31 Character Challenge
It occurred to me as I reposted the 2020 challenge entries that I hadn't done a proper introduction on LJ for the challenge. What is it?
31 Day Character Creation Challenge: New year, new you. For each day in January create a new character, and post it online for an RPG that you play or wish to play.
What is the 31 character challenge?
The basic challenge is exactly as written above: for each day in the month, create a character. What you actually do with your challenge is up to you. One of my friends wrote stories for fictional characters based in only three worlds, and didn't do any stats for them. John Wick does videos, where he explains what he likes about the games and then, one way or another, tells you about his character of the day.
My goal is to provide a very short capsule review, and then create the stats for a character and give it enough flesh to give an idea of the character. How any episode actually works may vary, but that's the core. My theory is that I give you a flavour of the game, enough for people to explore more if you are interested. Feedback is welcomed.
Previous years
I first saw this image from John Wick a couple of days for Christmas 2020. My entries that year were all written on the day, taken from books I had already read. Well, mostly. For the most part the game review was minimal to almost non-existent. The ones I knew well were easy, the newer ones... well they took more work. But I did it on Facebook so only my roleplaying friends saw them.
2021 I decided to repeat the challenge. I still had some games I knew which I hadn't posted yet because they used the same system, but I knew that most of the games I would have to read. To make things easier, I wrote up the games as I went through the year. And I did ok, but I do remember that December was tough. True to form, I was exhausted from work (and had to take time off) and was then too tired to travel so ended up having Christmas alone. Which, whilst not my preference, was the only reason I managed to finish the challenge.
So this year I decided to make things easier on myself by pushing the challenge back to January, so I could use the time between Christmas and New Year. To be honest, I struggled this year. After being exhausted last Christmas I just didn't have the concentration for longer games until about May this year. But I persevered and I've done most of the work for this year's challenge now, so I can release them roughly on schedule.
Next year
It takes a lot of work to do the 31 character challenge. It can take up to three hours for each post, not to mention the time to read the game properly. Plus I don't have capacity to do other reviews so anything I want to write in January has to wait until December. So this is the last year I'll be doing the challenge.
I will continue to do reviews and will include characters with them, but they will be more ad hoc.
This also means I get to read other things, like novels, non-fiction books and supplements for Spire, Trinity Continuum and CoD that have been on hold for a three years.
I regret nothing though. All this reading has been great and I feed anything I like into my story guiding, and it expands my thinking for my own game design. (In the same way that authors should read and artists should study other artists.)