No, dice!

I've talked at length about mechanics I've come up with to evoke a movie-making theme, and the one I'm proudest of is the resolution cards.  Previously I was resolving encounters with custom dice, with the number of dice you rolled for yourself and the enemy commensurate with the 'investment' of each in the encounter.  I realized that you could encode the same information onto cards, albeit at a slight loss of randomness, but with the benefit that we could add other stuff to these cards.  Specifically, we could include storyboard art and a description of what has happened -- "Protagonist throws punch"/"Operative draws a pistol" etc.  So in resolving the challenge it's as if you're story-boarding the scene, and the cards match the challenge category you face so it's thematically appropriate.  I love this idea and would hate to let it go. 

But it's not without a few drawbacks.  First, it's extra steps in encounter prep: "Grab the encounter deck for the appropriate challenge category, put a marker on the enemy track, put a marker on your investment".  It adds some minor fiddliness: shuffle the deck you just used after the encounter.  The randomness is bounded (this I consider very minor).  It's another component (48 cards) that eats up some table space (4 decks).  And it requires a mat for the encounter resolution, with tracks for your investment and the enemy investment.  And possibly the worst part -- when you flip a resolution card, you have to place it very precisely so that the tracks on the card line up with the tracks on the mat, so you can compare your investment and the enemy's to the results indicated on the card.

Now none of these are that big a deal and the pros, to me, outweigh the cons.  But it does take time, and those extra 48 cards and the mat are not insignificant in a game with a lot of parts.  Compared to 10 custom dice, maybe it's a wash, but what if we could do this with standard dice?  What if we can do it with just two standard dice?  Unfortunately for my beloved resolution system, I think we can.

It's so simple I wonder why I didn't think of it before.  When you face an encounter, roll two dice, one red, one white.  For the red die, if the number is less than the number of black cubes in the region, move the enemy pawn that many spaces closer to your city.  For the white die, if the number is less than the amount that you invested in the encounter (adventure cards, basically), advance that number on the success track.  Repeat this three times.

That's it.  There are other bells and whistles about ways to use adventure cards to get out early, block bad results, and some things like that, but then there were some bells and whistles with the resolution card version too.  The statistics are different.  In the resolution card version the expected number of successes scaled linearly with investment, but here it grows with investment.  But on the whole it captures some of the same suspense but with zero overhead, fewer rules and fewer components. 

Ah, but there's another problem; the hubris challenge also used resolution cards, and these had two effects.  First, they ate hubris, their main function.  Second, they deal out penalties for curses you've acquired, e.g. if you drank from the wrong grail.  Can we capture this with dice as well?  Here again, two dice to the rescue.  White die is for cancelling hubris, red die checks against curses.  If you roll less than the number of curse tokens you have, you lose life equal to your die roll.  

There are a couple of things to think through, most notably that, assuming we use a d6, there's no difference in your performance in the hubris challenge if you have more than 6 green cubes.  If there are ways to lose green cubes during the challenge, then having more cubes is better.  On the other hand maybe it's ok for the game to be saying that if you have more than 6, you've been inefficient, and could have played it closer to the bone.  Or we could just use a d8 or d10 in the hubris challenge, although that may be swingy.
I've rolled through a few challenges this way just to try it out, and I like how quickly it sets up and resolves.  Yes, you have to use your imagination a bit as to what the dice represent, but that's true of every dice-based resolution system.  The biggest drawback may be that over three rolls (six dice total), the statistics just won't even out very well.  Sometimes the enemy will scream to your location, sometimes they won't move at all.  Sometimes you'll fly up the success track, sometimes you'll be sucking pond water.  In previous versions players had "script rewrite" cards that changed an outcome in some way.  We could reintroduce that concept here, maybe just in the form of a few tokens that everyone gets that you can spend for force another player, or allow yourself, to reroll a die.  A different thought was to roll two dice for one or both effects and keep the ... lower? higher?  That's the problem, it's not easy to define what you want!  You ideally, for the white die, want the highest die that's lower than your number of white cubes.  Neither "keep the lower" or "keep the higher" quite capture what you want here. 
So I'm potentially very upbeat about this change, particularly since it seems to move us closer to the simplicity of the v7 system but with more substance and suspense, but will just have to see how much of a concern random swings of luck are and whether they balance out over the course of the game.