Runestone

This is an early alpha. Feedback is greatly appreciated. Discord server for the project can be found here.

What is this and why am I making it?

I wanted to play sword and sorcery adventures with a game system that provides:

• Starting out with competent characters, and then experience a slight increase in competency during play. Progression comes mainly through impacting the game world rather than increasing numbers.
• Rules that get out of the way when we “play the world”, and enter play in risky situations where GM fiat might feel unsatisfying.
• Easy to read dice rolls with minimal arithmetic. I ended up with a d6 dice pool, where you roll a number of dice equal to your skill level, add or subtract a die, and every 4, 5 and 6 is a hit.
• Setting difficulty should be easy for the GM. The probability of success should be intuitive to gauge for the players. This resulted in three difficulty levels, mapping onto challenging (1 hit), very challenging (2 hits) and extremely challenging (3 hits) tasks. 
• Simultaneous, dynamic and dangerous combat. Simultaneous to keep everyone engaged. Dynamic to make the path to victory something else than pure attrition. And dangerous to make every action count. But not a meat grinder. When things go south, you more likely get knocked out than die. Then you are probably sold as a slave, and your perilous path continues from there.
• Organic advancement based on skill usage. Characters should never go beyond human capacities, but should be able to become incredibly skilled in their specialty.
• Competency should be cut into the right number of slices—not too many (e.g. 50 skills), and  not too few (e.g. 3 attributes). Runestone has 15 skills. Every skill reflects a fantasy archetype.
• I wanted difference in skill to strongly impact how well characters do on difficult tasks. When you play a legendary archer, you are able to land shots that are near impossible for everyone else.
• No duplicate or near duplicate values: No concurrent DEX attribute, DEX save and acrobatics skill.
• No special abilities. Solutions to problems are not found in special abilities listed on character sheets, but through interactions with the fictional world, treating it like a real place.
• Light scaffolding for wilderness travel, including encumbrance and slot inventory.

This is what I came up with. The game is still under development. If you have ideas or feedback that can improve the game, I would love to hear from you.