So as not to be a thread necromancer, I’m starting a new post to recap the game I started developing here: http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?t=7701
Into the Wild was my first formal attempt to introduce a set of warm up training exercises into a convention game. The purpose of the games were four-fold:
- Have fun. This seems redundant but I really wanted to make sure all my mini-games were actually fun to play.
- Teach the game mechanics. In each game we learned a little bit more and built on what we had done in the last game.
- Establish the Setting. What is it like to be a mouse? What do they fear? Love? Eat? Fight for? I tried to reinforce those using examples in play and the Mouse Guard mottos.
- Back-story. The characters they played in the first few warm up games were the mentors of the main characters they played later in the game. The mentors started a fight (and some of them died in it) leaving a legacy for the player characters to eventually face and finish. It created great symmetry between the start and end of the game and made the story pertinent to the actual characters.
The game had some hitches but ran wonderfully. I’m going to continue working on my techniques in and effort to streamline them, but so far I’ve been really happy.
I wrote about the actual exercises in more detail on my LJ over here: http://wildljduck.livejournal.com/74233.html