Hi folks,

Finally managed to get sat down in front of a computer long enough to sum up my feelings about my first Indiecon. I had been to Conception a couple of times and was persuaded by Mr. Stokes that Indiecon would be right up my alley and a great place to get some playtesting in.

I ran Reel Adventures recently at Games Expo and it went rather well, must post up that AP over the weekend. Everyone enjoyed themselves and the system seemed to hold up well.

However, the session did give me some food for thought on plot and storytelling. The story, such as it was, went a bit crazy, with huge holes, inconsistencies and scenes not really leading one into the other as much as I would have liked.

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!)

Hey Iain

I tried playtesting Reel Adventures last night with Cat and we had some real problems getting it to work for us using the playtesting document you sent me.

I'm thinking that I must be missing something that's not in the document. It'd maybe be more helpful to actually see you run the game so we can figure out what order things happen in and how.

Anyway, it's maybe going to be a long thread with back and forth on the bits we didn't get. I was taking notes as we went so I'm hoping I got down the bits we were confused at.

So I have been beavering away on Reel Adventures recently and it is shaping up to be really good. Down at Conception I had a couple of playtests that really showed me what was missing and what needed to be chucked:

Applause: This was an attempt to make the players jump more into action due to the fact that there was little incentive to create resources and win the action scenes as it increased your stake danger. This is now gone as it was far too complicated, way too much book keeping post scene. It has now been replaced by..

At the moment in 'Reel Adventures' the nemesis is doomed to failure. He will be defeated, it is just a matter of how much by. I don't know if I like that idea anymore. It represents the genre well enough, but I think it is unsatisfying from a gameplay point of view.

Would it be better then, if I balanced the game so that the nemesis is hard to defeat. It would need to be tuned to just the right point so that he wasn't a pushover or so poweful there is nothing the heroes can do about it?