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Zero to low prep games
So, I have been getting into some Blades in the dark stuff recently. I am loving it due to the fact that I really don't need to spend much time between sessions doing any prep. Sure, I can spend as much time brainstorming cool stuff to happen but really it all happens at the table.
So, what other cool TTRPGs are out there that support this kind of play?
I am a big fan of most pbta/fitd games for this reason. You really do get to follow the players lead and don't need to do a lot of brainstorming between sessions.
There's one I've been itching to play called Stonetop which has you building a town and navigating it through challenges.
In the non-pbta space, Savage Worlds makes GM stuff so easy to run that prep for a session is minimal.
What do those two abbreviations mean, 'pbta' and 'fitd'?
Pbta = Powered by the apocalypse. I.e games based on the design from Apocalypse World.
bitd = Forged in the dark. I.e games based on the Blades in the Dark design.
This looks cool, thanks!
The last system I just ran was Dread, which I cannot recommend enough. It's designed more for one-shot kind of games, but you can absolutely extend a narrative for several sessions if you wanted. The quick synopsis being that instead of rolling dice you play Jenga. Players pull bricks according to the amount of obstacles in an action (i.e pull two bricks to get through the door: one to lockpick it and one to be quiet while doing it). If the tower falls, a character dies.
It's incredibly kinetic both in the pulling of bricks by nervous players and in it's modular story telling. Players can choose to only pull one of the total bricks and deal with the consequences of failing the other obstacles. If you're looking for something ~new and different~ then I highly recommend.
I really enjoyed playing The Laudunum Drinkers.
Its a simple RPG system that fits in a 6-page pamphlet (three pages of which are taken up with graphics of some sort). The setting is like a cross between an 1890's Victorian Gentleman's Club and Inception.
Me and my friends played it one night a few months ago when the DM at the time had to cancel last minute. We just winged it and had a blast.
If you want any more info on it and how I played it as a GM let me know.
Would be very interested in hearing more about how you ran the session. Just picked up the rules on a whim but not sure where to get started. I think a lot of my players would enjoy the setting's vibe.
So I only ever used it for a oneshot, but we had such a blast with it that I reckon we'll visit it again. Some of this is going to be as it's written in the pamphlet and some is my own interpretation since the rules are super vague.
First, it's worth noting that Luke Gearing, the creator, follows the traditions of the OSR, which is to say that the actions of a character are adjudicated by logic from a neutral GM as much as possible, so dice rolling is pretty minimal. LD itself was written specifically for the Dreaming Jam on itch.io, which was about making surrealist creations. When Luke recommends using other game material for the dreaming world, the other entries from the game jam are primarily what he's referring to although you could use anything, I used a fantasy world like Faerun because I know a lot about the setting already.
Now, characters have two forms, Waking and Dreaming. This refers to who they are in real life and who they are in their dreams. Surprising Facts and Secrets and the background elements of your character are part of your waking form and while there are a few examples to choose from on the pamphlet it's entirely on the player to determine what these are. So for example, in my Waking life, I might be an Old Soldier who likes to preserve flowers in a notebook (Surprising Fact), but is losing a battle with alcoholism (Secret).
Play is broken up into two parts, the Waking World and Dreams. In the Waking World, you play your Waking self. Your characters live double lives, doing whatever it takes to get by and make money, while also working for the "Institute", the clandestine Gentleman's Club trying to colonise dreams.
So you run this part like a standard game, with the 2d6 resolution system. Let's say my character is investigating a murder. Because of my Surprising Fact, I am able to reroll one of my dice when trying to determine if the victim was killed with a nightshade poison. I used the PbtA system for a 2-6 being a failure, a 7-9 being a success with consequences and a 10-12 being a full success giving my player the chance to illustrate exactly how they succeed.
Dreams are trickier. By default, your characters are unfortunate souls coerced by the Institute to investigate and explore the dreams of a given Host (this is where the Inception bit comes in). To do so, you need to consume at least one draught of Laudanum (which is liquid opium). As long as they can afford it (I generally skipped over affording it or not as it was a one-shot so I let my characters choose between 1-5 bottles of laudanum as the characters can drink as many draughts as they desire (up to a max of 5). The reason why is because the more you drink, the better able you are at controlling the dreams you enter. Once you enter a dream your laudanum draughts then become your single stat (which is a d6). When attempting to act outside of the logic of the current dream you are in, roll a d6 and compare to your draughts. If it's less than or equal, act as you see fit (so for example turning enemies into glass or flowers, making a door disappear, reshaping a building to your liking, flying, summoning a colt revolver in a medieval fantasy world, turning into lava etc. (it's a dream after all so go buck wild)). If it's greater, then you must abide by the dream's logic.
Now, the downside of drinking laudanum is how easy it is to actually leave that dream. When you wish to wake up after perhaps completing (or failing) your objective, roll a d6. If it's greater than your laudanum draughts, you wake up, but if it's less than or equal to, then you're trapped in that dream until the Host wakes up (I stated that the laudanum stretches your perception of time while sharing a dream so if you can't escape from the dream you'll wake up in a few hours but it'll feel like 20 or 30 years have passed completely scrambling your character's brain) . So it's this balance. You want to drink enough laudanum to be able to reliably manipulate the dream, but not so much that you unintentionally get stuck there.
I ran it that the Institute were a group of Victorian gentlemen looking for insider information on a rival petrochemical company owned by Sir Reginald Pennysworth so that they could make a killing on the stock market. They had the players invade his dream and they awoke in a jail cell where they used their abilities to break out, killing guards by turning them into sand and stopping guard dogs by turning their teeth into bananas. They escaped the dungeons into a large city where they assumed the bank would be where the info was held (I didn't plan it, I just rolled with their choice which made sense). They held up the bank by using shotguns (assumed to be magic by the denizens of this medieval dream world). They then broke into the vault by turning the vault door into glass which they shattered by shooting it then navigated a huge vault crawling with strange shadowy tiger-like creatures where they turned some of them into cute kittens and others were killed when one of the players turned into a giant snake creature. They managed to locate the correct lockbox, one of them became hulk strong and ripped it out where they read the required info on the Petrochemical company. Finally they then tried to wake up but only one of them managed it. The other two were stuck in the dream evading guards and demon tigers for decades. When they awoke they were completely mentally broken after living in what had become hell to them for years and years, now unsure what was real life and the dream world anymore so the Institute lobbed them outside to live the rest of their lives in Victorian London as broken, rambling beggars and gave the money for all three to the one who managed to escape.
Thank you for the detailed write up, this is great! Sounds like your one shot was a blast. I like the contrast between the waking and dreaming worlds and the inherent risk of laudanum use. The ability to change settings and genre-hop with dreams is also pretty appealing from a DM perspective. Really lends itself to episodic sessions - wild west one week, sci fi another etc.
I wonder how it might be run as a campaign. The potential to have to go rescue a player character who's become trapped in a dream sounds like a great premise for incepetion-style shenanigans. I could see it being pretty intense with a group that's open to the risk of losing characters with ease.
I really like The Quiet Year which does not require much in the way of preparation, but also doesn't particularly lend itself to multiple sessions, so I don't know if it's really a match for what you're looking for. That said, I'm still going to recommend it as a really fun time.
The Quiet Year is a game where a bunch of players are adding collaboratively to a map, and things happen by drawing cards from a deck of cards (just a regular 52 card deck). These things happen over the course of a year, and at the end, you reflect on what has happened on your map. That's all there is to it; not much prep, a lot of fun to run. You can use it as a way to prep a town for a different RPG that you want to run, or you can just play it on its own.
I have heard of this, haven't played it yet.
I do like the idea of games like this, or Microscope, just haven't found the group for it yet.
Our group played this, then started a campaign that began in the town that we had just crafted. It was a great time. I have pie-in-the-sky ideas for a campaign where I run 4 games of this to outline the main locations for that campaign.
I think it works more for one-shots and short-shots, but Beyond the Wall is a great game for sit-down-and-play games.
It all really works well for a 1-3 session game.
Yeah, this one is going on my list. Thanks!
Sorry to be late to the discussion, but I wanted to chime in with Super Mario RPG. Not the SNES game, but a tabletop game created by 4chan's /tg/ many years ago, and it was essentially created to be a beginner tabletop RPG experience. All anybody needs is a single D6, and since the game is by default set in the Mario universe, it's very first time DM friendly too.
I have two recommendations that are both universal systems.
I've never played it myself, but I"ve heard that the Cypher System is wonderful for this sort of mechanic. The gameplay is rather unique and is more based around resource management, but it is pretty simple resource management.
Fate is another good one, but it's more made to emulate cinema rather than a game.
Took a look at cypher. I had totally forgot about "Invisible Sun", which is quite a cool setting (at least from what I read). I assume that uses cypher, or a version of it
I'll make a strong recommendation for Ten Candles if you're at all into horror games or unique mechanics! It's important to go into the game with everyone understanding one thing, though. The players will fail. Nobody plays Ten Candles to win, you play to tell a story as a group. The players (and you as well) have to have hope that they will succeed, even knowing this. Not all playgroups are into that sort of thing so I try my best to always bring that up.
The game setup is all done collaboratively with your players, and the core rules come with a pretty decent variety of scenarios to help guide you as you run the game, but you can also come up with entire scenarios on your own too.
It plays in a much shorter amount of time than most TTRPGs--usually in around 4-ish hours for a session from my experience. The game's core mechanic revolves around a set of ten tealight candles (lit two at a time during setup) that also double as the lighting for the session. It's leans pretty hard into the collaborative storytelling aspect of TTRPGs, with the players actually able to take narrative control depending on the outcomes of their rolls. The tealight candles will burn out as the game plays out, either on their own... or accidentally because a player bumped the table, sneezed in the wrong direction, yelled, etc. Each time a candle burns out the party's dice pool shrinks, the GM's dice pool grows, and the game timeline shifts along to a new scene.
It's genuinely hard to put into words the feelings I had as I ran Ten Candles for the first time. The party's excitement when they had the chance to determine what they found inside an abandoned truck when they won narrative control for the first time. Their horror when someone laughed too hard and a candle went out at the worst possible moment. Desperation leading to the need to burn (literally) a character trait card to try and rescue someone. Even having not run the game before, it all just worked--and that session is still my favorite TTRPG session to date even six years later.
I've played some Lasers & Feelings and it is a one-page game. Takes about 5 minutes to start playing. Zany scifi hijinks ensue.
Epyllion is a POTA dragon game with the core flavor of MLP: Friendship is Magic. Although the book is fairly substantial (at least as compared to my recc above), I found it easy to run off the cuff. One part of it that I had a stupid amount of fun with was its Avatar-like animal blends. Players absolutely hated my idea of squitos (squirrel-mosquitos). (I suppose you could do this with any game/setting, but this one mentioned it canonically in the book, so I ran with it.)
L&F says to roll and compare against your number. What number is this?
Your character gets one number on a scale of 1-6, where one extreme is "lasers" and the other is "feelings". Ie, your character is better at one of those things than the other. If what you're trying to do is more "lasers" or "feelings" is up to the GM, and that determines whether you're trying to roll higher or lower than your number.
Back in college, my friend group developed an informal system we called Flash RPG. What you do is use the cards from Superfight to inspire the setting, situation, and player characters.
For those unfamiliar, base Superfight has cards for characters (i.e. 'Zombie', 'Chuck Norris', 'The Entire Coachella Lineup') and attributes (i.e. 'Laser Eyes', '30 feet tall', 'Can't stop dancing'). There's also expansions with cards that define settings and situations, which I think we always used.
You have your GM pull a setting card and however many character/attribute/situation cards as they see fit to make a setting, while all the players create their characters with one character and two attribute cards. Early on, we would take the cards quite literally (creating some delightfully absurd situations, such as a time-displaced Joker at Lincoln's assassination or the Terminator in Narnia), but as we got more comfortable with it, the cards became mere prompts, letting us really integrate the setting and characters.
The games played really loose mechanically and tended to be focused on the social side, and we generally handled rolls with coin flips (with maybe a d4 for one or two sessions). But let me tell you, some of those sessions were the best role-playing I ever did. It'd be impossible for me to forget Mt. Olympus reinterpreted as a trailer park or Mad-Max-style caravan truck racing.
Do you consider board game rpgs to be ttrpgs? If so, there is a plethora of low-prep options.
HeroQuest, Gloomhaven, Talisman, and Mage Knight, are the ones I can think of off the top of my head that I've played and enjoy.
They still require some initial prep, like reading all the rules together, and then the time needed to set up the boards every time you play, but that's about it. Mage Knight and Gloomhaven are probably the most complicated of the lot, but once you and everyone playing knows the rules even those are pretty quick to set up and start playing, or resume playing next session.
I second HeroQuest heartily. As a kid, I was not a DnD kind of guy, but I loved the simple mechanics and more streamlined experience of HeroQuest. Plus those minis! Good lord, I love them.
Eventually it was that exposure to HQ that led me to finding that I did, in fact, enjoy more traditional tabletop RPGs.
I'm dying to get my hands on the 2021 version of HeroQuest, too.
We used to use my HeroQuest minifigs for playing D&D too. I still have them tucked away in my storage room somewhere. :) I too would still love to get my hands on the 2021 rerelease though.
Nope!
Though I do enjoy boardgames for their own virtues. There are a few there that I haven't heard off before, so I will take a look, thanks.
Ah. In that case, oops, sorry for potentially derailing your topic.
P.s. Anyone who has access to comment labels already, please label my above comment as ‘offtopic’ so the people actually discussing ttrpgs don’t get drowned out.
Hey! I feel like this topic could maybe use a title change. I keep reading it like Say "No" to Low-prep games! which is a funny sentiment, I know, but my brain can't help it!
How about Which low-prep games do you enjoy?.
(@cfabbro @Drynyn)
I can change it to that if @Drynyn wants me to.
Was going to edit it to "Zero to low" but I cannot edit the title.
Cool @cfabbro can do it.
Done. cc: @Drynyn