Many small improvements, bundled up

Had a few months off due to Son of Oak stuff, but now I'm re-equipping Vivid (it goes in the helm slot) and I have some thoughts.

A vague idea for fun crafting

You draw three cards, and choose each to be either a tool, a reagent, or a preparation, and then also choose the order, or something like that. A high skill allows you to replace some of these cards with those in your discard pile. Then you compare to a table to get results. The point is for the process to feel like crafting, and not just be "roll high and get good stuff". 

An action round proceeds in "moments"

At the start of the round the players decide which PCs are in the same moment. Then the GM decides on foe and scene intentions, targeting the PCs inside the moments. The players then decide which moment to activate first, etc. It sort of makes them into directors of the scene!

Using a metaphor of "pits" for difficulties

Every difficulty affecting a check is a "pit" that needs to be "filled up" by red cards. Every action has a base difficulty, so you always need one red; if there's no difficulty, don't make a check! Or maybe the players can still do it, to generate reds which they can then use or hand out, a bit like in 2d20 where you can check against Difficulty 0 just to create some Momentum. 

A HUGE part of the GM's chapter will be about information control

A very big part of the game is discovery, and so much depends on knowing which features apply to which checks (as positive reds or negative difficulties). The GM must think about what is hidden and what is obvious, always delivering the latter and always hinting at the former.

Skills can be more natural 

Here's a thought: Instead of having 16 skills under 4 categories, you have 4 main skills: Attention, Body, Convestation, Knowledge. When you get better at a skill, you gain it not as a +1 number, but as a descriptor: For Attention, it's Sneak, Trickery, Awareness, etc. When you check, you draw a card for the skill (always at least 1, because everyone have all 4 basic skills), and an additional one for each relevant descriptor. This is in essence almost exactly the same as saying "you have Sneak 2", but more natural and possibly more fun.

One thing this is missing is the "I don't have the Casual skill" which I really liked; players enjoyed having the conversational approach of their character restricted by the rules. You can have Conversation --> Formal, but that's not the same as NOT HAVING the skill Casual at all. So I'm thinking of codifying what before I called "a Demanding skill" into a feature that your character has, like "awkward". This becomes a difficulty whenever you make a casual conversation, so it costs you one more red, which is very similar to not having the skill, I think. But maybe not. Need to be checked!