Since we've been discussing lately games which drove us away due to the great amount of mechanical prep, it seemed like a good time to discuss the games which we can prep stuff for easily.
My king right now is 4th-ED D&D. I'm running a successful game with players up around 4th level, and if I need to create something on-the-fly the DMG has a ton of tools to help out - from a random dungeon generator to room contents to "package" of monsters encountered (wolf pack, dragon's den, double line, etc.) or traps set, etc.
And with 4th, I'm finding it bleedingly easy to "reskin" monsters as often as necessary - a young green dragon became the "Great Old Pumpkin" monster around Hallowe'en, with special effects on its attacks changed as necessary.
So, what games do you find are easy to prep for? Ones you don't spend 45 hours running the numbers for?
Savage Worlds is very easy to prep for (or not) once you've run a few games.
I frequently run monsters "out of my head" with little or no prep.
It's also fun. :)
I haven't run Savage Worlds, only played it, but yeah, I can see prep being a breeze.
The older games, of course: OD&D, Basic D&D, Gamma World, Traveller.
True20
D&D 4
Savage Worlds
I still like the way A|State is laid out - each district of the city and major organisation has an interesting location and a distinctive NPC listed with it. I ran a campaign with pretty much zero prep simply by improvising out of the book.
HeroQuest is very easy to prep for. You just need to know what scenario or story you are telling.
Most of my time is taken up making the props, art, maps and handouts for my games.
Pendragon, once you have the GPC, is very easy to prep the adventure(s) and events for the each year are already lined out and every year follows a similar routine (meet lord during spring, head to royal court, christmas court, etc).
The stats for all the NPCs or besties the knights might have to face in combat are in the rulebook, or the GPC itself, as are the stats for any major batles they might find themselves in.
Tunnels and Trolls is probably the easiest game to prep for ever.
World of Darkness is pretty easy. Just come up with a couple dice pools per NPC (or make them up as you need them and write them down).
Anything from Precis Intermedia preps pretty easy. Genre Diversion 3, Two Fisted Tales, Iron Gauntlets etc.
Quote from: KrakaJak;287147Tunnels and Trolls is probably the easiest game to prep for ever.
World of Darkness is pretty easy. Just come up with a couple dice pools per NPC (or make them up as you need them and write them down).
Anything from Precis Intermedia preps pretty easy. Genre Diversion 3, Two Fisted Tales, Iron Gauntlets etc.
WoD (at least the old version, I'm not familiar with the new one) is an absolute nightmare to prepare, NPCs have to be as fully fleshed-out as characters and the books suffered from a severe lack of templates.
Unless of course by "coming up with a couple of dice pools" you mean "winging it and bullshiting the party so your version of the story goes on", which is what the WoD ST's I played under did and one of the reasons I stopped playing those games.
It felt like playing a story someone else had made and the dice where rolled just to make noise as they hit the table.
It depends what kind of "prep" you're talking about. There's the mechanical prep, of getting ready the mechanical/statistical side of an adventure, and there's the "setting prep" which involves having to plan out what's going on in the setting during a session or what is going to be happening as far as plot/NPCs in a given adventure.
They're two different kinds of prep, and some games are easy for some and hard for others. Amber, for example, is incredibly easy for "mechanics prep" but takes a lot of effort to work on for "setting prep".
I would agree that Pendragon, using the GPC, is the easiest I've ever encountered, on both counts. You just have to read what's going on that year, and possibly one of the general adventures you might want to tack in there. It takes hardly any prep time at all.
RPGPundit
If you have the dungeon tiles and a bunch of minis, 4e is stupid easy to prep for. If you belong to RPGA, you can just download one of dozens adventures designed for 4 hour play so life becomes even simpler. Personally, I like setting / adventure prep because so much of my gaming fun comes from creating my own shiznack.
T&T is great for quick prep...certainly no more work than OD&D. I am a huge fan of Mazes & Minotaurs because its an uber-easy prep in regards to creating interesting new adventure thanks to the Odyssey rules.
L5R preps pretty quick once you have run it awhile and know the setting and the characters well enough.
I find Sci-Fi prep more time intensive in regards to adventures than fantasy. I find I put more time into prepping Rifts, Gamma World or Traveller than I do in creating fantasy stuff.
From what Ive read of 4th Edition adventures from WOTC, prep time is setting up the miniatures and running the game. They seem to have taken all of the hard work out of running game.
Quote from: Lawbag;287176From what Ive read of 4th Edition adventures from WOTC, prep time is setting up the miniatures and running the game. They seem to have taken all of the hard work out of running game.
In my experience running 4E, this is very true. Not only is prep easy, but the format WotC is using for monster stat blocks and encounter areas makes it a breeze to run from behind the screen.
Over the Edge is really simple and the mechanics flow fast. Most of the prep you have to do is simple story prep and once you get used to the setting pulling crazy shit out of your ass becomes second nature. Three stats for the system makes it easy, if you have trouble buy some of the dirt cheap On The Edge CCG booster packs and use the stats from the cards in there. Hell random draw them for the NPC's that are encountered.
I've also ran old Red Box Dungeons and Dragons with zero prep many a time. But almost everybody knows of the ease there.
That's my two cents.
FUDGE is a super easy no-prep game.
Now that I think of it the easiest game ever to prep as to be d02, It Know No Limit after all...
Savage Worlds, Basic D&D and nWoD are very easy to set up for. All three games can have a character banged out in minutes, antagonists even faster. And all three games are so simple, you rarely need to look at the books after playing a session or three. Unless you're doped up on morphine like me, but that's a whole other tale. But even for someone blasted out of reality my opiates, I find these three games easy to run.
-=Grim=-
Hearts & Souls, superhero games are easy enough, in general. Make some characters, go fight crime. While it doesn't have to be a literal fight either. Could be investigation into a kidnapping, the stopping of a flood, the rescue of people trrapped in a burning building. All the usual fun challenges superheroes face. Throw one out, let the heroes go after it.
Other similar superhero games with low prep: Truth & Justice, Bash, 4C/MSH, Marvel Saga, Supercrew.
FATE 3.0/Spirit of the Century is very easy to prep once you know the system. The games almost run themselves once you are under way.
I'll second FATE/Spirit of the Century.
Quote from: Atsuku Nare;287115So, what games do you find are easy to prep for? Ones you don't spend 45 hours running the numbers for?
Warhammer FRP. First edition, anyway. I haven't run the second edition.
I've always been able to run a pickup game with it very quickly and because of the random character generation, I've even been able to run a game at a game club meeting in Japan where the players rolled up their own characters rather than using pre-generated characters. Picking and adjusting monsters is very easy and the setting is so colorful and works so well that it practically runs itself.
I'm surprised nobodies mentioned it yet, cause it seems to jump out at me. Risus.
Well, the easiest game I know of to prepare for is Trollbabe, where all you really need is an adventure seed, but as that's apparently not an RPG I'll go with HeroQuest. You can define an entire NPC with something like Warrior 17.
I'm equally surprised that nobody has mentioned Call Of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies.
Quote from: shalvayez;289293I'm equally surprised that nobody has mentioned Call Of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies.
Well I take "easy to prep" to mean among other things coming up with an adventure. I would imagine coming up with a decent CoC adventure, one with a solid backstory, a trail of logical clues and really scarey moments is actually quite hard.
Of course a ot depends on what you're used to.
Easy to prep ? Broadsword, of course. Here's a review of the game:
http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13301.phtml
It may be a socalled Beer & Pretzels game but I have used it for a wide variety of games.
Regards,
David R
I'll second Over the Edge, but expand. In addition to the mechanics that make it a snap to create a new character (a few seconds is all it takes), the game provides huge numbers of people, places and things that can be dropped into play. By huge, I mean the game would be about 20 pages without them, but the book is over 200 pages. That makes prep really quick, but the way the trait system works, you can get much more story and play out of the game than you would expect.
Quote from: Soylent Green;289307Well I take "easy to prep" to mean among other things coming up with an adventure. I would imagine coming up with a decent CoC adventure, one with a solid backstory, a trail of logical clues and really scarey moments is actually quite hard.
Of course a ot depends on what you're used to.
It also depends on how averse you are to a bit of illusionism. Think up half a dozen clues, throw them out there, decide what it all means on the fly. Not pretty or Ideologically Sound, but if it's for a short-notice no-prep one-shot it'll do the job.
In my admittedly limited experience, Spirit of the Century. I've found that we can make up any crazy shit we like on the fly and find a way (often several ways) to represent it mechanically.
BoJo