Legwork and the Home Game
A few years have passed since In Praise of Legwork came out. Long enough for the analysis and suggestions in there to become more commonplace in day to day discussions. Sam's piece was grappling with products being published for sale. Yet, I have seen a good number of people apply that seem methodology to their work for their home games that they will never end up publishing. This is an awful lot of pressure to put on one's self for a game that's probably going to be weekly or bi-weekly. There is legwork for a campaign but often it's not the full scale assault of making an entire city stat with countless NPCs or modeling the years of history in an empire, usually the prep a home game craves is all about fleshing out what's about to be played. The frame of mind for the home game is the long voyage at sea that you and your crew can adjust to as needed. Products are thrown out into the world and have to stand for themselves. It's easy to get the commercial advice twisted with the hobby advice especially as a lot of the pressures a referee can feel for their games can be trends that grow from the market. But a clear line must be kept in our minds at al times that keep those market pressures away from how we want our games to go.
Legwork in the home game is all about building scaffolds for later play. Something I have been doing for Classic Traveller is writing lists of business names and silly NPC names to just cross off as patrons get introduced. I have also been working on a structure for my sector notes that makes it easy to refer to different planets and patrons so I don't have to leaf through my notebook everytime. I am going to start making generic OPFOR ORBATs so that I can quickly field teams of enemies for my players to engage. These are all things I have felt the need to cover through the gaps in play I have noticed. All games will be different and due to our limited time it's best to acknowledge where you want to put the legwork into your game so you don't over exert and burn out.