A skill for every weapon and spell

In 2014 someone posted somewhere "I want a game about skill, about being skillful, like, maybe there's a different skill for each weapon and spell". 

That sounds like Rolemaster or something, I thought to myself, but the concept of skillfulness got stuck in my mind. That's when I began to want a game about skill, one with a message: Being skillful is about developing expertise in efficient use of force. Bonuses in d20 make it so that bigger is better, but that's not what real-world skills are about. In the real world, mastery is having tons of experience, not overextending yourself, and avoiding wasting time or effort. It's more like hitting a spot between extremes, rather then "highest is best." I wanted a game that evokes that feeling.

That was 2014, mind you, and Vivid is now in its third iteration, and no longer about "hitting a sweet spot". But I hope that the essence of don't waste effort is still there, and that the player feels their character is skillful, not just a general "good at what they do". 

I had one other big design goals, which is still a pillar of the game: I wanted everyone to be able to play this, to create my ideal gateway game into the hobby. That meant it must come with everything needed (so either there's a box with funky dice, or there are no funky dice), and that it must be very easy to run. So easy, that it'll feel like you're barely doing any work, it just happens, emerging from the conversation. 

The first issue I solved by turning to cards instead of dice - everyone have a deck of cards at home. Also, cards evoke skill, while dice evoke luck. Also also, the design space of cards have barely been explored in TTRPGs (Unbound, Phoenix: Dawn Command, Warhammer Fantasy 3rd; and Torg and Savage Worlds do some interesting things).

The second issue I addressed by avoiding all numbers - there's no (explicit) math in the game, at all - and by going with the following guideline: If you used an adjective when describing something, it makes it harder to face that something. A cunning rogue is more difficult to face than just a rogue, and a hidden cunning rogue is even more difficult. That makes it incredibly simple for the GM to add difficulty while at the same time making the narrative more interesting. 

The rules actually require some unusual abstract conceptualization - or maybe they're unusual for roleplayers, because we're used to specific thought patterns about how to imagine stuff - but I'm a keen scholar of tutorialization and I believe I can create a final product that would be able to ease new players into the level of complexity they're ready for, whenever they want to go deeper. 

But that's jumping to the future, when we're still in the past. Next time I'll talk about how the game, that was then still called A Skill For Each Weapon And Spell (WIP), utterly failed in being fun because back then I still cared about what's actually printed on the card, silly me!