The twenty-teens brought a torrent of new small-press, independently created roleplaying games to us. The Forge had come to an end, the diaspora sent seedlings far and wide, Google Plus and Twitter were rocket fuel for the chaotic dissemination of ideas and audiences, print on demand made the entire workflow faster. And then there was Kickstarter, stomping on the gas and never letting us catch our breath. Now Itch.io is poised to further aerosolize game publication.
What even are roleplaying games? Do we still play these things or just deliver hot takes about them?
What a decade.
I’ve gone through my notes and bookshelves and thought long and hard about the titles that were most important to The Indie Game Reading Club over the past decade. Okay nerds, don’t @ me about when the decade “really” starts and stops. I’m starting in 2010 and ending in 2019.
This is by no means a comprehensive list! That would be impossible, truly. As I went looking for date confirmation and reminders, I scoured the Indie RPG Awards page (http://www.indie-rpg-awards.com/), Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_role-playing_game), DriveThruRPG (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/) and of course my own collection. There is a marked uptick in raw output starting around 2016, and by 2018 there’s just too much to track. I know I’m forgetting stuff, which is why I’m relying on these games’ lasting impressions on me.
Let’s do this thing. If you want to buy these games, please consider buying them through the links in this article (I get a few pennies per sale).
This was originally a (very!) long piece for my $10+/mo patrons on Patreon. I’ll be doing this as a series of small posts here on the blog, one per year every year until we’re through the teens! Please keep checking in. 🙂
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Apocalypse World, 2nd Edition
This is the title that put Powered by the Apocalypse on the map and prompted a huge outpouring of hacks, reskins and PbtA-inspired original works.
2010: Apocalypse World Changes Everything
This is the year Apocalypse World changed everyone’s life. This is the birth year of Powered by the Apocalypse, perhaps the first truly new method-of-play (or “genre” as Vincent Baker, AW’s co-author, calls it) since Fudge/Fate. I’m not sure another one has shown up since. This game was by no means “the most important” game to me in 2010 itself, though! I had picked it up prior to BurningCon 2010, noodled over how the heck to make moves and fictional triggers and, what the heck, the GM never rolls? The GM doesn’t use stats? It was incomprehensible to me for the next two years, while I fell back into the easy habits of Burning Wheel and Burning Empires and late-stage Forge titles. I remember meeting Vincent at an after-party and saying “yeah, nice game, money well spent!”
I had no idea what was coming.
Apocalypse World is the single most important title to my gaming of the whole decade. I’ve played at least 20 titles that emerged from PbtA, and there’s little sign of the platform slowing down. It’s flexible, it has invited a generation of hacking, it does something genuinely new, and it doesn’t take advanced math to work it out.
2010 Runners-up
Stars Without Number
Stars Without Number was my first exposure to Sine Nomine’s OSR-inspired methodology. It’s a space adventure game, very loosely constructed, with lots of trad-style GMing tools. I ran it for a few sessions and it didn’t really tick for my home players at the time. We were accustomed to storygame-style mechanisms driving play via economies or other incentive schemes. SWN is D&D in space, and I hadn’t really internalized what that meant. It wouldn’t be until I ran Godbound (in 2019!) before this clicked. I would love to swing back around to the game’s beautiful second edition.
Freemarket
Freemarket was a collaborative effort by Luke Crane (Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, Inheritance) and Jared Sorensen (InSpectres, Lacuna, Parsley). I thought it was kind of a love letter to urban living, with post-scarcity cyberpunks out-creating each other in search of social media cred. It was hard for me to find the fun in the game but it was a beautifully produced box set, foretelling the uptick from indie-standard 5.5×8.5 perfect-bound books. Personally, I think Freemarket was just a decade ahead of its time. Love to see a new edition of this that took our actual social media dystopia into account.
Next Week: 2011
That’s it for 2010! What was your most important titles of the year?
See you next week for another year of important indie titles.
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I’m spending the next several weeks talking through my most important indie RPGs of the twenty-teens. Last week I posted about 2010. Onward!
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
The Burning Wheel, Gold Edition
The final and best edition of this ground-breaking fantasy game. The previous edition of Burning Wheel changed my roleplaying life, no joke.
I’ve been writing about BW for years but not recently. Here’s what I’ve tagged so far.
You can buy BW Gold through Amazon.
2011: Burning Wheel Gold
This is kind of a cheat but it’s my blog so I can do what I want. Burning Wheel, revised edition, came out five years earlier and continues to be the single most important RPG I have ever played. Every other game I have played and evaluated since then is colored by the life-changing experience of internalizing the lessons of BW. The Gold edition further refined and clarified the game into a jagged little perfect gem.
I’ve only run a small handful of Gold-edition games since it came out, but it continues to be one of the all-time greatest tabletop indies. If you get a chance to even just read this hefty tome – it’s extremely reasonably priced, I keep telling Luke he’s underpaying himself – it will change your thinking about conventional tabletop roleplaying. You’ve probably already seen the impact of Burning Wheel in whatever you’re playing right now.
2011 Runners-up
Microscope
Ben Robbins’ Microscope received a new release in 2017, but I was first exposed to it a few years prior. It’s GMless/GMful, depending on your biases, and might not even be a “game” that many roleplayers would recognize, but it broke a lot of important ground in this design space. Players work together to sketch out a civilization’s rise and fall, and use various tools to zoom in and fill in the blanks in between. Very clever, useful in lots of applications beyond just Microscope, you owe it to yourself to get educated about what it does.
Technoir
Technoir and I had a rough first encounter, but my regular con roomie and celebrity podcaster buddy MadJay Brown ran this for me at Dreamation 2018. It’s really sharp and it renewed my interest in decoding the game for myself. There are some terrific situation-creation tools in this game, way ahead of their time given the 2011 publication date.
Technoir and Microscope remind me of an era of design that felt less like a market-driven monoculture than 2020. There were hardly any Powered by the Apocalypse games out yet, Fate was out there since 2003 but would never dominate indie mind share, and Kickstarter wasn’t quite the monster it would become. Other big titles of 2011 (per the Indie RPG Awards) include Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Anima Prime, Bulldogs!, Chronicles of Skin, an early version of Dungeon World, and some titles I confess I’ve never read. Visit the Awards page for 2011 to see all the entries.
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Another week, another year looking back at the 20-teens and what they brought to small press roleplaying. To recap the games I’ve focused on so far: 2010 was Apocalypse World, 2011 was Burning Wheel Gold, 2012 was Monsterhearts. All huge games. But 2013 brought one of my all-time favorites, which I continue to play today.
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Sagas of the Icelanders
This is it, my favorite-favorite Powered by the Apocalypse game of all time. Serious, melodramatic, accessible.
The PDF is available at DriveThruRPG.
2013: Sagas of the Icelanders
Sagas of the Icelanders seems like it should be a weird little niche game. It’s early PbtA. It’s got some rough edges. It’s about Viking settlers making a life for themselves in a lawless, empty land. It continues to be my all time favorite PbtA game, even above Apocalypse World itself. I have written extensively over the years about SotI, but here’s my elevator pitch: it might be the best, most accessible subject matter for non-gamers to get introduced to roleplaying. Everyone understands family melodrama, and most everyone understands violent family melodrama. I introduced my wife and many others to ttrpgs via Sagas of the Icelanders.
The game’s killer app is a split list of common moves, one for men and one for women. It’s intensely binary, reflecting the values of the Vikings at the time, even while subverting that very binary via playbooks like the Goði (a judge/priest who can learn “women’s” moves like healing, magic and coercion) and the Shield Maiden (a woman dedicated to doing a man’s job and suffering at the hands of both the men and women who reject them).
Sagas also creates/demands the most amazing relationship maps. Here’s one from my 2E playtest I ran at OrcCon, February 2020.
It’s just so great. Games are quite intense and serious, the moves constantly push the women to be shrewish and manipulative and the men to be vicious and honor-bound, nobody ends up looking “good” but the drama is palpable. Designer Gregor Vuga is actively working on a second edition, which the game desperately needs. It’s not perfect, but I’ve learned to route around the game’s quirks.
2013 Runners-up
Torchbearer
2013 was a very good year for games with staying power. Torchbearer is Thor Olavsrud and Luke Crane’s love letter to old-school (but maybe not OSR!) Dungeons & Dragons, built on the skeleton of Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard.
What if you went dungeon delving not because you’re a great hero, but because you’re a dead-ender? Why would anyone go into life-threatening environments with a slim chance of finding enough sellable garbage to pay for room and board for a bit? That’s the Torchbearer angle. As part of this narrative deconstruction of B/X D&D of yore, your characters have Natures based on their culture, with much of the game maintaining a delicate balance of not too low (your character is alienated) or too high (your character craves comfort and safety). You also have a Belief and a Goal, big explicit flags you set to pursue the game’s various economies. There are all kinds of interesting procedural nods back to B/X-style play, including a hyper-detailed grind of light, food and rest, and an admonition to the GM to just Say Yes to players who come up with great ideas on how to overcome their obstacles.
I’ve run a couple campaigns of it and played several sessions at cons. It is consistently frustrating and fun, with fun just barely nudging out the frustration. Quite a trick to combine both overcoming obstacles and addressing situations: those are different play and design goals, and few games put them both under the same roof. Terrific game, and my favorite dungeon-delver.
Tenra Bansho Zero
Tenra Bansho Zero is a huge title in Japan, and translator Andy Kitkowski moved heaven and earth to translate it and bring it to America. It’s a hell of a smart design that does lots of weird things well: tons of manga/anime tropes (mecha and ninjas and sorcerers, oh my) are thrown together into one Rifts-like setting, players constantly chase and churn little melodramatic story arcs, an inverted NPC reaction table (you roll to see how your character reacts to an NPC!) and other cool little design gestures throughout.
The Quiet Year
The Quiet Year, a post-apocalyptic map-drawing game by Avery Alder that is kind of ttrpg-adjacent, opened my eyes to the pleasures of, well, ttrpg-adjacent play. I’ve had more exposure to The Deep Forest, a fantasyland adaptation by Alder and Magpie Games‘ Mark Diaz Truman where the monsters are spending a quiet year preparing their realm for the return of adventurers (ew, yuck, ptui).
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Closing in on the finish now, and not a moment too soon. The games in these last couple years are going to be familiar with most everyone, I think. Another tied year! 2018 was, I think, the year I finally conceded that I just can’t keep up with everything coming out.
If you’re just starting the series, the first entry is here. This series was made possible by my generous Patreon supporters. Thank you!
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
The King is Dead
Feels-heavy dynastic melodrama in a super accessible GM-less package. Great to play with your non-gamer friends who are enjoying the mainstreaming of fantasy.
PDFs are available at DriveThruRPG. The marvelous physical production, with neat little cards and other props, is available at Lumpley’s Itch page. Not necessary but strongly encouraged!
2018: The King is Dead
The King is Dead is a sexy, violent Game of Thrones-inspired GMless PbtA game. Each player gets a book filled with little mini-games that handle various types of scenes. You take turns arranging scenes between characters, while organically developing a map in the middle of the table comprised of locations, events, and characters mentioned in those little games. Oh and there’s a card game happening concurrently with the mini-games, where you’re trying to assemble the best possible hand before moving to “the coronation,” the last scene of the game.
Facilitating TKID at NewMexicon in 2019, with possibly the first set of prop cards available.
For subject matter that could be so fraught –a sexytimes-focused minigame, seduction baked into almost all the rest, lots of violence and the possibility of character death – I found TKID notable for the extensive safety and consent baked into every element. It is currently my favorite game by the Bakers.
Legacy (2nd Edition)
A PbtA game about building communities across generations.
PDFs are available at DriveThruRPG.
2018: Legacy, 2nd Edition
Legacy 2nd Edition by Jay Iles was my other important game of 2018. I ran a nice campaign of this for my local group, and playing it was a great reminder of how different PbtA games can be. Legacy is a post-apocalyptic game based on Apocalypse World, which sounds like an ourobouros but the focus is very different. In Legacy, you play both specific characters and the family/house/faction to which that character belongs. The editorial focus is on community building, rather than personal stories. Playing at the house level is the big, abstract movement of history, while zooming in on the characters lets you work out the personal dramas of the folks tied up in that history. The weakened character monogamy and shifting scales is an acquired taste; my players prefer sticking to one character. But the form is strong and distinct, and has spun off several free-standing hacks.
Maybe my favorite part of Legacy is how very different your world and shared map ends up looking, depending on the mix of family playbooks you started with. If you chose Kaiju-hunters, well, welcome to giant monster land! If you chose the sneaky scientists hiding away in their secure bunker, you get lots of pre-ruin technology. You want mutant monsters? Play the mutant monster hunters.
I’ll be running a Slavic-flavored fantasy game version of Legacy, called Free From The Yoke, as a spotlight GM at New Mexicon in 2020 (rescheduled for September – I hope you’ll try to make it!).
2018 Runners-up
For The Queen
Available through Evil Hat Productions.
Few games have garnered as much critical acclaim and fan hype as Alex Roberts’ For the Queen. The structure of the game is dead-simple, so simple in fact I’m having trouble reconciling how this was the first breakthrough game in this format. There’s a deck of provocative questions about your past with the Queen, and you spend the game drawing cards and answering those questions. That’s it. I called it a “feels filler” when I first played her hand-written draft of it at a house con. The published version includes a deck of gorgeous art of various “queens” to choose before you embark on your mission. Terrific game and enjoyable at any age or experience level. I expect many, many hacks to appear in the coming years.
Available through Evil Hat Productions.
Star-Crossed
Available through DriveThruRPG.
I got to play Star-Crossed, Roberts’ other big-deal game, at the same house con as For the Queen. This one’s more conventionally structured, although it’s still GMless: two players act out two people who cannot be together for reasons you come up with before play. Then you pull blocks from a Jenga tower as you execute PbtA-style moves from your playbook. There are two playbooks and they’re slightly different from each other. I played half of an isolated pair of scientists on a distant planet romantically orbiting one another despite the mission’s prohibition against fraternization. I love that this model can be mapped to so many different settings. It’s also got a nice game-y layer, which is a fine alibi for friends to not feel weird about flirting with each other.
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Goblinville
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Goblinville is a sweet little fantasy mashup of several other games. I’ve run it a few times now, and it always produces a fun time. The characters are little goblins in a big world, going off on small-time adventures for small-time stakes while trying to build up their small-time village. I wrote way too much about Goblinville in 2019. It’s a tiny, very good game.
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Forbidden Lands
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Forbidden Lands is Free League’s fantasy adventure game built on the Year Zero Engine. I played a bunch of it, and it was pretty fun, but I couldn’t help but feel let down by it. I was hoping for a more direct adaptation of Mutant: Year Zero, in particular in how MYZ delivers its campaign, but FL was more concerned with serving up an old-school-evocative experience. Which it does. Forbidden Lands is probably my favorite fantasy adventure game, but the setting is a mess and its official campaign was hard for me to deliver to the players. I’ll probably run it again in the future for my own fantasy setting.
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Old School Essentials
Available through DriveThruRPG. The physical boxed set is available through Exalted Funeral.
I’m not super into OSR-style games (other than Sine Nomine’s Godbound and Stars Without Number), but I’ve had a couple chances to play convention one-shots using Old School Essentials. It’s just B/X D&D, but it’s reorganized and super cleanly presented. It’s the D&D I grew up with so I know it down to my prepubescent bones. A fine platform to run system-agnostic OSR-style adventures in.
Available through DriveThruRPG. The physical boxed set is available through Exalted Funeral.
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Do you hate prepping your RPGs? I do. Well…I thought I did.
Because I have many decades of play in me, I considered prep a necessary evil. Prep is necessary so you don’t have to improvise at the table. Prep as a preventive measure. It was so deeply embedded, so baked into the activity, that I never really stopped to think about the questions this begs. Specifically: what’s the role of the GM? If I’m there to deliver an exciting storyline, then hell no I can’t improvise around that. Just making shit up on the spot, ye gawds, what if I TPK everyone by mistake? What if I forget to hit an important narrative mark? What will the players think?
Spending so much creative time in a defensive crouch put me in an awful, adversarial head space.
Sandbox-style play was an evolution, I have to think both for practical and play-style reasons: put a dragon in this cave if there would be a dragon there. It’s not your job to protect the characters from their choices. If there’s a real threat of failure, your players will feel more satisfied with their victories than if you’ve curated the difficulty to their abilities. Sure, okay.
Sandbox prep begs the same question: what’s the role of the GM? I think if you’re doing a sandbox, the GM is expected to be an impartial referee, yeah? Don’t pull any punches, be true to the reality of the challenges, evaluate reasonable solutions.
Skip ahead some years. Now we have games with yet another expected GM role.
A big swath of storygames are designed, either implicitly or explicitly, around the idea that I first saw in Apocalypse World: play to find out. Beautiful, short, crisp, easy to understand. Don’t force the characters to follow a plot, don’t preplan, let the GM be surprised alongside the players. What’s gonna happen? Dunno, let’s play to find out. The facilitator will have to make stuff up as we go.
Many storygames of the past decade are built with tools to help GMs improvise during play. Some take the dice out of the GM’s hands, requiring them to make calls about how the fiction changes based on character actions. Over in the OSR side of things, procedural tools generate content on the spot as needed. I’d imagine there’s a general assumption of sandbox-style play here, too, which takes the load off the GM to balance threats against the PCs. And then in the trindie space, you’ve got games that combine both: be okay with letting events spool out organically, and here are some procedural tricks you can use to generate content on the fly.
I still hate prep to this day. But the prep I hate? It’s the defensive kind. It’s thinking through likely outcomes, coming up with “balanced” fights, anything appearing at the intersection of math and tactics.
But what if I told you that, rather than prepping to avoid having to improvise, you can prep specifically for improvisation?
Fertilizing the Fields
When I want to run an improvisational game, either because the game requires it (PbtA) or because I just don’t have the bandwidth for conventional prep in a more conventional game, I want to make sure I’ve made my, dunno…psychic play space as fertile as possible.
Acceptable Tonal Range
I know folks play music, look at Pinterest boards, engage in all kinds of other creative media to get their juices going. Me too! I think it’s the process of curating that stuff that matters more than actually listening, looking, reading. It’s establishing a vibe.
For me, vibe comes into play when I’m thinking about acceptable tonal ranges. If I want a kinetic, high-energy action game then I’ll curate my music to that. If I want to aim for melancholy, I’ll find a sad indie folk-rock list on Spotify. But that’s all in service to implant that acceptable tonal range in my mind and my heart, so my improvisation in-the-moment serves that plan.
Understand The Rules of Genre
Different than consuming for vibe, I’ll try and track down the media that exemplifies the genre in which we’re playing. Because it bores me to tears, I mostly avoid “genre fiction” when I’m reading for pleasure. You know, the stuff that shows up free on your Kindle. But it’s excellent research when you need to sharpen your understanding of the genre in question.
For good or ill, I have found many improvisation-focused games lean hard on a shared understanding of genre, specific media touch points, and trope rules. I, personally, do not love how reliant on tropes — verging on cliche — some folks are when they play and GM. I’ll go so far as to say I personally hate treating RPGs as other-media emulators, but that’s a deep rabbit hole and I’m not feeling salty on that point today. (Maybe I’ll write more about it in the future.) But when everyone accepts a baseline of genre rules, they’re sure easy to improvise inside.
I’m certain most “naturally improv-talented” GMs got that way by being very well versed in genre. They can tap into tropes quickly. They think in terms of genre. The naturally satisfying outcomes of pattern-completion are easy when everyone knows the pattern you’re going for.
Right Tools For the Job
Not every game is well suited for improvised play. Many mainstream storygame-type RPGs are, like PbtA and Forged in the Dark type games. But even if you’re playing a trad or trindie game you can do some prep in advance to make improvising within them easier.
Know the Incentives
Big one for me: do you understand your game’s economic cycles? Do you understand the incentives at work? If I’m getting ready to run a game for the first time, I’ll do up a cheat sheet of the rules (if it’s the kind of game that didn’t come with play references) to teach myself how it works. But I’ll also sketch out the economic cycles at work. How do characters advance? How do you earn in-play currencies? What play cycles repeat themselves and how do those cycles restart?
Knowing a game’s incentive schemes usually clues me in to what players will chase. That’s a huge leg up when you’re prepping to improvise. Within a session or two, I’ll also have a better idea of what other play elements are incentivizing each player. Some players value scene-chewing spotlight time more than advancement. Others might really love helping another PC be amazing.
Situational Clocks
This is a PbtA-specific bit of advice but I think you can broadly apply it. Bear with me a minute.
I have found, quite often, that PbtA prep instructions are pretty half-assed. I’ve met so many designers who proudly declare that they run “improv heavy” games, and don’t need to prep. And it shows in their games. Since they don’t believe in prep, designers will drop “something” into a rules text because it “should” be in there – Apocalypse World, after all, has it – and not because it’s useful. The great offender here is half-assed Clock ripoffs.
Bad Clock prep is listing things that will happen as a Clock (fuse, storm, front, etc.) ticks down. I find this stiff and weird to fit into an organic game. I’ve done these Clocks and I usually end up ignoring the work I put into them. The situation on the ground doesn’t reflect the list of events I came up with weeks or months ago.
Good Clock prep is thinking through changes to the situation.
“The Honey Crips Gang burns down Dremmer’s hardhold” is a specific event. The fiction may or may not reflect a context in which burning down a hardhold makes sense. So I might instead write it: “Dremmer loses control of his hardhold to a rival gang.” It’s broader but also much easier to drive toward. Dremmer might lose control in any number of ways! Any number of rival gangs may be the cause! But the important thing is that, at that point in the clock, knowing that NPC stands to lose control of something valuable is a change in situation.
Pulling back from PbtA games, I’d say you can put Clock-like tools into play in any game. But focus instead on shifts in situation, not specific events. Imagine what play looks like when that situation comes to pass. I find that enormously easier than trying to shoehorn a burned-down house into the story.
Why, Not What
I feel like one place inexperienced-with-improv GMs stumble is not knowing the difference between an obstacle and a situation.
Dungeons? Those are maps full of obstacles. Monsters, obstacles. NPCs you need to beat by any means? Obstacles. Traps? Environmental hazards? Curses? All obstacles. Obstacles are so deeply baked into conventional roleplaying that I think many (most?) experienced players evaluate their play experience purely in their ability to overcome obstacles.
Situations, on the other hand, are organic within the fiction. They’re the context leading to the obstacles. Depending on the game, you can disregard situation. You don’t give a shit why this dungeon is full of treasure, right? I mean, unless knowing gives you a leg up in overcoming its obstacles.
Situations are unresolved points of tension. They’re unexploded bombs, tightened springs, whatever metaphor you’d like. They’re also, in my mind, constantly in motion. As situations resolve, they also lead to new situations. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t a situation.
Keep situations at the forefront of your play and your prep. The moment you’ve stopped thinking about context, you’ve started thinking about obstacles.
Situation Maps Once Again
One technique for understanding your game’s situation I’ve talked about before is the situation map. The very short version of this is:
Very clearly map out relationships between characters and organizations (follow that link, it’s good stuff), and
Labeling situations that are currently in play among those relationships. Put them in view so the players can see them too. Trusting your players to put that knowledge to good use is always more important than springing a big reveal on them, in my experience.
R-map + situations = situation map.
Armchair Psychology
Another why-not-what aspect of prepping to improvise is to have a very firm grasp of your game-fiction’s underlying motivations and pressures at work. What motivates an NPC? What goals does an organization actually have? What diegetic incentives are these things chasing? You can improvise action once you’ve got a firm grasp of the whys of your world. Always, always be thinking about the in-fiction logic of why things work the way they do.
Mixed Prep
It’s likely that, unless you’re playing a game that is entirely improvised, you’ll need to do a little of both kinds of prep. Stats for obstacles, knowing what drives your world, a clear understanding of tropes, and a clearly expressed acceptable tonal range.
I like finding a happy medium in trindie-type games where, if you need stats (because it’s the kind of game where GM assets have math), there’s a nice list of small/medium/large versions of expected obstacles: certain kinds of NPC (soldier, merchant, families), or monsters, or whatever. Burning Wheel, I think, does 1d/2d/3d NPCs, where literally everything they’ll ever roll is one, two or three dice, with an extra die for the thing they’re supposed to be good at at the GM’s discretion. This requires the GM and players have a fundamentally non-adversarial relationship, though. If you can just pull a number out of your ass, and it’s an absurdly large “I win!” value, you’ve just told the players you’re more interested in beating them than in collaborating to create a believable situation. But that’s not always on the GM, and some players will still find themselves craving adversity.
As a practical matter, unless you’re running a game purpose-built to be improvised, expect to do some of the old-fashioned prep. But do it in broad strokes, not specific, technical “builds.”
Okay But Why?
If you made it this far you might be asking yourself, why prep for improv when the best part of improv is not having to prep? I have thoughts!
Is the lack of prep really the best part of improv? There are other benefits, too: discovering your visceral creativity when you’re not overthinking it, being able to adapt to the tempo and temperature of the table, stumbling into surprising outcomes along with the players.
Prepped improv feels different than unprepped improv, in my experience. Unprepped improvisation I think is more sensitive to the unfettered table energy that can build up to the point of being manic energy. Maybe this is just me, but when I’m totally running a game off the cuff, it’s so easy to drive for more and more and MOAR excitement. And…maybe that’s not the best thing for your game. Particularly if you’re running a long series, which brings me to…
You can build toward longer play when you take control of your tempo. I suspect one secret to long-form play, which I have found frequently difficult in storygames, is that it requires discipline. If you ramp up every session to a point of manic energy, how long can you keep that up? If you hold some energy in reserve and get very intentional about tone and pacing, you may find the game wants to run longer.
Finally and not trivially, it’s a form of lonely fun that still provides dividends. Maybe you end up with an elaborate situation map instead of an elaborate village/dungeon/planet map, but it’s still nice to be able to revisit your game between sessions.
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