RIOT! PRISON BREAK! ONESHOT!

What I Learned from Running a Prison Break Oneshot:

I’m not normally a Game Master. I was running a campaign that had a couple sessions like 6 months ago, but scheduling conflicts happened and my mother had what we thought was a heart attack last time I dmed. Subtle omen of my place at the table? Hope not, I’m planning a pro-wrestling themed and trope-filled limited series. 

Anyway, my idea going in with 2 stellar players and Danny as my table was a prison break dungeon crawler kind of thing. I wanted to try a low-magic, unarmed, problem solving campaign. One thing I wanted to try having players react to were collars puncturing the necks of magic-casters that prevented them from casting magic. This also extended to certain abilities based on class, race, and feats that would immediately nullify the idea. I wanted to set the scene that the players were deeply disadvantaged, but the grip of total control a magical prison has can still not be total. 

The setting was a prison where a morally corrupt governmental body imprisoned political enemies with hardened criminals in hard labor camps and the government gave free reign to a gang inside the prison that shared their beliefs. Elf nazis was what I settled on. The justification for the gang of sociopathic elves being implicitly endorsed was that the government is not totally in control of the nation/city-state, whatever they were in that was a diverse place, so they needed to keep up some appearances. Additionally, the reason the government didn’t free them was because the prison gang’s desire for cruelty made them cheaper enforcers of slave-labor by non-elves than hiring more guards would be. The technology available was a mix; some guards had guns, and experiments were conducted on prisoners, but magic was still a thing possible if the traps for it could be avoided. Think whatever seemed cool cause it was a oneshot i wanted to try some combat things out in. 

 Listen, I get in the weeds sometimes to find ways to exploit a setting in gameplay so I probably solved more problems or at least different ones than my players were going to cause, but hey, we’re just trying something here. 

The characters I had to deal with were a “Knives Out, Benoit Blanc" type hippo werewolf gang leader, a smooth talking human caster conman like Ryan O’Reilly from Oz, and a confused and scared half-elf caster that was the “WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON” comedic value and on-task character.  He was great because I gave them a lot of options to help friendly npcs breakout of prison and fight with them too, so whenever I CONVENIENTLY (intentionally) ensured their friends would die, he reacted properly. 

Good characters. 

Here is how I was a bad GM:

1. Didn’t have a good grasp of what the npcs were going to be.

2. Literally forgot I had to roll dice in combat for like an hour. 

3. Didn’t have a clear grasp of how I wanted the cinematic ending to go. 

I was funny, charming, and riffed well with my excellent players and Danny’s ridiculous Benoit Blanc-like werehippo crap. I’ve got that dawg in me. 

However, here are 3 things I’d do differently that you can borrow for your games!

1. Set up the circumstances for the initial riot that would lead to the prison break better. I essentially sent it up to start with the prison administration grouping characters together into “can be productive slaves” and “cannot” and then have them kill the ones they deemed too expensive to keep alive. I did not set that up well. What I should’ve done is have that be part of the session background; or have at least one character would have heard rumors about downsizing the prison population. Something they could make a choice to take positively or negatively and go from there. I think it would have been helpful to get more immediate buy-in by immediately eliciting an emotion and choice from a player immediately. It gives the players something more tangible to roleplay with. 

1. Fewer battle maps, I wanted to have them go through 3 floors of enemies, and that was too many. We got through the 3 floors, but instead of fighting on the 3rd, I had to end it there. It was too much and it was rushed. What I should’ve done is have the break maybe take place outside or near some kind of outside space where they could be forced to work in a mine or something, and have at max 2 maps. That way we get the picture of forced labor; the players would likely be able to have more fun with their environment; and we could've had a cool running sequence or a cinematic surprise map culmination depending on if the players succeeded or not. 

1. I should’ve talked to the players a bit beforehand and ask what they would like out of a prison break oneshot, not that I have to take their ideas and try to jam them all in, but it would have given me a baseline for what they expected. 

There, be better than me. Go on. Good luck with your games!