What Is Your Go-To Pick-Up TTRPG?

[Ruin Explorer]

For my part, the ability to run a quick pickup game -- or any minimal to no prep game -- is familiarity with the system. If you know the system well, no matter what the system is, it is pretty trivial to put together interesting and "balanced" encounters on the fly. The rest is just whim, random charts or leaning on tried and true tropes.

Interesting - "trivial" is not really my experience!

Or rather perhaps there's a threshold of complexity beyond which I don't find that to be the case (FOR ME! I'm not saying it isn't for others).

Or more specifically, for it to work, you need a lot of pre-prepared material, particularly in the form of a lot of useful stat blocks. D&D has this via the MMs of course. But some games just don't have it. Most editions of Shadowrun don't have that, for example, or at least, if they do, I've never seen them (stat blocks tend to be fewer and more specific, or just are boring to work with). Other games require a level of familiarity with the specific stat blocks for them to work - to use another FASA example, Earthdawn. Maybe SWADE does have those? Cyberpunk 2020 kind of did, across various sourcebooks. Cyberpunk games in general whilst very trope-y you need to tread carefully if you're doing anything involving corporate environment because it's easy to improv your way into forgetting basic security elements (so if improvising cyberpunk genre stuff I tend to go for the "grimier" and more "street" oriented missions rather than corporate break-ins or the like).

The less I have to focus on pulling together mechanical stuff on the fly, the easier it generally is for me to DM no-prep, because I can focus more on the DMing - that's part of why I've found PtbA-type games to be very good for this kind of thing.

 

[dbm]

Maybe SWADE does have those?

SWADE has a lot of support materials available. I have the equivalent of about 5 Kallax cubes of first-party stuff covering a full spectrum of genres…

Some of the really useful stuff in this context is archetype cards with lots of pre-made characters, and several bestiaries.

Once you have internalised the system it is pretty easy to make up stuff on the fly, too, assigning dice to stats that make sense for the NPC in question. It is moderately granular and the systems are loosely connected so there is a lot of give in it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

SWADE has a lot of support materials available. I have the equivalent of about 5 Kallax cubes of first-party stuff covering a full spectrum of genres…

Some of the really useful stuff in this context is archetype cards with lots of pre-made characters, and several bestiaries.

Once you have internalised the system it is pretty easy to make up stuff on the fly, too, assigning dice to stats that make sense for the NPC in question. It is moderately granular and the systems are loosely connected so there is a lot of give in it.

Yeah seems like the bestiaries and pre-made characters would be the major thing.

 

[Reynard]

Interesting - "trivial" is not really my experience!

Or rather perhaps there's a threshold of complexity beyond which I don't find that to be the case (FOR ME! I'm not saying it isn't for others).

Or more specifically, for it to work, you need a lot of pre-prepared material, particularly in the form of a lot of useful stat blocks. D&D has this via the MMs of course. But some games just don't have it. Most editions of Shadowrun don't have that, for example, or at least, if they do, I've never seen them (stat blocks tend to be fewer and more specific, or just are boring to work with). Other games require a level of familiarity with the specific stat blocks for them to work - to use another FASA example, Earthdawn. Maybe SWADE does have those? Cyberpunk 2020 kind of did, across various sourcebooks. Cyberpunk games in general whilst very trope-y you need to tread carefully if you're doing anything involving corporate environment because it's easy to improv your way into forgetting basic security elements (so if improvising cyberpunk genre stuff I tend to go for the "grimier" and more "street" oriented missions rather than corporate break-ins or the like).

The less I have to focus on pulling together mechanical stuff on the fly, the easier it generally is for me to DM no-prep, because I can focus more on the DMing - that's part of why I've found PtbA-type games to be very good for this kind of thing.

I think one thing is that people feel like they need "complete stat blocks" too often. Again, I am talking about knowing a system here, but if you know how things are supposed to work, you just need some thresholds and baselines and can go. What is a reasonable difficulty? What represents a decent amount of damage or interesting condition? How long should the encounter last? That sort of thing.

 

[Reynard]

Yeah seems like the bestiaries and pre-made characters would be the major thing.

SWADE has a good cross section of stat blocks in the core rulebook. You can easily tweak any of them on the fly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not sure I really have a pickup game any more (my RPG running in the last years has rotated through too many games for one to have settled into my brain that way, and the two I probably know best I'd be pretty rusty for). Someone's suggestion of SWADE earlier wouldn't be terrible.

I don't do published adventures, so I'd probably just try to do the quick-sketch fakeup, maybe based on something I've run in the past that would work as a standalone.

 

[Staffan]

Astonished that people are picking SWADE given my impression was it needed a fair amount of prep/material to really function, but I guess some people have that to hand.

IMO, SWADE with pregens is good for a one-shot, particularly if the pregens (like the archetype cards they have for various settings – see below for examples) also have a short description of edges and hindrances. SWADE with character generation is not.

Spoiler: SWADE archetype examples

 

[Reynard]

What's interesting is a lot of these responses seem to presuppose players that aren't familiar with the game. Which is not something I stipulated.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If I was in a zero-prep situation, my go-tos would be Shadowdark, Pirate Borg or maybe Mothership, depending on everyone's preferences.

Pirate Borg especially you can have an adventure ready to go in about 90 seconds using the treasure map generators in the book.

 

[overgeeked]

SWADE has a lot of support materials available. I have the equivalent of about 5 Kallax cubes of first-party stuff covering a full spectrum of genres…

Some of the really useful stuff in this context is archetype cards with lots of pre-made characters, and several bestiaries.

Once you have internalised the system it is pretty easy to make up stuff on the fly, too, assigning dice to stats that make sense for the NPC in question. It is moderately granular and the systems are loosely connected so there is a lot of give in it.

It always makes me sad to see books and boxes still in the shrink wrap.

If I was in a zero-prep situation, my go-tos would be Shadowdark, Pirate Borg or maybe Mothership, depending on everyone's preferences.

Pirate Borg especially you can have an adventure ready to go in about 90 seconds using the treasure map generators in the book.

Ah. Mothership. That's another great one for no-prep one-shots. If you have the right booklets you can create an adventure almost as quick as with Pirate Borg. Hell, you could probably just roll up a Pirate Borg adventure and reskin it for Mothership.