Reason I decided to have some wine yesterday after having done a frankly alarming amount of work sober the past few months is that I'm hitting a mental block on finishing up the combat system for Dragons, and So On... that is mostly getting over D&D and similar games baggage.
Today I'm instead re-reading how a bunch of other games that are not necessarily what I want to play and yet also very not D&D handle such things, to convince my lizard brain that yes it's allowed for us to do things differently.
Fate Core is probably the closest to what I am going for, and I'm finding its existence reassuring in a way that wine and whiskey failed.
(Yes, I'm talking game dev today. It's a coping mechanism. Thinking in terms of constructed worlds and systems helps me re-order my brain when everything feels like it's slipping out of control. I can deal with the world outside by focusing on imaginary problems for a while.)
The big difference between the Fate Core approach and what I'm going for is in the area of collaboration - I'm trying to create a system where it feels like the players and the game runner are writing a fight scene together.
Which I am sure you could do with Fate Core...
...but the system itself does not inherently do it.
But my Big Idea, which is that players roll dice each round at the start of the round that indicate how well they will (potentially) do and *then* decide what to do with those die rolls fits better with a more narrative approach like Fate Core has than D&D's tactical combat.
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