A matter of time

I’ve gotten a bit more work in on my Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. I’ve been thinking, too, that perhaps I’ve been looking at it wrong. Instead of feeling like I’m just writing the same game again but with less stuff in it, I should take it as an opportunity to identify the parts that are important and the parts that aren’t? God knows, I threw in everything but the kitchen sink when I wrote this thing. It might not be the worst thing in the world to consider whether I actually need all of it.

For example, the Interval rules. Now, in theory I think those are pretty solid. They are essentially a way to manage time-keeping in game, and let different things take different amounts of time without too much nitty-gritty counting of seconds and minutes. And taking significant extra time with a task – as in, spending hours instead of minutes of it, for instance – gives you a big boost to your action, because it should.

But when I think back to my playtesting… I’m not sure I’ve actually used the system terribly much? Maybe it’s the players I have, but no one ever did say, “okay, I just spend as long on this as it takes.” They usually wanted to be done in a reasonable time or not at all. Likewise, I like the idea of putting events on a timer and counting down to when things happened, but the game actually ran better those times I didn’t do that but let things happen more or less as I felt like.

Maybe I should be on the lookout for things that should quite frankly be simpler. I’m not going to edit the whole game all over again, because I don’t think I’d ever finish if I did, but still… it might be handy to have a simpler version available. And if nothing else, there’s always the second edition.