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Socchan ([personal profile] soc_puppet) wrote 2021-02-19 05:42 am (UTC)

Found it on Google Docs! I remembered it being two pages long instead of one, which initially kept me searching a bit longer, until I subsequently remembered that, oh yeah, I increased the font size on the printed version to make it easier to read 😅

Short version:

Attendees would go to the Vaccine Station to volunteer to try our vaccine against Con Plague. To show they were playing the game, they would get a green sticker on their badge.

Starting then, they could stop by once an hour to roll a D20 to find out if their vaccine was still safe-ish, or if something had gone wrong, and now they were infectious; the odds of "something going wrong" went up the longer the convention went on.

If their roll meant their vaccine mutated, we'd give them a marked yellow sticker to put over their green sticker, to show that they were infectious. They'd also be given a strip of three plain yellow stickers; they could put one of these stickers over the green sticker of any other person who was playing the game (but it didn't necessarily have to be the first person they saw, so if they wanted to let the friend who was in line after them roll the die to find out if their vaccine mutated first, they could do that). Someone who had been infected this way could visit the Vaccine Station and we'd mark their yellow sticker, then give them their own strip of three plain yellow stickers to infect other participating attendees.

A roll of 1 meant the person was double infectious and was given two strips of stickers; a roll of 20 meant they were cured and could no longer infect or be infected, and given a pink sticker to put over whichever sticker they were currently wearing, green, plain yellow, or marked yellow. There were some options for how to get extra yellow stickers to infect more people as well, such as volunteering, donating $5 to that year's charity, or pre-registering for 2020 (oops), but I tried to keep it reasonably limited, to keep a single person from going out and infecting every single other attendee at the convention. (There was a kid who was, like, nine years old who really wanted to do that, and I felt a little bad about enforcing the restrictions on him, but uh. Not very.) If you were cured and wanted to play the game again, you could "earn" a chance to do so with the same activities.

Changes I would make for the future (in, say, ten or twenty years, when playing this sort of game will be in better taste):
* Increase the possibility of being "cured" as the weekend goes on, similar to how the chance of the vaccine mutating increases with time
* Remove the barrier to people starting over from green; they can start over with a fresh green sticker at any time after being "cured", even right that second.
* Maybe say 5 minute waiting period after your vaccine "mutates" before you can infect anyone else? That should cover the "I don't want to infect my best friend before they have a chance to roll on their own" pretty well, and I'm more than willing to treat "five minutes" as "once you walk away from the Vaccine Station".

Numbers wise, I prepped for waaaaay more people than we actually got playing. If we did this again—well, I'm pretty sure I can re-use the stickers we have already if we want to do this again, but if the stickers go bad or we lose them, or for some other convention that might want to try this, I'd plan for maybe 10-20% participation at most, rather than the 30-50% I'm pretty sure I planned for.

Also, sticker color choice was entirely arbitrary, and based on the colors of stickers available at Target at the time.


Edit: Oh right! My main reason for wanting to restrict how many people one individual could "infect" was to make sure that everyone playing had the chance to potentially infect other people; if one person infected everyone else, that would probably not be a very fun game!

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