopted NPC out of the way and that was a concentration spell, so there wasn’t much else I could do. Other than, as I said, keeping them alive with healing magic and making sure everyone failed the saving throws we needed them to fail.

It was a grand, fun romp. Everyone had a great time and the birthday person was thrilled with how it all turned out. I was a little disappointed that it was all an immersive experience, ultimately, but we were short on time and its entirely possible that this was a choice made toward the end of the game to skip the final fight. Which is totally fair! I just had a bard who made a point of finishing off foes, so my kill count dropped when it was revealed that we hadn’t actually killed anyone. Ruined my KDR. Also, since we didn’t have that last fight, I didn’t get to do my big reveal of my character’s name! They spent the entire game known as Adri Tondasea (Adri as in “Audrie” but with the “a” sound from the word “add” instead of the initial “aw” sound and Tondasea as in “upon” but with no “u” and a “t” instead, “das” as in the German article for singular neutral nouns, and “ea” as in “eeh-ah.”) rather than by their full name of Adri Fucking Tondasea which, when written out as they would sign something was “Adri F. Tondasea” or “Adrift on da sea.” I even used a drifting barrel in the ocean as their icon on roll20! A real let down that I had to explain the joke to my GM days after the fact. Other than this one specific thing, it was a great night and I hope we can do it again sometime in the future. One-shots are a lot of fun to play.