Hmmm... we're back there again.

You know what?... it's probably not surprising, but I solved the issue I was having in the last post, and I actually had solved it months ago.

The problem with my recent thoughts has been that I wanted a bit more grittiness and depth to the conflict resolution system. I had broken conflict down into a multipart die roll with successes on an initiative roll giving an action in the combat round for every degree of success obtained, then each successfully gained action would be rolled separately. That turned out to be pushing the system in directions it was never intended to go, so I've gone back to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) methodology. I'm also utilising the basic fundamentals of the rules rather than adding new concepts with conflict working as an exception in a "design by exception" model.

This game is meant to be about telling dramatic stories, the conflict system applies to physical violence, arguments, riddles, psychic showdowns, and anything else where two (or more) characters square up against each other. In fact, it should work smoothly when a Doctor Who styled confrontation occurs with one character using mental and social strategies to confront someone else who is predominantly using violence as their chosen modus operandi.   

So, for speed and simplicity, I've stripped it back to a single die roll handling the entire conflict round rather than breaking it up into multiple rolls. There's still going to be some weird quirks in the mechanisms and systems of play, but it's a lot easier to work through (and all games have those quirks anyway, so we'll just work to highlight them as features rather than bugs).

On a related note, I'm wondering if it's worthwhile generating a bunch of short videos to explain the ideas I'm working on. There's two motivators behind this... 

1. Sometimes I wonder if my writing accurately conveys the ideas I'm trying to get across. I've seen this in the writing from other designers, and in a lot of the academic papers I've read over the years. Too much nuance and detail can cause the message to become dry and boring, not enough can leave a lot of room for interpretation. There was some debate on this idea in game design circles back in the early 2000s. Providing an alternate method of transmitting those ideas might help to clarify them in the minds of people who might be interested in them.
2. As a teacher, I've studied the ways that different people assimilate new information. Some people are literal learners acquiring facts more easily through the written word, this is where RPGs traditionally sit, and most GMs/Narrators learn the deeper game through this way. Some are experiential learners, and they require a a situation to unfold around them, that's where most players learn the basics of the game. Some are visual learners who take symbols and illustrations on board more easily, and I've played with this a bit, but there still aren't a whole lot of other games that use thing method to convey their rules. Then there are auditory learners who learn from verbal cues. All of these are valid learning methods, but exploring that last one could be an interesting experiment.  
3. I've often wondered about new and innovative ways to present games to people who might feel excluded from the hobby. I found that the mapping tutorials I did over a decade ago, really gained traction when they hit Pinterest and Tumblr. So we might see some new audiences open up if we had entire games presented in 30 second videos on Tiktok, Youtube, or whatever the video social media platform of the day is... It might also get the games out from under the D&D shadow a bit.

Full of ideas, let's see where they go...