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?

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

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!

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'.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Mike Holmes wrote: 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.

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.

...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.

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

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.

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

Dude, what's with the confrontational posturing?

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.

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.

bcook1971 wrote: 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.

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...

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

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

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.

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?]

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.

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.

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

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

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

Mike Holmes wrote: 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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.