When in Rome
By Cape Rust
This week we will look at creating your campaign, adventure, episode or whatever you want to call it. Creating homebrew stuff is really fun but can take up time, lots and lots of time! Some folks have that time, most of us don’t. I’m going to try to give you some hints that might cut down the amount of time you need to develop the sandbox that your players and their well-developed characters will run around in. The Romans and even the Chinese of today were and are great at taking someone else’s idea, backwards engineering it and in some cases making it better. Why shouldn’t we as GMs do the same? After all, when in Rome…
The easiest way to save time when planning a gaming session is to run something that is pre-made. I know it seems kind of lame to those of you out there who have entire universes floating around in your brain bucket, but they are out there for a reason. These days there are thousands of places to find great pre-made products. With the growth of the interwebz there is some real high-quality stuff out there that is free and legal. We are part of a community that is great about sharing good ideas. There are sites out there, like this one, that have at least a metric ton of great stuff on them. Pre-made stuff is normally play tested and completely complies with the established rules of a game. This works best when you are dealing with a group of players you don’t know or if you are running a game at a Con. Pre-made stuff is great when you have to deal with rules lawyers as well, It is harder for one of “those” types of players to argue with stuff straight from the developers. They will still try but at least you can get some digs in on them. I am not a big fan of rules lawyers if you didn’t notice.
The overall best thing about any pre-made product is the amount of time it saves you, another great thing is that these days many pre-made products are plug and play. In the past, NPCs, monsters, villains and the like were easy to plug into any world, but now developers are designing products that make entire cities that will fit into most genre settings. When I say genre settings I mean a modern city will fit in most modern cities and some Sci-Fi settings on the lower tech planets. This modularity makes modules more module! Try saying that three times fast. One of the major drawbacks to this influx of great material, is sifting through it to find what you need. Sometimes you could have developed your own stuff in the time it takes to find the right stuff for your game. Enough of this pre-made stuff, let’s get our backwards engineering on!
For yours truly, backwards engineering is the easiest hybrid method for me to use. It allows me the flexibility I enjoy without burning out my lizard brian before I even add the x-factor of the players. Here is the process I normally use. After I decide what kind of game I’m going to run, I hit my RPG book shelves, physical and digital. I look at every thing I have on hand and see if there is anything that will be even remotely helpful and I pull it. I always start with the books that seem to have the least amount of info I think I’ll need. I go in this order because sometimes those books spawn other great ideas and sifting through them on the front end makes it easier to get to the chunky bits I’m looking for in the other books. After I cull the information “herd” it is time to get to the fun part.
I enjoy developing fun stories and encounters, it is one of the main reasons I GM. I like leaving the heavy lifting to other people who get paid to develop game products. I like to leave the world up to other people.
Most designers give you an overview of a city or nation and leave you lots of room to fill in the blanks. If I choose a source or setting that my players are familiar with, it reduces the amount of questions I have to answer about the world and the amount of “stuff” I have to make up. Deities are some of the easiest things to plug-and-play into your fantasy setting. Instead of the arduous task of developing your own pantheon, use someone else’s! It takes a long time to not only develop the pantheon, but writing up that pantheon for a player to read ahead or describing all of it takes mucho time. An alternative to this method is modifying certain aspects of a god or just developing an additional god to meet your gaming needs. One approach I have seen work well is to have a three or four god pantheon home-brewed or hijacked from an existing source.
In a modern game using things like existing laws or social norms for a particular social or racial group cuts down on development time. In many of the White Wolf games, these things are established and were established well. You can always modify some aspects of say, how a particular group of werewolves act, but why change the whole thing?
If you look at all of the things in our out-of-game lives that take up time, being a bit Roman in your approach to developing your own game can make sense. I understand the joy of completely developing your own world, but as I start to take a survey of the amount of time I have to develop game stuff vs. real life responsibilities, that game development time decreases quickly. Yes I do have time, but do I want to spend that time developing a set of laws for a clan or do you want to design a heavy mech that will rip into the players recon mechs? For me, the heavy mechs win every day. Clan laws are important but if you spend your entire time developing them and no time on your encounters, how much fun will your game be for your players?
As a GM you need to look at the amount of time you have and figure out the best way to use that time. Another factor to think about is the time you have to devote to your other hobbies. If you are spending a lot of your time developing a dissertation on the mating habits of Drow in your world, who is going to run that convoy in Eve, and let’s face it, that Wheel of Time book won’t read itself. You don’t have to be a Roman when it comes to preparing your game, but it might save you some time. And unlike Mick, time is not always on my side.