Colour-coded challenge ranks

Here's a brilliant idea: Let's segment "getting better" into several clear ranks. 

Your skills start at "Green", the simplest level, and have a +1 against other Green challenges. When you get better at this skill, the bonus increases to +2, and then +3. But it never increases beyond that; instead, you progress to Yellow level. Then this happens again, and into Red.

All challenges in the world can be designated as one of these three ranks, which are basically mundane, semi-pro, and pro. 

• Convincing your grandma vs. convincing the village elder, vs. convincing the trade prince. 
• Fighting a goblin vs. fighting an orc, vs. fighting an orc warlord.
• Knowing about local fauna, vs. knowing about rare fauna, vs. knowing about extinct and magical faune.

(It later became clear I need a "Grey" level below Green, and "Purple" above Red)

See? I cheated - instead of upgrading endlessly upward, you always upgrade only up to 3, then do it again from 0, yet you still feel you achieved something. And you did! Because Yellow skills overcome Green challenges.

At the time I was still looking at the number of the card, so task resolution went like this: You need to get a 5. You get one card from the fate deck (a signal deck shared by all players), and if it's 5 or above, you did it. Every relevant difficulty increases the number by 1 (so if an orc is trained, the number you need is 6), and you add your skill bonus to the card, which is between 1 to 3, as I mentioned above. 

I was mostly interested in one big feature of this system: the meaning of the difference between ranks. I decided that if you try something that's below your rank, you automatically succeed, no card draw needed. If you try something above your rank, you automatically fail, no draw result could help you. I thought that would give the feeling of being skillful (I just do it, no need to draw!) and emphasize the importance of skill (you can never achieve this feat unless you're skilled enough). 

Beating too-hard challenges is still doable, but only under certain conditions. You must "prime" the challenge, by creating Opportunities, usually as part of team work. One person might check their Dodge skill to dodge away from the ogre's club, thus creating an Opportunity, that a fighter can then use to jump on the ogre's back. 

I still think that's an awesome way of doing things, but playtest kept bumping into two main obstacles.

The first was about communication. For the system to work, everyone (GM and players) had to be super clear at all times about what colour was each challenge, and I couldn't find a way to make that work smoothly. Players kept thinking about their character as having a rank, so after their Yellow sword attack they were surprised to find their Grey awareness check was so shitty. That was supposed to be the point - you're only good with some skills - but the specific experience wasn't what I aimed for. 

But more importantly is the second: it was unclear what Opportunities are. Even after I codified them, so there were only certain ways to get them and use them, the in-game explanation was consistently confusing. If I sneak behind an orc, is that itself a challenge (against the orc's rank), or does it create an Opportunity for a follow-up action? 

A few months ago I decided to let go of all of these concepts, which have been with me for several years, in favour of simpler, smoother  gameplay. I hope the game still remains true to its core principles - next time I'll talk about Vivid's current iteration, how it works, and what it does.