If one visual was ever the face of D&D ...

... to me this was it:

...and now the man who created it is gone. End of the story here.

He did lots of other iconic work besides this, a good look at some here.

That's the cover of my original PHB, still in pretty good shape after thirty-something years and many, many miles.

I'm sure he had friends and family who knew him better for other things but these are my connection.

Thank you Mr. Trampier.

There IS a Hero System Combat Manager!

On a prior zero-prep post I made this comment:

"If there was program like Combat Manager for Hero System, I would run a lot more Champions than I do."

Well, it turns out they have one now. The Hero store has it here. It is linked to Hero Designer, but if I decide to dive back in to Hero in a significant way I would want that anyway. 

There is a video of it in use here. It's interesting. The interface is pretty plain, but it looks like it works well enough.

Now it works with 5th or 6th edition, as does Designer. I own 5th but have never really done much with it and skipped 6th entirely. I was thinking 4th would be my preferred flavor of Champions if I started something with it but the availability of these does make that call a little tougher.  I'll have to ponder this one for a while.

One More Zero Prep Game: ICONS (and superhero games in general)

My previous posts on this topic have involved either "lighter" games like Basic D&D and Savage Worlds or using certain tools to make a more complex game like Pathfinder a no-prep game. Now ICONS is a lighter game mechanically but the superhero genre as a whole is fairly easy to run with zero prep regardless of rule system.

First, ICONS: I've posted about it a bunch here. I think it's a great system. It plays well, plays fast, feels like a superhero game, and it's been very well supported. It's pretty portable too. Everything for the system is available in PDF so you could theoretically run the whole game from a tablet. The game uses d6's and those are easy enough to find. I keep my ICONS PDFs in my Dropbox folder so if I could scrape up a few d6's I could run a game from my phone!

Default character generation is random. Rolling up a character is quick though it may take a little time to come up with a concept. In a from-scratch zero-prep game I can use the time the players need to do this to pull together a scenario. A bank robbery is a traditional campaign kick-off, if nothing else comes to mind I can start there.

In the main ICONS rulebook there are some villains, stock NPC's like ninjas, cops, and cultists, and animals from dogs to dinosaurs. That's enough to get started and run a full session. Citizens, guards, evil henchmen and a villain or two who are in charge of the whole thing.

ICONS is not a tactical game so the need for a detailed grid or hexmap is pretty much nil compared to something like 4th edition D&D. Still, it's good to have references. If you don't have a good layout in your head then Google is a great tool - look up "bank floorplan" or "office map" and you will see multiple options.

So now I have heroes, villains, bystanders, a setting, and a plot. That's everything I need to run! Once the initial robbery is foiled, the players will begin to speculate on the heist and/or look for more trouble. This is where the nature of superhero games begins to work in your favor:

• Nothing is impossible or off limits

• There are a lot of fun things to do besides combat and looting that can be improvised pretty easily - media interviews, adoring fans, relationship issues, competing heroes, day job situations, and secret identities all can make for a lively situation

• Superheroes tends to be a reactive kind of campaign and while players will tolerate that for the sake of the game they don't necessarily like it and in the short term they will look for a way to be more proactive

Maybe one character sees someone else watching from a nearby rooftop - friend? foe? rival? I guarantee if I drop that into the scene it will be pursued by at least one player character. Maybe it's a local hero just happening by who can be a source of information. Maybe it's a setup and the pursuit leads to a dead-end alley full of ninjas. Players tend to offer a lot of helpful speculation when they get excited about something and there's no reason not to use those as suggestions if you can - plus it makes them feel that much smarter.

Now ICONS also has a pretty wide selection of published adventures if I didn't want to go in totally cold. With that the only prep is reading the adventure - still a pretty light load. The only downside compared to something like the Pathfinder AP adventures is that most of the ICONS adventures are only going to take one session so you will be on the hook to prep something new (or get another adventure) for the next run.

It only looks quiet ...

A traditional superhero campaign combines two things that are darn near omni-present in modern life: superheroes and ... modern life. This makes them especially suited to low-prep or no-prep play, because you probably already have a lot of familiarity with both of them. You really just need a system, some bad guys, a plot or scheme of some kind, and a setting. 

• System is mostly a matter of choice and for low prep I rate comfort and experience as more important factors than newness or realism. For this kind of game run what you know.
• Bad guys: Most superhero games will have a villain book available pretty quickly. Get it, read through it, pick the one (or several) that strike your fancy
• Plot: Think of the last comic book/superhero movie/superhero cartoon/heist film/Bond movie/crime news article that you read. 
• Setting: you need an over-setting, like a modern city (the traditional super-setting) whether that's Marvel New York, Astro City, or Freedom City. Familiarity and comfort are important here - you don't want to be flipping through a book - so consider using your hometown. In my case DFW has plenty of recognizable landmarks to be threatened and lots of scientific and financial institutions to be robbed. You also need scene-settings like a map of a bank or lab or city park. 

Super game core books also tend to include lots of scenery details: stats for normal people, animals, phone booths, fireplugs, mailboxes, brick walls, vault doors, cars, light poles, and all of those things that can be punched, thrown, or threatened in the course of a super-encounter. Use them!

My final piece of advice to anyone thinking about playing or running a superhero rpg is this: If comic books are too old-fashioned or a different flavor of nerdy than you like, get on Netflix and watch some Justice League. It's animated but it's a great example of how a long-running supers campaign could go: there is a core team of heroes but many come and go over the years and not every episode (or session) features the complete team. NPC's drift in and out of relevance. Some turn out to be enemies. Villains come and go but there is a core of recurring villains that help tie things together. In general there are consequences to things that happen and decisions that are made and that continuity over time is something to aim for in a tabletop RPG regardless of the prep-level.

Late Addition: Well well well, look what was just announced:

With a nice shiny updated version coming out this summer, there's even more reason to give it a try!

Motivational Monday

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.

Caverns of Thracia on DTRPG

This one is fairly highly thought of in OSR circles so I thought I would pass along that's it's available on Drive-Thru RPG now for $6.50. Link is here. That's a pretty good price for a usable copy of the thing.

This is another one I'd love to explore with one group or another in any of 3 or 4 different rulesets. We just never seem to have the time. One of these days...

Motivational Monday

Cheers!

Zero-Prep Pathfinder

It's spring break here which means more "doing" and less blogging but there is one thing I wanted to get out this week.I have been more and more impressed with Pathfinder and the amazing support for it by both Paizo and by others. Every time I touch it I come to like it a little more. One of the reasons for this is the realization that for me, it's the first time in a long time I feel like I could run a fairly detailed RPG with zero prep time.

First, some background: Basic/Expert D&D, and 1st-2nd Edition AD&D were fairly easy to run on the fly. Besides taking random generation of everything from monsters to maps to magic items as a legitimate way to play the game - something which has thinned out noticeably over the last few editions - these versions of the game had pretty simple monster stats. You didn't really even have a "stat block", you had a "stat line". This made it really easy to include abbreviated monster & NPC stats in the adventures wherever they showed up, with a longer entry in the back of the module or a reference to one of the monster manuals. This pretty much eliminated look-up time and let DM's just run things. This state of affairs made it especially easy when using a published adventure, as you just read the adventure, looked over the maps, tried to get an overview of the whole thing, look up any tricky bits, and you were ready to roll - at least that's how it worked for me.

Now we made plenty of our own stuff back then, and we also used the random generators sometimes as it made for a far less predictable experience. We also played a lot of published adventures because:

• They were ready to go. Once you read it you could run it, so it was great for those "hey let's play D&D" type summer days before we had to plan everything in advance.
• They were cool. Against the Giants, White Plume Mountain, Ghost Tower of Inverness, Dwellers of the Forbidden City - those were a lot of fun.
• They were a big part of the shared experience of D&D. Pre-internet there weren't a bunch of places to talk about D&D outside of a letter in a gaming magazine, but if you ran into someone at the hobby shop or at a con you could instantly bond over going through adventures like these - "We figured out the answer to the Sphinx's riddle" - "Ah, my group didn't bother, we just attacked her - hey what did you do with the vampire and the globes farther down that hall?" 

Third edition made on-the-fly adventuring much tougher to do by assigning all monsters feats and skills, possibly class levels, and possibly specific weapon & armor types. plus many also had extraordinary, supernatural, or spell-like abilities, all of which tended to force a DM to look them up beforehand or during the session to know what a monster could do. Every monster could end up as complicated as a player character. Trying to run a group of say regular orcs with a tougher orc leader type, a shaman, and a summoned demon was a nightmare in 3E because of all the different special abilities and the fact that each statblock was a fairly long item. The players loved it, but they only had one crunch-heavy masterpiece of optimization to manage. As a DM I had anywhere from 1 to 20 or even more on occasion, and then a new batch to learn and run during the next fight. I ran it for about 9 years but it ended up feeling like work quite a bit of the time.

It almost broke me

Even running published adventures (which usually included statblocks) the overhead of keeping up with the options and abilities available to a group of beasties was something that added more "homework" to the game, taking attention away from just running the thing and having fun. It might not have been a problem for everyone, and we managed, but it was less fun (for me anyway) after a while. I had printed index cards of most of the monsters sorted alphabetically in an index card holder because that at least gave me the stats at hand and let me pull out multiple monsters at once as needed as flipping through the monster manual every time you needed to check a new number got really old.

The next edition of the game helped somewhat by keeping all of the stats and effects needed to run a creature inside its own statblock, but I still had to print out those statblocks. The dream of the online reference was not fully realized as the way the monster handler tool was implemented was not really designed for in-play usage, but more for preparation beforehand. That was a huge missed opportunity, as I will demonstrate below, especially considering the amount of time and money spent on it.

So enough looking backwards - what about the whole zero-prep thing now? Well, zero-prep means either a published adventure or a random generator. Right now I am talking specifically about published adventures. I am also talking about Pathfinder, which  is pretty similar to 3E D&D which I just slammed for being unfriendly to this approach - so how does this work?  There are a few crucial tools. Before anything else you're going to need a computer, preferably a laptop, and the usual pencils, paper, and dice.

First, you'll need the first volume of one of the adventure paths. Take a look here. There are 14 of them now, hopefully you can find one you like. The PDF's run about $14 and will cover the first 4-6 levels of a party's career. Also download the free Player's Guide PDF for the AP that you've decided to run. Read them both - this is the extent of the prep work you will be doing.

Second, you should pull up the d20PFSRD, a really well-done, thoroughly hyperlinked version of the open Pathfinder rules. It's a website and it's free. It's a nice resource to have at your fingertips during play. Also, if you or any of your players are really "thrifty" or just want to try all of this out before spending money on it, this has all of the rules of the game from character creation to combat to monsters to magic. It also may cover some of the expanded rules from books you don't have if one of your players goes off on a tangent.

Third, download Combat Manager here. It's free and it's amazing. Also note that it's not an internet application - once you download it then you're running locally, meaning you don't need an internet connection to run the game. I know that sometimes that matters.  This program is really the key that makes all of this work.

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.

One of Apprentice Blaster's Pathfinder characters - the kids don't bat an eye at using a character builder.

Now, to run the game all you need to do is import the character files into Combat Manager. When the party gets into a fight then the greatest hidden treasure of CM comes into play: All of the monsters and NPCS from published AP's are included in the monster database that comes with the program. You don't have to rebuild them. CM as a tool makes combat a snap to run, with instant access to monster stats, feats, spells, and class features just by hovering or clicking on the relevant text. Having all of the stats you need for combat at hand like that eliminates (for me) the need to try and prepare mechanical notes on different monsters and reduces my preparation to ... reading the adventure. That's it! I don't need cheatsheets or monster stat sheets or a hour in HeroLab to recreate that hobgoblin cavalier/monk.

Fighting dretches - they have some special abilities

Just hovering over a link shows a pop-up with the complete info on that ability

Or if I want I can click on the link which takes me to the Spell tab (in this case) and shows me the full info on the ability.

NPC info is included in CM's database, and yes you can throw them into combat as well. This lets you include things like party mounts, men-at-arms, war dogs, summoned monsters (for either side), hostages, those "freed prisoners" that were so common in old school adventures, and even annoying NPC's forced on you by the narrative in some adventures.

Yes, unfriendly NPCs are included too, with class levels and spells and everything.

I have yet to find anything that isn't covered by this package, and all I need is my laptop at the game table to make it work. I have mine sitting on a TV tray next to the table so it doesn't come between me and my players but it would serve as an effective DM screen if I did that I suppose.

So again, the high points:

• I have a published adventure. If I choose one that's been out for a while I have a tremendous amount of suggestions and advice on Paizo's forums and many other places. There may also be everything from miniatures to cards to poster maps for hat adventure as well. Assuming I already have a computer, this is really the only place I am spending money, either for the PDF or a print copy. If the campaign keeps going I could run for a year or more all the way to level 15-20, just by picking up the remaining adventures in the series. 
• I have an online rulebook which I can keep open on the same laptop, or a tablet, or I can just go buy the rulebook, a good idea if you're really going to run the game. It's regularly updated with new rules as they come out and any errata that is published as well.
• I have a character generator, free or paid, which lets my players play with printed sheets or electronic ones as they choose, and lets me see their stats and details as well.
• I have a combined reference resource and combat management tool that will tell me what monsters do and let me track a large number of different creatures and my PC's and all of their abilities in one easy screen.

The best part is that I can make some notes and change some things up and I probably will if I see something in the adventure that I don't like - but I don't have too! I also have damn near zero overhead in-play as far as keeping track of what monsters and players can do on any given round - it's a far cry from having to flip through the book or my old index card file. It lets me focus on the setting and NPC's and any plots or events that might come up and still let's me run one of the crunchiest RPG's out there. I cannot communicate how happy that makes me, but it's a huge win.

Now I'm not saying zero-prep is how you should run a campaign or even the best way to run a campaign. One of my big concerns though when running a crunchier game like this is being prepared for each run. These tools eliminate those concerns. I no longer have to set aside several hours each week to make sure I have all the resources I need to run things. I just read through my notes from last session, look through the section of the adventure the party is currently in, and I am ready to go!

Beyond what I am describing here I am also cautiously optimistic that I could run a conversion of a 3rd edition era adventure on the fly with this approach and that I could run a 1E or 2E adventure with just a page or two of conversion notes on monster types and challenge ratings, difficulties, and treasure. That's not zero-prep but it's less than some of the conversions I've done.

Hmmmmm...

Anyway, that's the epic post for this week. It's a recent discovery for me and really opened my eyes as to what I could do with these things now. I could potentially run several different campaigns a week using this approach and I think that's a remarkable thing nowadays.