Trend towards simplicity

There was a post recently on BGDF.com, where someone asked if our games tended to become simpler, or more complicated as time went on. This game has done both, though honestly, I feel like most of it has been towards simplification.

The one asterisk I add to this is that I tried to develop the game in pieces. The last major game project I worked on ("Conquest of Diluna," a fantasy A&A-style game), the game began by me throwing everything in at once. The result: nothing was balanced, and I needed to balance several items at a time. In short, it was hard. It really took to about the 7th or 8th playtest before I had a game that didn't radically change from one time to the next. Here, the first time I played this, it was as simple as it gets. Each character had 1 advancement. There were no classes. There was no magic. There were no summoned creatures or animated creatures. And there were only 5 special abilities per world (including stat boosts). All I really wanted to do was test out if my basic mechanics (3 phases, orders that are mostly unchangeable, 2 worlds) were fun. It turns out they were. So, with that, I went into the game, proceeding slowly, trying to make sure each level of complexity worked before adding something new in.

That said, here are things that I've added in since the beginning (that weren't originally envisioned):
-Multiple missions
-Abilities where one character can influence their doppelganger
-Player aids (although, this is an addition that simplifies things)
-Terrain types
-Partial actions (although, this somewhat replaced disobeying commands)
-The "Retreat" action

Here are things I've dropped:
-Different classes having different stats
-Randomly determined HP
-A separate weapon system (never added, but originally I planned on it, this just got absorbed into abilities)
-One character must meditate at a time (basically, originally when a person was up in one world, they needed to be down in the other)
-Group orders
-Disobeying commands
-3 different types of savings throws
-The "Defend" order

Here are things I've streamlined:
-Spell failures (from roll a d10, on a 1, roll on another table -> to roll 2d6 whenever a spell fails)
-What happens when the general dies (it went from everyone makes Intelligence tests every turn -> to your # of orders are reduced)
-Damage (from either you do full damage or half damage -> to either you do full damage or x2 damage)
-Animated creatures (from you give them a specific order that you need to write yourself, much like programming a computer with a set of "if: then" statements -> to you choose from a list of pre-made commands)

There is probably more, although this is all that I can think of for now. Cheers!

Simon

PS It's still weird to think that after all of this simplification, the rulebook is still almost 70 pages long.

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