5 Great No-Prep Tabletop RPGs Under $20
Tabletop fans can debate endlessly about what makes a perfect role-playing game, but there's one thing every gamer I know has agreed on lately: game planning is hard. People are busy, last-minute dropouts are common, and too many campaigns die because it just wasn't possible to play regularly. That's one of the many reasons I'm a big fan of no-prep RPGs: it's easy to pick one up and jump straight into a story when one of your regular gaming crew unexpectedly can't make it to a scheduled session.
But there are many more reasons to have a handful of pick-up-and-play RPGs on hand. Maybe your core group wants to take a break and try something new, but you don't want to invest a lot of time or money into a new game that you're not sure they'll like. Maybe you want to meet gamers: organizing a simple one-shot at a convention or an open table day at a gaming cafe is a great way to audition new players for your home game. You may have tried some of the most popular pick up and play games like For The Queen, Fiascoor The silent yearand you're ready to keep expanding your horizons.
Or maybe you're just looking for the perfect gift for the tabletop gamer in your life, and want to start at a reasonable price. Anyway, here are some indie RPGs that require little to no prep that I personally love, all under $20 and ready to put a new spin on your gaming nights.
Rusalka
Nick Wedig's melancholic card-based storytelling game is one of my favorites to play at conferences. The premise immediately engages every group I've ever shown it to, and the game's structure really brings out players' creativity and taste for drama.
This one doesn't need a gamemaster: each player takes a deck of cards themed around a single word (the basic set is Sacrifice, Reflection, Moonlight and Mists), and you all play as Rusalka – the spirits of drowned women, according to Russian myth. The game works in rounds, with players taking turns coming to the hidden pool of the Rusalkas as petitioners to beg for favors, justice, or even just power. The cards determine what a petitioner can ask for and how the rusalka can respond, with threats or negotiation, sympathy or anger. You then play out the bargains that follow – including clues to help you retroactively build your own character's story, as Rusalka begins to remember her own life, and how and why she became a vengeful spirit.
It's an elegantly designed horror game; the card prompts suggest that Rusalka is often monstrous and rarely kind. But players have a lot of room to define their own characters and tell many different types of stories. The base set seats up to four, but I highly recommend the two expansions, which add more theme decks (Tides and sadness, Ghosts and mysteries), and let you bring in more players.
To serve her winter hunger
Designer Steven Dewey is best known for the excellent, innovative and extremely grim game play 10 candles (also highly recommended, and available as a $10 PDF), but personally I get more of a kick out of his playing To serve her winter hunger, a cruel little story about competitive winter spirits who fight to please their dark mistress while hunting for a lost human wandering through their forest. This one does need a facilitator, and it is best if they read the rules beforehand to understand the innovative structure of the game. But the four player characters – Flame, Cold, Fear and Hunger – are preset, and all preparation is done at the table once the roles have been chosen.
Normally, I'm not a fan of GMs reading blocks of text from the gamebook to their players instead of putting things into their own words. To serve her winter hunger is my biggest exception to that rule, because the setup is written so poetically and evocatively, with a clear, courtly fairytale tone. Everything about this game is formulaic and artsy in the best way.
This one plays best if your group is comfortable with sharp banter and a spirit of competition: being caustic, spiteful, and superior to each other as you compete for the love of the winter yokai. Yuki Onna is a core part of the game, and the mechanics include offering “pity” to other players – and sometimes rejecting the pity offered to you. This is also the only RPG I've ever played where cutting out a paper snowflake – and sometimes slightly damaging other players' snowflakes – is an integral part of the game mechanics.
The king is dead
When some friends told me there was a no-prep GM-less RPG that we could play a Game of Thrones-style “war for the kingdom” intrigue scenario within a four-hour convention, I assumed they were exaggerated – or at least that the intrigues would be quite simplistic. I was so very wrong. Meguey and Vincent Bakers The king is dead gives each player an individual booklet detailing a faction with its own history and agendas, and there's plenty to encourage competition, conflict and tentative alliances.
The game then guides you through building a scenario where your royal house battles others for control of the kingdom. No advance preparation, no endless world-building: you just make a few starting decisions, and boom, you're ready to seduce the scion of your hated rival or send your famous band of assassins after them as you seek the throne.
What appealed to me most The king is dead is the way it operates at both a detailed and broad level. You can focus on playing a prince or princess of your house and really delve into character building and their individual importance. Or you can join the broader movement of armies and resources. Randomization mechanisms cause different events, but you can choose the scale of your response. Our game had it all: passionate Romeo and Julietstyle prohibited rendezvous on a personal level, with battalions rolling up to lay siege to key strongholds on a kingdom-wide level.
Impostors save the world
Trickster characters like Coyote, Anansi, Sly Peter, or Sang Kancil make for fun, lively folklore, but they also often serve an important purpose in myth, as the heralds of creation or change who overthrow stagnant systems and solve major problems. Granted, sometimes they solve major problems they created. Eric Simon's cleverly structured, easy-to-learn narrative game Impostors save the world weaponizes that dual troublemaker-and-problem-solver energy by giving trickster characters a more specific purpose: pushing back against The Grey, the force of banality that sucks magic from the world.
Impostors save the world is openly designed as a political and progressive game about tackling real historical situations, righting wrongs and helping victims of oppression find strength and hope. To anyone who has used the phrase “social justice warrior” unironically and with authentic disdain, this is not your game.
The game's startup scenario suggestions are historically specific and narratively rich, but the game also includes clear guidelines for generating your own scenarios. Then it's up to you to play through the story, as players take turns directing scenes and opposing them, as you figure out how Loki's shapeshifting, Anansi's storytelling, Maui's power, or Eris' craft can be useful in pushing back the forces of greed or indifference. This is another GM-less pick-and-play game that's endlessly customizable: you can use the included mythic impostors or challenge your own with a simple system, and play the results as a one-shot or a City of Mist-style campaign.
Problems with renting
Sometimes it's hard to get games going because no one wants to be the GM. But what if everyone does GM want? In that case, Problems with renting is your game. Nathan D. Paoletta's brazen genre subversion is set up so that there is one player in each scene and everyone else controls the game. It's a surprisingly satisfying way to play!
The central character: Ruben Carlos Ruiz, a smuggler, mercenary and problem solver hired to solve tough problems, usually involving vehicular skills and violence. Everyone else plays into aspects of the world around him that can help or interfere with his latest job: the villains, the physical environment, the supernatural, the rival problem solver who might be a love interest or Ruben's deadliest enemy. The game comes with prefab scenarios and plenty of NPCs for quick-start games. In each scene, players switch roles, so everyone potentially gets a chance to be the hero, the villains, or whichever role appeals most.
Problems with renting is a hoot. Because the central concept so inherently subverts the usual RPG structure, and the characters and adventures are so archetype-driven and iconic, the game naturally lends itself to straightforward yet hilarious play. Think of films like Machete, In despairor Drive angry, and you have the target tone lower. But you can play it as direct or goofy as you like, as long as your playing group agrees. If you ever thought it would be fun to conquer the world as Leonard Smalls, the evil biker founding Arizona – or like any similarly big, wide, badass action movie character – this is the game that lets you alternately do that, and facilitate that for other people.