I ran a battle-royale-esque one-shot with Monsterhearts and it went pretty good.

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I ran a monsterhearts one-shot with a battle-royale premise and it went pretty good.

If you're not familar with Battle Royale/Hunger Games, the premise is: These students are being forced by the man to kill each other, with the last person standing declared the victor. If no one kills each other for an hour, someone is picked to die.

I finagled with the rules a little bit:
* Everyone has 2 pcs, so they will be more complicit with me in starting the bloodshed.
* Removed the stuff you could do to avoid death, because again people paid for blood.
* You can spend a String to find someone who doesn't want to be found, or to have been hiding in wait watching someone this whole time.

It did well in that:

* Two of the players expressed particular interest in doing a campaign.
* We got to see a lot of the Skins and a lot of the Moves.
* I think we all had a good time and the fiction was neat. There was a good amount of tension about who's-going-to-kill-who, and there was a good mix of resistance and murderousness.
* People used strings and their nifty powers.
* People had sex in the workshop.
* After having sex in the workshop people became a serial killer couple, and than turned on each other with their tools, and than the Hollow lost faith in humanity.
* I got that idea out of my system.

It did maybe not so well in that:

* There's a lot of fictional conflicts that I wanted there to be answers for that there wern't, like: Hey, can we barricade this place up so other people can't get in here? Or: Hey, I want to follow/evade following/hide/find a hidden person (I occasionally tried to use Hold Steadies and Running Away for those, but a lot of the time they didn't work.
* Running Away, in particular, asks for some NPCs to be inserted whenever there's a need for a scary person to run into. I really didn't want to have more than 1-npc this one-shot (I have to play a bajillion NPCs all the time, you guys can rip each other apart for once) so it didn't make much sense towards the beginning (Towards the middle part, there were more PCs running around being scary.)
* People didn't shut each other down much. They almost did a couple of times, but they just wern't sassy enough. Gotta teach people to inject more sass.