what's done isn't necessarily really done...

There's this blogpost of mine from about a year ago, where I wrote

As you can see in the news section of this site, that statement was... a bit premature. I tinkered with the initiative system, the application of magic skills, and now the whole shebang of how damage is tracked.

The challenge I face is twofold: I don't have the opportunity for lots and lots of playtests in a short amount of time with tight feedback loops, and I'm actually so far the only person running this game. Mind, my players are fantastic at giving me useful feedback, and generally good blokes to have at the table.

But I don't really know if what they react to is me, or my game. Is how I run the game actually how others would run it, based on the rules I've written down?

Anyway, in two weeks, I'll be playtesting the latest changes with actual other humans, so let's wait and see what comes out of that.

Later, I will really need to entice, bribe, force, or otherwise convince other people to referee the game to their own players, so I know if things properly work.

Until then, I keep tinkering at the writing, adding illustrations to help explain the rules and generally pretty things up.

Anyway, let's have a look at the original design goals again:

Check. That goal very nicely worked out. The rules really work with miniatures and square-based terrain.

Also a check. The rules do focus a lot on combat, and that is definitely a big part of the game at the table.

I think that worked out well. especially setting-wise. There is a bit of work needed to adapt stats and capabilities of monsters created for different systems, but it is not too onerous.

The system is not as streamlined and simple as I envisioned it. The options in combat and with spells makes keeping track of the rules exceptions a bit of work, but generally, one can rely on the players to know the few extra rules for their own character.

I've created a deck of cards with one card for each Skill^🔗 or Spell, and that is apparently very helpful. Now that I moved everything into Obsidian I do need to recreate the workflow for compiling and printing the cards though.

It works - mostly. Although I do not think this is an issue of the rules, but rather that my table isn't all gung-ho on inventing their own stuff.

I have tested that a few times - and I did get into play after 30 minutes tops. But I also needed to clarify rules a few times in the first session, so it is not entirely intuitive. But I still call this a win.

Not all of my players are of that type, but those that do delve into the depths of the dependencies and rules come up with a lot of good ideas on how to combine things, and so far, it seems that the "tinkering" is attractive to them.

There's nothing to add to the initial statement here, I think I managed to hit this goal pretty well.