Immediacy is important

We had a chance to playtest a few turns of the simultaneous system described in the previous posts.  In some ways it works -- it does reduce the total number of turns overall, it does provide some brinksmanship, it does speed up the resolution.

But there was one important thing that it lost.  When you're facing an encounter in the previous version you roll your white and red dice at the same time -- so you get some good results, but also the bad results at the same time.  Thus, with each roll, the enemy is getting closer and closer and the tension mounts.

In this version, we each take turns rolling, then the enemy rolls, and based on that brief description you would think that the tension is similarly pretty palpable.  But what really happens is, for each roll, you  collect your dice, then roll, then increment the track, then decide if you're going to get out, then (if you do) collect your rewards.  If you take a reward it may be upwards of a minute before the next person rolls while you do that.  Then the process repeats for each player and THEN, at last, the enemy rolls and maybe moves.  And then the process repeats.  The encounter just takes long enough that the sense of suspense is hard to sustain.

We had a very nice playtester suggestion that I think might help with this.  He proposed viewing the encounters as semi-cooperative.  Meaning that, at the start of the encounter, each player reveals how much they will commit to the encounter (equipment cards or black cubes).  Then the number of white dice the /group as a whole/ will roll is based on what everyone contributed.  Then, roll all those white dice, and the red dice, all together, and move a /single/ marker along the card's success track.  Each person can decide whether to get out after each roll (receiving rewards for whatever space the group marker is on), and a player who gets out takes their equipment card(s) with them, so the remaining group is a bit weaker. 

To preserve the quick resolution, I think it would be that you don't receive rewards until the challenge has ended.  So the encounter is the action sequence where Indy is frantically trying to grab the headpiece from the burning building, and then in the aftermath he looks at it and actually reads what it says and gets to think about it.  So thematically I think this approach is ok.  And we also thought that these temporary 'alliances' seem basically compatible with the theme -- in one sense we're all participating in the scene to make it exciting, in another sense our characters are perhaps temporarily cooperating to make the challenge a success but you're still trying to get maximal individual advantage out of the challenge.

One other problem was homogeneity -- everyone basically ends up with exactly the same information.  Perhaps it could be that if you get out early, you put a marker on the info you're going to claim, and anyone else who puts a marker on that same card when they get out must pay some cost to access it (or maybe they just flat out can't access it, although that probably won't work -- not enough info to go around in that case).