Something about low-prep feat. Cairn
I was writing some harsh criticism of Vaesen's maps but I decided not to be negative today and stashed it. Instead of complaining about the prep of Vaesens past I will ponder about the prep of Cairns present.
So like, Cairn is low-prep, right? I've ran Rise of the Blood Olms and got the prep done in what, half an hour? Maybe less. But now I'm running a full campaign and even though I'm stealing stuff off of other modules to put in my little sandbox, I've been spending hours and hours thinking about player goals, creating pointcrawls, inventing weird forest creatures and so on. Do I have to spend a lot of time thinking about statblocks and "encounter balance"? Of course not. But the day before every single session is dedicated to a lot of work regarding the game and, to me, that's not really low-prep. Doesn't mean I don't enjoy it though, the three sessions I had so far were immensely fun to prep (and to run), despite the required effort.
I think my low-prep comparison would be Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy. These games' rules that are a lot more complicated then Cairn, but I never spent more than an hour thinking about what would be the contents of the next session. You have to commit a lot of time to reading the book once, but after that it's always: 1) think of what the players did last session, 2) think about a possible job by browsing the factions and locations in the book, and 3) arrive at the session and ask what the players want to do, often completely throwing away the possible job from the previous step. I think this lands in a described-setting1 versus implied-setting situation?
So now I'm left thinking if it's possible to define low-prep. Ordinal posted about terms that need defintion in ttrpg discourse last week and I really believe I've gotten to the point where it's impossible to have a conversation in the ttrpg space without every participating member linking to a personal glossary2. I know more than one friend who would be able to whip a one-shot of 5e without skipping a beat, who would probably call running a 5e one-shot as something low-prep.
Is low-prep descriptive instead of prescriptive? If I forget to prep for my {insert extremely rules and prep heavy game here}, was it low-prep? Maybe it's just a mentality thing. It would feel very silly to ignore the game when deciding if a game is low-prep.
anb
I'm pretty sure some people online would maul me with a toothbrush if I said Scum and Villainy's setting was a described one, given how much of it is left open to interpretation. I think it's more about the way that the setting is presented in SaV, with the short, usable bullet-points and NPCs that you can instantly chuck at your players - versus the implied setting in Cairn 2e, with tables to generate content that are extremely inspiring but still need some, well, prep before hitting the table.↩
But sometimes it's just about the conversation, right? Talking to peeps, having fun, misunderstanding what "narrative" means... The good life.↩