So I have an idea for a one-shot and I would love to hear people's feedback.

The idea is to come up with a one shot adventure that is fun and light hearted (i.e. slasher crashes a rave, zombies attack a high school, etc).

Instead of the players making a starting PC, they each make a minion group. I am thinking a group with 5 minions, but as long as you have to set creation rules its probably flexible. The fun part is that the player's minion group would start off pretty strong but they reduce in power as the night progresses and their minions get picked off.

Personally, I would probably have my players give a 1 or 2 sentence description for each of their minions, and maybe a side quest for each one (i.e. high schooler must find his kid brother), just to add to the roleplay side of it.

Any comments or feedback would be appreciated.

What a creative and interesting idea! This is perfect for the sort of horror genre suggestions you have up there. It makes player casualties an expected and accepted fact and ratchets the tension as you go (as you mention).

Are you going to have the minion groups specialize in things- like the scouts club has survival and medicine, the computer club has computers and mechanics, the football team has athletics and resilience, the drama club has charm and deception, and so on? Staying away from combat skills would make sense with your setting and keep pushing them to look for non-combat solutions to the situations they find themselves in.

In fact throwing in a few rival-level npcs that do have combat skills that fall victim to the bad guys could help ratchet up the tension- like the police officer/guard that works at the school, or the student who everyone sees as a total martial arts bad ***- both of whom get taken down by the threat in like two seconds encouraging the PCs to do the only logical thing- RUN!

Let us know how it goes if you decide to do it! And good luck!

Why does this question make me think of the Kobolds Ate My Baby RPG ? 😃

You can even set it in Terrinoth as have the players make up minion groups of goblin bandits that are terrorizing the trade routes along the countryside. As a GM, you roll up the party of adventurers hired to guard the caravan in a "reverse dungeon" like way.

As FinarinPanjoro said ... very creative and interesting idea!

Have fun!

Z

Haha i remember that Kobold one. You could look at We be goblins

To make the minion rule work make sure your players are aware that the minion group act as one and that they are sort of always together or semi engaged if you will.

Also structured wise your players will start out more powerfull and then loose power towards the end.

So if there is a big bad in the end try an gauge how many minions are left.