Posts Tagged by prep-lite
| July 30, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by reader Ryan Latta, who took Phil Vecchione’s Prep-Lite articles — and other articles about keeping prep light — to heart, put them to use, and wrote about the results. Thanks, Ryan! I hate prepping for a game. In fact, the more prep work I find myself doing, the less excited I am to GM whatever it is I’m prepping. Naturally, I was captivated by many of the articles here on “Prep-Lite” and began to apply as many of those…
| January 16, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
A while back I dropped an article talking about a prep method I used, called 3-3-3 Quick Prep. It’s a method composed mostly of bullet points to give some minimal structure to a game but allow for improvisation at the table. There were some requests in the comments to show some examples of it in play. Well, I am more than happy to oblige and dug up some old quick prep examples as well as making sure to detail some for the game I’m currently…
| November 2, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Anymore, I’m pretty much an improv only Game Master. I like getting down and making an awesome, intricate, and detailed game, but so often those types of games just blow up when the players get into them. You either have to reign players in to preserve the spiderweb of the plot, or you have to help set it on fire and fiddle away. So I’ve taken to improvising as much as I can for most any game I run. It just works better and tends…
| June 10, 2011 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
In the past few months I have been exploring a new way to create my session notes which I called Prep-Lite. Now several months and sessions into this exercise, I have come to realize a few things about session prep, and am starting to see a general philosophy forming based on some common themes and techniques that I have used and discussed. Today I am going to try to put into words the core philosophy of Prep-Lite. Previously on Gnome Stew Not so long ago,…
| May 19, 2011 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
In Phil’s recent article: Prep-Lite: Maps, he proposes a system of making maps for your RPG that reduces prep time but still produces simple and elegant maps. In overview, Phil proposes breaking your map into important and unimportant rooms, making a rough map of the ways your important rooms connect, and using this as a framework for lite improvisation. However, Phil makes this provision in his article: For some types of games, especially the Dungeon Crawl where the dungeon is a character of its own,…
| May 16, 2011 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
In my continuing Kwai Chang Caine-like quest to find Prep-Lite mastery, I stumbled upon another place in my session prep, that was consuming a lot of my time, and begged for some prep-lite love. This time, my prep-lite scalpel made an incision into one of the cornerstone elements of our hobby…the Map. When I was done, I had once again removed precious time from my session prep without sacrificing the important parts. So grab your walkin’ stick grasshopper, and let us journey once again on…
| March 15, 2011 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
In my last installment of Prep-Lite, I talked about the concept of Wireframes & Skins; using and re-using condensed NPC stat blocks, as a way to reduce prep time. In this article I am going to discuss, in more detail, some of the assumptions I was working under, how I condensed the stats I needed, and how I populated different tiers of NPC’s. The Assumptions So lets start with a few assumptions that guide this whole process. You may or may not agree with all…
