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[MattCowens]

Thanks to all the players in Debbie's Evil Genius Summer Camp game - you guys rocked! I had a lot of fun in the game, and was really pleased to see you triumph over your adversaries (mostly).

Game Premise

You are all kids from an evil genius school. You are aged 10 - 15. You all belong to the same 'house'. You are all on summer camp. You must compete against other houses in fiendish tasks, to win points for your house.

Order of Play

*Debbie explains premise.
*Players all make up characters, including name, age, what their plan for world domination includes, a catchphrase, 3 handy skills, one weakness, and why the character wants to take over the world.
*Each player comes up with a name, strength and weakness for a rivel house.
*Welcomed to camp by NPCs, structure of camp (a series of inter-house contests) is established.
*Each player chooses a camp activity which the group will have to participate in.
*Players are given half an hour to come up with a game plan and decide what resources they want to assemble
*Draw randomly to see which house is faced in each event
*Play through each challenge (each challenge will have 3 stages or components. 2 or more successes out of 3 wins).

This game
Had lots of fun stuff in it, including:
*A rival house called Midnight Darkraven, made up of supernatural creatures like vampires. Their strength was 'supernatural powers', and their weakness was 'angst'.
*Cool camp activities like 'climb the cliffs of insanity' and 'play a game of field hockey' and 'the labyrinth/spelling bee challenge'.

[hix]

What a fantastic game.

The greatest thing about EGSC, for me, was that as soon as we started designing our characters, we were trash-talking each other, trying to get one up on each other. Basically, you put a bunch of teenage evil geniuses together, of course they're not gunna cooperate with each other.

But then, to introduce that half hour of planning, to try and trash the other houses ... well, that by itself wasn't enough to get us cooperating. Figuring out that we had to figure out how to efficiently deal with all of the challenges (by both sabotaging the other teams & cheating on the events) - and then shifting into an analytical (but still really imaginative mode) ... well, that was brilliant.

By the time Matt and Debbie came back, we were evil geniuses with a goal. A goal to win. Evilly.

Guys, I had some other thoughts. Did you want me to put them here, or I could start a playtest thread at the Forge, where you could get some other designers' input as well. Honestly, I think the game is in good enough shape to start working on, if you wanted.
_________________
Cheers,
Steve

Gametime! A Kiwi groupblog about RPGs. Come and join the conversation.
multi-dimensional: my script-writing blog.

[Debz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm keen for feedback be it here or on the Forge. I'm not sure whether to develop it into a Scenario with pre-written characters, activities etc or tidy up the mechanics so that it can run more smoothly as a shared narration game.

At the moment the biggest issue is that (as you said) the GM wants to be in the room when the players are planning their preparations, yet if the rival Houses (and activity) are generated by the players, you need some time to plan out their strategies as they tend to be specific to the House and activity.

I think having sample character sheets, lists of abilities etc would help the character generation. The rival house generation and scheduled activities would probably also work better with examples that could be used or not.

[Matt]

Neither Debbie nor I read the Forge, so my vote is for feedback here

[hix]

Done! The thread is here, in Game Designers's Cabal.

I vote for scenario first, publish (if you want) later. Seems simplest.
_________________
Cheers,
Steve

Gametime! A Kiwi groupblog about RPGs. Come and join the conversation.
multi-dimensional: my script-writing blog.

[Stephanie]

I can still remember the collective shocked gasp from the group as the PE teacher announced to us that we would have to go outside and exercise.

Re the problem about planning, could you nominate someone to be 'the Adversary' and have him or her do planning away from everyone else, and then have the GM arbitrate the two plans as they are presented. Much like Matt was doing informally, actually.