23rd
Nov09
By Sebastian Hickey
Done and dusted.
It’s all over, the competition has ended, and it’s time for me to reminisce.
Busy Bee
What a gaming month. Since the competition started, I wrote a game, playtested it for 20 hours, visited Ireland’s biggest gaming convention and hosted two on-line RPG sessions. I’ve been sleeping erratically, ideas bouncing and spewing out with irreverent enthusiasm, keeping me awake until dawn. I’ve been eating like a student, ignoring my friends and arguing with myself on the street. I feel like a yo-yo that’s been made to ‘walk the dog,’ sometimes rolling or spinning on the spot, sometimes shooting off into the ether, pulled away on someone else’s whim. It has been manic, introverted and productive. And Hell for Leather is the result.
Drawing Board
I should probably take some time to talk about a few design issues while they’re fresh in my head. At the outset, I imagined a GM-lite co-operative game with a toolbox for facilitation. That is, I expected a trad game with some clever charts and knobs, so GM-ing would be zero prep and adversarial. There were four stats in the game, and you rolled inside a target. As a player, you were trying to build up ‘safety points,’ which brought you closer to your ‘safe haven.’ The GM could spend points (earned from your mistakes), to oppose you, or just add colour. Blah, blah, blah and so on.
The only thing I kept from the original draft was the Conflict Target (the bowls style dice solution). Some of the changes came in early, after Joe Prince took a peek. The GM vanished, the number of stats were reduced, and a new kind of currency for the game was formed, all thanks to the support of Joe Prince and a couple of my peers. The rest of the changes came during playtesting. For the last five weeks I’ve been forcing my gamer mates to toss dice at other dice, and it’s been a blast. In between sessions, I’d scribble new ideas, test new theories, and ask for more advice on-line.
Support
That’s how I got introduced to the Collective Endeavour, and particularly to Joe Murphy, an old hand on the circuit who I had the pleasure of meeting in Dublin for a coffee. Joe, among many people I have talked to about the game, helped me to streamline a few of my concepts and tighten the final product.
I was walking home from work the night before last, and I thought to myself, did I actually write this game? Sometimes I try to find an idea that was mine, that was really, 100% my idea. I get pulled around in a sequence of conversations. Was that a suggestion, or a comment, or a seed sown? Did I write any of this or did I just edit a bunch of good ideas into something fun? Either way, I’m proud of how it plays, though I’m not sure I’ve translated that correctly yet. Until I get the text right, this is a small thank you to all the people who helped me (in whatever way) to finish this submission PDF. Cheers lads.
Sebastian.
Supporters: Daniel Klein, Eoin Corrigan, Jason Hickey & Roger White
Critique: Dan Maruschak, Joe Murphy & Joe Prince
Playtesters: Alex Tang, Daniel Klein, Eoin Corrigan, Jason Hickey, Joe Sullivan, Roger White & Susan Holmgren
Games: Inspectres (Jared A. Sorenson) – In a Wicked Age (Vincent Baker) – Prime Time Adventures (Matt Wilson)
Books: The Running Man (Richard Bachman)
Sebastian,
It was a pleasure to be involved, for 2 reasons:
- in my opinion, the game is fundamenatally a strong, sound concept, inherently gameable, with an interesting and original mechanic; therefore it was great to be involved in many of those 16 hours of testing simply because they were a fun 16 hours of carnage; and
- it was fascinating to watch the iterative modifications, evolutions, advances and retreats of a system being rigorously tested.
Oh, and I love the “A Game of Skill” sidebar. Awesome
Best of luck with the competition.
Dear Game maker,
All the ideas are yours. Just because you used the talented people around you to bounce ideas off does not mean that this game is anyone’s but yours (and anyone else who wants to own the game can buy it soon for a very reasonable price – watch this space for artwork updates over the next few months).
You should be proud of yourself, it’s a work of art and I think anyone who plays it for real will be refreshed by the system: by the honest blood thirsty fun of it; by the way it forms strong bonds and strong competition and by the way that the more tense you get the more tense the game gets.
Congratulations, regardless of whether you get an honorable mention or win a prize I think you’ve got what you were looking for when you entered the competition.
Jason Hickey.
Thanks guys. You’re right Jay, I think I have accomplished what I wanted when I started out, and that is enough. I’m looking forward to testing this a couple more times over Christmas. I still need to figure out if I’ve illustrated how narrative works properly in the text. It makes me nervous to think I’ll probably be demo-ing this game to a blind audience sometime next year. Brrrrrr! (That’s the noise of anxiety)
Anxiety sounds like a cold place but I’m sure success will be much warmer. And Jay, of course, is right. Only you could have taken the ideas in the direction you did and only you could have taken those seeds sown and tended them so that they became the Oak that is Hell for Leather. It is yours totally and completely and you should be proud of it. All the best with the competition. Now if only I could somehow buy a Cobweb Games related t-shirt…