Adventure for a day

[Wellington]

Suppose you were given the following challenge:

You must create an adventure game with a budget of $300 or so - $600 if you're ambitious, but bear in mind you aren't getting paid for this. It must be a multiplayer game, it must have intriguing challenges and puzzles, it must stimulate (and require) imagination, and it must run from 8 AM to 5 PM on a weekday. Of course, it should also be fun.

Action sequences are allowed and even encouraged, but they may be difficult to do. Because, you see, the game has to be, on some level, real. It can't be on a computer screen.

-

Every year, seniors at the California Institute of Technology try their hand at this challenge. The exact day is always kept secret to outsiders - when asked, seniors simply reply, "It's Tomorrow." But when the time comes, it's pretty obvious. Fourth-years hammer on dorm doors, screeching "IT'S DITCH DAY! WAKE UP!", then flee the campus. Classes are cancelled, and the underclassmen are left to deal with the adventures set up by the seniors.

The groggy undergrads stumble out of bed and sign up on painted boards, jostling for cool-looking stacks (the term for the games in question.) Brute force stacks may just involve a single challenge: breaking into a room with power tools, sledgehammers, and whatever else is handy. Finesse stacks may require code cracking or other ingenuity. Honor stacks may demand role playing and weird stunts; accepting the Bribe (the prize) at the end of the stack without performing these stunts would be a violation of the Caltech Honor Code. Most stacks combine all these elements into some kind of story or theme - like an adventure game, but sillier.

EXAMPLES:

In a Harry Potter stack last year, six or so students were first assigned houses and wands. These wands had various properties; some contained infrared LEDs to activate switches, some had black lights to read hidden writing, and so on. They then played through the plot of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, concluding the stack with an astounding series of challenges meant to mirror those in the book. They untangled themselves from green cargo netting (the Devil's Snare), solved a chess puzzle by moving chess pieces on a board with weight switches, solved a logic puzzle centered around potions, retrieved a key dangling from the ceiling, and so on. This was a particularly ambitious stack.

In an Ocean's Eleven-themed stack, players followed photographic clues around campus to locate block-shaped keys to open up a homemade electronic lock and break into a student's room... after another team had used a sledgehammer to smash through a concrete barrier to GET to the lock.

So... my question is, what would you do for YOUR Ditch Day stack? What would your stack theme be? How would you implement puzzles in the real world without risking severe injury to the players? Be careful, though... if your Ditch Day stack sucks, you get counterstacked, which could mean anything from being thrown in the pond to having the door of your room replaced with a giant block of ice. Take care.

Note: Ideas suggested here may be shamelessly stolen by Caltech students. They would be appreciative... because Ditch Day is Tomorrow.

[lo_res_man]

SO. this is what us adventure gamers will be doing if all the computers go kaboom and western civilization ends, while our good friends, the FPS crowd, will be shooting everbody, while the rpg clans will be chasing mutent monsters and wondering "HEY, weres the gold?!" :

[Kinoko]

As a Japanese RPG gamer, I'd be walzting into peoples' houses and touching all their furniture looking for items, then I'd walk around for a bit, talking to people and looking for someone to offer me an odd job.

OP: That's about the coolest thing I've ever heard in my life. I wish I could do some stacks. *sigh*

[Miez]

As a Japanese RPG gamer, I'd be walzting into peoples' houses and touching all their furniture looking for items, then I'd walk around for a bit, talking to people and looking for someone to offer me an odd job.

Hey, don't forget to pick up ALL their pottery and barrels, and throw those at the walls looking for huge gems or shiny apples.

[Layabout]

Don't forget to include lots of crate puzzles to annoy the hell out of the participators

[m0ds]

My stack would be called Fountain of Youth and would be open to female participants only. I'll leave the rules to your imagination.



None the less, this day sounds really cool - I wish something existed in the UK! I suppose it might in some of the Uni's but I wouldn't know, cos I haven't been. They should definitely set something like this up. I like the idea of having to get in a room using power-tools. Or even better, getting OUT of a room with power-tools. That'd be like Saw.

[Hammerite]

My stack would be called Fountain of Youth and would be open to female participants only. I'll leave the rules to your imagination.

[Wellington]

The jar-breaking thing? A Legend of Zelda stack a few years ago had that.

[R4L]

This happened to me!  :o

My brother said he had a stack, and I was like "WTF is that?"

I soon found out when he switched my ibuprofen pills with sleeping pills (still it cleared my headache ) When I woke up, I was in my bedroom with just a toolbox, which was locked and the key was hidden among my things. My brother had locked me inside my room and he put something in the keyhole so I couldn't do anything to unlock it. I panicked and started screaming "WHAT THE F**K IS THIS!" he just laughed and told me that I had to find my way out AND unlock the tool box to get him something inside. He said that I would know what it was, and if I didn't get it when I got out, he would force me into the woods I used to be afraid of (I was young, mind you). My window was screened up and it occured to me that he had planned the whole thing. Luckily, my mother came home and stopped the whole thing. That was the only day that I was truely scared of my brother. He told me that seniors told him to do something in which it made someone else get something for him!

But I would do what Kinoko would do, because I love RPG's and I think the real world would be cool like that.

[Kweepa]

If you can't make it to CalTech you can always play the adventure game "Ditch Day Drifter".
http://www.drizzle.com/~dans/if/jetty/ditchday.html