Where is the Grail?

[ethan_greer]

Well, first of all, I don't consider any of Chris L's bullet points to be part of prep. The first one is a necessary thing - the GM has to sit down and take the time to learn the game. But this activity requires no creative drain, it's just reading and retention. The rest of the bullet points can all happen in play.

Prep is where the GM sits down by himself or herself, and does what's needed done in order to ensure (or at least make as likely as possible) a fulfilling session. In the Tom Moldvay D&D, this was pretty clear cut - make a dungeon map, populate it with monsters and treasure, and come up with a reason for the party to go there.

DitV is on my list and is now bumped higher up. Thanks for the suggestion, Bill.

Trollbabe has decent prep guidelines, and they look pretty light. And Chris (Bankuei) is right about the scene request stuff in there too. But I'm not into the Trollbabe thematic trappings, at least not for the purposes of the dream game I'm thinking of orchestrating.

I have a number of options at this point:

[*]Forget about any aspirations of running such a game.[*]Write a new game.[*]Cobble a system together using a number of different game sources that have been discussed in this thread.[*]Give up on role-playing entirely and start a Sorry/Chess club.[/list:u]

[Sean]

Hi Ethan -

Another idea is that you could use TSoY or FATE or some other light-rules system (Pocket Universe, or maybe Rules Cyclopedia or Castles and Crusades D&D) and just write the adventure prep guidelines for your group, for the kind of adventures you all want to have. What kind of adventure are you looking for? This of course requires more work on your part.

Dogs in the Vineyard is an absolute model of clear GM prep guidelines. Trollbabe and MLwM are pretty good too, but DitV is the first game I've read since original D&D that really explains what to do with it.

Maybe just picking a system you know is functional for you and having a group character generation session will either (a) inspire you with ideas or (b) convince you to take up chess instead.

[M. J. Young]

Legends of Alyria has pretty much zero "GM prep" as you've defined it; the game is "GM optional". There is initial prep involved in setting up the game, but it is done corporately by all the players, who collectively create all the major characters in the anticipated story, parcel them among themselves, and determine where the story begins.

Although the system's color is closely wedded to the setting, it is very much a fantasy game, and could be divorced from Alyria and used with another setting, as long as there is the possibility to establish genuine conflicts in that setting and it doesn't require mechanical support for task resolution. In any event, it's worth a look in this regard.

--M. J. Young

[Ben Lehman]

Ethan -- the reason I seem so grumpy about this is threefold:
1)  "Tolkein" taken to mean things not in his books.  Grr...
2)  I have done a lot of work in low-prep, hi-color gaming.  You might want to check out Polaris.  It's pretty fast playing.  Nonetheless, the time for everyone to read everything, think about it, and be ready to start play is about 2 hours.
3)  I am a mean, terrible person.

Now, Polaris is a hippy GMless game.  But I suggest a lot of what you want isn't about GM prep (although the "prep gap" you speak of exists.)  The idea that the GM is the only one who needs to be familiar with the setting and color is just... bosh.

So what's a technique that can get everyone aware of and on board with setting, situation, color and system (oh, yeah, that other one, too...) really fast?

That's the grail.

yrs--
--Ben

[Mike Holmes]

First, Ben, D&D started with party play pretty much precisely because of the fellowship's jaunt through Moria. Which is not to say that this is a particularly Tolkien-esque trope, but that when people say that they want to play something Tolkien inspired, they often mean party play.

So let's jettison Tolkien here, and just call it the derivative form that D&D has created from it's pastiche of Tolkien, Conan, and Jack Vance, and call it "Standard Fantasy." What Ethan wants is standard fantasy. Which I understand, because most of what I still run is standard fantasy. In any case, it's his specification, so don't contradict Ethan. This thread is about coming up with what he wants, and that includes party play to some extent. OK?

And it's not hard at all to get everyone on board with setting and color. The advantage of playing standard fantasy, in fact, is that you can approach any gamer and say, "You know, something sorta like a D&D setting" and you're off and running on that part.

But if you mean to say that the prep requirement isn't too difficult, then, and that it's much harder to have a system that delivers, say, a non-standard fantasy world like Polaris, I'd agree. Fortunately for Ethan's purposes, that's not a requirement.

I think the requirements are pretty easy, but just haven't been done perfectly yet. I mean, Trollbabe comes close as mentioned, and Alyria might just do it almost to a T.

What if I told you, Ethan, that I had a gamist game, Standard Fantasy, works for long-term play, which had zero prep time. And was invented in 1978. It's an old SPI game called Death Maze. Characters head off into a dungeon which is created by drawing chits as you go. Monsters are generated randomly, as is the treasure they have. It's precisely the "Chess" RPG. Characters advance in ability, and return to the dungeon for more loot. (Dungeoneer isn't a replacement for Death Maze here, because long term development isn't a possibility from what I've seen).

Now, this doesn't satisfy your "story" requirements at all (and it's also not a "real" RPG by the "exploration" requirement - same as a CRPG). But what it shows is how the system itself can interject the elements into the game that one needs to keep play moving along.

But Bill has it right above...the tradeoff here is that you basically do the "prep" during play. In Death Maze you have to figure out how the next tile is laid down, and roll and check a chart to see what's in the magic pool. One can even do all of this before play. Making play much faster.

So which do you prefer? To have the absolutely neccessary information for interaction be generated during play, or before it? How about if between sessions, you simply rolled on a set of charts to prepare for the next session? Would that be the "Grail" for you? Just follow the procedure with little or no GM imagination neccessary?

Because it sounds to me like what might be the problem here is a lack of explicit process to get the prep done. I agree with you that in most games it says, "Make an adventure" and then at best they give you a finished adventure and say, "Make it something like this one." Without explaining the process by which they created the adventure.

What if someone demystified this process, generally? That is, what if somebody came out with a non-Sorcerer specific text that showed how to use the Sorcerer techniques with any basically nar supportive game system? Would that solve your problem? I mean if it made it pretty easy to do, though it might still take 20 minutes sometimes instead of ten?

I happen to know that somebody is working on just such a thing, actually.

Or is it part of your requirement that somehow the short prep method included would somehow be game specific? If so, why? I mean, I'd agree that it would be optimal to have a single system that did precisely what you're asking, leveraging the prep to somehow produce more reliably the thematic material that you're looking for. But I don't think that exact system exists right now. You've just thrown too many requirements together to have any system match perfectly.

But I think it could be done most certainly. Are you asking somebody else to design it, or whether or not you should yourself? Or, again, can you be satisfied with some supplementary instructions to, say, a game like Hero Quest?

Mike

[ethan_greer]

How about if between sessions, you simply rolled on a set of charts to prepare for the next session? Would that be the "Grail" for you? Just follow the procedure with little or no GM imagination neccessary?

Yes. As long as it lead to satisfying play. (By satisfying I think I mean Sim/Nar hybrid, for the GNS curious.)

What if someone demystified this process, generally? That is, what if somebody came out with a non-Sorcerer specific text that showed how to use the Sorcerer techniques with any basically nar supportive game system? Would that solve your problem? I mean if it made it pretty easy to do, though it might still take 20 minutes sometimes instead of ten?

Maybe.

I happen to know that somebody is working on just such a thing, actually.

Good news, that. I will buy the shit out of such a book should it appear.

But I think it could be done most certainly. Are you asking somebody else to design it, or whether or not you should yourself? Or, again, can you be satisfied with some supplementary instructions to, say, a game like Hero Quest?

In a perfect world, I would write the game. I am unable to do so at the moment, however. If I can get what I want through supplementing another system, that'd be nice.

I'm off to check out Alyria.

[ethan_greer]

Ben, I didn't mean to step on your Tolkien peeve. Sorry 'bout that. I like Mike's "Standard Fantasy" better anyway, so I'll stick with that.

For Polaris, is that 2 hours once, or two hours per session? What's prep time like between sessions? Just out of curiosity.

I didn't mean to suggest that the GM is the only one who needs to be familiar with setting and color. Color, I agree, needs to be established amongst all the participants.

For this pie-in-the-sky game I'm thinking of, setting could be something that got fleshed out gradually as needed in play in a collaborative fashion with GM having final say in what sticks. So, GM needs to have a decent vision of the sorts of things appropriate to the setting, but the specifics are open.

And yes, what you describe would indeed be the grail.

Anyway, I'm off to check out Polaris.

[groundhog]

I've found that the ebst way to do low-prep with any system and setting is to come up with one big event for the first session which grabs attention, then follow up from there. Sure, you're gambling that the group will accept the bait. Some bait is pretty hard to pass up, though.

If your group are police officers or knights of some court, then nonlocal rogues coming in and just generally terrorizing the people and retreating once they take fire and have enough loot is a good place to start. Do the PCs follow them outright, fight them in the streets and try to hold them there, wait for a pattern, try to figure out clues, or scour the countryside while the trail is somewhat warm? The only prep you need is a crude village map, some nasty-natured NPCs and a list of possible clues about finding the nasties.  If your group are demon hunters, it's very similar or they could have found something and gone hunting before anything bad has happened in town.

Brigands striking a travelling party is similar. You may think of it as a one-shot if the PCs dispatch the robbers quickly, but there are ways around that. What if your group sees more robbers in the bushes who were to be reinforcements and who run away as soon as things get nasty? Some groups will want to follow. If you can get one of the party (a friendly NPC preferably) kidnapped or the party's money all taken and then have similar attacks around town, that's motive to go into a few sessions worth of finding people and getting things set straight. After that, perhaps the local crime boss regularly sends baddies after the group, so you have several confrontations before clearing everything up.

If your group starts out destitute and don't have many objections to using their skills to make money, then have them try to find work as body guards, building guards, couriers, livestock handlers, or whatever. Whereever there are things of value and there are criminals, there's something there that can be an adventure for the good guys.

Conversely, if your player characters are not the good guys, they can be the robbers, rustlers, card cheats, cat burglars, con men, smugglers, or demon summoners that attract do-gooders wanting to stop them.

Not that I'd recommend the game itself for serious long-term gaming, but while playing Shadowrun, this has been pretty common with my groups. There's usually more time spent making characters than deciding what scenarios to run the first couple of sessions and what they might contain. More depth usually comes in later scenarios, but we often use the stories of previous sessions to fuel the backstory. It's easy when your PCs are mercenaries, merchants, or police types to find connections from one scenario to the next. Nearly everyone is conencted to someone else. Maybe the brigands were udner some local crime boss. Then maybe that boss was paying a debt to someone with the money, and that person's bigger bad guys come looking for why the debt isn't being paid. Or maybe the local boss was on the run from somewhere else, and they heard how you handled him. Now they want to know if your party can come handle some other low-lifes.

Maybe your PCs are in their favorite restaurant or pub when it's set ablaze. Your party vows revenge when their friend the barkeep runs out into the street and is cut down by the arsonists.

Let's say there's a racial clash, and that people in your party are in the minority in the area. This is not Tolkien really as I present it, but it has multiple races with tensions. There's a chance to try to figure out why tensions rose to this point and to try to get them back down. There's also a chance to fight your way out of town. The players might choose instead to seek reinforcements. This gets really interesting if, for example, you have an elf, a coupel men, and a dwarf in a party. There's this turning of dwarves on elves in the local area, but the party has no problems with either race and doesn't know the cause. Obviously, fighting the attacking dwarves is no good, as is attacking the defending elves. Figuring out why there was attack at all when the two races normally tolerate each other is a goal that could take a long time and lots of sidesteps. There are some on each side who still trust most of the other to some degree, but cannot tell which to trust. The party must be stealthy at times to avoid roving bands of vigilantes from either side while investigating and recruiting cool-headed allies from both sides. Maybe an elf really did something to some prominent dwarf to start this. Maybe some wizard, demon, or whatever made fake indications of an attack of one race on the other, and it just keeps escalating and spreading further geographically. Finding the right source of the problem, holding them accountable, and trying to diffuse the situation are all important if the players take this on. Or, they could flee outside the area and wait for it to blow over. In that case, a random encounter with something else, maybe our previous brigands, could come into play.

Having low-prep is less about the system I think, and more about having a big grab of attention up front, with ties from one scenario to the next. Come up with one big but fairly simple issue that effects a whole geographic area, and chop it up into small pieces. Session one, survive a conflict and determine who caused it. Session two, find out how to locate those people. Session three, get together the weapons, armor, supplies, and people needed to take care of the issue without drawing too much attention. Session four, try to take care of the issue, and either find out it was the tip of the iceberg or that there will now need to be negotiations about something. Session five, explore possibilities of the iceberg or try to hold the negotiations and keep the recent peace from failing. Session six, travel to where the crime syndicate is headquartered and just survive getting there with the price on your heads or formalize the peace agreement from Session five and present it to the general populace of all sides. Wait for feedback (not all of which will be peaceful, and may start intra-racial bickering about being soft on the opposite side).

Remember that with any complex bad guy, that there are not just the good guys fighting him, but other bad guys too. Some NPCs should be opportunistic, leading to more conflict from more areas. Some bad guys may be partnered with good guys, too -- either perceived good guys with dark secrets, or good guys the bad guys were deceiving. They may turn on the other good guys when bad guys are taken down. Your party could be fugitives for the task of helping. There's not a lot of prep needed once your characters are being hunted, just some NPCs to do the hunting.


The above are just examples. The one type of scenario is kind of computer-game schtick with bosses controlling minions and such, but the characters are free to try any number of ways to deal with the issue. Many more scenarios can be written which lead from one session to the next easily. I tend to have a few thrown-together NPCs on both sides, and one or two halfway developed ones. Quick and dirty sketches of places can help, and just a paragraph of back story about the area can too.  

The first things I'd look at for a low-prep time campaign are quick character creation or suitable pregens, a system that handles mystery and intrigue well, relatively simple motivations for NPCs (like safety, greed, bloodlust, power, honor, or hate), and circumstances around the players that are difficult to ignore.  

There's also the job-board type of adventure. Many different types of work are offered at a central location (pub or market up through today's Internet sites), the party sees all of them, and the party decides which to take on to get some quick money. These can be a dungeon crawl, an escort mission, helping to harvest crops (at which time the farmer explains his workers keep dissappearing, and that's why he needs new help), or whatever. You can spend five minutes on each of two to five "jobs" up front, and just replace every job or two they do with one or two new ones. If they decide to right a wrong in the meantime, become full-time explorers, or move on to the next town, then have one hook to throw at them which can get their attention on the way to wherever they are going. Once it's used, replace it with a new one as well. Throw in a couple of openly strange NPCs in each town that the players are free to investigate but who don't openly attack the PCs. Maybe they are good guys, maybe they are bad guys, or maybe they just aren't interested in any of the worldly concerns of the PCs. It gives the PCs something to be interested in besides the job board, and if they bite, have the NPC slip away until the next session. At that point, you can spend some of that ten to twenty minutes for that session fleshing the NPC, his abode, his connections to the town and townsfolk (if any), and other things out a bit. I've used (and seen used) this job-board type of adventure used outright, and just as effectively as a side-story in a bigger campaign. The party is split and trying to regroup (so one part of the party stays put in town while the other makes its way back), or needs money for supplies to go on a quest, or needs to to research and can't spend all the money they have with them on lodging in a strange town. So, they go earn some money in the short term, have some interesting side adventures, and get back on the trail to the original plot. This not only serves the purpose of the party regrouping and saving up, but it gives the GM (if you're playing in a way that one person or two people drive a good portion of the story -- to which obviously this post is already coupled) a chance to use the spare here-and-there prep minutes from these sessions to build the more complex one to come after.

Now, with games in which each player contributes abut equally to the background story, just make sure the premise is clear. Have each player jot down three to five interesting things related to the premise, each on one sheet (from 3x5" cards up to a full notebook page). Pick one from each player by show of hands, and try to work them all into the plot. From there, if the system lets the players control parts of the background, even better. If not, the GM just needs to tie the themes together.

I don't give NPCS nearly the detail of PCs for the most part. An NPC thug in a fortune-based system might only have initiative, strength, and health stats. In fact, a dozen of them will probably be 8 identical weaker thugs pulled from one card and 4 stronger ones from another. An NPC wizard might have four or five spells preselected unless he's likely to be the main ally or enemy of the party. These can easily be scribbled down, along with a primary and secondary motivation and one or two personality traits, on an index card. That's a real timesaver compared to generating full characters in some of the more stat-heavy games. Why do you need to fully develop a character that's fodder for the story? Save the time for the parts that really matter.

[ethan_greer]

Wow, that's a lot to digest. Thanks for taking the time. Looks like good advice for the most part.

I take it you've run low-prep long-term fantasy games before? If so, what system(s) did you use? What were their strengths and weaknesses?

[groundhog]

The systems I've used most for classic sword-and-sorcery type fantasy are Palladium Fantasy, Rifts in a fantasy setting (not much different from the previous), AD&D 2nd edition (more or less straight), GURPS, VtM with a custom fantasy setting, highly customized AD&D 2nd edition, and some custom games my friends and I have put together but not yet published.

Truthfully, my groups have had fun with all of them but I can't honestly recommend any of them. GURPS isn't too bad, but it's not one of the ones that easily facilitates low-prep sessions, IMHO.

I've run across many of the issues with the bigger-name RPGs that have come up before on the Forge. Spending so much time customizing systems to  work well is how I became interested in RPG design. I and many of my friends have written systems and background material for many different games, but never released them. We never felt comfortable enough with them to show them to strangers. My whole reason for being a Forge user is to learn, discuss, and tweak until I have some games I think are good enough to share with the public.

I think the most important thing about a system to use for low-prep games is that you understand the character creation process and the meanings of any info on a character sheet well enough to wing NPC creation without having to perform the whole process for each incidental character. Have general ideas about lots of things, and only flesh out specifics where you must.

All that being said, the most successful long-term low-prep campaign I've ever run with a published fantasy game was AD&D 2nd edition with lots of magic system customization and a little combat simplification. I was co-DM with a buddy of mine, and the campaign lasted 18 months with biweekly 6-10 hour sessions. Each session generally required about 10 to 15 minutes of prep. We'd write 5 or so sentences about the main threat beign faced, one or two sentences about each of about 10 sideplots. We'd at least partly randomize most of the NPCs besides the main NPC for each sideplot and the top two or three for the main sideplot. We'd grab creatures and items randomly out of the supplements and toss any out that we didn't want rather than trying to find the perfect items for each NPC and storage room. Noone ever complained and I'm not sure they ever realized we were rushing things together. A play log helped, because we'd recall details from one session out of the log and explore them more fully in later sessions if they still applied. This allowed us to embellish our designs during play and not get caught being inconsistent.

I still can't recommend a particular published system for what you want to do. Perhaps gthe people who have already recommended systems could give you an idea which of these methods will work well in those games.