"I have some... unfinished business to attend to."
- Dr. McEvilClaw

Games are easy to start, but sometimes hard to finish. They are the like the green vegetables of the mind.

Here's the eightfold path to achieving Flawless Victory:

1. Name your unfinished business.
2. Pick a reasonable deadline for finishing it.
3. Laugh loudly and arrogantly. HA HA HA! This is not optional.
4. Pick a ridiculous deadline that is very imminent instead. One that makes Goro wince with its harshness.
5. FINISH HIM!
6. Post a link to your game and gloat.
7. The Chairman (that's me) will declare your Flawless Victory and award prizes.
8. Rinse and repeat, until the festival expires. I will suddenly close it with no warning, YOU FOOLS!

Example:

1. Geiger Counter, my survival horror game
2. Before Jarrod needs to play it with his game group next week
3. HA HA HA!
4. An hour and a half, before my girlfriend gets off work at 10:15pm (Goro squeals).

FIGHT!

I'll be back once I finish my game. The Chairman must lead by example.

HERE COMES ANOTHER CHALLENGER!!!


1. This unfinished Coming of Age RPG, which may or may not be the manifestation of Strange Visitors, my white whale of game design modeled after The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay.
2. Finished sometime over Christmas break, before I have to start work again in January
3. HA HA HA!
4. Tomorrow while also watching a one year old. (And I choose to fight Dhalsim, because it's like fighting Lincoln and Ghandi at the same time.)

HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!!!

1. Snap, my game about journalists in trouble
2. Before the new year
3. HA HA HA HA HA!
4. By Monday. Now get over here!

5. FINISH HIM!
6. Well, not posting a link, since it's a rough draft and embarrassing. Really this is just round 1.

HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!!

OK Cammy, you're going down. I've seen Kylie's hotpants, I know what I'm up against.

1. Gangs at War, some weird game a southerner pressed into my hand at Dragonmeet, he was too soft to complete it
2. Finished by X-mas
3. Mwhahahahahaha
4. By tea time.

Jonathan, since you're the one that pushed me back into working on my current project, and since it is, in fact, a Mortal Kombat &*%$ing RPG, I cannot pass up the challenge.

My Obliterating-Hand Kung Fu is powerful!

1. Fighting Game style RPG. Working title "Single Combat"
2. Be ready for playtesting by the end of the year.
3. Nyahhhahahah! Heh. Hahahahh!
4. Begin playtesting tonight instead! Playtested version to be made available by New Years Eve!

Liu Kang. Your kung-fu is weak, and your fireballs are pathetic. Now, you are mine!

1. The playtest draft of A Flower for Mara
2. End of the month
3. HA HA HA! I mock your pathetic deadline.
4. Tonight!

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Harvard grad school application is in. Time remaining: 8 minutes.

ROUND 2. FIGHT!

1. Geiger Counter, for real this time, Goro.
2. Next Wed, for Story Games Boston.
3. Ha ha!
4. Sunday at midnight.

P.S. How have your battles gone, cats? Give us gory details.

I choose Mileena, who closely resembles a girl I dated in college, particularly her grill. Ack.

1. Gestalt: The roleplaying game of abstract thought, distorted states of mind, and perpendicular worlds.
2. Spring, in time for playtest before American Con Season^TM.
3. HA HA! I'M USING THE INTERNET!
4. January 1st, in time for the game I stupidly said I'd run!

Oh, what the hell. I choose Voldo, because he is creepy and gross!

1: It's Complicated, which has been playtested and critiqued a half-dozen times since its last draft and sorely needs a new one.
2: Next friday at midnight.
3: MUAHAHAHAHA!
4: In 24 hours. So, 7:20 PM EST tomorrow.

Approaching the end of round 1...

lumpley:
[[[[
Shun Di:
[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[

HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER

1. I've got to complete a playable draft of Anima Prime, which is a barely started mess full of Final Fantasy tidbits.

2. Given my new job and all, it would reasonably take 3 months to write everything out and structure it, plus character creation and all that shit.

3. HA HA HA!!!

4. It'll be ready in a month from today. January 15 it is.

I'm up against Reptile, that agile little fucker. COME HERE!

Shang Tsung: RAIDEN WINS. FATALITY.

But, I'll get him in round two.

Man, I didn't even know modern browsers still supported the blink tag.

Wait, does posting in this thread mean I have to undertake the challenge? Oops.

1. Collect all the unfinished and disorganized thoughts I have regarding my look-at-me-I-can-make-a-game-that-involves-setting-stakes game into a single, readable document. Also, come up with a better name.
2. Before 2008 rolls around the corner.
3. HA!
4. Before the sun rises on Monday morning. Suck it, Goro!

5. FINISH HIM!
6. FATALITY. QAESG may not be a revolutionary or ground-breaking game, or indeed something I expect to ever be played outside my immediate circle of friends, but I, personally, am pleased with the progress I made tonight. Many props, thusly, to Jonathon Walton, for the push I needed to get this from "a bunch of scattered posts on my livejournal" to a single document. And to Ryan Stoughton, whose "Raising the Stakes" hack basically inspired this entire game. (Really, it boils down in its simplest form to the stakes-bit of that hack, minus everything else including the d20 system entirely, and then slapping on bonus and penalty dice from Over the Edge into the equation.)

Editted: Translating it from an MS-word file to Google documents seems to have done slightly weird things with the formatting of my sparse section headers. I'll have to fix that later.

Vincent, I love the line art you're been doing for IaWA. More!

A series of furious blows have passed between my game and I. The initial playtest was successful and useful. Tournament Mode is now ready for a full playtest. Story Mode is in the works.

:-(

I am done in. Too many fun people at my house last night.

Round 2, lumpley vs Shun Di!

2. By Wednesday.
3. Ha ha ha!
4. By Monday.

Scorpion has won this round, but the battle can still be mine!

2. Man, I'm stupid busy right now. I dunno, mid-January?
3. HA HA HA
4. Friday, before game night, because my group DEMANDS.

I was utterly defeated! Yikes! Both on my initial and aggressive date!

Here's what happened though:
1) I made an honest effort to finish it, and failed due to some writer's block and because I thought I had a lot more written than I actually did.

2) I realized that I had three versions of the game to reconcile into one. I was unable to keep my mind straight in this process. I realized that I work best when writing from start to end, and thus I discovered a new successful workflow for me! I'm cutting up the book into bite-sized sections, posting them online in HTML format for my own use, and then finishing it from there: That way I can go start-to-end on micro-sections, and then when I'm done with everything

3) I also had a breakthrough. There's a magic component of this game I'm writing, but I could not think of spells for the life of me. I was thinking of going to the "Team up" thread and look for a parter to write spells for this game. But on a drive home from gaming on Saturday, I had a shot to the brain: I reincorporated an idea for a game I had worked on long ago, fueled by some ideas from the J-RPG DoubleCross. The "magic" is going to look more like "Becoming a Whispering Vault character".

Anyway, I can probably have a playtest version up in a week, but that's longer than I had hoped. DEFEAT! :-(

And yet, some success. :-)

The first round is about half over. I'm putting up a valiant fight, but it turns out a lovely young lady surprised me by dropping by and is likely going to occupy my evening, so that whole not neglecting social connections is the deciding factor. As an amusing anecdote though, here's an excerpt from the rules:

If a character's Success Rank (SR) is equal to or greater than Challenge Rank (CR)-6, the check succeeds but introduces unintended negative consequences. If the SR is equal to or greater than the CR, the check succeeds. If the SR is equal to or greater than the CR+6, the check fails but has unintended positive consequences.

Players choose how many d6 to roll based on how determined they are to accomplish a task. I think I rolled too many dice, but I can live with that. Here's to defeat being preferable to victory! :-)

5. FATALITY! Shao Kahn has been defeated!
6. Err, so has Six Bullets for Vengeance! I wrapped it up last night and sent it out for comment. Yay!

*stands, swaying gently back and forth for a few moments, then collapses*