Hello everyone!

I'm excited about a happy accident I had while developing my current game, and I'd love to hear from you if you ever had similar occurrences!

Mechanically, it's a Carved from Brindlewood game, which means that it's a Powered by the Apocalypse game that stole the mystery-solving moves from Brindlewood Bay, such as search for clues and theorize. Brindlewood Bay has been an outstanding success for half of my playtesting group and fell flat with the other half, so I was left stranded with much fewer playtesters than I'm used to. For practical reasons, I was forced to change the system to accommodate for GM-less play so that we were enough players to run group sessions, so I spliced it with Ironsworn (another game I'm fond of), added an oracle-like move, and ran with it.

Long story short, moving the game to GM-less made it pop! It should've been obvious in retrospect, but Brindlewood-like mystery-solving games don't really require a GM to handle either the investigation or tell players the solution. Hence, it's a system that can be brought seamlessly to GM-less group games.

Has something like this ever happened to you? Have you ever been forced to make a change to your games by external circumstances, only for your game to get better?