NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 5388488" data-attributes="member: 99">I would agree with that in general.Running something well on the fly doesn't always require a super simple ruleset.  But, at the very least, you've got to get your monster stats from somewhere.  When I was running 4e and the players took an unexpected turn that forced me to make something up I hadn't prepared for, I'd either recall an appropriate critter from one of the Monster Manuals I had and run the encounter with the book open to that page or I'd flip to something that was close enough to what I needed in the big binder full of printed monsters I'd prepared for my game.  Then I could modify the stats on the fly fairly easily, but I needed some raw material to work with.With games like Basic D&D or Old School Hack or even Savage Worlds, I only need to know a very few key stats and the granularity is such that it's pretty easy to decide if that monster has an AC of 4 or 6 or whatever.  That simplicity frees up a lot of brain space for other creativity like setting the scene or weaving together some kind of coherent story.  In fact when I create games on the fly like this I pretty much ONLY focus on the story part, comfortable in the knowledge that, when it comes time for combat, I'll be able to throw together stats in my head without any problem.I'll reiterate though that this is generally the way I do things for a select group of one-shot games.  For one-shots with pregen characters I always do extensive prep.  For my ongoing campaign games I like systems best that let me do lots of prep in terms of thinking about the game and small amounts of prep in terms of actually sitting at the computer and printing stuff off.  I found that to be very much the case with 4e D&D as well as Savage Worlds.</blockquote>

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