[The Words] A desperate gamble to finish in time

[greyorm]

So for some reason I ended up directed to the rules for last year, and thus thought I had until June to worry about Game Chef (and thus not in the middle of packing to move, selling the house, and various other fun bits). Three days ago someone mentions they had submitted their entry...I check again and now see the rules for this year, and realize I have three days to whip something up.

Got it in just under the wire. Well, AT the wire...posted the link at midnight exactly.

Unfortunately, just not enough time. I ran out of time to detail how combat works. I think, or hope, "you lose this conflict and you die" should just be straight-up obvious, and "I give" being a way out of anything majorly "hose-y" and a solution to desperate circumstances, but knowing that gaming in general has this idea about hit-points and so forth -- some numerical measurement of "how close to death am I?" -- I think it may not be as obvious as I want. And I'm left wondering if it doesn't just need more on the whole "combat" front.

I also had two more attributes in the game at first, but ran short of time to write how they were to function. Though it seems that the game works despite their lack. There's a whole bunch of stuff I cut as either "I don't have time to figure out if this will work" or "I don't have the words right now to explain this", and finished writing what I do have at around 11:53pm. I submitted the literally roughest draft possible. No editing. And I pray I didn't completely miss something obvious, or cut something vitally important out and forget to paste it back in.

None of the named ingredients were used, instead I went for the full volley of Forge-generated topics, specifically here:

http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=26131.0
Grammar & Grimoire: An Aklo-based magic system for CoC & horror generally

http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=24463.0
GM-less games

http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=22323.0
[Downtown] My first attempt at writing a game.

http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=29082.0
"realistic" HTH/Melee Combat system

The core concept is built around some short fiction I wrote a number of years back ("The Dog"), specifically the concept of "the words".

[greyorm]

It occurs to me I should probably mention what the game is about: "A GM-less card game about dark magic and martial arts in the gritty downtown streets -- with mutants, madness, crime-fighting, and inner demons made manifest."

That was my original idea-blurb I used to build from. And then I realized I would basically be writing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the RPG (maybe a little darker, and more supernatural). Which, despite the cool factor, I didn't want to do. So I sort of picked at the concept for a while.

Eventually it became a sort-of apocalyptic scenario where the heroes were just whomever was around that wanted to stop the chaos, no matter what their motives behind doing so were. People who knew the words, knew what they were doing, and could fight the chaos their knowledge had engendered among the unscrupulous, disturbed, and insane.

Making mutations fit and work was a little more difficult--I'm actually wondering if I made their occurrence TOO prevalent--but using the words is definitely a scary gamble. I didn't get the rules for Masters included--fairly certain it is obvious you can just use them for Edges right now--but other stuff was planned for them.

Also sure there's a way it could be even more GM-less, maybe making the attributes function as the GM instead. Or everyone else's attributes. Or something goofy. Even more boardgame-like if I'd had time (that was the original plan, and cards were laid down by players on a "map" -- every card had a meaning/event to go with it), but that didn't happen with just three days to write.

[Troy_Costisick]

Sorry you didn't get finished in time.  But Game Chef is about getting ideas down on paper.  Do you think you'll continue development of this game?

[greyorm]

Sorry you didn't get finished in time.  But Game Chef is about getting ideas down on paper.  Do you think you'll continue development of this game?

Greetings,Troy! I finished enough to submit a (hopefully) playable game, though it wasn't everything I had considered or wanted to include. In a way, a "lite" version. We'll see how it fares. (I've already found one typo -- I state the players lay out four cards for attributes, but only list the two I went with for the GC submission. Oops. I guarantee that will be confusing.)

At the moment I am going forward with the design, filling in the parts that weren't included in the existing submission. I've already written up "Fear", the third character attribute, and am kicking combat and "this is how the 'board' works" bits around on paper/in my head. A few tweaks for clarity also; and the mechanical effect of Masters is written down, but currently half-baked. (This isn't a bad start, given past GC entries that I've never developed beyond the submission.)