Where is the Grail?

[Bankuei]

Hi Ethan,

Well, like I said, it usually boils down to either giving players more input to creating good conflict and addressing theme, or putting in a little extra time with prep.  It's not impossible to go with 10 minutes- but it would be shakey.  I could see it with 30 minutes the first time- which may be you scrawling down notes and ideas during that first "char gen/learn the system" session.

But if you do fiind that "sure fire" 10 minute formula- be sure to let us know :)

Chris

[Sean]

Hi Mike -

It seems to me that 'Tolkien-esque, long term fantasy game', while it doesn't strictly speaking rule Sorcerer out, is not the best fit. You could do some kind of full-on power-fantasy thing with it (I had an interesting (to me) idea for a mini-supplement to S&S called Sorcerer Kings where you play out the arc of a Kull or Arthur-type character in several phases), but the thing about Sorcerer is that you have to want the kind of game it's offering, one in which the game is built around the humanity/demons conflict. I don't see this as the best way to start out a small-group traditional fantasy game with an open-ended plotline at all. I know Clinton managed to kind of make it work from his posts on the game, but I certainly can't imagine using it that way. Even something as close to one kind of 'traditional fantasy' as Charnel Gods (which of course I love) is really quite a radical departure from what it seems like Ethan's looking for.

Ethan -

I thought that's what you meant by lite-prep, and it rules Dying Earth and Burning Wheel out, much as I like both those games. Heroquest could be lite-prep like that but if you don't like Glorantha you'll have to do a bunch of work up front to make it work for your game in terms of homeland/profession/race etc. keywords (though some of this could be stolen from others on the web).

Do you have an opinion on Shadows of Yesterday yet? I think it's your best bet. Second choice would be to take a relatively light, relatively GNS-neutral system (lots of these out there) and just get the narrativism at the social contract level. Fate could work too, actually - I forgot about that. I perceive prep for Fate (which I haven't run) to be slightly heavier than for Heroquest (which I have) but not a deal-breaker for you.

[Mike Holmes]

Sean, I wouldn't use Sorcerer for this sort of a game, either. I wasn't suggesting it. I wanted Ethan's response, because I thought it might tell us something about what sort of game he's looking for, and what he's not.

"Something rubs me the wrong way" doesn't help a lot, however.

Anyhow, Ethan, I wasn't talking about chargen session. The Bang Style prep simply takes a little time before the first session (and after chargen is complete) to get right. Far more than ten minutes. Once you have that, however, ten minutes intra-session isn't impossible.

Like Chris said, however, somewhat shakey.

Alyria does have a lot of this prep taken up in chargen, actually, so it might work. But I still think ten minutes there would be shakey. You know, it really depends a lot on how focused those ten minutes are? I'm a firm believer that one can do a ton in ten minutes, if one really concentrates. It's just not easy to get that focused.

It seems to me that the only way to really make prep short, and still have a game that goes somewhere, is to make the in-game system take care of the neccessary creativity. There are a few games that do this a little, but only one that I can think of that has less than ten minutes garunteed. In fact it never has any prep time at all.

Mike

[ethan_greer]

Sean, I wouldn't use Sorcerer for this sort of a game, either. I wasn't suggesting it. I wanted Ethan's response, because I thought it might tell us something about what sort of game he's looking for, and what he's not.

"Something rubs me the wrong way" doesn't help a lot, however.

Well, okay, fair enough. To be more specific, Sorcerer's laser-like focus on the "demonic binding and humanity" theme rubs me the wrong way. The question, "What are you willing to do for power?" isn't one that I am motivated to answer through role-playing. It doesn't grab me. To tell the truth, the PC/Demon relationship in Sorcerer kinda freaks me out. The back of the book asks, "Can you handle it?" And I answer, "I'd rather not if it's all the same to you."

Anyhow, Ethan, I wasn't talking about chargen session. The Bang Style prep simply takes a little time before the first session (and after chargen is complete) to get right. Far more than ten minutes. Once you have that, however, ten minutes intra-session isn't impossible.

Understood. That paragraph was actually aimed more at pfischer; I should have specified.

You know, it really depends a lot on how focused those ten minutes are? I'm a firm believer that one can do a ton in ten minutes, if one really concentrates. It's just not easy to get that focused.

You're right about that. I guess I'd be wanting light brain work - somewhere roughly in the middle between idle daydreaming and headache-inducing concentration. I don't know how to describe it better, unfortunately, but hopefully you get the idea. The type of role-playing experience I'm looking for should be a light activity - no heavy brainwork, no angsty brooding, just engaging adventure with the occasional spots of humor and pathos. But there I go using "should." Bad Ethan.

...but only one that I can think of that has less than ten minutes garunteed. In fact it never has any prep time at all.

Now what game could you possibly be referring to? :)

[Ben Lehman]

I'm missing something.

"Tolkeinesque Fantasy" is just color.  No, really.  It is.  Tolkein's fantasy has moral issues at the core, yeah, but they're actually the sorts of moral issues that Sorcerer is perfect for (Frodo, Elrond, Gandalf, Galadriel, Aragorn... all Sorcerers.)

So my impression here is that you're looking for a quick-play system with a lot of color.

That's a problem.  Ain't no such thing.

To have good color in a game, you need to get everyone really immersed in the color, really tasting it and feeling it and grooving on it together.  And, for that, you need prep.  Prep lets people get on the same page.

Otherwise, it's just the GM forcing his color down the player's throats.  Which is no fun for anyone.

yrs--
--Ben

[ethan_greer]

Tolkienesque fantasy, for the purposes of this conversation, means a few things.

- A certain regard for the party mentality. Characters in general will work together. Split-ups and side-quests will happen, but the understanding is that characters will stick together and pursue common goals.

- The stories are big, and the stakes are medium to high. Save the princess. Save the village. Save the kingdom. Save the world.

- There are elves and dwarves and men and orcs.

- There's a big evil force in the world. It may or may not be directly faced eventually.

My take is that the first two are Situation more than Color, and the third is definitely Color, and the fourth is a toss-up between Situation and Color.

Furthermore, I totally disagree that heavy color requires prep. I believe that Color can be established for a game prior to the application of system, up in the Social Contract area.

What you seem to be saying, Ben, is that I shouldn't take my stated approach to a game, or that the game I'm looking for doesn't exist and will never exist. Is that what you're saying? If so, that's pretty irritating. I can only assume I'm not reading you right.

[Ben Lehman]

Yep, that's pretty much what I'm saying.  Prove me wrong.

I agree with your assessments of what your criteria fall under, in terms of situation/color.  My only note is that Party Mentality isn't part of Tolkein at all.  And, frankly, the situations you are describing seem more to me to be about D&D than about Tolkein.

Now, if you consider Social Contract prep to not be prep, you might be able to.  But, then again, I don't really see why it is different.

yrs--
--Ben

[ethan_greer]

Dude, what's with the confrontational posturing?

[Bill Cook]

I think Ethan wants payoff. I think Ben is saying "you can't get something for nothing."

I disagree about the threshold to achieve color being very high. You can always borrow from established sources. Also, highly related input can snowball.

The "ten minutes or less" criterion is a little cheeky, to me. I bet if you had to spend twenty minutes but didn't have to do algebra or reach some conceptual plateau, you'd be just as happy.

I think Ethan is staring at a trade-off between prescription and improvization. There's a certain amount of work that has to be done, either way. I can think of three cases:

[*]Pick up a published adventure scenario. Use the pre-gens provided. Without even reading it through once, sit down and play. Read the narrative sections aloud. Present each little room or conflict as written. Tally advancement per system. When you finish, go buy another one.

Even if nothing's random, I don't see this satisfying your requirement for creating stories. It more of a re-enactment.

To me, this is pretty low pressure.

[*]Have a chargen session. Accept input for goals in play. Retire to your ominous laboratory. On game night, serve the table per order. Drive requested elements to encourage interactions.

Here, I see advancement of story subplanting a task-ish "now I can swim 30 meters further" variety.

Pressure .. increasing.

[*]Have an everything generation session that is also play itself. Act on every impulse to really, actually play, to the limit of conception. Fill in the details as you go. Use every head at the table to leap the hurdles of "drawing a blank" or "hitting the wall." Everyone acts out to establish and drive the interests of each competing element.

With this approach, there are no limits on creating the type of story you have in mind. Ten minutes? Try no minutes. Every moment is play. However ..

The pressure is unbearable! High-level performers, only. It's an iron man contest.
[/list:u]

[CPXB]

If you're sure you players want to do a Middle Earth sort of game and your players are the right sort for it, you might want to give Universalis a shot.  One of the strong appeals is that it is a very low preparation game, and GMly tasks are generally distributed amongst the players.

[ethan_greer]

The "ten minutes or less" criterion is a little cheeky, to me. I bet if you had to spend twenty minutes but didn't have to do algebra or reach some conceptual plateau, you'd be just as happy.

Ten is a number I pulled out of thin air to mean the same thing as "little to none." Cheeky? Yeah, I guess so. Would I be okay with twenty minutes? Yeah, you're probably right. But that's not the point.

Really, I can't see why a group couldn't pull out an RPG and have satisfying long term play, the same way you pull out Sorry or Chess. You pull out the game, you play it, it's fun. It should be that easy, damn it.

There I go again with the "should." And again with the cheeky. It can't be that easy, and I realize that. Not for long-term play. Things like Deep 7's 1PG line of games, maybe, but not long-term epic fantasy campaigns.

But how close can we get? I've now read the three games that were free, namely Jasper McChesney's The West Wind, Jeffrey Schecter's Legends of Middle Earth, and Clinton's The Shadow of Yesterday. (Links can be found above.) All of them are good. Of them, I'm most inclined to try The Shadow of Yesterday. It really does kick ass.

But even with TSOY, excellently written as it is, there's this gap. There are sections on Designing an Adventure, which talks about Key Scenes, analogous to Sorcerer's Bangs, and designing NPCs. But it doesn't really explain how to prep for the game. It doesn't give a step-by-step, this is what you do to get ready to play.

Like the traditional IIEE gap that Ron has railed against, I think this is a huge missing piece to most RPGs I read. They assume that the GM will just know what to do to get ready for the game. Glancing through the 1980 Tom Moldvay D&D basic set, There's a section with step-by-step instructions for prep. It's just awesome. It's all right there, clear as crystal, everything you need to reach the starting point of play.

Maybe that's what I'm really looking for. Some sort of road map that tells me what the fuck I'm supposed to do as a GM to prep a game session. An empowering set of easy-to-follow instructions to get me started right. Something that gives me some way to determine how much prep is "enough."

Now that I recall, I tried to provide such prep guidelines with Thugs & Thieves. The guidelines didn't make it into the first published version. I should aspire to completely fill the "prep gap" with the next revision, which I'm now suddenly more inspired to work on.

Anybody have any thoughts on the prep gap, its causes, whether or not it exists, or whatever?

[Mark D. Eddy]

Oddly enough, if you don't mind furries (anthropomorphic animals) IronClaw or JadeClaw from Sanguine Press might do what you want. I've built a party's worth of characters in less than ten minutes each, and NPC's have fixed stats. The game is designed for political/social conflict as much as combat, and I've  been able to run a game with nothing more that a vague idea of who's doing what.

They also give a quick outline for "Hosting" a game -- including, in each book, more than thirty NPCs of the form "Race, Profession, Sentence about personality/goals."

Don't know if this helps at all...

[Bankuei]

Hi Ethan,

I totally follow with what you are saying.  As I've said before, the only two methods that I know that hit theme consistantly either involve high levels of GM prep or more player input.  

Consider Trollbabe- this is one game I could easily see regularly running with 5 minutes prep- and it working just fine for long term play.  The key mechanic that allows that to happen?  Scene request.  By allowing players to make input into possible scenes and conflicts in play, the burden to keep play moving is spread out amongst the group and the players are allowed to keep play focused on what they're interested in with no fumbling by the GM.  TB's rule of Stakes allows the GM to clearly mark what the conflict is for most of the NPCs, and between the two you have quick, easy prep that can dish out good play on a regular basis.

Maybe you should consider taking a look at TB and instituting it for LoME or TSOY?  If you're willing to cede that tiny bit of traditional GM/player division, I bet you could get what you want in all other regards.

Chris

[clehrich]

Hey Ethan,

Let me ask a second about prep time.  You say really, really quick, right?  Okay, but what's included in that?

[*]Learning the rules
[*]Getting everyone else to learn the rules
[*]Getting the hang of the color
[*]Getting the hang of the setting
[*]Getting everyone else to master color and setting[/list:u]Seems to me that at least some of this is going to take time, but a lot of it may be one-time setup.  If you want a system that's got lots of color, then it seems like Ben's right: you've got to master that.

Except you don't, really.  The question is whether everyone else will do it for you.

Now this depends a lot on your gaming group, but in the right sort of system, you can let them handle the color and you just work on the rules.  If the rules are simple and the color is complicated, then with all that flying the GM has low prep.

But I'm not sure which of these things you want cut to the bone.

[Bill Cook]

Boy, this thread has really raised my interest in Trollbabe.

Ethan:

I think your need for clear instructions and a well-defined endpoint to prep is greatest, even beyond support for long term play. I can see why Sorcerer didn't float your boat.

(You're the guy that wrote Thugs & Thieves? Cool.)

To focus on that one issue, for the moment, I think Dogs in the Vineyard really satisfies. The chapter recaps read like boardgame instructions. To prepare a campaign, a GM creates a town and its NPC's. Pages 77 and 90 pretty much spell it out. There's no mystery to calling prep done.

I think just reading those two pages would greatly please you.

A designer can get caught up in expressing the conceptual level of a system when writing the rules text. It's almost like you have to write two drafts: the first, in which you capture the mad ideas, flitting about in your head; and the second, in which you address an audience.

It can be hard to get to the point. And the reader suffers for it.

[Edit: reading Chris' post, I realize I've been assuming prep is isolated from learning a particular system. i.e. You know the system; now what do you have to do before you can start playing?]