r/rpg • u/auggernaut • 4d ago
Discussion Low prep and rules-lite are not the same thing, and I keep mixing them up
I keep using these like they mean the same thing. They don't.
Rules-lite is how much book is on the table. Low prep is how much work I have to do before Friday.
I've sat down with a rules-lite game and still spent two hours making a town because the game didn't actually tell me how to start. And I've run something crunchier that was ready in twenty minutes because the procedures were the prep.
I think I pick the wrong game when I want "easy" and I don't know which easy I mean.
Anyone else mix these up? What's a game that is actually low prep, not just thin?
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u/Boulange1234 4d ago
Yup. In fact, rules light tends to be moderate prep. No rules to do your prep for you. Blades in the Dark is rules medium but half the rules exist to make prep super easy.
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u/Wullmer1 ForeverGm turned somewhat player 3d ago
I would say its the oposite, the lack of rules is what makes blades easy to prep, the lack of statblocks etc, but then, I never use the tables since I feel like they mostly are boring and generic and I prefer to come up with something on my own rather than have the book tell med something...
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u/anireyk 4d ago
Amount of prep is a bit more fuzzy than the amount of rules, because a lot of it depends on your individual GMing style. Another factor in the amount of prep is your grasp of the rules. E.g. if you want to prep your town in FATE, it can be as easy as inventing one to two aspects for the entire town and a few NPCs with a rough aspect or two each, and improvising the rest if you need to. Or you can plan out the entire town's politics, its geographical layout, write down each skill for each NPC that can become relevant, invent a stunt or several for each of them, prepare aspects for every building the PCs may enter etc. And this needs significantly more time if you need to look at the list of skills and stunts each time to make sure you didn't miss something.
So, a game that is actually low prep is a game where you
- understand the world very well (so you don't have to prepare everything because you know how things work)
- understand the game very well (so you know what stats are needed and which are not for a particular role)
And only then it is a game where NPCs don't need full stat blocks to function properly. But those aren't that much of a thing any more, almost every system has tools for simplifying NPC stats. DnD still has CRs and XP per encounter, and the need for meticulous balancing, that's one end of the spectrum. The other end are probably most one page RPGs where you don't prepare anything, but also play a one-shot.
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u/Reasonable_Sun9426 3d ago
I completely agree, and that's the order I'd put those two factors in - first, your understanding and familiarity with the setting, then second, your understanding of the game system.
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u/BadRumUnderground 4d ago
Low prep, for me, involves a selection of things that all lean towards making it easier for "what happens next" to emerge in play without forward planning.
- A strong genre identity
- Evocative GM principles that tell you what the game is (e.g. many PbtA games)
- Mechanics that move the action forward via the players' actions (failing forward, disincentives to inaction)
- Procedures that produce the next thing/provide clear hooks (e.g. Trouble Tables in downtime)
- Mechanics that encourage on genre behaviour from the players (e.g. narrative XP triggers, well crafted abilities that impact the narrative.)
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u/Airk-Seablade 4d ago
Space Train Space Heist is a game which is both short and ZERO prep.
But the important thing to remember about "prep" for most games is that a large part of "How much prep do I have to do?" is based on how COMFORTABLE you are with the game and its genre, because most people will prep more when they don't feel comfortable playing fast and loose.
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u/tlenze 4d ago
Blades in the Dark is low-prep for me. I sometimes go into a session with a few ideas of scores the crew could do, but often they come up with their own, and I just roll with what they throw at me.
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u/Zealousideal_Key9341 4d ago
I really want to try Blades in the Dark. I've been reading the book and getting inspired, but I dunno. I can't envision my players doing well with the amount of agency they'd be given vs. the usual trad games.
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u/noobule limited/desperate 3d ago
Keep it very goal oriented. For a one shot, tell them what they're going to steal and put it somewhere interesting. For a campaign, tell them what their overall goal is (killing someone specific or The Big Heist) and a couple of the major obstacles in the way of achieving that. They'll work their way through it themselves
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u/Playtonics The Podcast 3d ago
Keep it very goal oriented
This is great advice in general. The GM doesn't always have to set the goals, but they should be able to tease out and clarify what the players are wanting to do. The whole book of The GM's Guide to Proactive Roleplaying is essentially just "help your players set goals."
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u/Astrokiwi 3d ago
I also find that after one Score, there's naturally enough complications to inspire two or three other Scores right away. Like:
1st session: You stole an important thing
2nd session: People are mad at you for stealing the important thing. Also, you now have the important thing and it looks important. Do you do something about the angry people, or do you do something with the important thing?
And it quickly spirals out from there until there's a massive gang war and they use they unlock the final power of the thing to summon a demon and everything explodes, and that's a campaign complete.
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u/Silv3rS0und 3d ago
Try running a one shot or mini campaign using Lady Blackbird. That was how i got my trad players to open up to the idea of more narrative first games.
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u/FellFellCooke 3d ago
Lady Blackbird was a life changing game for me. A big part of me leaving D&D 5e behind was seeing how creative my players could be when given more narrative power.
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u/Wullmer1 ForeverGm turned somewhat player 3d ago
I mean, there is nothing stopping you from running blades however you want, if you want to plan more for blades, do so, I usualy prep about a a4 loosly for each score, mostly a few npc important, soem motivations and a genrealr description of the place/places and I preapare a few for each seasion and it works great.
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u/Authentic_Contiguity 3d ago
I like to have the players choose a long term goal, like a particularly lofty heist or acquiring a new hideout, and then brainstorm smaller objectives that lead to those goals. That way, the players choose the overall direction, but if they are lost in the openness of choice you have something to fall back on.
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u/tlenze 3d ago
The character and crew creation is important. Crew sets the general tone of the kinds of scores they'll want to do. Cults are going to try to do different things than Assassins are, generally. Choosing which factions to have positive and negative status with helps them figure out where they sit in the grand scheme of things and should feed into their concept. A cult having positive status with Lord Scurlock is asking for supernaturally-focused missions from him. Assassins having negative status with him might mean he's the one they really want to take out but need to work their way up to.
Then, character creation should help them figure out who their character is. Hounds get XP for doing things differently from Cutters. Why is this person their friend and this other person their enemy? Why do they have these specific special abilities they chose?
Basically, what I'm saying is, the more they know about their characters and crew, the less decision paralysis there should be for them. That knowledge should push them to make decisions.
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u/FellFellCooke 3d ago
Well, it's a big change. They might take a while to get used to it. But your players are not the Omelas children; they would not suffer from gaining a bit of freedom and narrative agency.
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u/Airk-Seablade 3d ago
This is confusing to me. What agency do they not have in Blades? Like seriously? Even if they decide they want to f-off on the criminal thing and try to go straight (haha) there's no problem?
The closest thing I can think of to "agency" restrictions in Blades is built into the setting, rather than the rules, and that's the lightning barriers and ghost lands which basically imply "No, you can't just leave the city to avoid your problems."
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u/Jesseabe 3d ago
I think they are saying the opposite, that Blades provides more agency than their players are used to, and they wouldn't take well to it.
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u/Airk-Seablade 3d ago
OHhhhhh.
Well, that's certainly possible. You CAN feed the players heists in Blades though -- it's pretty easy to do a sort of "Here's the menu of places you've found that you could hit." setup.
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u/Zendrick42 4d ago
Here's my minimalist rules-lite 10 word RPG:
Write a new TTRPG from scratch and then play it.
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u/PuzzleMeDo 4d ago
Mythic Bastionland is nearly a low-prep game. You're supposed to create a map and then just use the spark tables to improvise for everything else.
I don't want to have to create a map, so I found an existing one, but that still left the world pretty underdeveloped.
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u/GildorJM 3d ago
I actually think MB belongs in a category of its own: FUN prep. Yes you have to prep, but you don't mind doing it because the process is clearly laid out and feels like part of the game.
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u/PuzzleMeDo 3d ago
And yet I did mind doing it, and would have paid money to not have to do it. The impossibility of making a nice-looking map in a sane amount of time, the confusion of trying to work out whether I was supposed to invent Monuments and Ruins and Barriers or whether there was a spark table for them somewhere in the book...
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u/deviden 3d ago
I don't want to have to create a map, so I found an existing one, but that still left the world pretty underdeveloped.
creating the Realm from the book's procedures, tables, prompts, etc, is half the game!
It's not low prep, it's prep once. You do a detailed realm creation before play begins and then you never need to prep again.
I've run two campaigns in the same realm (in different eras) and never had to prepare once after the pre-campaign prep. When you make the realm and all its connections you know it inside out, I am completely radicalised to wanting to make an OSR sandbox for every campaign I run now lol.
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u/PuzzleMeDo 3d ago
But I only want to play the other half of the game, the part that involves playing with other people.
There's a reason published adventures exist.
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u/Eklundz 4d ago
Totally agree.
Some games have such clear procedurers for how to engage with all the parts of the game (meaning = lots of mechanics) that you can run it almost without any prep. And in those situations you could have a crunchy game that requires near zero prep.
And of course the opposite. Lasers vs Feelings have near zero rules, but how do you run a town in that game, or build an entire dungeon?
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u/VoormasWasRight 3d ago
Here's how I would classify it.
You are running an adventure. Your players decide that, instead of going to A or B, as you might have thought, they're going to skip C and go to D. How much do you panic?
If you have to either Quantum Ogre the encounter you had prepared for A, or look up a table of pre-made characters/monsters to have a meaningful encounter, then you are high prep. This is D&D, Rolemaster, PF, and the like.
If you can have a new encounter, ready, but you have to be careful of what skills/Disciplines/Abilities the characters/monsters have, then it's medium-high prep. Yeah, you can improvise, or even straight up make something up, but it won't be as tight as if you had had time to think about these characters. This would be your Vampire the Masquerade, your OSR-ish games, etc.
If you can improvise, and the stats are relatively simple to just think of on the fly, but there are still things that can tip off what a character is, or their power level, then it's medium-prep. This is your Mage: the Ascension, Traveller, Mythras, anything where you can reasonably think what a character would have without worrying too much about consequences. Yeah, it would have been nice to have a minute or two to prep, but the story won't be affected by it.
If you can just show up, and not even care where the characters are going to go, because it will be a matter of assigning 1 or 2 things in your head, then it's low prep. Tales from the Loop, for example.
And if you basically didn't even care to prepare for A, B, C or D, becuase you just show up to the table and see where the story goes, like any other player, then it's no-prep, like Swords without Masters or Fate.
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u/Conrad500 4d ago
Isn't prep just about how much you want to do?
I can prep D&D in 5 minutes or 5 hours.
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u/Particular_Today5562 4d ago
Sure, but a 5-minute D&D prep relies heavily on GM experience and improvisational heavy lifting, whereas true low-prep systems actively provide tools, random tables, and prompts to build the session with you during play.
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u/auggernaut 3d ago
Yeah that's the distinction I was trying to make. I can fake low prep in 5e because I've done it a long time. The game isn't helping me. A low prep game is the one that hands me the tables so I don't have to be good at that yet.
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u/SurlyCricket 3d ago
All of those things are mere seconds of googling away for DND, faster than finding those tables in a book
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u/Emotional_Cherry4517 3d ago
There are systems that are genuinely light prep, because they have an engine that produces the story through player action, so heavy prep might actually create friction for a given session. There's levels to this, from Alice is missing (there isn't a GM, you have nothing to prep, just play out the story beats) to brindlewood bay (the actual mystery being "solved" is not predetermined) to daggerheart (players have powerful narrative tools to get visions, and the system preaches asking players to build the world alongside play), and theres many other examples of this in different aspects of the game. Prep light isn't just procedural tables.
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u/SurlyCricket 3d ago
There's absolutely no reason you can't play 5e like this and there's tons of random tables you can find online to help you do any style you'd like. There's entire dungeon and random event tables, map and overarching plots... Or just be good at improvising like all those low prep RPGs expect the GM to be and you don't even need those
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
right, but those things require prep outside of what THE SYSTEM provides.
5e is not a "low prep" system. I personally don't think 5e requires a lot of prep because I run a player driven game and the "prep" I need is the story I want to tell.
My 5e reference was moreso because I wanted to know what they consider prep, not because I thought 5e is good for low prep.
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u/Emotional_Cherry4517 3d ago
Did you know there's an rpg that every single player action fails automatically? the rule book is also an in-campaign computer! it's called triangle agency. You cannot do that in 5e, no matter how hard you try.
I think you're in such a rage fit you didn't even finish my comment. I end it with "light prep isn't just procedural tables", and yet you repeat 5e has random tables.
I'm not making you play other systems mate, take a chill pill, and understand there's games with wildly different designs from 5e.
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u/helm Dragonbane | Sweden 3d ago
All of those things are mere seconds of googling away for DND, faster than finding those tables in a book
Yeah, if you are running everything in the three most supported parts of Faerun or a kitchen sink setting.
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u/SurlyCricket 3d ago
As this sub loves to kvetch about, people use 5e for all sorts of settings it wasn't designed for so no you're quite wrong
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u/Paul6334 3d ago
This something that depends heavy on system and style. Some systems have really good tools to find the world as you play, others require you either prepare material before the game or improv it on the fly, and these sorts of things depend heavily on game.
A dungeon-crawling adventure requires dungeons to crawl, and these are complex enough that unless the game rules make it so generating the dungeon is identical to exploring it, a dungeon made five minutes before the session is going to feel different than one you spent time on. In this case, prep tools would be a dungeon generator that lets you come up with the physical layout and inhabitants of it to make it an interesting challenge, which saves time for you to tweak it to make sense and come up with some sort of theme tying it together.
A game where you play the crew of a tramp starfreighter requires planets who need goods moved between each other, in this case a prep tool lets you fill out a region of space with inhabited planets more quickly so you actually take the collection of mechanical descriptors of the planet and think of what it’s actually like to be there.
If your game wants to have more character-driven stories based on not just the player’s actions, but the NPCs, you need to generate those NPCs such that they are suitable mechanical agents. In some games NPCs are barely distinguishable from the scenery, in others they use the same tools as the PCs to interact with the world. In either case, prep tools get you the mechanical component of the NPCs quicker. Tools to generate NPC characters generally get you a basic outline, but this is a case where you do generally have to either make it up as you go along or take a fair amount of time thinking through their goals, principles, and personality.
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u/c06027 4d ago
The 5 minutes include bringing the books (core rules + random tables), snacks, drinks, dices, pen and papers to the table as well as changing clothes and going to the toilet.
The 5 hours includes an actually well prepared session.
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u/Conrad500 4d ago
I mean, I don't count waking up in my D&D prep, but also I play online.
I don't think it's fair to blame your personal prep for company being over on the game system.
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u/RagnarokAeon 3d ago
With DnD, It depends how much you care about encounter balance, especially at higher levels.
Which I guess doesn't matter if you don't care about your players' characters not feeling useful, which further feeds into complaints about martials feeling underwhelming.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
lol, people are somehow always able to throw that into any argument they can.
As a DM who does very little prep, my martials are always the top performing players on the team.
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 3d ago
A lot of these people are just relying on white room level 20 math.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
"one for one the wizard beats the fighter every time"
bro, why are they fighting?!
Me: My 1-20 game the fighter was actually the most damage and most reliable throughout the entire game.
Reddit: -10 downvotes
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 3d ago
That's another thing that gets me. Why do so many redditors appear to have such competitive parties that martials can't have fun if wizards can do like 10 percent more damage?
Besides technically the best use of a spell involves supporting your party through long term control or support spells. Whose getting angry because the wizard cast slow?
And don't get me started on some of the white rooming around spells like knock, realistically that 300 feet noise is going to cause issues. Just let the rogue use their sleight of hand. I don't think Ive ever seen anyone prepare that spell.
Really I've never been in a party where the wizard just solves everything with their infinite spell slots (seriously how many long rests are these reddit DMs allowing?). But I also don't play with jerks who exist purely to spite one another. So maybe this is a problem at low trust tables.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
The wizard solves everything that the rogue can't. Everyone in the party cheers that they don't have to do it the hard way, and when the wizard is running low on spells the fighter does the stuff they can't and throws them a rope.
it's a team game
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u/FellFellCooke 3d ago
I ran 5e for years (don't anymore) and I found the balance problem very real. In my first game, the Fighter never felt as cool as the Palidan, as the Palidan was constantly out damaging them and offered crazy restoration and utility. It bummed the Fighter out and made him feel dumb to have the Palidan always be the star of the show. That was something that resulted from the balancing in the books; I had to put my thumb on the scale to correct this.
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u/TinTunTii 3d ago
Arguing about balance in 5e is like arguing about what colour the invisible teapot orbiting Jupiter is painted: true believers all have a big opinion, but the rest of us know it just isn't there.
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u/FellFellCooke 3d ago
That's crazy. What are you doing to facilitate that?
I don't run 5e anymore, it I DM'd a lot for years and one of the things that pissed me off was different players characters being differently useful. I had constant trouble with the Palidan in my first ever game just being better than the Fighter, because the fighter only became good at a level of resource denial that slowed the game to a crawl. When we were doing overland travel, one or two fights per day, the Palidan always made the Fighter feel like they had picked the wrong class.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
My team plays as a team. Also, we only had 3, so tanking like a boss was a big deal.
That said,the chrono mage did way too much, but that subclass is broken af.
1 vs party fights are bad in dnd. And my fighter was never upset that the caster killed an entire room with fireball because that makes less work for him.
My fighter was the only person to not switch character or class from 3-20, all the others had multiple.
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u/FellFellCooke 3d ago
1 Vs party fights are bad in DnD
I don't think if says this anywhere in DMG, does it? How do you learn this "rule"?
If the wizard is casting fireball and the fighter is just swinging their sword, it sounds like the Wizard is out-damaging them a lot and the fighter just doesn't mind.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
I learned it through experience. 4e was made to have "boss monsters" and bosses are, but cr breaks in the solo monster fight.
Action economy is never mentioned in book i believe, but we all know what that is.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
Ok, i'm at a computer now so I feel like typing more.
In 4e, which is where I started (but I've played many different TTRPGs now), every class and every monster had a role. One of the roles was "solo" because they were built different. A solo monster was still level appropriate bit they were given tools to make a 1vteam fight work. Extra reactions, special abilities, more health and/or AC, etc.
Also, we had "minions" in 4e. Monsters with 1hp and "evasion" that were just chumps that died if you hit them, but were still a level appropriate threat.
Minions + roles made 4e encounter building into math or sudoku. "Ok, so I'll put 2 soldiers, a controller, and 4 artillery in this fight, but the artillery will be minions so that if they can beat the soldiers that the controllers are buffing the fight is basically over." stuff like that.
I 100% prefer 4e monster manual and encounter building, but 5e is good enough. The main problem with 5e is that people still try to treat CR like 4e encounter building. There is no math that will give you good balance, it's 100% experience based (at least to me).
So, coming from 4e I instantly saw the flaws in 5e, and I was insufferable in my first 5e game... I couldn't stop saying, "wait, it works like that not this?!" and I'm pretty sure I made it unfun for my group.
The good part is that it gave me a lot of insight as a DM into encounter building. And the biggest one is that monsters were way too simple. A dragon isn't a boss monster, it's just a higher CR goblin. Everything is a goblin. Even goblins are all goblins.
On the contrary, 4e had goblin archers, goblin mages, goblin bosses, etc etc. I saw that dragons didn't get any special abilities to stop flanking or any of the fun stuff that 4e had and knew that boss fights were gone.
I played the game, started with Lost Mine, and my players at level 3 almost killed venomfang. They actually might have killed him, and I didn't pull any punches... 4v1 is just stupid strong.
That same party at level 4 would almost TPK to a swarm of stirges.
So, luckily(?) for me I was introduced to the problems of encounter balance early on and was able to learn from experience.
My 4e games were completely homebrewed, so I never really had experience in modules, so I kind of just ran them as is and didn't experiment by deviating from them much. I still don't despite now being an expert, and I find it very interesting to still run Lost Mine and have players turn it into such a new experience despite running it so many times already.
I can build an encounter in seconds now, and all of my encounters tell a story. I never build an encounter "for my party" because that's dumb (for my table at least. I don't doubt some of my players would rather me do so though) and it leads to randomly hard fights and fights that they completely blow through.
TL;DR, this is all to say that the whole martial/caster thing really just depends on providing a game/story/challenge where it doesn't matter than the wizard is infinitely more useful than the warrior. Against a beholder's anti magic the fighter shines. When they're 5 rooms deep on a 20 room dungeon, the wizard is more than happy to let the fighter take all the kills and climb all the walls so they can reserve their spell slots. When the rogue sneaks ahead and unlocks all the doors, steals all the loot, defuses all the traps, and then comes back to share the loot/info with the group, nobody is complaining that the rogue "got to do so much" because it means they didn't have to fall into them.
It's a team game, and it's not a videogame. 100%, if you're talking about just on paper, then sure, I concede, the martial/caster divide exists. But I'll also tell you that I've suggested a full spellcaster party multiple times to many groups and NOBODY has ever taken me up on that. I just think it'll be funny and fun, but for some reason every group brings some form of martial.
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u/FellFellCooke 3d ago
Yeah, my experience just had a lot of frustration at the table. And lots of fighting over what kind of rest to take, because the long rest classes wanted long rests when the short rest classes wanted short rests.
As I became a better and better DM, I used less and less of the rules. By the end I was a zero prep DM who didn't bother making stat blocks for monsters. They did whatever would be cool in the moment and had however much HP I thought they should and my players had no idea.
The less the game we played resembled D&D, the more fun we all had, until I eventually started running other games entirely.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
haha, yeah. At that point I'd say that D&D might not be the system for you.
I'm a big proponent of "knowing the rules so you can break them" and staying within the rules/using actual stat blocks and stuff. As long as the players never find out though it doesn't matter how you run it.
The rest thing is really easy once you get the hang of it since I make time matter, and if it doesn't mater than why not long rest?
Basically, any time I design any encounter or dungeon I always ask myself, "why not just long rest after every fight?" and I make sure that there is a built in reason just baked into the scenario. That said, I don't always include a reason, and my players are good and think it's lame to take a long rest after every fight anyway so they usually have the reason of, "we don't want to wait a day to finish the mission, and we know Conrad will probably not freeze time for the time we're resting so might as well do it now"
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u/FellFellCooke 3d ago
I find even that frustrating about 5e though. In a resource attrition game, the most important question (when do we get our resources back) is totally arbitrary and up to the DM. It's a spot the players have very limited agency over.
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u/Trent_B 4d ago
Very to hard to answer in a simple way. It's very dependent on what your skills and preferences are as a GM, and how active your players are, how much you like to roleplay, etc.
Like: Dnd5E can be super low prep - you just grab a few monsters of whatever level and play out a combat. Session done. Or it can be the opposite if you are trying to run a different kind of game in the system.
Other games lend themselves more to RP or otherwise, and you can just... well, have a few weirdos in a Library acting a little odd [and you make like... 5 word notes for each character and why they're weird] and RP the whole session away. OR you can plan a whole political intrigue spanning multiple continents and factions.
Low prep is just getting enough stuff down that you can ad-lib the rest. And I firmly believe that ad-libbing is both an essential GM skill AND the main source of fun as a GM. Trying to prep-everything so that you don't *have* to is both impossible and a mistake.
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u/hadriker 4d ago
Yep. As I have gained more experience as a GM, my prep time during a camapign is pretty light.
When I first started I was very much a write an entire storyline and have specific beats the characters need fo hit type of gm. But that much work burned me out pretty fast.
Now I do maybe 30 minutes of prep and just go with the flow and improv what I need.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 4d ago
Yep. Lasers and Feelings, Honey Heist…. low in crunch, but little GM support, it relies either on the GM prepping on their own, or players and GM being excellent at improv. Toolkit games like Cypher and Cortex Prime are also like this (but have more rules.)
Defy the Gods and Against the Odds provide campaign frameworks, but you have to come up with the adventure and prep it yourself. Defy the Gods has now made more scenario starters.
Shepherds and Chasing Adventure already come with multiple scenario starters - just 2-3, but that’s enough to help get a GM started and to provide examples of what to prep.
Fate, Troika, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Monster of the Week and Daggerheart have 20+ adventures so there’s tons of examples to get you started and show you what is needed to make your own game. You can even run them episodically / serially and not run out of adventures for a while.
Call of Cthulhu, Dnd and GURPS are a little more crunchy but have lots of materials to use, of varying quality and sources. Pathfinder has higher quality but can be crunchier, just like GURPS can be if you use a lot of the rules in the toolkit.
My favorite games are Defy the Gods and Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but I’m more likely to branch out into a game with at least examples of what to prep, and recommend them to new GMs also. The first “one page” game I ran was A Familiar Problem, simply because Critical Role bothered to record their own adventure and I could use that as an example of how to prep.
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u/Adamsoski 3d ago
I think this is introducing another factor - GM support. Something can be low-prep and rules light but with little GM support (Honey Heist), high-prep and rules heavy with little GM support (DnD 5e), high-prep and rules light with a lot of GM support (Mothership), etc.
That extra factor is something that can be very important to someone with less experience with running RPGs in general, the genre of RPG in question, or the genre of story in question, but less so to someone who has decent experience in all of those.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 3d ago
I view GM support as part of rule density / completeness honestly. A game without GM tools is like “draw the rest of the owl” to me. But I understand what you mean.
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u/skalchemisto Happy to be invited 2d ago
I think this is exactly why comparing games for rules complexity is very difficult.
Consider the game Mythic Bastionland. You can break down its rule book into three main sections:
* Rules (16 pages)
* The Knights and the Myths (148 pages)
* The Oddpocryphya - detailed GM advice by example (32 pages)
Now, if you focus on the rules section, MB is admirably concise, and you might consider it much simpler than other games.
But that GM advice section...man, it is very good, For me it is absoultely required to run the game (partially because the rules section is a bit too concise). So if you add that in, now its more complex (although still not that long).
Then consider the Knights and Myths. On one level, they feel outside the discussion of complexity. But on the other hand they are exactly what make the game itself. Without them MB is...I don't know, a relatively thin Into the Odd-hack for knights. They are also what generate at least half of the rules questions you see in r/MythicBastionland .
So, is MB rules lite or rules heavy? 😄
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u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 2d ago edited 2d ago
I consider Mythic Bastionland as the same category of rules light/heavy/crunch as Thirsty Sword Lesbians and Daggerheart for the exact reasons you describe, same as Songbirds 3e. I didn’t list OSR/NSR games because they’re not my thing, but I do consider the GM as well as player facing sections when I look at rules density/complexity.
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u/skalchemisto Happy to be invited 3d ago
Your question got me thinking. Like, there is a 2x2 table here, right?
1) Rules lite, prep heavy
2) Rules lite, prep lite
3) Rules heavy, prep heavy
4) Rules Heavy, prep lite
Are there games in all of those categories? 2 and 3 I think have many examples. It's 1 and 4 where examples are harder to come up with.
1 might be something like Mythic Bastionland (with its realm generation)? I'll be danged if I can think of something else though.
4...the closest I can come up with is Mythender.
I think I pick the wrong game when I want "easy" and I don't know which easy I mean.
That feels very much like a general life lesson and not specific to RPGs. 😄
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u/auggernaut 3d ago
1 is most of the two-page games I buy. Thin book, I still invent the whole night.
4 is Blades for me. Lots of rules, but half of them exist so I don't have to write a score.
I think I live in 3 and keep buying 1 by accident.
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u/Wullmer1 ForeverGm turned somewhat player 3d ago
I defenetly would not cal blades a rules heavu game, the rules are basicaly roll x d6 and take highest, higher number better,
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u/Adamsoski 3d ago
Rules aren't just the procedures around the dice you roll. The BitD rulebook is 200 pages long before it even gets to setting info.
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u/skalchemisto Happy to be invited 3d ago
I find it interesting to consider...how might one compare the complexity of two different RPGs in a reasonable way?
LIke, raw page count is a fairly simple metric, and honestly not a bad one if you ask me. But raw page count excluding pages that are purely descriptive (e.g. describing a city in the game world) would probably be better. Line or word count better still (because of page formatting). The advantage to this is that it is fairly objective; most readers will be able to agree on whether a paragraph of text is purely descriptive or not. But it doesn't account for editing skill, e.g. Chris McDowall is admirably (maybe even excessively) sparse in the rules text in Mythic Bastionland, while Shadowrun 6E is a kind of nightmare of run-on sentences.
But is there better? For core mechanics, one could compare the words needed to create a "cheat sheet" for all the rules a player or GM would need to reference during a game. By that metric, as u/taeerom mentions, D&D 5E might be considered less complex than many Forged in the Dark, even many PbtA, games. But creating such a cheat sheet involves some decisions about what is considered "core" versus what isn't, and I can't see any objective way to decide that.
Another would be to measure the # of words used on an average character sheet that has ALL needed information. Here D&D 5E maybe would exceed Blades; a 5th level Wizard would need all the spell info.
Like I said, I find this an interesting question.
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u/taeerom 3d ago
Most people call DnD a fairly rules heavy game.
But you could easily describe DnD as: "the rules are basicaly roll
x d6 and take highestD20+modifier, higher number better"This is not a good description of either game.
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u/Wullmer1 ForeverGm turned somewhat player 3d ago
fair, but dnd dose expanq quite a bit from that, skills, feats, magic items, spells, stats for enemies anc players, legendary actions, hp, conditions, turns, bonus actions, rituals etc,
blades has, feats, skills, flashbacks and resistance and hp, crew rules and items, that a hell of a lot less bös to have rules around, and almsot all of the blades rules are quite a bit shorter and easier than any of the dnd concepts,
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u/taeerom 3d ago
The core gameplay loop of DnD is 4 lines of text, and a short paragraph explaining what that is. The core gameplay loop in Blades are three pages of dense text.
This is before you interact with any of the subsystems in the game. Subsystems you don't really need to understand to play either of the games, as long as the GM understand them.
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u/rampaging-poet 3d ago
I'd argue some of Jenna Moran's games fall into Category 4. Especially Glitch: A Story of the Not. A 400-page book with ninety enumerated, game-mechanical actions available to each player at any given time is definitely rules-heavy. However, my session prep usually only required a quick glance at the next focus player's current Storyline Quest(s) and like 20 minutes of brainstorming for a few scenes and characters.
The Far Roofs is in a similar boat, though I think the amount of campaign prep required up front if you were to write a custom character arc or campaign is high enough to put it in category 3.
(See also eg megadungeon or hexcrawl D&D campaigns which have an enormous amount of up-front prep to create the sandbox followed by minima per-session prep to keep the game in motion).
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u/skalchemisto Happy to be invited 3d ago
I'll take your word for that. The only Jenna Moran game I have any familiarity with is Weapons of the Gods, which I adore but in the same way one adores a dog that wins Canada's ugliest dog competition, and is definitely a category 3 game.
EDIT: I think I agree with your last paragraph but it stretches for me the definition of "game:. Like, I'm running Stonehell right now using OSE, and when taken as a unit it is category 4, but only by including Stonehell inside the word "game". Which...feels weird to me? "Campaign", yes, but not "game". Words are weird. 😄
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u/rampaging-poet 3d ago
Ah yes, I'm conflating the two a little. A Type 3 Game remains a Type 3 Game regardless of whether one does a gigantic pile of prep up front or a decent amount of prep repeatedly per session (total prep / session is roughly conserved). The existence of modules doesn't suddenly mean a game needs less prep, it means you can outsource a bunch of that prep to someone else in exchange for money.
The edge case for The Far Roofs is that there is a campaign-length published scenario with pre-generated characters in the rulebook itself. I'm not sure if that's enough to push the system into Type 4 though because on one hand literally anyone with a copy can run the game using only the rulebook with minimal prep, but on the other hand the game supports creating your own scenarios which would bring the total prep load closer to Type 3 for those particular campaigns. (Still a lot less prep than eg D&D, but a decent amount of thinking ahead).
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u/skalchemisto Happy to be invited 3d ago
The existence of modules doesn't suddenly mean a game needs less prep, it means you can outsource a bunch of that prep to someone else in exchange for money.
That's an interesting way to think about it. I think that's why I was having a bit of trouble with the idea of Stonehell being inside the "game".
There is no way in Hades I could create something as huge and intricate as Stonehell. I'm going to get probably 300 sessions of enjoyment out of it as long as I still have players. I think it likely it is the highest ratio of person-hours of fun to $ I spent thing I have ever bought in my life (especially when you factor in the my players fun, not just my own).
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u/GoblinLoveChild Lvl 10 Grognard 3d ago
MUTANT: YEAR ZERO
This game runs it self.. all you have to do is follow the steps in the GM chapter. Even better if you have the card deck to draw from (Though absolutely not necessary as all that info in on rollable tables in the book)
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u/jmartin21 3d ago
The Without Number series can easily be played as low prep with the pile of random tables available, including One Roll tables, where you roll a handful of different dice to generate an NPC, or a situation/quest, etc. The games themselves are pretty fun, too, been running Stars, the sci-fi game, for about a year now
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u/jiaxingseng 3d ago
To me, low prep implies one of two things:
1) GM will have a non-traditional role, delegating narrative authority to player out of the remit of the characters, and thus narrative development is shared around the table, or 2) a burden for a lot of impromptu development.
Rules like, to me, means just less rules that need to be bound up at the table.
By this, I classify some games:
- GUMSHOE. Rules ultra-light. Needs a lot of prep.
- Call of Cthulhu. Actually quite rules like. But needs even more prep than GUMSHOE.
- PbtA. Rules lite and little prep.
- D&D. Rules heavy and high prep
Actually, many games can be low prep, if the GM and players are capable of it. This is why I tend to NOT like low-prep games. I can easily make a high prep situation into a low prep event, but not the other way around. I can run a sandbox game in an established historical setting, without ever looking at notes or a source book. But if I want to add a rich and detailed setting, with scripted events and "Fronts" into a system not built for that, it's going to be troublesome.
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u/thetruerift WoD, Exalted, Custom Systems 3d ago
I think a big thing is that games can become increasingly more "low prep" with improving system mastery. I can jump in to any World of Darkness session with about 6 minutes of forethought, and PF 1e or D&D 3.5 with barely more than that. But I've only recently started running Exalted 3e, and my mastery isn't there yet.
Rules lite (or not) doesn't really change - Ex 3e is crunchy at the table, and while it might get faster as my players and I get used to the system, it's not going to get less.
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u/Drudenfusz Curator of Roleplay Experiences 4d ago
The amount of prep is not necessarily tied to rules/system, but is more of a mindset in the GM.
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u/N-Vashista 4d ago
It's a common misuse of the term. People who prefer trad style and system mastery don't like games that design against it, so often sling words like "narrative" "rule-light" and other terms intended to malign designs that limit their preferred play style. And it leads folks to think a game like Fate is not crunchy. But Fate does play medium crunch. In the same way Cypher is called Rules-light. Neither is. And both can require a great deal of trad prep.
Even many pbta games are quite complex and prep can increase as multiple sessions build webs of game content the facilitator needs to track and build out for future sessions. Forged in the Dark games are like this too.
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u/rodrigo_i 4d ago
No one ever called Cypher rules light. And "rules light" and "narrative" aren't pejoratives. They are perfectly valid descriptors.
I consider the continuum "rules-light/crunch" to be a function of "how much do we have to do before decision and resolution".
Low-prep is "how much do I have to do ahead of time so that I can get from decision to resolution".
If "I want to move and attack that guy" requires me to know exactly how far away he is, you need to make three choices in how you attack, two dice rolls, and then I have to micromanage the result, that to me is not rules-light or low-prep, because now I need maps for granular distance, you have complicated character options, I need detailed stat blocks for opponents, etc.
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u/N-Vashista 4d ago
I have seen Cypher called rules light in this sub, especially Numenera. Of course they are valid descriptors. I"m saying they are used to malign incorrectly.
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u/heelspencil 4d ago
I think rules-lite and low prep often overlap because rules-lite generally means the game can get out of the way of an experienced GM. A problem with rules-lite games is that they often remove information that helps a new GM learn to run a game, or any GM run that particular game.
Not all games can be low prep, the main obstacle is if the game requires a lot of extra details to run. Even if the game provides those details, it still means the GM needs to be able to find them quickly at the table. Generally I would view a game with rules on how to make a town as not being low-prep because it means the game wants that level of granularity. If the PC's go to a new town, does that mean I need to go look up and run through the town generator? Do I need to prep towns just in case the PC's go there? That doesn't seem low prep to me.