Fast Prep with Personality

Last week I was ridiculously busy. I was racing towards a gallery opening at work, getting the house reorganized after our epic Halloween shenanigans, buying birthday presents for my niece, working on the weekend, fending off a creeping cold and generally not doing any prep for my usual Wednesday game. By the time my group decided that we were absolutely going to play, it was already Wednesday morning. This left me with my lunch break to come up with a plan for tackling the night's adventures.

Now, I've done short-prep games before, but at less than an hour this was by far the shortest. I knew I needed to be fast and to prep ONLY THE THINGS I WOULD NEED TO SURVIVE!

I decided to stick with my typical strategy for quick-prep games and start with the characters involved. The previous session, my players had rescued a group of slaves from some hobgoblin mercenaries and had taken one of the hobs prisoner. I knew that the party would likely want to get information out of the various NPCs and to get the slaves back to safety.

The first thing I did was figure out the makeup of the group of slaves. This consisted of single sentence or even single word descriptions of their appearance, occupation and, of course, their names. I made sure to throw some variety into the group and to use the characters to establish some potential conflict points. How do the slaves react to their former captors? What condition are the various slaves in? I wrote some of these points down, but just kept others in mind. When nothing was written, I used the character's brief description to establish a likely personality.

and that was it. That was my prep.

Granted, certain other things made additional prep unnecessary. My players had stated their intent to retrace their steps through a previously traversed cave system, so I didn't need to plot out new locations. They had also left a couple obstacles in their path, including a cave full of previously turned undead.

By focusing on the characters first. The fast-prep game became a really engaging escort mission. Jittery slaves on the verge of madness tried to flee or went catatonic, the mercenary prisoner made an unsuccessful escape attempt, and the undead very nearly took out several of the players' precious cargo. I felt that creating varied personalities for each of the NPCs made all the difference in the world. The session wouldn't have been nearly as engaging if the players were simply escorting slaves 1-7.

Y is for "Yes And"

One of the fundamental rules of improvisational theater (one of my other hobbies) is often referred to as the "yes and" rule. If you are performing in improv comedy, or any other form of unscripted theater and one of your fellow actors gets a scene rolling, or adds to a scene in progress, it is important to run with what they have set up. In improv terms, adding something to a scene is called an offer and it is important to accept that offer. If you don't accept it, the scene may immediately break and/or descend into something completely unintelligible to the audience... a terrible place to be for any actor.

Learning to accept and run with others' offers can be tough. Sometimes you enter a scene thinking, "I'm gonna come in and be the hyperactive little kid" Then just as your stepping on stage, your fellow actor says, "Ah, Old Man Withers! there you are, I was hoping you might help me with some car trouble." Well, you can either shift immediately to Old Man Withers mode which will further the storyline that was just established, or continue to play your original idea and play as the little kid. The latter could very likely cause a break in the audience's suspension of disbelief because they're thinking, "Wait, I thought that was Old Man Withers?"

There is an improv exercise that distills the idea of "yes and" down to its root, in which each of the participants begins every statement with the words yes and.

1: "Hey grandpa, I can't wait to get to the carnival"
2: "Yes, and we're going to stay there all day, Billy"
1: "Yes, and I want to eat tons of cotton candy!"

and so on...

I bring this up because running a tabletop RPG is very similar to performing in improv theater. A GM plays every character not played by one of the players and also orchestrates all of the interaction with the surrounding environment. During a game session, the GM typically has an idea about where he/she wants the session to go. However, this idea is not always apparent to the players, and they may read the clues the GM drops in an entirely different way and attempt to take the game in an entirely different direction. The question is, as the GM, do you accept the players' offer and go in their direction or do you try to convince them to go with your plan as intended? The former can be challenging because it can put the GM into a spot for which he/she is unprepared, can potentially derail the course of the adventure and/or even bypass some of the hours of work the GM put into planning the session. The latter can be challenging because the players can start to feel railroaded (like their choices don't matter) and potentially breaking the fun of the session, and if it happens too much, dissolving the group.

There are a couple tricks a GM can use to say "yes and" to the player's decisions -to help guide the adventure without denying the players their active roles in the way it plays out.

A is for: AAAAAAAAAAIYEEEE!!! GO GO GO!!!

The terrified scream in the title of this post is brought to you for two reasons...

Reason the first: After a morning coffee bender, I decided I did not have enough time-sensitive obligations in my life and decided to enter the April A to Z Blogging Challenge. How does this challenge work? you ask. Simply put, during the month of April, I shall attempt to post to this here blog every day except Sundays. Each blog post shall be brought to you by the letter for that day, beginning with A. In today's blog, "A" is for "AAAAAAAAAAIYEEEE!!!", which is, in part a cry of disbelief that I have decided to commit to this challenge... but I have.

However, "AAAAAAAAAAIYEEEE!!!" also has a less cop-outey meaning, which is actually relevant to the gaming subject matter included in this blog. For it is the sound my brain made yesterday morning when I decided to run a session of Gamma World on a whim, which began about 8 hours after the decision was made. Oh, and I had absolutely no prep time, because I was at work until about an hour before the game was scheduled to start.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, my regular D&D game night fell apart at the last minute, due to an unacceptable number of absences. When a number of my players who still wanted to do something brought up the snot green box that has been idling on my shelf since my birthday last fall, I thought... "Oh, sod it! who needs prep time? Let's play!" and so we would hurl ourselves into a world ruled by the cruel and capricious atom.

"A" is for "Atom."


While I have had my share of planning scrambles, I have never run a completely improvised session before. Fortunately, Gamma World is very easy to start up from an RPG standpoint and fairly straightforward to run, especially if you are familiar with the 4E D&D game mechanics. (I am only sort of familiar with 4E, but run a regular 3.5 game, so it wasn't a big stretch.)

Anyway, the minimal prep I had consisted of:

1. That time I walked one of my friends through character creation process back in November
2. That time I read through the introductory adventure... also in November

When it came down to it, the game played out really well. Honestly, the roughest part was getting the characters created. I didn't have time to prep pregens, so I had to walk 5 entirely new players through the creation process with only one rulebook shared between them. (NOTE to other GMs: If you find yourself in this situation, either walk all your players through each step simultaneously, or each player sequentially. I did a mishmash of the two and it left me feeling all higgledy-piggledy.) Nevertheless, given the considerably stumbling blocks, I was thoroughly impressed that we were ready to roll 40 minutes after the last player arrived. No way that would happen with D&D!

We only had a couple hours of play time for the evening, but we managed to get through a roleplaying introduction / investigation, a little intro flavor encounter and a combat encounter. Most importantly, however, everyone seemed to have fun! Now that I at least know the structure of the rulebook, I feel like I would have no trouble picking up the game where we left off... on a moment's notice. If I had to come up with my own adventure, it might be a different story. I might need a couple hours to lay things out, but Gamma World is definitely a lighter time investment than something like D&D.

Oh, P.S. Our amusing cast of characters:

Buckworth, hypercognitive electrokineticist
Chlorzak, the genetic amalgamation of cockroach and plant-matter
Dusty Two-Shoes, the Radioactive Doppelganger and his faithful Rifle Hound
Harvey Birdman, empathic hawkoid
Willard, the empathic rat swarm

This spunky Scooby Doo gang set out through the mountains of Cascadia to solve the mystery of the Steading of the Iron King! Zoiks!