After Gregor and Cat's playtest was a bit disasterous I have been beavering away on Reel Adventures and have run two playtests, this being some notes from the first one.

The first one was called 'Jungle of Madness' and was quite short, as we ran out of time, starting a little later than normal. The film we came up with was a U rating, talking animal affair that worked suprisingly well involving a domesticated leopard holidaying in the jungle and getting involved with a sort of turf war between a monkey and a slow loris, which is tiny cute creature with poisonous elbows (no really!)

The U rating was interesting as we have a bit of a tendency to be a bit filthy with the jokes when we are roleplaying and I found it really kept that to a minimum which was very gratifying.

We only got through the first act which involved 'Leonard the Leopard' arriving in the jungle meeting up with the monkey ruling the area as well as a large gorilla. We used up just over half of the colur scenes available to the protagonists but had some good action as well, with the slow loris launching an attack on the monkey camp and a chase through the jungle.

I had reintroduced the nemesis scenes in this version, so that the nemesis gets a scene to himself after eveyone else has directed once. These scenes are colour only but gave the nemesis time to flesh out their plot and provide a connection between sets of scenes that setup the ones to come.

The suggestions from Cat and Gregor about how much setup work should be done at the start of the film and each scene came in very handy and there was a lot more roleplaying than their had been in previous playtests, people really getting into their characters which was nice to see.

The clarified action rules did a lot to help those scenes run smoothly and I have since tidied up the character sheets more to help people remember what they need to do when during action.

The pitch has now been changed to a little game of sorts where players can put in a token to add something to the pitch, or to veto the last thing added. This worked well and meant the pitch was short and to the point but threw up a couple of issues:

The last token in is too powerful and I have since added a vote style veto rule for the last token in each of the two sections of the pitch.

We defined some characters that were not used as heroes, but that was not a problem and actually added something later on when some of the players had to take on those roles. The rules now reflect that you can define any character during the pitch.

I realised in action scenes I needed to add more advice on what constitutes action. I was thinking there are four possible types of action:

Physical: fights etc.
Social: trying to con someone etc.
Mental: puzzle solving
Travel: chases etc.

Can anyone think of any others?

There were some more issues thrown up by the second playtest 'The Power of Babel' but it went a lot better and I will post it up tomorrow.

Cheers

Iain