Playing RPGs impromptu, or while missing supplies!

[MadLordOfMilk]

What do you guys usually use when you have the sudden urge to play D&D or some other RPG, but are missing either some supplies or everything?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been sitting around with some friends when suddenly someone says, "hey! let's play D&D!" without having everything on hand. Here are some of my suggestions...

Missing Dice:

• Use playing cards. A stack of 1-4 is a d4, 1-6 is a d6, etc. For d20s, just use one suit for single digits and another suit/color for the 10s (for example, make 1-10 clubs, and 1-10 of hearts mean 11-20)
• Use d6s if you have them lying around from board games, etc. For a d4, just reroll on a 5 or 6. For a d10, 2d6-1 and either reroll on two 6s or just count it as a 10 works. Come up with similar stuff like that.
• If you're just missing a specific die, try coming up with a combination of other dice to be it's rough equal. 2d4 is mathematically slightly better than a d8, but when you have no d8s, you might want to make due that way.
• Computers. My friend has a dice rolling application on his iPhone, and Wizards has a page for dice here. You can also get DiceTool from here, or find another similar application.

Missing Rulebooks:

• For characters, you can always use premades if you can find them or have them on hand. For D&D 4e, the "official" ones from KotS can be found here.
• Have a player with ridiculously good memory, or a hardened veteran of the system you're playing.
• Wing it. If you can roughly remember things like "well, elves in 4e have +2dex +2wis and 7 speed" you can pretty much work with that. The more details you remember, the better, but if you forget stuff you can always make up something relatively fitting, or go with what you remember.
• For D&D 4e, if you have a DDI subscription you have access to the character builder and compendium, which covers all of that assuming you can get internet access.
• Keep copies of the rules with you. My friend Sam has a few D&D pdfs on his iPhone for ready access, or so he's told me.

Missing minis/battlemat/tiles/etc:

• Paper always works, but sketching out a grid on paper and ripping up sheets to use as counters can be a pain.
• Print out counters. There are all kinds of links here.
• Use coins in place of minis.
• 4e: The very back of the DMG has two gridded pages; they're basically stone dungeon-tile looking things. You could leave a book open and use that as the battle grid.
• Run the layout of combat on someone's computer and have everyone look at the screen. A laptop on the gaming table, theoretically, should work well. If you're lucky, you might even have a projector hooked up to the computer, but for an impromptu game session that's not *too* likely. There are a number of applications that should let you handle this, though having no experience with it I'll leave it to others to link to these sorts of things.
• Just don't use a battlemat. This depends a lot on your game system, but generally any of them can handle it. Yes, even 4e! If you want a rough tactical layout, just put some dice on the table to give a rough representation of where everything is, maybe with a sheet of paper under them giving a rough sketch of the layout, and have the DM rule whether you're close enough, how many targets AEs would hit, etc. As long as players are fine with this, it works great. Even if they're not a fan, it beats not playing, right?

Have nothing prepared/missing your notes on today's session:

• Wing it if the system allows it, and you're comfortable with it. For virtually any D&D system you can usually throw something together and just pick monsters out of the monster manual, for example.
• Likely, you'll have to spend some time preparing. In this situation, quick thinking is generally the best asset you can have.
• Find something online. There's bound to be something available for you to use.
• D&D 4e: Dungeon Delve tends to help a lot in this sort of situation.
• D&D 4e: If you have a D&DI subscription, pull something out of Dungeon, use the encounter/monster builder things, etc.
• D&D 4e: In the back of the DMG, there's a guide to building random encounters. This could work fine.

 

[jdrakeh]

In this day and age, I find that not gaming with a library of books isn't very popular. I love light systems but trying to convince other people to try things like Risus is like pulling teeth most of the time. People seem to think that if a game doesn't have a few dozen supplements, it's not worth their time.

That said, just in case I do happen to run into a group of 3-4 people who don't have the aformentioned hang-up and want to game off the cuff, I carry a copy of the SLUG rules on a laminated business card in my wallet. I use my watch's chronometer function to mimic 1d10.

 

[EP]

I wanted to start a new tradition with an annual Hallowe'en game. Had just picked up Horror Rules and thought it would be good fun. We even set it up that each player would create their lead characters, but they could create any additional supporting cast as they thought of it. These supporting characters were expected to be killed off by the Slasher and the players were free to do any stupid thing they wanted to raise the body count.

On the night of play, I forgot the whole damn computer and all I had was a PDF copy of the Rules.

So we pretty much made it all up as we played with nothing but my memory to draw from and imagination to fill in the gaps. It was a blast (especially when they all played a trio of high school cheerleaders camping - it lead to little innocent kissing ), but I do kick myself for forgetting the PDF at times. Shamefully, we lost a member and never had the inititive to try it again.

 

[MadLordOfMilk]

On the night of play, I forgot the whole damn computer and all I had was a PDF copy of the Rules.

Stuff like that is exactly what inspired me to make this thread Gotta love it when completely winging it works, though.

 

[jmucchiello]

I once ran a rules-in-the-GM's-head game with just a book. Any sufficiently large book can simulate a d10. You open to any page toward the middle of the book and chose the middle digit as the value. It will always be the same on both facing pages in a traditionally numbered book, page 158 will face page 159 and page 160 will face 161. Works best when the number of actual pages is close to being divisible by 100.

(Of course the hook to this game was that the magic system was a "language". So the players could attempt new spells by rearranging the words they knew to make new effects. And enemy spellcasters were a source of new words to add to their vocabulary.)

 

[EP]

Stuff like that is exactly what inspired me to make this thread Gotta love it when completely winging it works, though.

If anything, it completely inspired me to wing it on all game nights (except during playtests). It became so apparent afterwards that delivery is the most important element, not the planning.

I have a couple other stories involving missing dice, but there's so much of those kicking around our group that you can always just borrow off someone else. It's only funny if I tell it in person with funny voices.

 

[The Green Adam]

You mean not everyone plays RPGs with just the ideas in their head, a piece of scrap paper, a pen/pencil/crayon, and asking players to pick a number from one to ten?

Seriously though, in high school I ran an entire scifi/cyberpunk campaign with no book, dice, character sheets or pretty much anything other then our imagination. I had a general idea of what each characters' abilities and would ask for a number from one to ten when a random 'roll' was needed. I would periodically switch the table in my head so sometimes high numbers were better and sometimes the reverse was true.

It was actually one of the best campaigns I ever ran. It lasted just over one school year.

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