The pictures are to break up the wall of text for readability and stuff
Also, I am having a DGames problem and need to put it to the think tank of y'all to help me solve it:
So I've been wanting to host an Adventure Game pretty much since Batman: WOTK ended. But as college ramped up and I took on additional responsibilities (job, new friends, new hobbies, actually being a good student, etc) it just got harder and harder.
My first concept was a sprawling mega-adventure that would have, literally, an entire explorable continent. I still have most of the work on that one done, and hope to run it in a somewhat reduced form some day, but it's cagey. It might just be too big.
And that's the thing. I keep hitting that wall, the idea is just too damn big to fit it into my life. And so when I hit that wall, I put the idea in my back pocket and hope I can run it after I graduate at some point, in some form, even if it has to be heavily changed. And the cycle repeats.
After the prior game came Condemned, which quite a few of you were hyped for. I am still ****ing
enamored with this game. I think the balance of it was perfect, and I think I fixed literally every design flaw or speed bump from running a sandbox game in WOTK. And it would be a return to the unforgiving real world physics of The Fog. And horror elements! And moral depravity and general thought-provokingness, gughghg. It was going to be something special.
But it, too, was too big. I was still making an effort to get it going, though. I had most of my prep done, but I'd only just started the prologue stage for a handful of players, only a few people had role PMs, college was ballooning even more, people with crucial roles to the game's design were disappearing off the face of the earth...
...and then my ****ing harddrive
died.
Ugh.
And that basically killed Condemned. I just did not have it in me to redo all that ****ing work. To give you an idea of the extent of what I lost... the roster, about 8 half-finished role PMs, a WIP map, a list of important locations, a list of various lore related facts I'd need to keep track of, a list of about 50 game-crucial NPCs, and a sprawling 12 page Word document with painstakingly collected mood music to suit any occasion.
But even if I had all that work done... right now? Still too big.
...so I got another game idea.
I won't even talk about the flavor of this one, as it'd just cause an explosion of pointless speculation/hype that would be fruitless and disappoint people in the end, since I'm at least temporarily welching. But this pisses me off. This game idea was ****ing designed around college...
I thought. Turns out senior year is kind of a teethkicker. I'm writing five papers and reading ~650 pages worth of material in the next week and a half or so.
But that's what sucks. This game was designed with GLife's newly patented "chapter-style" AGame thing. That being his Calamity schtick, where you just schedule around people's ability to be active, and you have a story that progresses in pieces that have a definitive start and end, can finish in about 5 or so sittings/sessions, and are scheduled in advance. The operational area of the game is limited enough that things should progress at a steady pace, and yet open enough that railroading is minimized.
I thought it was perfect. I even had a few basic design elements that would work even
smoother than Calamity -- the game's players would be split into two groups. Group A would contain about 12 people, and at least some people from Group A would have to be in every chapter. However, only 1-2 would be story-essential, and the others could be, well, anyone in Group A, to a certain maximum number. Group B would be larger, and only have 1-2 people at a time. They would initiate their chapter of the story, and Group A would be swept up into it. I thought it was perfect.
But there was just too much prep. Despite the optimized design, it was STILL too damn big in sheer prep work terms to launch.
Sad Two-Face is sad
So, what am I doing with this game? I want to say "I'm running it later", but I feel like that's just going to be me repeating the pattern. Granted, its simplicity makes it a good candidate for something to run at a later point after graduation, particularly since Condemned would entail redoing a ****-ton of work. Maybe I will. I really, really want to. I love the overall plot I came up with, the balance, and the structure of it. And it seems feasible and forgiving. Maybe not having college in my life will make things that much simpler.
...but that still leaves me, once again, smacking jaw-first into the Wall.
And wanting to run a god damn game, god damn it. I need to collect the rest of my thoughts, but I'm gonna post this now, ugh. Another concern about my most recently-shelved game is that the activity of all the AGamers I know and have cast into the crucial Group A (and myself for that matter) has been spotty this year to say the least. Not sure if that's me being busy and studying relentlessly, or them being busier than usual too, or just both, but I've hardly ever seen a large enough group of Group A peeps that were both online and actually not afk on AIM, on a night where I'd have time to host stuff.
This is distressing, because I have zero interest in a game that is
completely drop in/drop out. I think AGames need the element of a compelling and rich story that moves forward with the players' actions in real time, with real consequences, to keep the players hooked and willing to bite the bullet of spare time it will consume. You simply cannot have a story that will entertain and compel if anyone can drop in or out of the situation at will. Maybe that's the last compromise I need to make for a game I could feasibly run right now, but I won't do it. There'd be no joy in running the game for me.
Quite a pickle indeed. Anyway that's where I've been at A-and-other-gamewise in the last year or two, for those interested or wondering
ika:
