What Do I Know?

We’re up to day twenty-two of the RPG A Day questions. so let’s look at what our question is for today.

Which RPGs Are The Easiest For Your To Run?

Alright, fairly straightforward question, but with the zinger of implying more than one answer. I can do this. I’ve got this . . .

By no means does this question indicate that the games involved are easier games to run than other games. These are games that have a confluence of concepts and rules that I’m comfortable with, and themes that are imbedded in my brain.

With that out of the way, I’d have to say that it is fairly easy for me to fall into running a game of D&D 5th edition or Monster of the Week. Yes, those are two very different systems.

D&D 5th edition is easy for me to run because I can go through most of a session without looking at rules (not counting stat blocks). It reminds me a lot of AD&D 2nd edition, which I ran so much back in the day, and could quickly write up an outline of an adventure 10 minutes before a game and just look up stats in the Monster Manual.

In fact, 5th edition reminds me so much of those old days of D&D, it’s actually tougher for me to run things like Storm King’s Thunder, even though I’m running that so that I have an “end point” for the campaign. I mean, I can come up with individual adventures, but coming up with a satisfying ending for a campaign isn’t always easy.

I’ve loved monster hunting media for so long that Monster of the Week just feels like home to me when I run it. I can draw on watching Ghostbusters when I was too young to get the Cthulhu homages, my 3,578 viewings of Fright Night*, watching X-Files, Buffy, Angel, the Ghost Whisperer, and 12 (!) seasons of Supernatural. There is just something fascinating to me about monster hunting as a sub-genre of horror. But I’ve gone on about that before.

Star Wars just barely misses this list, for one reason. I can come up with single missions or dungeons for D&D. I can come up with one mystery with a weird monster and a strange situation for the hunters to deal with for a one shot. I have a lot harder time telling one off stories in Star Wars without wanting to create more of a story arc. So it takes a little bit more effort.