I flipped through the Savage Worlds RPG while I was at my local gaming store yesterday, and was interested to see that Savage Worlds bills itself as requiring very little prep, and shifts the traditional GM/player roles a little bit. This got me to thinking about prep-light RPGs in general.
What prep-light systems are out there, and what makes them prep-light?
I see prep-light RPGs as falling into three categories:
Beer and Pretzels RPGs
Beer and pretzels games like Toon, Og: The Caveman Roleplaying Game and kill puppies for satan are designed from the ground up to require little to no prep, and they don’t really benefit from extra prep. I’ve run both Toon and Og with close to zero prep, and I wouldn’t have wanted to do more prep than I did.
These games don’t have a whole lot in the way of sourcebooks or complex rules, and they leave a lot of things up to GM fiat. They’re also funny, and often designed to be played as one-shots or diversions from your regular weekly game.
Short-Play Indie RPGs
Indie RPGs like Dogs in the Vineyard and Primetime Adventures are designed with fairly specific play cycles in mind (for example, PTA specifies how many sessions each show will include) — and they shift GM/player roles around quite a bit. They also tend to have very tight themes, and they don’t take a kitchen sink approach to mechanics (there aren’t a whole lot of rules to learn).
I’ve read (and read about) these kinds of RPGs, but never played them. I think my conclusions are reasonable, but if I’m way off on my assumptions please call me out on it.
Long-Play Traditional RPGs
Games like D&D, GURPS and the various World of Darkness titles are geared towards relatively long-term play. That can mean decades-long campaigns with the same characters (the old school D&D approach), shorter arcs that last for 12-18 months or anything in between, but the end result is pretty open-ended.
These RPGs tend to to have rules for most situations that come up during play (lengthy combat sections, for example), and they’re built to support a variety of play styles and goals. Prepping for — and running — these kinds of RPGs is the topic of a lot of GMing advice, and has been for many years. (On TT, see: I’d Rather Rake Leaves than Do Prep, More Fun, Less Work, Speeding Up Item Management and Start Small.)
The Questions
For the first two categories, beer and pretzels and short-play indie RPGs, do you agree with my take on why those games are generally prep-light? And what factors that I didn’t cover play into that?
For the last category, long-play traditional RPGs, are there any games that fit this definition that aren’t heavy on prep? If so, what makes them different from the ones that are heavy on prep?
And lastly, how can the third category be made more like the first two without losing sight of the open-ended, long-play aspect (drifted, in other words)?
The issue in the long-running games is GM burnout/lack of freshness. It is one thing to do a week of solid prep, for a solid day of gaming. Or enough prep for a ‘scenario’/dungeon. But the long running campaigns where the GM has a job/real-life run into real-world issues.
We had a game set in the ‘Shadowrun’ universe, but using the old Rolemaster/Cyberspace rules, but we shared out the responsibilities and let the GMing rotate. One guy ran the Harlequin plots, another a series of mercenary scenarios, then there was the Bugs. So each player would have the _sheets_ for the NPCs that they had run previously. So the current GM doesn’t need to know for sure all the details of an NPC we’d run across 3 years previously.
This has the possibility of munchkinism, so it has to be used with people that are our of the sheer powergaming and into fleshing out a more interesting story. But that gaming group met roughly three weekends a month for 14 hours of gaming each for nearly 12 years. GM can’t make it? Fine… I’ve got a story in exactly the same universe. Shade, roll dodge… a car wipes out the bike next to you, but you recognize that the biker is a Bug! now what? No you can’t find X, Y, or Z, they’re busy….
Heh, I have a very different view of light prep than you do, Martin. DitV I consider medium prep, unless you steal a town someone else has already completed 🙂
Generally, here’s what I’ve found makes for short/zero prep:
1. Have system generate conflict
When the system itself creates the conflict, you don’t have to prep it really. You see this more in boardgames than rpgs, but stuff like Polaris and Falling Leaves are built with that in mind. Likewise Inspectres “create a client/mission” chart does the same thing.
2. Make challenge prep non-complex
Most games, the GM is required to make characters which are full fledged character builds (or fudges picking out key stats), but still, that’s a lot of math to deal with, especially if you have a lot of weird derived attributes. Games like HeroQuest or Tunnels & Trolls where you just assign a challenge rating and do not have to make a lot of calculations means it’s terribly easy to just glance at a chart and make up stats or challenge ratings on the fly.
I’m not familiar with any of the Indy games, except what I’ve read online. I want to expand on Chris’ item #2, make challenge prep non-complex. There are two basic ways to do this:
A. Make all characters not very complex. If you are focused, you may get something fun in the character design. If not, the best you can probably hope for is either beer and pretzels or a game where the fun lies elsewhere than in complex characters expressed via mechanics.
B. Make the complexity scale, as needed. Or rather, design the system so that scaling is easy, obvious, and explicit. (An implicit example would be a d20 GM writing down only the name and a few skills on a barkeep, because he was not expected to engage in combat.)
Many systems, I think, try to finesse option B by making “monsters” use different rules than player characters. See old school D&D, for example. As soon as 3E decided to make monsters use the same rules, however, they made prep more complex.
As someone trying to write a long-term play game that can include complex characters (PC and NPC) but does not require them, one of my challenges is to design a system that really does provide option B.
Oh, and one of the secrets to Toon prep is that it does provide this kind of scaling, even though it doesn’t really need it. You can whip up a quick NPC in Toon with just the four stats. Of course, a game that crazy makes such scaling easier to design.
Chris – good point on DitV prep. The one bit I would add is that if you use a pre-written town, prep is blessedly simple. There isn’t much to read and then you generate a set of proto NPC stats (and if you use Chris Week’s web proto NPC generator, that’s a flash). Contrast this to using a D&D module, where you still need to set aside several hours to read the module, and possibly transfer opposition stats to something more useable.
Definitely making NPCs not need the same complexity as a PC is important to reducing prep if the PCs have any complexity. I wouldn’t quite consider the D&D example of only specifying the 2 skills the bartender is likely to need such an example (you still need additional stats if the system’s conflict resolution system – aka combat – is invoked). Burning Wheel is a better example (minor NPCs have all 3s or all 4s or whatever, with a few better skills, and it specifies what their derrived stats look like).
I always liked Rune Quest as an example of the NPCs having the same stats as PCs, but being simpler to prep because you don’t need to follow the same generation/experience rules.
For Cold Iron, I’ve come up with a system to make it easy to stat up NPCs, though that depends on simpler characters overall. The key there is that the strategic choices for the PCs are not so much in stats and skills, but in equipment (which is easy to quickly assign to NPCs).
But Burning Wheel is teaching me another side of the prep issue. Prep isn’t just coming up with NPC stats. It’s also coming up with situation. And Burning Wheel doesn’t have much guidelines for such, and doesn’t have a narrow focus.
Frank
Preaching to the choir here, in the interest of clarity:
Maybe I need to reword my “easy, obvious, and explicit” criteria, because the d20 bartender example was meant to be an example of a GM wanting the kind of scaling I mean, but not having it. So they make it up. And of course the problem is that the bartender might end up in combat, but the notes the GM has on him are worthless for combat. That is, you don’t have a simplified character, you have an incomplete character. (A purist might note that giving a few ability scores and a few skills, one can make an educated guess on the bartender’s class and level, and thus rough combat capabilities. This is true, but is exactly the kind of reverse engineering that isn’t easy, obvious, or explicit.)
Derived stats are pretty much the only way I have seen games attempt to address this issue at the design level. Toon does it, Hero system does it. GURPs does it. Sounds like Burning Wheel does it. Trouble is, derived stats don’t so much handle complexity as push it into another part of the design. Derived stats have other issues–which is why there is endless debate, for example, in Hero circles over the usefullness versus complexity cost of the derived values. For one thing, a lot of derived values make it hard to fiddle with a system without changing all the derived material.
There’s also a (smallish) set of games like Universalis in which most, if not all, of the prep is done in-game, and is indistinguishable from the rest of the game.
Roger – good point on Universalis, though it could be noted that if one played a multi-session Universalis game, there might be a small amount of prep if the players determined it was desireable to type up and organize the notes taken during each session. But that prep would be pretty trivial compared to even the task of creating a Dogs in the Vinyard town from scratch.
That brings to mind that there is value in indentifying the amount and types of prep necessary. Off hand, I can think of three separate types of prep:
+ creative – generating ideas, situation, etc.
+ mechanical – writing up NPC stats, determining obstacle DCs, etc.
+ organizational – organizing and neatening up notes, e-mailing notes to all the players, updating a game Wiki, etc.
Two minor notes on Burning Wheel: First, the derrived stats aren’t separately purchased, so the rules on simple NPCs is just providing some information to make it quicker to compute the derrived stats. Second, Burning Wheel has another thing that helps simplify prep and better use the simple NPCs. Burning Wheel does not require the full combat system be engaged for every conflict where combat skill is relevant. The GM may call for a simple opposed test, and this is especially worthwhile when the survival or injury of the participants is not relevant to the conflict.
Frank
(Scott) Dogs in the Vineyard and Primetime Adventures are prep light, but for a different reason than you guessed.
I touched on the reasons you mentioned, but only broadly — your examples are excellent, and I couldn’t agree more that traditional RPGs can learn from their nimble indie cousins. Flag framing is an incredibly useful — and driftable — concept.
Al: I think that’s one of the big reasons why so many indie games focus on shorter play cycles. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that real life intrudes on long campaigns more and more often, and that’s really starting to change my POV.
Chris: Yep, we probably do see light/medium/heavy prep differently. 😉 Your points are excellent — thank you.
CJ: Care to share any details on your game-in-progress?
Frank: Burning Wheel is a tricky one, which is why I didn’t bring it up. 😉 I’m not sure which of my categories it fits into, if any.
You’re definitely onto something with your division of prep by type — I’d love to see that expanded. If you post about it on your blog, please let me know so I can link to it.
Roger: I’d forgotten about Universalis, the game that breaks so many tidy systems of categorization. 😉
Martin,
Building a good scaling mechanism for character design is one of the two big gaping holes in my current game design. I have identified the problem, but I’m not happy with solutions thus far. I was going to cop out. Unfortunately, other parts of the design (“players play all the monsters”, and design many of them) indicates that I must find a solution, or find a way to bypass the issue. ;D
The best I have so far is that I’ve promoted some categories in the design from a purely conceptual state to having an effect in design. For example, I have the category “weapons” (referring to ability with weapons), which has whatever specific groups of weapons the GM wants for his particular campaign. Might be “blades, hafted, etc.” Might be “short sword, rapier, etc.” But the important thing was that “weapons” was only a way of talking about them, not something you recorded on the sheet. There are about 15 such conceptual categories in the current design.
Now characters can be passed around. The person who designed the initial character, first introduced the character in-game, added to the character, or play it next–they might all be different people. So you see the need for scaling. The important thing is to convey an idea of the character without necessarily pinning it down precisely. (We want those players that add to the character to make informed, but real choices.)
Say I design a generic orc grunt. Orcs use all kinds of weapons, and this guy hasn’t even been used in game yet. I specify that his “weapon” ability is 5 (competent, but nothing spectacular). This does *not* mean that he has a 5 in all weapons. You can’t directly derive his battle axe ability from that number. All it does is provide a marker for the next player to pick him up–so that they don’t do any reverse engineering from pure text or unrelated skills. It says that if the orc had all of his individual weapon skills written out, he’d roughly have a five in the things he bothers to use.
Player A picks up (a copy of) the generic orc, gives him a name, and decides this particular orc has a short sword. He might decide that the orc prefers the sword, and bump his skill up to 7 or 8. Or he be in a hurry and use the 5. Or maybe the orc picked the shortsword up in recent loot and only has a 3. Whatever, this makes a statement about the orc. If Player B later takes over, and decides the orc has a knife at his belt, then skill with that probably needs to average out with early short sword pick. (Either player could also bump the orc’s skill up or down, using “GM Points” to do so. But then this isn’t a generic orc anymore.)
As you can see from that example, I’m largely punting on the issue so far. I don’t want derived values. I do want a way to communicate information about a large number of skills without writing them all down. The fact that I want to leave some wiggle room actually helps in my particular design.
I’m also considering the idea of semi-derived values based on random die rolls. So perhaps Player A decides this orc has a short sword, then rolls againt the 5 to determine actual skill with it.
Back to the larger topic, I do believe that something that really address such prep issues has to be built into the game design from the start. This issue is holding up about a third of my game text, because I anticipate any decent solution necessarily changing other parts of the design.
CJ: Do you have a design blog/Forge threads/etc. for your game? I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed your comments here, and I like what you’ve shared about this project so far — I’d love to see more. 🙂
Frank: Thanks! Great post — it’ll be the subject of tomorrow’s minipost here.
Frank, I didn’t have the patience to navigate Blogger comments last week, or I’d have commented on your site: I find that when I do the “creative” prep myself, the other three prep types are easier to do. So when I use a pre-written module, it can actually be more prep work (and less enjoyable) than when I write my own.
Martin, I haven’t put out anything on my game in public yet. I’m trying to get the first draft written and playtested before digging too deep into that aspect. My gut tells me that some Forge ideas are helpful for me. Other Forge ideas I’m deliberately bucking against. So I want to see where I can go on my own before reviewing the game against those ideas.
The need to handle prep issues is really driving my design at the moment, and not just in that big gaping hole that “scaling” represents. I have several pieces that work well enough for play, but I’m not satisfied with the amount of prep required. One of the ways I’m trying to make prep easier is use some of the concepts from software design. In Frank’s terms, the main effect is that certain “organizational” prep support must be built into the game itself, rather than supplied by the players.
CJ: I can appreciate the desire to hold back until you’re ready. If you’re in the market for a non-Forge place to bounce around ideas, though (especially GMing-related ideas, like prep concerns), keep the GMing Q&A Forum in mind. 🙂
CJ: The thing that always stalls me is an initial idea. An evocative map can be all it takes to get me going. Other times, the situation in a module is valuable.
My problem with D20, and especially Arcana Evolved which doesn’t have the level of 3rd party support, is the complexity of NPCs. AE spell casters basically need to be built from scratch. I also kept needing monsters that the easiest way to get what I wanted was to advance a monster from the Monster Manual, but that then takes work to re-figure BAB, saves, skills, choose new feats, etc.
And sometimes picking treasure became such a hassle that I basically told the players: “There’s a bunch of treasure, in fact enough to get each PC up to what they should have by the wealth guidelines – tell me what items you want.”
As the PCs gained levels, the complexity went up, and the spell casters became more and more dominant.
Right now I’m struggling with how to prep for Burning Wheel. I’m about ready to can the game as being unplayable for me right now.
One thing that’s starting to be really frustrating is that D20 players can’t be bothered to learn anything else because it’s too much work. Meanwhile, D20 GMs are burning out due to the prep effort. I guess as long as there’s enough people willing to GM, the situation will never change.
Frank
“My problem with D20, and especially Arcana Evolved which doesn’t have the level of 3rd party support, is the complexity of NPCs.”
I know what you mean, though I want to disagree on a minor point to support a larger one: d20 NPCs are typically not all that complex for the degree of detail you get. Sure, it can be somewhat difficult to run a d20 high level character with a lot of resources (such as a bunch of spells), but not grossly so compared to options available. That’s not entirely true, but I’m generalizing for clarity. 🙂
However, d20 NPCs achieve this state by moving tons and tons of complexity into the prep side. Heck, just writing up the listing is an exercise in calculating and organizing a bunch of things that might be needed. Now, in d20, derived stats aren’t the only thing that contributes, but they are a big part of it. There are really only three options for the game designer, where the question of complicated derived options are concerned:
1. Simplify the game (i.e. remove the complexity, perhaps more than desired), by using only derived stats that can be quickly and easily calculated in play.
2. Keep the derived stats, but calculate them during prep instead of play (possibly impeding play time).
3. Abstract the complexity into some mechanic other than derived stats (perhaps leading to subtle, unwanted consequences due to the nature of the abstraction).
It is in this area that I think the drive to have better character sheets for games can yield the most useful results.
Note that I’m using “derived stats” in a very general sense here. Getting more spells when your D&D wizard gets another level is a form of derived abilities.
I was primarily talking about the complexity of prep for NPCs in D20.
But I actually started to discover issues with D20 run time complexity. I kept forgetting to use NPC feats and abilities (and a couple times I even accidentally invented abilities in play).
Now I’m not sure if Cold Iron seems less complex because of my familiarity with it, but somehow, it feels like it has just as much depth as D20, with seemingly a lot less complexity. Now one factor is that it doesn’t have so many ways to do the same thing (look at how many different ways undead “drain” works for a simple example…).
Part of D20’s complexity actually turns out to be the challenge rating system. By having such a metric (and the metric actually having a significant factor of useability), and tying XP very directly to that metric, the prep is more complex. Now the good part is that a relatively innexperienced GM will probably do better at setting decent challenges with D20 than they might do with Cold Iron (which doesn’t have such a metric). On the other hand, the novice D20 GM may have no clue what to do when the CR rating is horribly wrong, and if that happens very rarely, he may never learn how to deal with it.
Of course the complexity in a given GM’s view is dependant on how the individual GM deals with each of the 4 categories of prep. For me, D20 prep is the most intensive of all the games I’ve run recently. Cold Iron is fairly light. Dogs in the Vinyard is even lighter (especially if you use towns others have created). Burning Wheel completely stumps me, and I have no idea how light or heavy the prep would be if I had some clue how to prep for it.
Frank