User Blog:
Holy Crap! We Have Game This Weekend? - Drunk Game Planning and Instant Game

Happy New Year! 

Thanks to a stark infusion of liquor and food, this week isn't the best for GMing advice. If you asked me right now, I'd probably tell you that every time your players say something stupid, take a shot. Don't tell them why you're taking shots at seemingly random intervals through the game, let them figure it out. And by let them figure it out, I mean it'll be completely over their heads up until you're tanked and tell them that no, they can't have a katana. 

That's why I'm not offering GM advice this week. Instead, I'm going to give a slightly longer than usual profile of a free gaming product. Conveniently, it'll help you come up with your weekend's game when you've been drinking too much. 

Instant Game, by Animalball games, is our Tool For Drunk Game Planning™. It's free, so it won't break the hooch budget, either. Bonus! The purpose of Instant Game is to offer a tool for designing an RPG setting/scenario randomly, on the fly, without taking silly time to plan and all that mumbo jumbo. Not only that, but if you're using Instant Game, you can't plan. This means that if you intend to use it, you actually have incentive not to do work the week before. How hard does that rock? Plenty, of course. 

In execution, it's done with a streamlined system of d100 rolls. The initial process takes about thirty minutes your first try. You make a handful of rolls, coming up with a setting, tone and plot elements. Basically, you have your game premise at that point. Then, you give a couple of rolls and voila, plot. Player characters can also get random generation. If you're using your own system (a valid assumption with Instant Game,) then you just throw together characters by its rules. Otherwise, this system allows you to come up with fully-fleshed characters with inborn quirks and flaws. 

The system itself is quite simple, it's a pretty standard 3d6 system, nothing to write home about. But the generator works well if you use a nice generic system like Savage Worlds or GURPS. I think I'm going to be trying it with World of Darkness, particularly after getting the results I did with my first generated game. I'm curious.