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Hey, I've only just seen this (2022 was a really crazy year for me) and I wanted to say I really appreciated your review and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your playthrough. The game is balanced towards failure so I'm not surprised your playthrough ended the way it did, but I thought your log and interpretation of the prompts was very thoughtfully handled. When I wrote the game I'd always envisioned the expedition as a lonely affair, a single soul aboard a ship no bigger than a life raft, so your take on it involving a full sailing ship and crew was refreshing to read.

I'm really looking forward to your game, it sounds awesome from everything you've posted here!!

this is an excellent idea! I love stuff in games that puts narrative control in the players' hands like that, and with the consequences the GM could easily twist anything the players come up with to actually cause a lot of trouble for them. Thank you so much for this suggestion! 

oh yeah, I'm also making the age of the cat an important factor as well. Kittens have a lot more points in their ability pool than older cats, but have less points to spend on attributes at character creation. Elder cats have a much smaller ability pool, but a lot more points to spend in their attributes, and adult cats are kind of a middle ground between the two. 

So I don't have a name for my game yet, I've always been terrible with names, but my setting and theme is basically Disney's The Aristocats as an RPG. It's set in Victorian era America and everyone's playing as house cats (called Proper Cats, or PCs) that are meant to be pets of the aristocratic upper class folks. The game is just about getting into hijinks and going on little cat adventures, fairly low stakes and light hearted. 

My main addition to the mechanics already present in 3d6d is having specific attributes for the 2d6 actions (Cute, Curious, Cautious, and Caring) which players can put points into in order to get bonuses to their normal, non-special-power-using rolls, and to give some sort of guidance towards what actions are considered typical for the game, since every action the Proper Cats take will be something which is either cute, curious, cautious, or caring. 

My main problem and why I'm posting in the brainstorming thread here is that I have no idea what to do for the abilities (or powers as they're called in 5 Second Rule). I've named them all after different idioms about cats, so I've got Nine Lives, Out of the Bag, Grey at Night, Cat & Mouse, Herding Cats, and What the Cat Dragged In, but I've got nothing on what to actually have these abilities do in game that wouldn't just be covered by an Attribute test. I'm looking for suggestions cause I've got nothing lol 

The location randomizer is a really cool system and I'm really looking forward to seeing the other disaster events you have set up. I'll definitely use this cave in system next time I have my players fighting underground! 

I have two things I'd like to see in a finalized version of this. The first thing is I'd love to see at the very least some advice if not a whole section on how to convert this to non-square maps (25'x45' for example). I can imagine how it might work but I'd like to see a section in the book on doing that. The other thing I'd like to see is a separate map included as a jpg or png of the location randomizer, either in various sizes (16x16, 32x32, etc.) or as a non-gridded version. That would be really handy for vtts as a quick reference tool and I'd really like to see that included in the download package.

Dogs in the Vineyard is still my favourite conflict resolution system in any game I've played. The way it escalates as the nature of the conflict evolves during play totally changed the way I saw non-combat encounters in every other game since.

I love betting mechanics in RPGs and you done built an entire game around them. The conflict resolution system seems very cool and I like that actions become easier the more players are willing to risk, it fits the theme well and is definitely suited to the type of fast paced, high stakes action of a one shot type game. I also love the little bits of flavour like the note about shallow water. 

Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback! This was my first time doing print layout and I definitely learned a lot, particularly with how the choice of font and the size of the text affect the reading experience. I'm glad the vibe I was going for came through, I've actually been working on a much larger game that centers on tarot so it was a very obvious choice for me. 

I totally agree about not seeing enough of that stuff in the solo journaling game space. I've read/played a good number of them and too many of them feel less like games to me and more like an engine for generating writing prompts, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but I always find myself getting stuck on what to write if my choices aren't being informed by anything in the game.