Boredom & the No-Prep Game
I’ve been playing a lot more indie games lately, which is great, but I’m finding they have one big problem: boredom.
Not boredom during the game — the games are fun. But lots of indie games follow a model where the GM (if there even is a GM) doesn’t prepare anything ahead of time. Everything is created at the table, during the game, usually with all participants acting as more equal contributors in the creation of the game world.
Neato, and terribly convenient too, since it means you can just sit down and play whenever you can get folks together.* If you have three people and two hours you can blast off and explore the mysteries of space without ever having the GM say “well, I really don’t have anything prepared…”
But there’s the rub. Ask any serious GM: preparing game material is half the fun. Sometimes more than half the fun. It’s a creative process all in itself, even if the game never gets played. Lots of GMs would sit around and make worlds all day, even if they didn’t have a group lined up. Because let’s face it, if you don’t like prepping games then traditional GMing is not going to be your cup of tea — if it’s not fun, it’s a huge burden.
I admit it: I miss prepping games and building worlds. Sure it’s frustrating when your golden idea is smashed to bits by contact with the players, but that goes with the territory. But I’m also consistently surprised by how awesome the ideas are that are born at the table, in the moment, as a reaction to the hodge-podge of ideas everyone else is throwing in. It’s one thing to be able to shape a nice clean idea in a vacuum, but it’s a far greater mental challenge to come up with ideas on the fly that genuinely click with everything else other players are tossing in. I would never have come up with the some of the ideas that emerged organically in the chaotic consensus of play.
Play Like a Child
If you look closely at that last paragraph you’ll discover something interesting: what I’m describing sounds an awful lot like, y’know, gaming. That thing where you all sit down at the table and react to each other and see what happens. No matter how much the GM has prepared, when the player running Carlos the Dwarf says something rude to the Duke’s daughter, what happens next is just improv. Everyone at the table is reacting and coming up with something on the fly. That’s gaming.
The no-prep game just shifts the bar, taking what was once the GM’s prep and making it part of everyone’s play. Making it just like the rest of the game.
There’s a serious danger in becoming all grown up and brainy, getting overly-analytical about games and what you want from games, thinking too hard about what’s right and wrong in gaming. Chasing perfection.
It’s the kind of over-analysis that leads to GMs strangling the life out of the game by preparing too much, by thinking they have to control the game for it to succeed and (gasp) thinking they’re storytellers and their players are the audience. It leads to GMs that fear the unexpected, which is like a fish fearing water. The unexpected is the game, dummy! It’s why you’re playing with other people and not writing a book.
It also makes players who doubt their own instincts, who hesitate and analyze when they should just jump in with both feet and (you guessed it) play.
Do you remember what is was like when you gamed when you were a kid? Did you think about that stuff? Do you remembering GMing those games where you were totally making stuff up on the fly and it went great? Do you remember doing totally crazy stuff as a player like you were a young revolutionary Dave Arneson?
All of which is to say: try trusting your instincts again. Don’t get so hung up on doing it right. Let go and see what happens. If you goof.. big deal. It’s a game, remember?
Look After You Leap
It is entirely possible that there are so many indie game designers because they have nothing else to do: they would be preparing adventures like traditional GMs, but since they can’t, that between-game time and energy has to go somewhere. That’s pretty much what I’m doing so I can hardly criticize.
But don’t let the risk of being sucked into game design scare you away from trying no-prep games. There are lots, but I’ll throw out In A Wicked Age, Shock, Geiger Counter, and InSpectres — I’m specifically picking games where the premise is made at the table, not games that include a premise, module-style.
Will playing no-prep games help you get back to trusting your instincts? Will it make you a better more interactive gamer, a more fluid GM? It’s a trick question. What you should be asking is will it be fun.
* kind of like Promised Land, but in a way that actually works…
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“Ask any serious GM: preparing game material is half the fun”
I definitely agree with this (I’ve found myself making worlds, cities, creatures, etc, just for the fun of creating), however, in my personal experience, it isn’t really prepping it, as much as it is being creative and making environments as the game develops and plays (making it up as you go). This may be because I do not have a good understanding as to how one should prep a game, as I really don’t have have much experience with role playing games (nor have I been playing with people who have any more experienced than myself, in most cases). Either way, so far, I tend to find it far more fun to create the adventure as the players go, rather than preparing a lot of material before hand. Not to say I don’t have anything prepared, but I’d say about 3/4th or more is created during the session. I tend to find that if I prep a lot prior to playing, it feels like I’m restricting the players too much.
I make outlines as to what is going to happen, but all the details in between major parts is purely made up as I go, and created around the players reactions.
I’m rambling a bit, but, I hope that gets what I mean across.
My current campaign has a time line with main and side quests, maps, encounters, and NPC names. I have also made maps and puzzles for certain places that are important to the main quest. Other than that the beginning starts out with a short story that lasts about 2-3 minutes and straight into a brutal battle. It forces the players to fight for the town’s cause at the beginning but after that the world is theirs to mold. They can go wherever they want and do whatever they want. If they ask around they will know about a lot of the current things happening in the world. Ex: Side Quests, and Main Quest. Also if they don’t ask around I have a list of independent quests that happen whenever people seem bored or lost. Basically I am god. I will allow them to follow any lead they want and I will react with NPCs logically and accordingly. I try not to comment on the players choices too much, as I do not want to sway their decision. If they made a bad choice then they will know it soon enough. (Remember, bad choices lead to interesting situations anyways.)
P.S: I’m starting to think that low prep games are not that cool. My players were like: “Right on!” when I handed them the map I drew of the town and surrounding area. The simple map I drew was enough to draw them closer to the world.
I’m a low-prep GM, and I’ve run several multi-year campaigns in both D&D and Shadowrun. The key for me is very simple. Define my antagonists and their motivations (NPCs and Organizations) by answering who, what, where, when, and why? That’s it.
This works for me because if I know my NPCs – what they want, the type of people they are, what their background is, who they’re connected with, etc – then I have everything I need to manage their interactions with the players.
The bottom line is: let the characters tell the story. In the case of an RPG, the “characters” include both the PCs and NPCs.
As much as I like gaming–and I REALLY like gaming–I like game prep even more. I love the act of creation, I love to plan and anticipate, and I love to go the extra mile to wow the players. So I’m with you on game prep. I like that there are games out there with no prep needed (sometimes I run out of time like anyone else), but even if I was stuck on a desert island by myself for the rest of my life, with no hope of ever playing in another session again, I’d still probably sit back and build worlds and plan campaigns.
Great post! Agreed completely, and I’m highly intrigued to play one of those games where folks make things up on the fly.
I do love world creation, but I think I’d benefit from more player-generated content, so to speak.
I, for one, like the no-prep game a lot. From an administrative point of view it’s easy to organise a game and then play it. For hectic lifestyles, that’s a bonus. Secondly, it makes it easy to try new games.
Perhaps most enjoyable for me is that it stretches me as a GM. It can be harder work than a high prep game because of the time constraint. I ran a game of DRYH at a con and I sweated bullets because of the time pressure. But in the end it was a great experience.
@Renato: “…if you really feel the need to write and detail a word, really, you should write fiction, ’cause that’s what you are doing anyway.”
I very strongly disagree with that statement. My rich, detailed homebrew setting, which I’m running a sandbox game in at the moment, is easy to run because of its high level of detail. I have NPCs and organizations that have clear motives and complex interrelationships. This gives the world verisimillitude, rather than just being a backdrop for the orc-bashing of Thog the Barbarian and his friends.
Granted, I run D&D 3.5, which can be very heavy on prep (so you wanna roll a enemy NPC with many class levels? maybe even a prestige class? Cue at least 30 mins of chargen), but at least I don’t have to dwell on how my world reacts to what the players do.
I have heard somewhere that inside every GM lives a frustrated writer, so there is some level of thruth to what you say. IMO, this is the motivation for quite a few GMs – the _collaborative_ storytelling of running a game.
“Ask any GM”… well, not any. *I* don’t like prepping much at all, and I would not have the time to do it, either.
Besides, for many games you need to prep in a wholly different way: if you play with a relmap and bangs structure you’ll have to think how the “map” evolves from game to game, what the NPCs will do, and what bangs you can prepare (even if most of them will not go off, probably) for the next session. The best thing is that you can do most of that while driving to work, instead of pouring over manuals.
…if you really feel the need to write and detail a word, really, you should write fiction, ’cause that’s what you are doing anyway.