Over the New Year holiday I got a chance to run a couple games that I've grown to love: Dr. Magnet Hands and All Out of Bubblegum. These are excellent party games where you can literally just sit down and play (okay, AOB requires a story, but we have plenty of those). These "micro-games" are so much fun that I am often left baffled on why we would ever need more elaborate rules.
But then I'm reminded of many conversations with friends and designers alike where we talk about the difference between a good snack and a full meal. Sometimes, we just want some salty potato chips - and that's exactly what micro games provide. A short, but delicious burst of enjoyment. The problem is that it doesn't actually fill the roleplaying need that a lot of us feel. For that, we turn to our super in depth and crunchy games, like Shadowrun or The Burning Wheel. These games, with their thousands of pages of printed material, provide us with deep, rich roleplaying experiences that micro games rarely give us.
Swinging back though, we're now all busy adults, with very little time to game, much less prep for said games that will give us the rich experiences we desire. Instead, it's much easier to turn to professional video games, that gives us hours of carefully constructed content in a relatively short amount of time. Alas, these games take their toll too, eventually, as we realize how we're stuck in our basements instead of spending time with our friends.
So the target that I suppose a lot of us are aiming for is that perfect balance of streamlined gameplay and depth of content. Some would say it's a fools quest, but damn it we're proud fools. I can't play micro games forever; they just don't stand up to the test of time for a campaign. Yet at the same time I can't push myself to commit to huge games of Shadowrun when I know easier games like D&D exist.
For Hostargo, a design goal that I have is to create a game with enough campaign content, adventure hooks, and interesting things to play with that both the players and the GM can have fun without having to pour tons of their precious time into it. I have a long way to go, but I'm willing to climb the mountain.
That is the epic quest. Striving for that goal of satisfying 'crunch' and being easy to prep for is important. I would probably agree with the dissidents, it is likely impossible to reach that perfect balance. That being said, I know that working toward that is how we innovate and move designs in this industry forward. Both The Burning Wheel and Shadowrun are a huge pain to prep for as a GM from my perspective. I felt like Numenera was easy to prep for due to their plethora of modules and simple NPC challenge system. I think making it easy for GM's to run and create NPC's is something that gets forgotten. When a system does this well it at least gets me to try to run it. In the case of Numenera I would never run a campaign in it as it doesn't hit the right buttons for me or my group but I ran two one shots of it. I hate to reference that last post but Dragon Age is pretty approachable for me as a GM. The only concern that I have there is knowing the world. Really detailed worlds can be a burden, they present a lot of knowledge for a GM and can make players feel like they are a really small fish. I have also witnessed an hour long GM timeline overview of Glorantha once, I have blanched at the mention of that world ever since.
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