One of the things I wanted to achieve with this game was a simple and coherent ruleset. Ideally just one mechanic that can be applied as broadly as possible. And mostly, I think I succeeded in this:
All rolls are done in the same way, with skill plus modifier determining how many dice you roll and the potential severity of the action occasionally dictating which type of dice to use. That’s it.
Over time, this system did accrue some cruft though: Occasionally, I would have opposed rolls – but not always. And sometimes we would take away dice before the roll, and sometimes after the roll. And sometimes we would only look at the result in a binary way (is there at least one success or not?), sometimes we would count the successes, and sometimes we would look at the actual numbers.
Individually, these are small adjustments, and individually, they all make sense. But I’m starting to loose track of all the individual tweaks, and whether they work together just fine.
As a result, the system is not as intuitive and simple as I intended it to be. That might not be a bad thing – after all, I did write down system mastery as a source of fun when starting things out. But it is easy to make things too complicated, and that would lead to groups to simply forget a few rules unintentionally.
My goal is that I end up with a system that is coherent and simple for at least 60% of all actions one does. It is fine to have exceptions and complications for certain spells and combat actions. But then the players who use them should be able to keep those exceptions in their mind clearly.
One tool for this that I’m going to try out is “skill cards”, printing each skill and it’s special rules onto a playing card that players can have at hand when they want to use it. That also gives them something tangible to look at when thinking about what to do in a given moment.
The drawback is that the more specific rule-elements I introduce as possible actions, the less people come up with out-of-the-box ideas. And that would be a shame. Still, I am pretty happy that I keep track of these skills in a database, because that makes it pretty easy to output them in various formats.
Welp, on to more testing and writing of details.
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