Where is the Grail?

[ethan_greer]

Hi, Forge. Maybe you can help me out with something.

I want a game.

It has to support fantasy play, prefferably Tolkien-ish, but with either no setting, or one easily disregarded or sufficiently general to allow flexibility.

It has to support long-term play with the same characters, who may change gradually but may not spiral upwards in power at a prodigious rate.

It has to have a GM who plays the setting and players who play characters, one per.

This is the important thing: It has to make creating stories easy. It must require only minimal prep time of the GM, we're talking ten minutes or less prep for a jam-packed three-hour session. Yet the stories and situations created with this game must tend to be meaningful and thematically satisfying for the participants. That is to say, no randomly generated dungeons allowed.

So, does this game exist?

If so, I want to know about it so I can play the beans out of it with my gaming friends.

If this game doesn't exist, well, the inevitable question must arise: Why the fuck doesn't it?

[Bankuei]

Hi Ethan,

Hmm. How about:

Legends of Middle Earth
( http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/Legends_of_Middle_Earth_Free_RPG.php )
HeroQuest
Sorcerer
Riddle of Steel(hand out SA points at a few per session, instead of per scene)
Burning Wheel

Burning Wheel is the most Tolkien-esque, but also the crunchiest and most time consuming in terms of dealing with stats.

Are there other requirements or concerns that would eliminate ALL of these games from the running?

Chris

[ethan_greer]

Hey, wow, that was quick!

I'm skeptical about Sorcerer. Ron has said on multiple occasions that Sorcerer is fairly prep-intensive. Plus, I own it (including supplements) and it's not really what I'm looking for here.

As for the others, are you seriously telling me that all of these games can be run on little to no prep? I'm not saying I don't trust you, but that seems...too good to be true. Can you explain briefly how each of your examples replaces GM prep time? Well, except Sorcerer and Legends of Middle Earth, which I can look over myself. And you can skip Riddle of Steel, too. I owned that at one time and the combat system didn't do it for me, though the SA system was rockin'.

So, Burning Wheel and HeroQuest - how do they eliminate the need for rigorous prep?

Thanks!

[Jasper]

It's not entirely finished, but you might check out my The West Wind (pdf).  Strongly Tolkein inspired, but no detailed setting  -- instead it's made very much for on the fly world creation.  Might work for ya'.

[MikeSands]

There was a thread which touched on low/no prep HeroQuest at http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13920

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Cough, cough, cough.

The Shadow of Yesterday might work. You can prep this game in 10 minutes so easily. And your stories will mean something, 'cause the characters are front-loaded with Keys that tell you as GM what to do.

You can ignore the setting, really. I'll shed a tear, but if you write up your own, shit, you can sell it. Or I'll put it up for free.

[Bankuei]

Hi Ethan,

In my experience, good thematic kick either has to come from solid prep, or greater input by the players in introducing conflict and framing scenes.  That said, assuming the latter is completely out of the question, you have to try and cut the prep time as much as possible.

Prep time boils down to two things- Situation and Logistics.  Logistics includes statting up NPCs, monsters, items, figuring out how tough skill rolls need to be, etc.  Situation can often be put together as fast as you can think of one("Fight the Dragon!") while Logistics takes as long as it takes you to slog up numbers for the system in question.

LoME, HQ, Sorcerer, and Clinton's TSOY* all use universal resolution systems, making it real easy to pull out numbers on the fly for NPCs, or any challenge you might encounter.  ROS & BW aren't very far from it, though they do have a higher learning curve to be able to guesstimate most of the numbers you might need.  Luckily both have a solid set of NPC stats in their rules that you can pull for most things.

That takes care of Logistics, now, on to Situation...

All of the games listed above have something in common- they have mechanics for players to flag what kind of thematic content interests them- in the form of Passions, Relationships, Beliefs, Kickers, Spiritual Attributes, Keys, etc.  The key to using this to your benefit is to agree as a group to base all of these around a focal situation("Struggle for the throne!").  Then, as the GM, you need to take that situation, and all those thematic "markers" and tie them together in a conflict that will hit as many of them as possible.  Then, during play, you have to deliberately conflict and hit those markers in a thematic fashion as much as you can.

That all said, this means raw, as the games are, you're going to have to put in some effort and hustle to make theme fire with that little prep time.  Options that could make things a LOT easier, would include going with a formula situation(such as Dogs in the Vineyard's Towns), or opening up the game to more player input(such as Trollbabe's Scene Request rule).

In my personal experience, I find games with traditional GM/player roles require more prep into the situation, usually a lot in the initial part, and between 10-20 minutes between subsequent sessions.  That would be the serious prep Ron would be talking about, and even more so if you leave it open to any old Kicker or character concept.  For short prep, and sure fire thematic fun, I go with stuff that has a good amount of player input, as it allows the players to help add things to focus and address theme by producing conflicts or twists I myself might not have thought of.  

But, given the restrictions you've put up, those would be the options I would take.

Thoughts?

Chris

*I would have also mentioned TSOY, but I had forgotten that it included a good option for slower advancement. Doh!

[Sean]

Hi, Ethan -

I've been thinking along similar lines recently - why doesn't a game like this exist? It's also amazing to me that (with the possible exception of Castles and Crusades, which is really just another D&D variant, albeit a solid one) nobody's really designed a rules-lite, quick-prep gamism-facilitating fantasy game which would allow long term play for a really long time. Well, I guess Savage Worlds comes close, but it's actually still more complex than it needs to be. Why not? These are the games that theoretically people ought to want to play, given that most gamers go for fantasy, have limited time and patience for rules, and tend to be either Gamists or Narrativists.

Part of the problem is that most games are written by gamers, for gamers which exerts a tremendous choking influence on the hobby. I still feel that while D&D 3.x gave the hobby as a whole a tremendous short-term boost, long-term it's a disaster. If people think role-playing is that - a very solid, hard-core gamist design with a simple core mechanic but very, very complicated applications of that mechanic - they're all either going to go to CRPG's or give it up, unless they're lucky enough to have a game designer friend as their GM. But I digress.

ANYWAY, to answer your question, Clinton's TSoY is my top pick currently for your particulars, and Heroquest would be second. Burning Wheel has the best Tolkien-like vibe of any game yet published IMO, but I wouldn't call it lite prep.

Sorcerer & Sword also meets your particulars, but you have to want that demonic-inflected fantasy vibe for it to be the right choice, and the "Tolkien-"/traditional aspect of your post probably means that's not right. Not unless you maybe want a party of ringbearers.

[Per Fischer]

I was thinking TSOY immediately when I read your post, Ethan. There must be a way to do a quick fantasy version of DitV as well, as it is fairly short-prep after character generation.
The good thing about TSOY in this respect is that it supports the game's longevity as you can set the experience pace to slow and get a longer game with the same characters. But you still have to spend a little time actually creating characters, and it sound as if you want to jump right into it.
Per

[ethan_greer]

Chris, you're making a lot of sense. Thanks for the clarifications.

Sean, I completely agree with what you're saying about these types of games and their confounding scarcity.

So, based on all these helpful suggestions (thanks all!), now I have three new free games to check out, and two (HeroQuest and Burning Wheel) get bumped up on my "to buy" list. Cool.

Maybe these types of games aren't as rare (or nonexistent) as I'd feared. They're just hiding or something.

[Bankuei]

Hi guys,

The key to the whole thing is Situation.  For all that Story Now to pop off, the conflict has to be well built and in motion.  The difficulty in prep, is in making a conflict that the players will find interesting and worthwhile thematically- so it becomes a question of how well do you know your group and/or what forms of input do they have in helping create the relevant conflicts you're going to get in play.  For games with higher player input, they can modify and help produce Situation as you play. For games where the players get very little input during play itself, it becomes a matter of tying in the cues they've given you plus your own knowledge of the tastes of your group.

Obviously, games like the Mountain Witch are tightly defined for Situation and that makes things easier.  I could see similar things happening if you used pre-generated Masters, towns, and Stakes for MLWM, DitV, and Trollbabe respectively.

When it comes to Sim games- situation is easy because it doesn't need to fire conflict right away.  An entire session can revolve around finding a clue to a clue to a clue to actually having to make a serious decision- all that is necessary is an excuse to explore the imaginative space.  Some groups don't even need that.  

Likewise, for gamism the conflict is built into the system, you don't need to create a setup in the shared imaginative space for why the conflict is happening- both you and the players are already oriented for the types of conflicts and "why" based on the system("Oh, we fight supervillains. Cool!").  Then the time is eaten up solely by logistics of doing the stats necessary for those challenges to exist and trying not to over or under do it.  It's even easier if you can simply set players vs. players, at which point you might not have to generate any prep at all.  The various brawl options throughout the Marvel games comes immediately to mind.

Chris

PS-Ethan, I look forward to hearing what works best for you and how that works out.

[Valamir]

I'll put in a third recommendation for Shadows of Yesterday, largely because its the game *I* really want to play right now, and I've been trying to browbeat Seth into running it.

It has perhaps a bit more "players play the setting" to it than your initial post implied, but nothing that strikes me as being overly radical in that regard (other than Transcendence).

The Keys are one of those concepts that once you read them you wonder why you hadn't thought of them along time ago yourself.  Its just pure brilliance.  The players define for themselves as part of their point buys for character creation exactly how their character will earn experience.  One character might get XPs for telling stories about his long lost tribe.  Another might get XPs for mooning after some unobtainable love interest.  All have a "buy out" option where you can get a sizeable amount of XPs for betraying or abandoning the Key.  In other words...character growth.  Those Keys really help with prep because all you need to do is make sure the nights adventure gives some opportunity to hit some of them, and then wrap that into a traditional fantasy adventure which most of us have dozens of ideas and/or modules lieing around already for.  

The world itself is actually far more interesting then I'd first imagined.  Reading the initial story of the ending of the empire my first thought was "Yawn.  Yet another ancient utopian empire brought down by a cataclysm."  But the world that arose from that cataclysm is VERY very cool.  Zu magic is just scary wicked, and the Khale get me totally jazzed.  Each region of the world comes with its built in source of conflict and friction, so again...lots to draw from for easy prep.

[GB Steve]

Dying Earth tends to be a low prep game. At Cugel level, the PCs are mostly scoundrels on the grift, prey to their vices. All you need is some half-attractive situation and the players soon out do each other in trying to get the upper edge.

I've certainly run it that way.

It's also still, mind-bogglingly, free.

[Mike Holmes]

Ethan, I think part of the problem here is that you haven't indicated just how "light" the prep is that you want. Give us a figure in terms of, say, minutes.

Most of the systems mentioned here, are, I think light on prep if you use Ron's basic methods from Sorcerer. Sorcerer is somewhat intensive before the first session, but then intra-session I think it's quite light. But, again, that's all relative.

Also, what is it about Sorcerer that makes it not what you're looking for? Just the wrong basic premise? If you can tell us why not Sorcerer, that would help narrow down.

Mike

[ethan_greer]

Hi Mike,

Like I said, prepwise I'm looking for ten minutes or less.

That said, I don't mind an intense char-gen session - as long as it's something that everyone can do at once and is involving, and not an exercise in bean counting and number crunching. I wouldn't consider a couple hours of everyone sitting around learning a bit about the system and making characters as "prep" per se. Prep is where you sit down by yourself and think, "what am I going to do to/for the players this session?" Then you write down notes, stat up any NPCs you might need, do some research if that's your thing, make maps, whatever.

Why not Sorcerer? <horse>No sir, I just don't like it.</horse> Something about Sorcerer has always rubbed me the wrong way. I recognize the merit of the game, and I'd be willing to give it a try as a player, but no way am I going to run it without having played it first, and no way do I want it behind a Tolkien-esque long-term fantasy campaign.