At the end of the 2015 convention season i knew two things. First, I had a really good idea that had some legs. Second, I needed to change a lot in order to make it great. I was about to mess with just about everything in the game, which my experience has told me never to do all at once.

I started by removing most of the mechanic additions from the previous set of versions when I was working on the graphic design. They were pretty much just adding things, so taking them away was easy to verify. Since I knew doing all the changes at once would lead to disaster, I focused on two items that would be fairly removed from one another.

Trimming the Fate system down
- Aspects renamed to Story Cues and gave them different weights
- Approaches stayed the same (for now)
- Flipped so dice rolling was setting target instead of adjusting skill level
- Removed Specialty (Stunt)
Rewrote the entire first storybook
- Improve flow between books and overall story arc
- Better flow within book
- Handling of new encounter system

Fate Accelerated

Since version 3 I had been on a Fate based system. It was always something I had tweaked to make it fit my target, but anyone who had played it before would recognize it, especially the dice. I spent about a year and a half trying to make that system work for me, that is a long period of time, but time well spent. I wouldn't be where I am without it. I am very grateful that Evil Hat and it's community are such a great group of people.

Storybook Rewrite

Now that I had a good idea of the story arc across all the books, I knew that the original writing wasn't going to hold up. I had spent a lot of time and money getting that book "done". In the end the game would be so much better with it rewritten.

All the Other Changes

There were many more changes but they mostly supported these three huge ones. What was also huge was the gameplay improvement. Everything was more streamlined and the flow was much better. But it still had room for improvement.

While the encounters where easier to understand the dice and the story token mechanics where still too clunky for my liking.