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[bryant]

I just completed my 24 Hour RPG. Phew. Started: 1 PM, 7/24/04; finished: 1 PM, 7/25/04.

Above The Earth is a superhero game designed around resource management mechanics. It's flexible enough to handle street-level superheroes and cosmic powers, all in the same fight. "You have a hundred six sided dice; when you run out, you run out."

I started this one with the example of play, which made writing the rest of the game almost painless. I wish I'd had another hour to review it and in particular double-check the math in the example of play; I looked at it a few times but I'm convinced I missed something. C'est la vie.

I also forgot to add the section on using HeroClix figures and maps, which was intended for people who really like tactical maps. I wanted to point out that rules-light systems could still support that kind of thing. Perhaps there'll be a Extended Remix Edition at some point.

If there is, I will definitely have better art and formatting. I really wanted to make it easy to print this out and fold it into a booklet, which meant 5x8 pages printed two-up, but I couldn't figure out how to get the PDF right using just Microsoft Word, so I punted to a columnar layout. Which works, but I couldn't do page numbers properly, which is why there aren't any of those.

Not that a twenty-four page book needs those, but still... hey! I hit 24 (small) pages exactly. Keen. The final word count is 6,300 words.

I also wanted art. I spent an hour looking for public domain superhero art on the Web. No luck. So the look is pretty boring. But functional.

I didn't lose any sleep writing this; in fact, I even took time out to go see The Bourne Supremacy which actually revitalized my energies nicely. And I thought about the game design during the previews, so it wasn't totally lost time.

As a whole, I'm pretty happy with the project and the result.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I'd rewrite that as "You have one hundred six-sided dice," `cause, you know, i was gonna complain, "it's one die, not one dice, and i've never seen a hundred-and-six-sided die."

[bryant]

Now that I look at the game itself, I think the canonical quote is "You have a hundred six siders; when you run out, you run out."

When I'm not half-trying to follow stupid Chicago Manual of Style rules, it's "You have 100 six siders; when you run out, you run out." Which is eminently clear.

Argh! This is why this kind of thing drives me nuts. You have no idea how much time I wanted to spend formatting and polishing, as opposed to putting rules down on paper.

The extended remix edition will have a dash. Part of me is saying "You could polish this up just fine over the next day or so, then get fifty copies printed at lulu.com and bring 'em to Gencon." But that's somewhat excessive of me.