RPGaDay Question #22

Question #22: Which RPG is the easiest for you to run?

At this point in time, I'd have to say FFG's Star Wars Roleplaying Game.  As long as I've got some already made characters on hand and a core idea for an adventure, I can throw down a session on pretty short notice.  And in fact, have done so more than once, where the usually scheduled game for one of my groups has gone belly-up for whatever reason, and I was able to spin an entertaining full-length session out of a single sentence idea.

A lot of that "wing it and go" ability got honed on WEG;'s Star Wars d6 game, which has the benefit of a fairly simple yet functional rule system and the assorted character templates, from which it's quite easy to add a name and some skill points and get playing.  Had a lot of fun sessions with SWd6 that sprang out of  "we're bored, let's do something!" back in the 90's.  Now I'll be the first to admit that a great may of those off-the-cuff sessions weren't exactly high-minded or really all that nuanced, but for being off-the-cuff they did the job of providing an evening's entertainment with laughs and excitement for all.

Another RPG that I'm getting increasingly comfortable with running is John Wick Presents' 7th Sea 2nd edition, which generally speaking is mechanically simple in task resolution (decide on what Trait+Skill is being used to overcome a Risk, decide how many Raises are needed to overcome Consequences) and coming up with adversaries to face is an equally simple matter, especially for Brute Squads, who really boil down to a roving pile of Consequences that's going to smack an unlucky Hero in the face.  And if I don't have a collection of pre-made Heroes already on hand, I can easily fall back on the Heroes and Villains supplement for player-character options to draw from.

There was a point that I could do an easy job of running WotC's Star Wars Saga Edition, as I was very familiar with the rules.  However, doing an off-the-cuff session wasn't so easy, since I'd need to worry about creating characters as well as NPC stat blocks.  Yeah, I did compile a rather huge list of pre-made NPCs of various challenge ratings for Saga Edition (there's still an active link to it in the archives of this blog if you're interested, though the production values are pretty damn lacking).

Yeah, not too surprising that of the various systems that are easy for me to run, most of them are Star Wars.  Given how much of an impact Star Wars RPGs have had on me as a gamer and for how long they've been a part of my life as a gamer, that's not really much of a surprise.

Tune in tomorrow to see if tomorrow's question has a (not really) jaw-dropping answer.