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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5050329" data-attributes="member: 3820">I really don't think that's true. The checklist that is your opinion is something you create. The individual player is the one who comes up with a list of things like "reminds me of the good old days," "fighters kick the amount of ass I want them to kick," or "there should totally be rules for vampire werewolves." Sure, many games will not even try to check off some of the boxes on your list, but the importance assigned those boxes is completely different from player to player, sufficiently so that arguing about any one box (no matter how much you want to check it off) can get dang counter-productive dang fast. Especially when a box appears for the same game, with the same wording, on different people's checklists: and one can satisfactorily check it off and the other cannot. If one person has checked off "fighters kick the amount of ass I want them to kick" for a given game, and another is irritated because it's left blank, nobody gets anywhere unless you actually look at the reasons why that is — without assuming that the answer is "One of these people must be wrong." I think that's true for a lot of people, but you'd also see a huge variance between just what parts of prep time are fun. I love coming up with weird architectural details, trying to figure out distinctive features for NPCs, or jotting down extra names I might need. I am less enamored of filling out stat blocks, unless they're something I can use again and again (like a supervillain in a nonlethal solutions sort of RPG, or a disposable monster the players might encounter more of later on). I know guys who love rooting around like a haruspex in the guts of the d20 system at its fiddliest, including one guy who enjoyed building complicated things out of a game he never ran just to see what he could do. I also know folks who would just as soon jot down a stat block as "5 dice melee, 4 dice social, 8 health". I think it's not about how much prep time a game requires, but how much it enables you to spend as much prep time as you like on the things you like prepping best, and as little as possible on the things you like prepping least.</blockquote>

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