Hey Veeky Forums, so my gaming group are frankly terrible at reading rulebooks...

Hey Veeky Forums, so my gaming group are frankly terrible at reading rulebooks. Several just don't and those that do don't want to learn systems, so suffice it to say that the somewhat crunchy stuff I lean towards isn't going to work for them.

I do still want to run something with these guys though, so I'm hoping you can help me with finding a rules light system with a baked in setting, preferably not generic fantasy but I'll take what I can get since I'm already being kinda picky with it. We've already done a couple of weebshit games in 'just throw a couple of dice and that's it' "systems" and I'm not really looking to compete with those ideally, but again I don't know how much of a viable field I have to pick from.

Other urls found in this thread:

zioth.com/zioth/place/index
mediafire.com/folder/7llc83r2xf8bg/Barbarians_of_Lemuria_-_Mythic_Edition
mediafire.com/download/p5w885sa9a869ma/Barbarians Of Lemuria - Legendary Edition.pdf
mega.co.nz/#F!CtQR2bST!y_awB-GHCiL3CdK4iLCV7A
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Use Risus as a litmus test on whether you either have lazy players are players with a different preference than you. If your group doesn't even read the rules for Risus D R O P T H E M

*or players that have a different preference than you

Couple of things...

Any game with a setting will be a book. How else would you convey a setting?

As the GM it is your job to run and explain the rules. Players don't have to read anything except their chargen flavor.

You probably tried DnD or Gurps or some other victim franchise. Those are games that monetize by selling secondary and tertiary books. Of course they're verbose. That is not a problem of games, but of publications like self-help books and smut fiction.Most RPGs aren't like that at all.

And asking for a game with setting but specifying only preferably not generic fantasy does not give us much to work with.

Here's what you should do...

Describe the kind of game dynamic you are looking for. Describe a genre you want to play. Or describe your group and how they like to play.

Download 5 of the then suggested games, read them, and play the 2 you liked best as a one shot. Then have the group decide.

>but of publications like self-help books and smut fiction
What?

>How else do you convey a setting?
By being a decent DM...?

So a requirement for being a decent DM is the ability to telepathicaly dump information into your players' brains?

>How else would you convey a setting?
Bullet points, paragraph summaries beforehand of major factions, landmarks and continents, interesting points to note and showing everything else through play.

No...?
Have you never DMed...?

If you're looking for a rules light and easy to learn rpg, I'd recommend Rogue Trader. Incredibly easy to understand, and only uses 2d10.

>Showing through play.
Thank fuck, someone gets it.

A lot of DMs write their own settings, instead of buying other people's settings. I personally am a big fan of doing this, as you can tailor things to make it interesting for your group.

You can pass over the vital information to your players in about 2-3 pages alongside information on the game and what you want the tone of the campaign to be for a small campaign.

For larger shit, you can make a wiki and expand it as you make more stuff up - look at this example I found on google.
zioth.com/zioth/place/index

In particular making your own setting is great, because you can get your players to get some input into it, and that automatically means a: you've got less work to do, and b: they're already getting hooked because they've got an investment in the game.

How else but through a book would you convey a setting TO the GM, professor...

Not the topic at hand.
Of course DMs do more work.

Online notes or a wiki, via spoken speech, pictures, braille, interpretive dance.

Or IMAGINAAATION!

Barbarians of Lemuria is pretty simple. It technically has its own fantasy setting, with airships and blue giants and stuff, but overall, it's relatively generic swords & sorcery stuff, and I think its setting is commonly ignored.

>Barbarians of Lemuria,Mythic Edition (current edition) -- mediafire.com/folder/7llc83r2xf8bg/Barbarians_of_Lemuria_-_Mythic_Edition

>Barbarians of Lemuria, Legendary Edition (earlier edition, fewer details & more minimalist presentation makes it even easier to learn, but the rules aren't as refined) --mediafire.com/download/p5w885sa9a869ma/Barbarians Of Lemuria - Legendary Edition.pdf

>Barbarians of Lemuria, House Rules / Patches for Legendary Edition (if you want the bare bones minimalism of Legendary, but with the rules tightened up a bit) -- mega.co.nz/#F!CtQR2bST!y_awB-GHCiL3CdK4iLCV7A

>not making your own setting
try iiiiit

No semaphores?

Try reading the thread, maybe?

The thread is talking about DMs expressing settings to players though.

Alright, let's go off topic then.

Worldbuilding? I get the appeal, but it isn't roleplaying, you have to understand that. A GM in roleplaying has to prep one session. Preparing much more is wasted effort and often counter productive to the session at hand.

What you are thinking about are published scenario books. But that is nothing an individual GM can do. It is a whole lot of effort and details than any GM can come up with on the fly, and has to normally, which a publisher sells to a lot of GMs. But nobody reads that if it isn't published. For a single campaign the effort would be ludicrous, and no player could ever live up to such a massive vision.

No, worldbuilding is the gamer equivalent of masturbation. It's fun. It might make you get to know your own instincts better so you can handle the situation more routinely when you don't play by yourself. But for it to become a creative product of any value in relation to the effort it takes you have to polish it enough to sell it to many other... gamers.

OP is asking about simple systems to look at.
Try to keep up?

You never heard of plan enough to improvise?

You can't DM a single session if you don't know your setting.

I'm sorry you feel world building is too much for you, but shit isn't as hard as you're making out.

>Product of value.
Nigger, it's just a game.

I would recommend the Star Wars system by FFG, while the dice system is weird at first, all the rules are pretty simple and tend to favor a more narrative gameplay.

And you're talking about a tangent relating to expressing settings to players. You keep up.

When I worldbuild, I usually just write a paragraph and a plot hook about each area. Then say, write a list of criminals in the setting, major villains, major monsters, shit like that.
Efficient worldbuilding is key. As well, exploration based campaigns work better with premade settings ime.

Worldbuilding is best if you want to run a longer campaign with a set out milleiu and whatnot. The current world I'm working on is a 200x200 mile area in not! 1600's north america. So there's bits of research on native cultures, early modern history, superstitions and religion of the time. Stuff like that. I want to have that feel of colonial times so it pays to do a bit of research rather than just winging it since I'm not an expert on this stuff.

You're doing it right then. Planning enough to improvise. You're likely a great DM.

>A GM in roleplaying has to prep one session. Preparing much more is wasted effort and often counter productive to the session at hand.

Worldbuilding can be done in a day. Hell, I can and have built a world in the space of 15 minutes.

>But for it to become a creative product of any value in relation to the effort it takes

Bullshit. You just need to take some concepts, slap together the core premise and draft outlines of the competing factions in vague outline and then only make them in greater detail when your players actually approach those factions. You can even ask your players to put input in and then you have less work, have more plot hooks AND the players are invested.

Hell, let's make a setting right now.

>Wild west fantasy
>Guns are prevalent
>there's a giant desert full of spiders, hungry fire elementals and shit
>colonists from the old world only have basic magic because they had to leave it behind to get to the new place. There's three or four colonising factions and they all hate each other
>natives include hill people - nomadic kobold riding venemous lizards who rule over orcish tribes, and there's also
>Kobolds had left the underground because of a war between intelligent spidrers and drow

>you all start in a saloon and the water source from the nearby mountain is drying up. The sherriff deputizes you all. Go investigate.

BOOM. You're set. Make up a reason for the water source drying up - it's a war between a shaman group of orcs trying to break away from kobold oppressors by diverting water away from the mountainside. That's being orchestrated by the South Indestrad Company, which is a huge organisation that's driving a lot of bad shit.

This is basic stuff you should be able to come up with to get your players hooked.

Extensive worldbuilding really depends on what sort of campaign you're wanting to do.
A single session for me is grabbing a 1 page dungeon and taking a half hour to draw a map of the area. Then saying a few general statements about the local town.

If your players tend to wander a lot, it can get real fuzzy and arbitrary real fast. Things like if they get some strong power, having a high level villain show up out of nowhere. When prepping a world, you can take time to figure out what high and mid level threats could happen. So the evil duke is a persistent asshole from day one rather than someone who pops up just because the players have a small kingdom.
A big thing as well is that instead of just popping up "there's a deep canyon here, how do you cross?" a lot of that sort of thing exists because the players decided to go left rather than right. Pre planning helps the GM be a bit more "neutral" and whatnot. It helps some players immersion and adds an organic feel to the game though it's not strictly necessary for a game.

A big thing that bogs down worldbuilding is that a lot of folks get masturbatory with it. In a d&d style game, villains, threats, resources, plot hooks and dungeons should be 70% of the worldbuilding with evocative flavor stuff making up most of the rest. Writing several pages about the basket weaving cultures of bchenga rather than shit that's important to the player or the game is pure masturbation. Hell, even lists of npc's and random encounters are mainly inefficient prep imo.

I've found as well that half the worlds I've started building never saw actual play but I can always just grab some situations or encounters from those and recycle them into something else.

Having factions sketched out works well to keep things appropriate. I go for a few weak factions and a few strong factions. The players get to tangle with weaker factions in the early game while the strong factions may have a presence in the background.

That sets up the stage for later for when the players scale up. Often a good trick for when the players get powerful is sudden overwhelming force, or having a large threat show up *because* the heroes are a destabilising presence.

That often gets the players feeling they're doing some thing since they've got someone's attention.

I do like a small amount of masturbation but too much as you said is no good for you. Getting things fleshed out helps bring some colour to the game.

But yeah, still going to tell op he should try making his own setting.

I think making your own setting is a lot easier than most folks realize. Just have 3-5 factions and a list of 10-20 plot hooks as well as a map. Most other things can be sketched out later. That's for a longer campaign though. A single session can start with a vague situation and idea. Preplanning mainly pays dividends in long campaigns.

Yeah, having the strong faction show up due to the players being heroes can work well. It works though if the players are aware of their existence before that or they haven't obviously just materialized into existence.

I get a bit masturbatory with architecture and art but those are things that immediately get described to players when encountering a culture.

One thing I like to do is leave the starting area a bit vague and allow each player to add something they want to the setting. It gets them more invested in that starting area I find and helps add things they want to see.