Converting Adventures from One Game (or Edition) to Another

 

Certain published adventures in certain RPGs are considered classics, and there may be certain adventures that you personally love and it would be a shame to leave them behind if you change games or move to a different edition of a game. This happens to me in particular with D&D but I'm going to talk about other games as well.

First, why use an old adventure in a new game? Well, because I like it a lot mainly. Some adventures, especially with D&D, are touchpoints one can share with many people across multiple editions of the game - Keep on the Borderlands, The Giant series, Isle of Dread, Hommlet and the Temple of Elemental Evil are just a few examples. For Runequest it might be Snake Pipe Hollow or just exploring the city of Prax. For Mutants and Masterminds it's Time of Crisis (probably the only published superhero adventure I actually like). For Gamma World it's Legion of Gold. For Star Wars it might be Tatooine Manhunt. There are many ...

• Though I may have run or played these in the past I might have a group of players that have never been through them but are interested in some classic old-school stuff.
• My players may have started them at some point but never got to finish them. If everyone is interested why not revisit one and give them a chance to close that loop?
• Maybe I ran them some time ago and feel like I could do a better job now or have an idea to change up some elements that would flow really well with this group of players and characters.
• Maybe we want to test out a new set of rules against a known scenario - does it feel similar? Easier? More difficult? It can be an interesting experiment.

Second, what do you have to consider when adapting these things to a new game?

• I'm going to lead off with "setting" - as it's not just the mechanics we need to check. Does it make sense as far as time and place and NPCs and organizations or power groups within the baseline of your new game or are you going to need to adjust some expectations. Many games mix the setting and the rules into one mish-mash and a new edition means setting changes as well as rules. You need to find a place to work it in. Old D&D adventures tend to be pretty generic as far as location other than some geographic features so they are pretty easy to drop in but some editions also update their settings and kill off gods - you might need to re-work a few things if Bane is no longer the big evil power in the Realms.
• Characters - Are characters built and presented differently in the new game compared to the old game? Is there a level range involved? How different are the mechanics for the PCs in the new vs. the old? Imagine trying to run Keep on the Borderlands for a Rifts campaign ... yeah that's just not a great fit for a typical Rifts party unless you make a -lot- of adjustments - likely to the point of unrecognizability. Expedition to the Barrier peaks? Now that might work.
• Encounter Structure - D&D 3E & Pathfinder started and then 4E perfected the concept of X number of encounters per level of various challenge ratings all calculated up to provide a certain level of XP to allow the PCs to progress through the adventure at the appropriate pace and the appropriate level. That's not going to be relevant to your new game. If your new game has something similar you are going to need to re-work it using those rules if it matters to you.
  In contrast a game like Savage Worlds does not care about that at all. If it does not have that kind of structure then I typically look to the flavor of the adventure - it's not the exact number of stormtroopers are guarding the docking bay - it's that there are some stormtroopers guarding the docking bay and you need to sneak/persuade/bribe/shoot your way past them to get to the ship and if a fight breaks out you only have a limited time before reinforcements start showing up.
• Monsters can also vary dramatically from game to game and edition to edition - don't get caught up in exact monster levels or stats, try to keep the flavor of the thing. If there's a Behir in a cave and your game doesn't have a Behir or they are too powerful or too weak for where your PC's will be then maybe it's a dragon of some type. If another cave has a singular minotaur but in the new game that's not much of a challenge to the party then maybe it's a minotaur chieftain and some followers. If your players are talking afterwards about "those minotaurs" rather than "that minotaur" then you're still doing it right.
• Pacing - D&D has XP for monsters defeated and a milestone system where PC's level up at certain points in the story. Old school Runequest grants a chance to improve skills just for using them. The current edition of Savage Worlds uses per-session XP with advances granted after a certain number of sessions. An adventure may make certain assumptions about party advancement during the course of the adventure - it's usually worth taking a look at that and seeing how it will work with your system of choice. 
• General Mechanics - Old D&D had no skill system. Many newer versions of it and many other games do. That means there are no target numbers for things in those old adventures like finding secret doors or avoiding traps or leaping over pits or climbing walls. Your new system should have some baseline guidance on what easy/average/difficult tasks should be and in my experience that should be enough but if you want to assign some specifics you're going to have to come up with those yourself. That's just one example.
  

Having done this a few times over the years I can say after thinking through the things above there are some other points to consider:

• It's not really all that difficult to adapt a D&D adventure to some other edition or version of D&D. Pick the setting, make some notes on DC's if you need them and then start adjusting the monsters. Since D&D tends to have the same monsters and races and settings across the editions all you need to do is ensure you have the statblocks you need for your chosen edition. Goblins, bugbears, ogres, trolls, dragons - they all tend to stay around the same level range across editions though I would advise against pulling these on the fly - there are occasional outliers that can be much tougher or much easier than you - or your players - probably want. AD&D 2E's update to dragons compared to what they were in 1E is a good example.
• Adapting an adventure to a very different set of mechanics within the same genre is more complicated but still doable. I ran a short RQ2 campaign using Caverns of Thracia as the adventure so a lot of my GM processing power was used in on-the-fly rulings on when a skill check was needed and whether any modifiers applied. I had monster stats picked out ahead of time so that wasn't a drain. That said moving an old Judges' Guild adventure into the framework for an old percentile-based system was an adjustment but one I could manage mostly live. 
• Adapting completely different systems and genres - this is a little trickier and probably rare but sometimes inspiration strike and your knights and wizards or cowboys and mad scientists need to go up against the Legion of Gold or Cylons or the 21st Panzer Division. In this case you need to look at what you do have:
• You have an overall situation that you presumably want to keep
• You have maps!
• You have NPC descriptions and motivations
• You have a list of the opposition
• You have some idea of what the prospective group of PC's can do

    That's plenty! Again we are mostly working out numbers for the new game - target numbers, statblocks for monsters and vehicles, and equipment/loot if that's a thing. For Star Wars & Superheroes it doesn't usually matter but for D&D and Gamma World it will.

Some of these conversions are pretty easy. Updating Time of Crisis for M&M was really just a matter of new stats for the characters encountered. It's a 1E adventure and Green Ronin did publish a conversion in the 2E GM screen which made it even easier and then somewhere along the way the stats one would need for a 3E conversion came out as well. 

Examples I have done:

• I ran Red Hand of Doom (a large 3.5 adventure/campaign) in 4th edition - recap here - and it was fairly easy because it is still a recent (at the time) D&D adventure with all of the D&D assumptions. I ran it in Impiltur in the Forgotten Realms which involved a bit of customization beyond systemic stuff but a lot of my effort was spent working out how it should work within 4E's level and encounter framework - basically getting the math right, at least according to the designers. The thing is I really enjoyed that part! The challenge of keeping the original flow and monsters and situations while making it work within a new framework ... yes that was a lot of fun and then seeing it play out with a really nice level of challenging but not deadly was pretty gratifying. Most of the effort was going through each part and saying "alright we have an ambush by a bunch of bugbears here - how many and what types make sense here for level X?", adding in skill challenges where appropriate, and then typing up my notes. It worked really well and it helped that I was coming out of doing it for two prior campaigns. 
• Of those two prior campaigns one was a 4E version of Temple of Elemental Evil and one was a conversion of Pool of Radiance, er, "Ruins of Adventure". 
• ToEE was again pretty straightforward as I was trying to run it largely as-written so it was mainly a matter of determining what level each part of the wilderness or moathouse or dungeon was and then dropping in the new statblocks for those creatures on a cheatsheet to use while running. It might have been the easiest of all of these because it's so easily divided up - breakdown here.
• Return to the Ruins of Adventure was my first 4E campaign and it was not a strict conversion - more of a loose interpretation of the gold box computer game and the paper module associated with it. Like ToEE it was pretty easy to structure it for 4E with each area being a certain level and having a certain number of encounters but I had a blast deciding what to put where and linking the encounters in narrative ways where it felt right and figuring out how skill challenges could fit in for the first time. This was also mainly a structure and statblocks conversion as the scenario was already solid and it was still a D&D adventure. 
  
  
  
  
  
• I am running the Temple again ten years later using Tales of the Valiant but this time I have a 5e conversion from Goodman Games that handles a lot of the details and all I have to do is sub out the boring 5E monster stats for the more interesting ToV Monster Vault (and other books) versions which is ridiculously easy to do. This is a truly easy mode conversion
• As far as 5E D&D conversions most of the ones that have been published have been solid to excellent. WOTC published some in Tales from the Yawning Portal, staying very faithful to the originals. The Goodman Games conversions are just excellent, putting a copy of the original and then a 5E update in the same book in most cases and adding in some optional extra material where the original is a little thin. I've run both the B1/B2 combo package and Isle of Dread in 5E and I am very happen with them.
• Old Traveller adventures are handy drop-ins for some Star Wars campaigns and I've run the 3-part starter campaign for Star Frontiers in both d20 Star Wars and d6 Star Wars as I think it's a really good fit and it's mostly a statblock-swapping exercise: Space pirates attack a ship? I just pick out Star Wars space pirate stats. The characters travel in an air raft or are attacked by a jetcopter? I pick out an airspeeder. Traveller free trader/far trader = YT1300 - it's not hard, you just have to work through it to prep.

That's probably enough rambling on this topic but I wanted to get it out there -  just because the rules change doesn't mean you can't use an old favorite again - or for the first time!

How Much Input Does the GM Get on Player Characters?

 

This was stirred into motion by a post on an RPG Facebook group that pushed some buttons for me. In general it described how someone was starting up a new campaign and in so many ways it was the complete opposite of  my thinking on the subject. I figured this might be worth some discussion.

One of the statements was about how they usually start a campaign and this included some perfectly reasonable and expected stuff like world info but then it mentioned "... reasons they are there, some drives, and background story ... " mentioning that this could be a group one and some personal ones.

I have to ask even here - whose characters are these again? Why are you giving me drives or background at all? Reasons to be there is a little more flexible but even that can get tricky.

As for the specifics of the new campaign they mentioned some totally acceptable things but then it got into a family tree chart that showed how they know each other and some NPCs, along with a comic strip the GM created covering the starting story and background for the PC's.

For the chart there were more than 20 characters connected by various lines showing how one knows another - this is the beginning of a campaign with 5 PC's. I was kind of surprised as 

a) that seems like a lot of relationships for a game that hasn't even kicked off yet -if you have to chart it out like that maybe that's too many connections, and 

b) did this come from the players? or is this the GM setting all of this up?

It just seems like a really heavy GM hand for the start of an ongoing campaign. Defining the starting situation I get completely - Paladin Steve is setting up a new campaign that allows whatever background situation you want but it has to end with "you joined a caravan and travelled to a new city" and then he's starting the game in that new city. This example just seems over the top to me. This isn't a convention game - it's supposed to be the start of a new ongoing campaign. I am much more in the camp of "here is are the rules, the setting, the time period, and the situation - now make up your characters" and then any connections the players want they can work out themselves and run by me afterwards.  I don't care if "traditional party roles" for this particular game are covered - if the party cares they will work it out. I certainly wouldn't presume to start telling them who they know or are related to unless the game has mechanics for that kind of thing  - like Hero's Dependent NPCs or Shadowrun's Contacts - and they need some likely suspects.

I have been playing with the same group for quite a while so I am wondering how common this is out in the wild?  I don't remember it ever being too common except for maybe a brand new GM. Is this a generational thing, maybe a new GM,  or just a one-off?

The "Barriers" to Old and Out of Print RPGs.

 

Thought I would put an AD&D PHB cover here didn't you?

This post was spurred by a couple of things:

1. A post asking why anyone would choose to play AD&D (1E) over another game
2. A post discussing the best ways to get players to try a new game where one of the responses was that a game needed to have merch, like T-shirts, because that helped get players interested.
3. Discussions on "when is an RPG dead?" and "what a successful RPG looks like"

So let's discuss ...

First up - Why would one choose to play an "old" game? Or at least an old edition of a game with newer editions? "Because I like them better" is all the answer anyone needs to give. RPG's are not technology. Newer is not automatically better - which is not even true of technology but that's how people tend to see it. RPGs are art, not science, and don't let anyone tell you different. Are there innovations in game design from time to time? Sure. Does that make a game that uses them "better" than one that does not? No.

Innovative but not a replacement for many

Let's talk about an example: Advantage/Disadvantage as described in 5E D&D. It's a solid mechanic. It simplifies a lot of what used to be separate modifiers, often found in charts, and lets the game play faster. It can be included in new games (and should be in some) and is pretty easy to retrofit to existing games, even non-d20 games like Traveller. But ... some people like granularity. Some people don't mind checking multiple modifiers for range, light levels, target movement, attacker movement, etc. That adds to the fun or immersion or realism for them, and abstracting it into advantage/disadvantage just feels less good. Sometimes this could vary by genre or specific game for the same person. Sometimes speed of play or simplicity is not the ultimate goal but that's where a lot of recent game design trends have been headed. "People don't have time to play games with complex rules" - maybe you don't. Maybe I do. Maybe I want to count every bullet in my Twilight 2000 game and not really worry about it in my Star Wars game.

Also nostalgia should not be discounted. I suspect that for many people the edition of D&D that you first played, or the one that "clicked" for you is what D&D is for you and that person would always be open to giving it another try. I started when AD&D was still coming out and we played it (and the various Basic, B/X, BECMI sets too) for a decade+ and so while clunky in places we know it is eminently playable and it feels like home to some degree. To someone else it may well look clunky, needlessly complex, and just old. That's fine. No one can make you play a game you don't want to play.

As someone who has taught multiple members of the Next Generation to play RPGs I can tell you they have been interested in some old games because they are good, not because of any nostalgia. Moldvay Basic, Runequest, and Warhammer FRP are all old at this point and all feel very different and the younger set liked all of them when they got the chance to play. RQ 1-2-3 in particular is not like any modern RPG and has a whole different feel to it. It's nostalgic for me to run these - it's  just cool and different to them to play them. Heck Blaster started out loving d20 Saga Edition Star Wars and then after playing just a few sessions became a d6 Star Wars Die Hard and refuses to play any other version - and this is a game that published its last supplement the year before he was born.

For the second part let's just combine those other two entries- "merch" and the current state of a game:

Right up front I will say I don't care about either of these things when it comes to RPG's.

Merch? Seriously? Does having a t-shirt for Game X make it a better game? A more interesting game? Does it make playing it more fun? I suspect this is the mark of some of the newer type of player we see that is more interested in tying themselves to a thing than in actually playing a game. I really don't understand this mindset when there are so many other hobbies out there one could join. It's the same with "does it have a YouTube following" or some other social media presence - who cares? Why does it matter? Does any of that make the game better?  How did we survive before these things existed? This kind of stuff is really satisfying something else as it has no bearing on actually running or playing the game.

It's the same for "is a game dead?" or "is the game still in print?" - why does it matter? A good local game store will have a used game section, there are online used game sellers like Noble Knight, even Amazon sells quite a few old games, and eBay is basically the world's attic or garage where you can find the most obscure stuff for pretty reasonable prices most of the time. That doesn't even get into PDF's which are widely available for the more known games, legally and not. So the question can't be a concern about availability.

Definitely on the TBD list

Is it about finding players? It's not on store shelves or it's not widely discussed on the socials so someone thinks finding players might be more difficult? I mean, it might be, but isn't everything outside of 5E a bit challenging now? maybe your players have never heard of Lords of Creation - if you want to run it then it's time to make a pitch*. You really only need 3 players for a fun time with most RPG's, maybe as few as two, so this is not an insurmountable obstacle. 

* You are talking about running it right? Otherwise you're going to have a hard time with any slightly obscure game. 

I'd be happy to run this tomorrow if someone asked

A fair chunk of the games I've run over the last 20 years were out of print, sometimes drastically so, at the time I ran them. The aforementioned d6 Star Wars, RQ2, WFRP 2E, Mechwarrior 3E, Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, B/X D&D, 4E  D&D ... the publication state of a game means very little in reality. If you have the core book for any RPG I can think of you could run a campaign for years with no outside support if you have interested players. Maybe you need to spark that interest at the beginning but that's often the GM's job, regardless of how current the game is. There's really no reason to not pull out that old game you've been thinking about running and make your pitch - take the grognards home and take the noobs somewhere interesting.

Deadlands: The Flood - Things I Could Have Done Better as a GM

I had one last topic I wanted to cover here after running the latest Deadlands campaign to completion - what I could have done better. Anytime I have a campaign wind down I inevitably think of some things I could have done differently - and likely better. Some of this is perspective looking back but sometimes I realize things and try to course-correct while the campaign is still running. 

• System Mastery - I've been running and playing Savage Worlds to a lesser or greater degree since it was published over 20 years ago. Casually, I know it like the back of my hand. When it comes to certain details though I rely heavily on my players to share their knowledge as things come up in play. I could be better at this and next time I will be.
• There are some general rules that get tweaked when a new edition comes out like Shaken, the various conditions that can be imposed, or how backlash works, and those tend to catch me the first few times they come up. The chase rules change with every edition and those take a while to re-learn each time. 
• Edges and Flaws are where a lot of the chrome comes in with this system and they get revised in every edition - sometimes even within a single edition - and more than once I have run a monster or NPC as though one of these worked like it did the "old" way. 
• Powers are another area that gets tweaked quite a bit. The power itself may not be dramatically different but the extras and options often do and I should really pay more attention to these kinds of details before I start throwing dice with them.  

Lots of good pics from movies and TV out there for a western campaign

• NPCs - I made an effort to individualize NPCs in this campaign and made sure to have images to show my players for many of them and this campaign was good about having names for almost every NPC one could encounter, but I am not sure many of them really stuck with my players. This is strictly a thing in my head, not something they have mentioned, but I do wonder about it after the fact. Anywhere the party is going to spend a lot of time it would be beneficial to work on more of this in advance.
• For example, the Shan Fan run has a lot of distinctive NPCs built-in as it's a core part of the storyline here and I think it went pretty well but the Perdition election arc is presented in much less detail and I did not really fill out the townspeople beforehand like I could have done. It would have made for some more memorable characters at least.
• That said my own award for "unusual NPC of the campaign" goes to Born in a Bowl's severed finger which had a definite personality while it was with the party. Holding a grudge against the character who botched the knife work that created it gave us some humor opportunities that most campaigns don't see.

• The Setting - Deadlands has some very distinct qualities as a setting, both mechanically and just as a supernatural old west campaign. I think I hit a lot of these in play but I could have done more.
• I did not emphasize the classic tale-tellin'-to-offset-the-fear-level part of play that figured a lot in old (and in some new) Deadlands adventures. I don't think my players missed it but I could have paid more attention to he fear levels of various areas and made that a bigger part of things. 
• The Flood in particular is also heavily affected by Famine and I could have played this up more too as it's supposed to permeate the whole region. It was a factor in one of our adventures regarding the only decent ranch in the area, and it did come up in talking about the appeal of Lost Angels food program to the common man, but I don't feel like I made it ever-present as they were traveling through the state. I don't know that the campaign suffered from it really, but it's a part of the flavor of the campaign area that I could have used more frequently.

Those are my take-aways from this one - now on to the next game!

Deadlands, Star Wars, and the Sentinel Comics RPG

 

It's been an interesting year so far. Besides working on mini's in anticipation of the new edition and catching back up on STO I've managed to run a fair number of games. So far that's 4 sessions of FFG Star Wars, 4 sessions of Deadlands, and 1 session of the Sentinel Comics RPG.

We play on Saturday evenings and things have settled into a steady average of 3 out of 4 weekends in any given month. It's not bad considering everyone has jobs and families and I no longer have my in-house crew to run for in between the big sessions.

I talked about scheduling issues here and how I planned to overcome them and the plan is working pretty well ... with a few adjustments.

• Deadlands is still the "main" game and is still set for the 1st and 4th weekends. We miss one here and there but this is working.
• Star Wars is 2nd weekends and has been hit and miss but the players are still interested so it's still in the rotation.
• 3rd weekends ... for some reason 3rd weekends have been a regular gap for us. I'm not sure why but for now I've decided to stop fighting it and just stay flexible. 

To adjust to this we discussed options for a backup game and for a while we leaned towards something like Battletech but there is a certain amount of setup time and haggling over when and which mechs and tonnage or points and it just was not feeling like the right answer. This led to the re-realization that a supers game has near-infinite flexibility for characters to come and go each session and with the 3rd weekend - penciled in as a supers game - not happening it was an easy call. So that's how I came to run a SCRPG game last weekend. 

I'll post up a session report later since it's a new campaign and I really need to get back in the habit of doing those. For now though it is the ongoing, intermittent, backup game. I have 5 players. If at least 4 of them can make it we will run the scheduled game. If we are at 3 or less I will run the Superhero option and we will get back on track the next weekend. 

Of course I get all this figured out and then realize this month has a 5th weekend ... ah well we will figure something out.

Greatest Hits #12 - Missing Players in an Ongoing Campaign

Still a good discussion - it's not like the problem has gone away!

I've been running two ongoing campaigns the last few years, both more narrative than sandbox. What happens when a player can't make it? We deal with it and the game goes on. But how do you deal with it? OK let's discuss some details. Here are three rules I go by:

1. Never end a session in the middle of a fight
2. Set a minimum number of players who need to show to run your game
3. There's always a plausible explanation why Character X isn't here right now

Another wave?

Reasoning for Rule 1:
(This is really more about avoiding the awkwardness of having a missing player next time)

Say you have a 5-person party in the middle of a huge fight = "alright, it's two in the morning, we're going to have to call it til next time." Sounds reasonable, except that someone won't be able to make it next time - better hope it's not the cleric! Maybe two someones won't. Then another week goes by and someone else has a conflict. Odds are you're going to end up finishing the fight either a man down (or more) or so much time will pass that no one can remember the details from the first part of the fight and spell or power usage, hit points, and maybe even consciousness state are all very fuzzy. It dilutes whatever dramatic impact your fight might have and for me anyway is just an unsatisfying way to handle things.

Most people who give this advice don't do it because its's a nice theory - we do so because we've tried it and found how many ways it can go wrong. After a few years go by you might be tempted to try it again - nope, it still sucks.

Solutions:

• Never start a combat 5 minutes before "quitting time". My weekend night games generally run til midnight, but we've called it as early as 11:35 when it felt right.
• If you know they're starting a good-sized fight and you could freeze-frame before it starts but are tempted to push on, tell your players the situation and let them have some input. They might be cool running over a bit or they may already be running on fumes. 
• If you find yourself in the nightmare of fight-started-with-plenty-of-time-but-now-taking-way-longer-than-expected-and-it-needs-to-stop here are some emergency ideas:
• Bad Guys all beam/teleport/vanish out
• Bad Guys retreat through a hidden secret door to some new room you may need to map before next time. Darkness spells and smoke grenades can help here.
• Bad Guys heads explode and all fall dead - could be real, could be an illusion
• Bad Guys surrender - players never really expect this in the middle of a fight. If you can tie it to the death of a particular bad guy leader or a nasty move by one of the characters, so much the better.

These are much more satisfying without built-in excuses like "but the cleric wasn't here"

Reasoning for Rule 2:

Maybe your sessions are "game night" and you play something regardless of who and how many show up. That's cool and I envy you. Here it's "Campaign X Night" and we either play that or we don't play at all. The concept of the "backup game" has never really taken root with us. That said we very rarely cancel at the last minute, so setting that minimum number lets us figure out in advance whether we're going to run next week or not.

Examples

• I was running Red Hand of Doom in 4E with a party that varied from 5-6 players. If at least 4 can make it we play, if 3 or fewer we don't. It does mean you miss some sessions but it also means you don't have a TPK destroy your campaign because the groups was a man or two short the night they ran into a really nasty dragon. 
• In Wrath of the Righteous I knew I was going to run it mainly for two of my players, so they each made two characters (it's Pathfinder, so it's easy enough). Adventure Paths are written for 4 characters - presto, we're solid. If both of my two can't make it, we don't play that weekend. If someone else can make it on a day we do play, they can make up a new character or continue with the one they had created last time. If someone else starts showing consistently they might get to make a second character if they so desire. It's easier to adjust upwards on the fly than downwards, at least for me. 
• The Exception To This Rule: Superhero games - I've run sessions with only a single player running a single hero and still had plenty of fun. 

Spock's player couldn't make it that night - look at how that worked out

Reasoning for Rule 3:

If you've seen The Gamers then you've seen "Mark". Mark just appears in the background of the scenes, motionless and doing nothing. Then his player shows up and the character goes into action for one fight.  The player then has to go and his character pretty much disappears from the rest of the story. It's dumb but very true to life. 

Speaking from my personal view as a DM, I'm not here to run your character - that's your job and I have enough to manage. So I'm not going to run your character, Spock's Brain-style, in the background just because you're not here. My rule is pretty much "if you're not here then your character's not here". That pretty much eliminates the issue of characters dying in a session the player didn't attend, treasure shenanigans, and "I wouldn't do that!" conversations. 

Practical Considerations for Rule 3

• It's incredibly easy to explain character comings and goings in superhero games - they were "called away" or Lois is in trouble again or they had to go take some pictures for their day job. it's trivial and should never be a real problem. Unless you're running Time of Crisis, then it's a little tricky. 
• Wilderness adventures are great for this kind of thing - communing with nature, following some interesting tracks, leading a hostile monster away from the party, gathering some rare herbs, celebrating a high holy day in private, heading back to watch the road, spending quality time with his new dryad friend, acquiring a new familiar - these are all pretty easy to do. 
• Cities make this even easier - it's not hard to figure something out. Shopping, stealing, or carousing are all popular options.
• In contrast dungeons can make this really painful, especially the big ones. When the party is six levels deep, the DM still checks for encounters even on "cleared" levels, and there's no shortcut back out (Hello Town Portal!) then it can really strain belief to come up with a plausible reason why the fighter suddenly isn't going to fight for awhile. My advice is to think about this beforehand and try to come up with some possible explanations. Some ideas:
• Fell through a trap door into another room or another level - hey megadungeons are supposed to be "living" right?
• Taken prisoner by some group on this level or the next one
• Ran into a rival adventuring party and didn't want to lead them back to the group until he checked them out
• Wizards are studying in that last library/laboratory/summoning room the group discovered
• Clerics are purifying a defiled temple, defiling an enemy temple, or communing with their god in some other room
• Thieves are off sneaking around looking for more loot - you know how they are. A good candidate for "taken prisoner" above. 

Sure, let the DM run your character while you're gone ...

Final Thought: If you're really stuck for ideas ask the player what their character is doing while they are out. Their third or fourth idea is probably good enough to use.

Getting into a Well-Supported RPG

Does anyone run games from just the "Core Rules" for a given game anymore? I will say that I have for some games, usually smaller games like ICONS. It seems like that used to be more of a thing, but now if a game has been out for any length of time it's likely to have a set of supplementary material from the "Advanced" book or "Player's Guide" with some extra crunchy stuff to the inevitable "GM's Guide"to a whole pile of adventures. If you're coming in late, where do you start? I did this recently with Pathfinder, and it probably has more "stuff" available than any other in-print game right now,  so I'll share my plan and experience with that.

First, you need the main rulebook. I knew I was going to be playing with the Apprentices so I picked up the PF Core Rulebook and the Beginner Box at the same time. One for them, one for me. We played through the adventures in the box and I decided we should look at a full campaign.

The heart of the whole Pathfinder system is the Adventure Paths. You know the idea by now - each AP is a full campaign from Level 1 to level 13+ in six installments released once a month. The *fifteenth* of these is being released now and the 16th has been announced for early 2016. That's a lot of options, and that's on top of standalone modules, third-party adventures, and of course doing your own. Your choice here will drive some of how you tackle the rest of the system so I think it's important to make this call fairly early. Example: The "Kingmaker" AP features building and ruling a kingdom - the Ultimate Campaign book is useful here. The "Wrath of the Righteous" AP assumes that the Mythic Adventures book is in use. Then of course every AP is supported by a regional supplement and a player's option type supplement, a map pack, some cards, and maybe more. You don't really need any of that extra material, but if it interests you or the players choosing an AP lets you focus on a smaller set of the options.

Creating your own adventures might mean you need some non-traditional races - there's an Advanced Race Guide with all of the mechanical details for doing that. Want non-traditional classes? There's an Advanced Class Guide with that kind of thing too.

So the idea is to decide what kind of campaign you want to run after reading the basic/core rules, and letting that guide your early acquisitions. If nothing really inspires you, wait. Set it aside. The moment will come.

The other consideration is players. Have a few that like to play wizards and clerics? Plan on getting Ultimate Magic. Lots of focus on combat? The Ultimate Combat book is probably in your future. Rangers or Druids a guarantee? The "Animal Archive" is a good idea.

For me, I wasn't sure where I wanted to go with the game but I knew even more character options would be welcome so I added the Advanced Players Guide as my first book. More classes, feats, spells, etc. - that was an easy choice. I grabbed "Paths of Prestige" too to add even more options as we advanced.

Setting-wise I realized there were a ton of area books out for different parts of Golarion, many tied to a particular AP. I had no idea where to begin so I started with the Inner Sea World Guide, the big book that covers the whole setting. After reading that, I was up to speed and had the big picture.

I still had not decided what kind of campaign to run and then they announced the "paladins and clerics vs. demon invasion" campaign and I knew I had a winner. One of my players is a paladin fan and this one had his name on it as soon as I read about it. So then it was a matter of watching for the specific books that added to this one campaign and that's worked out very nicely. I had a couple of hardbacks, a few softcover player and DM books, and I was ready to roll. I did not need the entire PF product line to run this campaign.

Now I have added more books since I started running this last year. Partly because I like to have options, partly because I started playing in another game, and partly because over the course of the campaign things just naturally come up where supplement X might be handy to have. Playing in a campaign certainly modified my perspective as I became a lot more interested in some of those player companion books. If you're going to invest in a system, might as well get everything out of it that you can.

Pathfinder is a little different in that most of the rules material is covered by the OGL and is available online, meaning you don't need to purchase a lot of the rulebooks to run a particular situation. For myself, I like to have them if I think something will be a regular part of the game, but it's possible to run just about anything from one of the SRD sites.Setting material is not a part of this, so if you're using the campaign world that might make that material a higher priority than the big rule books.

The main area of impact for me with this is with the monster books - I already know what most D&D type monsters look like, and the numbers are freely available, so the "Bestiary" books are not a priority at all for me. I'm sure I'll end up with a few of them sooner or later but I haven't felt the lack thus far.

I have most of the big rulebooks now, I've been both running and playing the game, and I have a fair number of the smaller regional and player books. I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the system, I like it, and now I'm just picking up what looks interesting and what might be useful in a future campaign, particularly APs I've acquired along the way. I do check reviews at times, but those are a secondary consideration at best.

Anyway, that's how I did it, for what it's worth. The short version:

• Get the core rules to the game
• Figure out a campaign concept or at least an adventure idea
• Pick up a supplement or two that enrich that particular idea
• Listen to your players, see if they're interested in something covered by a particular book
• As the game goes on, add material as it makes sense

Final thought: Never assume that you need "everything" to start your game. Some kind of rules and an adventure idea is all you really "need". Online discussions will often assert that you can't run X without a particular book, or you really need Y to have fun with a certain adventure - ignore that. Get a game going, then worry about the add-ons.

Missing Players in an Ongoing Campaign

I've been running two ongoing campaigns the last few years, both more narrative than sandbox. What happens when a player can't make it? We deal with it and the game goes on. But how do you deal with it? OK let's discuss some details. Here are three rules I go by:

1. Never end a session in the middle of a fight
2. Set a minimum number of players who need to show to run your game
3. There's always a plausible explanation why Character X isn't here right now

Another wave?

Reasoning for Rule 1:
(This is really more about avoiding the awkwardness of having a missing player next time)

Say you have a 5-person party in the middle of a huge fight = "alright, it's two in the morning, we're going to have to call it til next time." Sounds reasonable, except that someone won't be able to make it next time - better hope it's not the cleric! Maybe two someones won't. Then another week goes by and someone else has a conflict. Odds are you're going to end up finishing the fight either a man down (or more) or so much time will pass that no one can remember the details from the first part of the fight and spell or power usage, hit points, and maybe even consciousness state are all very fuzzy. It dilutes whatever dramatic impact your fight might have and for me anyway is just an unsatisfying way to handle things.

Most people who give this advice don't do it because its's a nice theory - we do so because we've tried it and found how many ways it can go wrong. After a few years go by you might be tempted to try it again - nope, it still sucks.

Solutions:

• Never start a combat 5 minutes before "quitting time". My weekend night games generally run til midnight, but we've called it as early as 11:35 when it felt right.
• If you know they're starting a good-sized fight and you could freeze-frame before it starts but are tempted to push on, tell your players the situation and let them have some input. They might be cool running over a bit or they may already be running on fumes. 
• If you find yourself in the nightmare of fight-started-with-plenty-of-time-but-now-taking-way-longer-than-expected-and-it-needs-to-stop here are some emergency ideas:
• Bad Guys all beam/teleport/vanish out
• Bad Guys retreat through a hidden secret door to some new room you may need to map before next time. Darkness spells and smoke grenades can help here.
• Bad Guys heads explode and all fall dead - could be real, could be an illusion
• Bad Guys surrender - players never really expect this in the middle of a fight. If you can tie it to the death of a particular bad guy leader or a nasty move by one of the characters, so much the better.

These are much more satisfying without built-in excuses like "but the cleric wasn't here"

Reasoning for Rule 2:

Maybe your sessions are "game night" and you play something regardless of who and how many show up. That's cool and I envy you. Here it's "Campaign X Night" and we either play that or we don't play at all. The concept of the "backup game" has never really taken root with us. That said we very rarely cancel at the last minute, so setting that minimum number lets us figure out in advance whether we're going to run next week or not.

Examples

• I was running Red Hand of Doom in 4E with a party that varied from 5-6 players. If at least 4 can make it we play, if 3 or fewer we don't. It does mean you miss some sessions but it also means you don't have a TPK destroy your campaign because the groups was a man or two short the night they ran into a really nasty dragon. 
• In Wrath of the Righteous I knew I was going to run it mainly for two of my players, so they each made two characters (it's Pathfinder, so it's easy enough). Adventure Paths are written for 4 characters - presto, we're solid. If both of my two can't make it, we don't play that weekend. If someone else can make it on a day we do play, they can make up a new character or continue with the one they had created last time. If someone else starts showing consistently they might get to make a second character if they so desire. It's easier to adjust upwards on the fly than downwards, at least for me. 
• The Exception To This Rule: Superhero games - I've run sessions with only a single player running a single hero and still had plenty of fun. 

Spock's player couldn't make it that night - look at how that worked out

Reasoning for Rule 3:

If you've seen The Gamers then you've seen "Mark". Mark just appears in the background of the scenes, motionless and doing nothing. Then his player shows up and the character goes into action for one fight.  The player then has to go and his character pretty much disappears from the rest of the story. It's dumb but very true to life. 

Speaking from my personal view as a DM, I'm not here to run your character - that's your job and I have enough to manage. So I'm not going to run your character, Spock's Brain-style, in the background just because you're not here. My rule is pretty much "if you're not here then your character's not here". That pretty much eliminates the issue of characters dying in a session the player didn't attend, treasure shenanigans, and "I wouldn't do that!" conversations. 

Practical Considerations for Rule 3

• It's incredibly easy to explain character comings and goings in superhero games - they were "called away" or Lois is in trouble again or they had to go take some pictures for their day job. it's trivial and should never be a real problem. Unless you're running Time of Crisis, then it's a little tricky. 
• Wilderness adventures are great for this kind of thing - communing with nature, following some interesting tracks, leading a hostile monster away from the party, gathering some rare herbs, celebrating a high holy day in private, heading back to watch the road, spending quality time with his new dryad friend, acquiring a new familiar - these are all pretty easy to do. 
• Cities make this even easier - it's not hard to figure something out. Shopping, stealing, or carousing are all popular options.
• In contrast dungeons can make this really painful, especially the big ones. When the party is six levels deep, the DM still checks for encounters even on "cleared" levels, and there's no shortcut back out (Hello Town Portal!) then it can really strain belief to come up with a plausible reason why the fighter suddenly isn't going to fight for awhile. My advice is to think about this beforehand and try to come up with some possible explanations. Some ideas:
• Fell through a trap door into another room or another level - hey megadungeons are supposed to be "living" right?
• Taken prisoner by some group on this level or the next one
• Ran into a rival adventuring party and didn't want to lead them back to the group until he checked them out
• Wizards are studying in that last library/laboratory/summoning room the group discovered
• Clerics are purifying a defiled temple, defiling an enemy temple, or communing with their god in some other room
• Thieves are off sneaking around looking for more loot - you know how they are. A good candidate for "taken prisoner" above. 

Sure, let the DM run your character while you're gone ...

Final Thought: If you're really stuck for ideas ask the player what their character is doing while they are out. Their third or fourth idea is probably good enough to use.

Low-Prep Games: Savage Worlds

I've talked about Savage Worlds before (see sidebar for other posts) but it too fits into the low-preparation zone. The high points:

• It's mechanically simple but still gives enough customization options that players can usually make something they like
• It's very much focused on actual play with little need for DM recordkeeping
• Many of the setting books include an entire campaign

The simplicity comes in things like stats being measured in dice - no translation, no modifiers, no charts, just that you have a Strength of "d8" so when you need to use it you roll ... a d8. Genius!There are also edges and flaws to give players those unique things that make each character awesome, and there is a skill system as well, also rated in dice. It feels more detailed than Basic D&D, but is not as complex as Pathfinder, making for a nice middle ground.

Actual Play: Initiative is tracked via cards - higher cards go first, when your turn is over you turn in your card - no  need for tracking it round to round! Most opponents are either fine, shaken or out of the fight. There are not a ton of conditions to track and there are no real hit points to worry about either. Beginning with an approach like this makes it very easy to run in real time and not have to research complex abilities in advance. It also makes it easy to include extras like henchmen or guards that the players can run alongside their own characters. 

Settings: The real zero-prep genius here are settings like 50 Fathoms and Necessary Evil. These come with a unique setting in the traditional gaming sense of a world or city to play in, usually with some unique monsters, races, or situations. Then they also include a plot-point campaign which is a series of adventures/scenarios/encounters that form the backbone of more narrative style campaign leading to some ultimate goal. In between those though a DM can use the random adventure generator included in each, along with the stats, maps, and guidelines about how the campaign works to run a virtual sandbox campaign with a few key "triggers" laying around to keep things interesting. It's a complete campaign in one book!

Somewhat like Pathfinder Adventure Paths there are several of these out so it should be easy to find one that interests enough players to get that critical mass going. Westerns, Fantasy, Pirates, Supers, Modern War Stories, and Science Fiction all have representation here.

So what would I need to go no-prep here?

• Copy of the rules - the Explorer's Editions are $10, paper or PDF, one of the best bang for the buck deals out there.
• One plot-point setting book - they tend to run around $10-$20
• Dice, pencils, paper, players, and time (sigh)

That's it, and you may not need all that much time! I was shocked at how much we accomplished in just a few hours when I first ran the game and familiarity only makes it that much faster and smoother.

Now you could certainly sit down and come up with your own detailed campaign setting for the game, and there are non-plot-point settings out for it. There are conversions of just about every other RPG setting and pop-culture media thing out for it too and with some additional prep you could run almost anything for it. I'm just looking at it as a zero-prep game and for that it's amazing. It's a game pretty much built around the zero-prep philosophy and it shows. 

More Low Prep Games: D&D

It may seem kind of obvious, but Basic/Expert D&D is pretty much a no-prep game. Maybe not if it's your first time to tun or play, but assuming you have some experience then it really boils down to this:

• Grab the rulebook
• Grab an adventure
• Read said adventure
• Gather and roll!

For me and most of my players at this point in our gaming lives this is all it takes. Now we don't play it all that often because it's almost too simple, but that simplicity is exactly what makes this kind of no-notice run possible. 

Even character creation is simple enough to be done at the table. In a few minutes the party is ready to go. Simpler characters also make it easy to run more than one character, which makes it even easier to get to actually playing the game as you could run with as few as two players.

It's priced nicely too. If you don't have a copy of the rules, well:

• DnDclassics.com has the Moldvay Basic book for $4.99
• Goblinoid games has their retroclone Labyrinth Lord for free

...and there are a bunch of others out there too, some more fiddly than others.

If you need an adventure then D&D Classics has  a bunch of ...classics... for small prices and Dragonsfoot has a bunch of old-style but more recently created adventures for free.

Most of these kinds of adventures are not complicated so I wouldn't spend much time re-reading or re-working the module - just run it and enjoy! Most of them will take at least a few sessions to plow through so once you've started you are set for a while.

This is really the opposite end of the scale from my Pathfinder post. In that case technology and a certain approach let me run a complex game with very little preparation. In this case the game is simple enough and familiar enough that I don't need any technology to run it - just what's mentioned above and pencil/paper/dice. That's a great thing! No, it isn't a replacement for a game like Pathfinder for my players, but it's so easy to do that it makes for a fine game when you want one without a lot of rules or setting crunch and just want to get on with the adventure and play. 

Zero-Prep Pathfinder Revisited

My Pathfinder post generated a couple of comments that surprised me so maybe I failed to communicate well in that one. I thought it was worth it to try again.

In my mind there are two kinds of prep for a game: campaign prep and session prep.

Campaign preparation is what I do before a campaign actually starts. Things like this:

• Choose a system to run - D&D, Star Wars, etc.
• Choose a setting to use - Greyhawk, Star Wars, etc.
• Figure out the general situation for the campaign - 1st level? Name level? Rebels? Imperials?
• Round up players - not always as easy as we might like
• Figure out a time - maybe the toughest part of starting it up
• Prepare the details - NPC's, maps, monsters, vehicles, organizations, etc.

Every campaign is going to require some of these if not all. Even if I know the system and the setting by heart and plan to run completely seat-of-your-pants I still have to get some people together. 

With some games I may want to lump character creation in with this too - if the players know the game and the setting they can make characters ahead of time and Session #1 can jump right on into things.

See that? I don't have to do that anymore - I don't even use a screen for the Pathfinder campaign.

Session preparation is what I do before each session, such as:

• Checking where we left off last time
• Statting up the opposition for the next run if I haven't already
• Mapping any areas they might get into if I haven't already
• Printing out whatever notes I need to run things efficiently
• Reminding the players of any major events or complications that are still hanging out there, if they need to level up, if a new player is joining, any of that kind of thing.

If I am running a published adventure I may include re-reading the relevant part of the adventure as part of this too.

So how does the zero-pathfinder thing play into this? From my previous post:

•  First, you'll need the first volume of one of the adventure paths. 

Right, because writing my own isn't zero-prep. Running an AP saves me a ton of effort in session prep and gives my players a shared experience with other Pathfinder players. This is really a campaign-prep level item as you're only going to do it once to begin with. Now granted, if you continue all the way through there are typically six volumes in a full Paizo adventure path so you would be doing this again but it's not per-session.

• Second, you should pull up the d20PFSRD, a really well-done, thoroughly hyperlinked version of the open Pathfinder rules. 

This is just an aid to running a session. There's no real work here -it's just opening a tab on your browser.

• Third, download Combat Manager here. 

CM is also an aid to running the game during a session. You do it once, ever. You're good to go other than the occasional update. Again, there's no work here.

• Fourth, get PCGen here or HeroLab here. PCGen is free, HeroLab is not but I think it does some things better than PCGen. Have your players create their characters in their tool of choice and send you the file.

Upon further review, the DM doesn't need these - the players do. So cross this off the DM's list. They just need to send you a character file so you can use it in Combat Manager. You want to see their character in advance, right? They can drop the file into the same email that describes their character. No extra work for you.

So sure, you have some campaign prep before you launch the campaign - I don't see a way around that most of the time. In this case it's "get an adventure, read it, tell your players". But the session prep is almost nil - the adventure provides the situation, the maps, opposition, and the NPCs. CM lets me run all aspects of combat in a very crunchy game with no paperwork. The d20pfsrd site lets me check rules details quickly and efficiently as they arise.

The "overhead" of running a game - stats, bookkeeping, initiative tracking, condition tracking, all of that kind of stuff - just melts away. I do keep a notebook open to jot down who was present, the date, cool stuff that happens during the game, and just anything interesting I might want to know later, but I don't have to refer to it at all for mechanical stuff.

Heck, all of my monsters are getting individual initiative rolls in my Pathfinder campaign and I can't tell you how long it's been since that was a regular practice here. Sure the players always have individual initiative, but usually the monsters have been side or group initiative, at least since 3rd edition. Now, after 14 or so years of that, if 10 Fiendish Vultures swoop down on my heroes in the devastation of Kenabres, they're not acting as a huge block - I roll for all of them. Because I can.

I know not everyone likes published adventures, advantages or not. I've used quite a few over the years, the past 14 or so in particular, though many of them were converted to systems other than the original. I find them to be useful tools for almost any campaign.

I know not everyone wants gadgets at their table, though I have relented on this in the past two years myself as laptops and tablets and phones are pretty handy for some games. When I run Labyrinth Lord I don't need a combat tracker - the game is so simple that it doesn't add anything to the experience. When I run ICONS I use a tablet as I have most of my material for that game on PDF. ICONS also has a nifty character generator/creator which is certainly not essential - I just like the character sheets it puts out. For D&D 4E games a lot of my players use electronic character sheets because they make it easier to track power usage and conditions and I have no problem with it. It all depends on the game. If there was program like Combat Manager for Hero System, I would run a lot more Champions than I do.

It doesn't really need a character builder but the output just looks good. 

If you are OK with published adventures and you are OK with using a PC at the table, then there is a lot of opportunity out there, especially with  a game like Pathfinder. Anything that lets me focus more on playing and less on getting stuff ready to play is a win in my eyes.