1KM1KT Free RPG Community

After spending 24 hours hammering away at your game, I can't blame you for not looking at it again but have you? Are you going to improve it? Expand it? Upgrade it? Sort out that dodgy paragraph? Add some more image or maybe finish it?

Take a look back at your old game, even if it hurts to do so - you'll be surprised at how good it is!

Absolutely!

I've run it four times now, and have a small set of notes on how to expand it based on in-game feedback.

I've not only looked at Hundedammerung, I've playtested and made revisions based on the test and player suggestions. Hv2 is already available on the 24-hour rpg site.

Apotheosis Blues is a much more complicated rewrite, especially since it's not finished. I plan to devote some time to it, but not until I finish some other projects first.

As you may know, I've updated and fleshed out Big Hearts in Big Country and released it as a new version (see the BHiBC thread for more info), although I (still!) haven't had a chance to playtest it. I've only had one weekend where it was even a possibility, and that weekend went down in flames thanks to the flu hitting our household.

I have had a few people approach me and ask me to run a game of it after the school semester starts, so that's a good sign! Summers are dead for gaming in our neck of the woods.

I've done some updates for both, though more for Extended Mission. No definite likelihood of playtesting at the moment.

It's good to see that 24 hour projects are picked up and expanded upon! I especially liked the feel of Big Hearts, and certainly will have a look at the other extended versions too.

Personally I did revamp both "The French Invade Texas" and "Santiago Joe" within a month from the 24-hour version. In both cases I continued writing immediately after the 24-hour period, and made it more or less as I would have liked it to be. Then I put them down, and refrained from making any more amendments or changes. But I did print them and reread a few times when I felt like it, making notes on what I'd like to add or change. I did those changes in a single run later on. Good for concentrating and not spending too much time lingering endlessly on the same project. I did not find time for thorough playtesting yet, but once I have, I might make more notes and change in a single run again. You can find the current versions at www.darkdungeon.ws

I noticed for myself that the 24-hour period provides a good kickstart, and forces you to make some decisions. You can actually lay down 80% of the game, it seems, in such a short while But the revamped, more finished versions are a lot better, because they are put into better order, have more examples, and fresher lay out. These things take up some extra time, whiich you don't have in the 24-hour run if you want to sleep and have a life too.

One of the things I learned from my recent two trials though, is that working out the details is not what takes up most time. It's making the decisions that you don't realize you must make. Choices that are implicit, and not readily formulated, but if you do not make them, you cannot proceed. In Santiago Joe for example I had to write examples, but I also felt I had to resequence the rules. If I reordered the rules, then I would have to write the examples differently than when I would not do so. But without writing the examples I did not quite know how to change the rule sequence... It took me a while before I realized that I was kind of gridlocked in my decision making there!

Did anyone have similar experiences there?

For me, the big decisions were snap and I did have to stick with them. I got lucky. My choice was to use a pool of dice, rather than a diceless bidding mechanic. If I had gone wiht the diceless mechanic, I would have tied my hands later and made the game feel more competitive, rather than teamwork against 'The Man'. I agree that you are forced to make big decisions pretty early on and then build on them. You simply don't have time to switch.

There is plenty more to do after 24 hours. I would argue that most 24 hour games are very thin on background and setting. Mine included. It's the job of the designer to make the game as fun to play and as easy to run as possible. Without plenty of depth, you're not going to get much of a campaign out of a 24 hour RPG. Many players and GMs need only a thin veneer of a setting (even a single sentance) to run a three year campaign but there is definitely joy to be had in delving deep into a large RPG with loads of coherent background and setting and getting under its skin. Of course, one should structure the background such that it can be understood without reading hundreds of pages but I doubt 5 pages of background is really enough to equip a GM for a long campaign.

Yeah, having recently done a 48 hour challenge prior to the 24 hour one, I knew what I could expect to do in a one-day time-frame, even accounting for a full night's sleep in there. So I built the game using that basis - knowing how much I had time to do. I knew I needed a simple equipment system like AssassinX (where equipment is automatic, and good equipment is stuff you get for kicking ass and it just provides a stat bonus).

My big thing was the module. I needed to have an introductory adventure in there, and I put a fair chunk of time aside to get it written.