The Rules so far.

Character creation was a bit ad hoc. I had a skill list but the guys went with a more Indie mix of "Mistress in every port" and "Good judge of character" sorts of things. Everybody started with three points in each humor.

When a skill check came up we used a D10 plus the humor associated with that skill against an easy/normal/hard target number. One of the important features was that the player set the difficulty for the challenge. That way the challenge felt appropriate to the character concept. We were still in the talking about every challenge at length stage, but they didn't even seem to be uncomfortable with it. I can see that GM description will sometimes be a control issue, but it worked with no difficulties here.

Every skill challenge had an associated humor. After the challenge that humor went down one and a different humor went up based on the outcome of the challenge. For example, sneaking the ship into the Ottoman city would be a skill associated with the phlegmatic humor so the player would look at their sheet and see that they had a 3 in phlegm. They would then decide that sneaking into the city while it was heavily patrolled was a hard challenge and roll D10+3. If the roll was higher than 12 the roll was a success and the player would transfer one point from phlegm to sanguine. If the roll had failed the point would go from phlegm to black bile.

A note we seem to be going back and fourth between the humors and the fluids freely so what I will call black bile someone else calls melancholy and so on. I don't know if this is a problem or not but will try to decide on one or the other later.

Combat is currently a card based system which covers dueling and other sword fighting. The players are dealt a hand of cards. 5 cards if the character is a swordsman and three if the character is a mook. An additional card is placed face up on the table to make for terrain advantages. If either player plays a card with the same number on it they get to take another card.

The players cross swords by playing one card face down for advantage in the fight. They turn the cards over and the player with the lower number may add a card to meet or exceed the higher card. If they meet the process is repeated. If the card is exceeded that player takes the advantage. All cards are discarded after comparing.

The player with advantage plays another card face down and the defender plays a defense card face up. The advantage player turns their card over and the defender has the opportunity to add cards if their total does not match or beat the advantage player. If the defenders card exceeds the advantage player's the advantage turns. If there is a tie the advantage is lost and they go back to crossing swords. If the defender cannot match the advantage players card with a second card they take a touch. If they cannot play any more cards the advantage player strikes as many blows as they have cards left. Wash rinse repeat if necessary.

It ain't much but it got us through. The players feel that there needs to be more room than the D10+humor scale allows for now. If you use a skill the point loss makes them feel weak. They have asked me to try a scale between humor points and points in the roll. they would like something like 10 humor points to start with and a sliding scale of points to bonus conversion. with at least three uses of the skill to bring the bonus down below three.