Thank you for your channel, I designed a scavenger hunt for my brother's birthday last year using ideas you share and now I'm back one year later to design another one :)
Great video, both topic and coverage! I want to add to fixed appointments and skippable stops. Depending on plot, you may be able to have opponents, and their skill can dull with the passage of time. Unless they're the Big Bad, the stumbling tends to go down well. You can also have self-regulating activities via parallel tasks. If you have to muck up the City Absconding Net by destroying nodes, there's no telling when enough damage is done. A dressed up scavenger hunt where you need to accomplish 5 of 8 very different things runs a lot less of a risk of hitting a blind spot and dragging on. There are a few asterisks about travel time. First, some travel is fun in itself and needn't be rushed, say hiking or sailing. Even if it's a bus ride, breathers are occasionally welcome. The other is specific to near locations in competitive setups. I've seen people run into traffic when carried by excitement. You can deal with that by either significantly shrinking or expanding distance, or having a smaller percentage of the event time being travel.
Hey Chris, thanks so much for making these videos! You're for sure the #1 teacher on treasure hunts imo. I binged all your videos and it helped immensely to put together a nice challenge for a person I care about a lot :) I deviated in a few ways and I'm curious what you think (and what the player thinks, as it's ongoing). For one, as there's no special occasion, the weather has been pretty bad, and the player has a busy schedule, I decided to remove all time constraints, which means no hand-offs or reservations anywhere. That also means I ramped up the difficulty a bit, as most of the adventure is dead drops and decodes (I know you advise against this but the player is smart and determined and they can take as much time as they want so I figured I'd try). I also obviously can't be guarding the dead drops 24/7 but since the player is into geocaching I used some of those hiding techniques, so that hopefully no one else will see them (if they do, the player's name is written on them as you suggested which probably helps). Lastly, since I'm a programmer, I also made a few webpages that can be reached with QR-codes that I hid as dead drops. Then, so no one else gets involved, the players needs to use a password to actually see the contents of the webpage, and I receive a notification of that. That last part is nice to stay up to date with the player's progress. It would also work really well on a tight timeframe because it'd be an easy way of skipping a gambit by simply redirecting the link (like switching the envelopes at a hand-off like suggested in this video). Anyway sorry for the wall of text, I just got really into this project and I'm super excited to see how it plays out :D Thanks again man
Hey there! So happy I could help! Everything you did sounds fantastic! I'll be shooting a video on hiding dead drops pretty soon and I was going to talk about geocaching and other ways to mitigate risk. but you nailed it. Love the use of websites. QR codes to websites or youtube videos are a great way to give your player a LOT of information. I would love to hear more about your Adventure! You should post a recap on the Constructed Adventures Subreddit!
I made a scavenger hunt for an unknown number of children of various ages and wanted to keep it at around 4 hours once. I ended up designing all the puzzles to be very difficult with extreme shortcuts. Sudokus where you can get away with just solving one line, a multiple choice series of riddles where you can probably look at the multiple choices and pick the ones that spell a word, etc. There ended up just being one clever kid show up and it took almost exactly four hours with very gentle nudges that let him still feel like he had outsmarted the whole thing.
Thank you for your channel, I designed a scavenger hunt for my brother's birthday last year using ideas you share and now I'm back one year later to design another one :)
Thank you so much!
Great video, both topic and coverage!
I want to add to fixed appointments and skippable stops. Depending on plot, you may be able to have opponents, and their skill can dull with the passage of time. Unless they're the Big Bad, the stumbling tends to go down well.
You can also have self-regulating activities via parallel tasks. If you have to muck up the City Absconding Net by destroying nodes, there's no telling when enough damage is done. A dressed up scavenger hunt where you need to accomplish 5 of 8 very different things runs a lot less of a risk of hitting a blind spot and dragging on.
There are a few asterisks about travel time. First, some travel is fun in itself and needn't be rushed, say hiking or sailing. Even if it's a bus ride, breathers are occasionally welcome.
The other is specific to near locations in competitive setups. I've seen people run into traffic when carried by excitement. You can deal with that by either significantly shrinking or expanding distance, or having a smaller percentage of the event time being travel.
Hey Chris, thanks so much for making these videos! You're for sure the #1 teacher on treasure hunts imo. I binged all your videos and it helped immensely to put together a nice challenge for a person I care about a lot :)
I deviated in a few ways and I'm curious what you think (and what the player thinks, as it's ongoing). For one, as there's no special occasion, the weather has been pretty bad, and the player has a busy schedule, I decided to remove all time constraints, which means no hand-offs or reservations anywhere. That also means I ramped up the difficulty a bit, as most of the adventure is dead drops and decodes (I know you advise against this but the player is smart and determined and they can take as much time as they want so I figured I'd try). I also obviously can't be guarding the dead drops 24/7 but since the player is into geocaching I used some of those hiding techniques, so that hopefully no one else will see them (if they do, the player's name is written on them as you suggested which probably helps).
Lastly, since I'm a programmer, I also made a few webpages that can be reached with QR-codes that I hid as dead drops. Then, so no one else gets involved, the players needs to use a password to actually see the contents of the webpage, and I receive a notification of that. That last part is nice to stay up to date with the player's progress. It would also work really well on a tight timeframe because it'd be an easy way of skipping a gambit by simply redirecting the link (like switching the envelopes at a hand-off like suggested in this video).
Anyway sorry for the wall of text, I just got really into this project and I'm super excited to see how it plays out :D Thanks again man
Hey there! So happy I could help! Everything you did sounds fantastic! I'll be shooting a video on hiding dead drops pretty soon and I was going to talk about geocaching and other ways to mitigate risk. but you nailed it.
Love the use of websites. QR codes to websites or youtube videos are a great way to give your player a LOT of information. I would love to hear more about your Adventure! You should post a recap on the Constructed Adventures Subreddit!
@@ConstructedAdventures For sure I will once the adventure is wrapped up :D
I made a scavenger hunt for an unknown number of children of various ages and wanted to keep it at around 4 hours once. I ended up designing all the puzzles to be very difficult with extreme shortcuts. Sudokus where you can get away with just solving one line, a multiple choice series of riddles where you can probably look at the multiple choices and pick the ones that spell a word, etc. There ended up just being one clever kid show up and it took almost exactly four hours with very gentle nudges that let him still feel like he had outsmarted the whole thing.
Thats awesome! I love giving people multiple ways to win. Makes them feel like a champion!
+1 for Playtesting! So important to figure out how hard your puzzles really are, and how long they take to solve. (Spoiler, they're too hard)
thanks!
I’m planning one for 11 days 2:01