Love the mod system on science and arts! Having negative and positive effects to make the options so diverse gives the game quite a lot of tactical depth. Plus having little steam punk robots play capture the flag would be so fun to watch.
The only real issue I have is that the dice pools are hidden, and could be easy to... errr... "manipulate" in your favour. Do you think it would still work if the dice pools were visible to the players?
Great game overall I really like it!!
Glad you like the system -- thanks for giving it a read. It was fun to work on!
Regarding the hidden dice pools, I think of them very much like a hand in a card game. Part of the tension in activating an attack is not quite knowing what your opponent has to defend with. Likewise, there is some depth from "feinting" with fives early in the turn, but holding a high die in reserve. Or tempting the opponent into clustering their Automa knowing you hold a Massive modifier secreted away.
In the mood board I had an inspirational thought of dice cups that you would shake up, and invert, peek at with your hand as a shield, then place the cup back down to prevent manipulation. Definitely not a fool proof system - the design certainly targets casual play and would be wildly unsuitable for tournaments. :)
I think actually using playing cards is a great idea. Use 3 packs of the same brand. Seperate Ace(1) to 6 of each suit from the packs and shuffle the black suits in one pile (negative), and the red suits in the other (positive). Both players draw from the same decks (3 from each) to keep things a bit random and boom! Also, 36 cards in each deck means there's 6 of each result which keeps things similar to the d6 system.
Keeps the big reveal idea and would prevent chumps like myself being tempted to cheat. Haha.
