First off sorry for the long post, I just had a lot to figure out recently.

So after taking a step back for a moment and reviewing the combat/gridded interaction in most TTRPGs I've decided that I need to stick true to my motto of "less number crunching and more imagination". This is a pretty unique method of thought for me because I usually like to meticulously calculate my chances of succeeding with a set of actions in more structured TTRPGs, but I believe this game can only be true to its theme if I'm very light with the rules. To be clear, there will be rules but they will be a bit more open to interpretation and players may even be encouraged in certain scenarios to work around the rules. The way I see it, in order to truly be a clown the players have to  "bend" things a little and rely on their imagination to solve issues. 

In D&D players sometimes add "flavor" to their actions to make them more unique. This could be anything from their firebolts being blue to whispers from an eldritch god singing a song of the end of days whenever they enter a room. The reason I'm mentioning this is that I think this game will work in a little bit of the opposite direction. Players will come up with their actions and they will work with the GM to reason with the rules on how these actions work. This may seem a bit more tedious than the alternative but I think it can work just as well once players get used to it. 

A good example of this is measuring distance. I've tried to figure out a good method of how to reason distance when it comes to actions but with some of the very cartoonish and magic abilities the players will have, I don't think classic values of feet and meters will work best. I think using numbers will just make things more confusing when we have to start working in 3D during combat. Once things go vertical in a tabletop the rules are usually warped a little in my own experience anyway. A solution for this is using a tape measure maybe but I think that is just asking the players to make the measuring tape a required tool to play. I definitely want to avoid adding any tool that isn't a die. So the best way I see of making distance a still relevant value but also fitting the theme is by giving a set generalization for distances. These would be something like "Next To", "Nearby", and "Far Away". I will definitely give them more clever names but this creates three simple options for the GM to describe a character's distance from a point. With some extra explanation, it can probably even help GMs depict the scale of a space more vividly without concerning themselves with accurate numerical values. This also makes it easy for a player to determine if they can interact with a point. 

Using these terms, the abilities of players will say something like "only if the target is next to you" or "when the target is far away you lose connection".  

I hope I explained this well enough. I'm aiming to give the game a good balance of die rolling and imaginative judgment. I think these decisions will help with that.