I thought I should really start using this site to blog a little bit more about the design process behind some of my games. I am not the best at self publicity so this is kind of an attempt a little bit in that direction, just to make people more aware of what I and the Giant Brain are up to.

Reel Adventures saw its first 'public' outing back at Spodley Grange, or the Collective Endeavour goes to a cottage, a few months ago. I got some great feedback there and the basic idea was good as everyone enjoyed themselves. However there hae been some problems that I have finally fixed:

1) The game was way too complex, involving different way of manipulating a pool of d6.
2) It was hard to define yourself through action, as you had to set up a pitfall, an enemy, before you could defeat it and couldn't do anything else in that scene.
3) The character sheet was to confusing, probably from the mechanical complexity.
4) Pitfall creation was done by the player to overcome it which is unsatsifying.

Since then I have solved a lot of those problems by removing presence, which you spent to give your character hooks, things you could use to increase your dice pool, and your qualities, which are the basic thing you use to overcome pitfalls. You could also use presence to boost your dice pool when overcoming pitfalls.

The problem with presence was that if you gained too much of it then you nothing felt threatening, and I needed pitfalls to feel threatening even if they aren't actually.

So now, each scene is one of two types:

Action: where you overcome pitfalls in order to gain hooks and qualities, with a risk of increasing the threat pool.

Development: where you can gain a hook or pitfall without overcoming a pitfallm but the threat pool increases.

The new thing here is that you define yourself through action and the threat pool. The threat pool is a little like the twilight pool in the LOTR ccg, which you should play if you haven't, meaning the enemy gets stronger as you do until the final confrontation.

Also your dice are now just d6 with no mods so you are just rolling pool versus pool which feels a bit more satisfying.

More on this once i have tested it.

The Giant brain website can be found here.

Cheers

Iain