I'd heard of Vigilante, but had never seen it. Still get any hate-mail for it?
Here's my comments on my first 24 hour RPG, culled from the end of the document in question:
Here are my thoughts, from the last page of the document:
I didn’t expect a 24 hour RPG to be easy, but I certainly learned a few points to make it easier next time.
1. Don’t decide on the formatting first. I sat down at the beginning of the process, decided I would do something intense and bloody, and built the page layout and cover graphics first, and then a few of the blood spatter graphics later. Then I typed the material for this ugly game into the layout I had prepared. This lead to some problems as I added material or shortened material to make it fit the page better. Suddenly, the game REALLY had to suit the format instead of just doing the formatting last. I like that the formatting came out so stark and strong, but it certainly but a serious crimp in my writing style. Plus, you can see that my formatting style evolved as the document did, with later chapters having somewhat more creative formatting than earlier ones.
2. Gloss over a lot of stuff. I wanted this game to have actual equipment rules initially - it was going to use the guns from the d20 system, and include full shopping lists of other cool stuff like in the original Top Secret game.. That had to go when I realized that it was either going to be 10 pages of equipment and rules for such, or the mission generation system. Since the mission generation system is basically the excuse for this game to exist... equipment had to go.
3. Don’t ever actually expect to have 24 hours to do your 24 hour RPG. Between family, summer time, 2 home businesses, car repairs, and a million other things (like sleeping and eating), actually plan to get something topping out around 12 hours into each 24 hour RPG. If you can get more time out of those 24 hours, more power to you. I honestly expected I would spend at least 12 hours just in the writing stage of this project. As if.
4. Maybe, just maybe, try to make something with some sort of redeeming value to gam-ing, to yourself, or to someone. Somewhere around this morning, I realized that the game I was writing may well go into the history books as a nice, light, modern version of FATAL or perhaps even have worse scorn thrown upon it. I’m no Rockstar Games, so I don’t know how I’ll take any of the abuse that may well ccome as a result of this mini RPG.
5. Do the work in an environment that supports spell-checking. I was a twit and set this all up in a layout software that does not include spell-checking or grammar checking, so getting that instant editing that is often required means copying the text into Word or another software and checking it there.
6. To me, character advancement is one of the hardest elements to balance properly for an RPG. This is doubly so when you won’t get the chance to actually playtest your creation. Consider how you are going to handle advancement from the first moment that you start laying out a game system and character generation system. Finding that balance between fast enough advancement to make it ex-citing to the players and slow enough to keep power levels under control is a heck of a job, especially if you leave it for last.
7. Balls to the wall. If it is worth 24 hours of insanity to put together, it must be worth publishing. Get it out there and tell people about it and the 24 hour RPG project. I’m setting this piece of trash up for printing at LuLu, and then I’m hoping to bring a few copies with me to GenCon if they get here in time. Yes, I’m actually going to run this mess of a ‘game’ and see if everyone else thinks it is as ugly as I do.
