I'm Gonna Pop Some Tags

I distributed the 47-page draft of the revised Core Rules to the Kickstarter backers yesterday, and I'm pleased with how the draft is coming along. I've expanded and clarified rules throughout, better organized the gifts, swapped out all of the art for public domain pieces (so that the entire core rules falls under a Creative Commons Share-Alike License), and revised language throughout for the concepts of Tier and Level. 

I also debated about the Character Sheet - Aldo (a.k.a. Dragonfly) has made incredible form-fillable sheets (which I keep asking him to revise, because I keep changing concepts)... but I felt like I should have the entire rulebook be my work. I felt a tinge of guilt for using something someone else had made and putting it in my book, even if it's 'only' one page. It's still his work, not mine, and he technically owns it, I don't. I will keep links to his character sheets on the new web site, and I encourage you to use his character sheets. They're great.

But there's one thing that is still bugging me. I don't like how the naming for Tags works. While there are some tags that introduce new concepts (example: Leadership gives you a specific bonus in a specific context), others just grant bonuses to existing abilities (examples: Concentrate gives you extra Force; Stalwart gives you bonus hero points). I am thinking of getting rid of the new names for all of the second type of tag, since these only require more thinking... okay... Dodge gives you extra Evade (so, why don't I just have the Tag be 'Evade' and have it give you more Evade?). I know the answer - I didn't want confusion on the player side of saying 'wait, I have Evade twice on my sheet... which one do I use?' If you have "Evade 5" written in one section and "Dodge (Evade +2)" written somewhere else, at least you know that they are not the same thing. However, just placing these under the Tags section should be enough. I think the confusion potentially created by having the same names under Tags is lower than the ongoing confusion created by 'what does Concentrate do again?'. I think it's better to have fewer names and concepts than more.