So for this devlog, I wanted to go back to early days of SOAR.
The pdf you're able to read is VERY different from how SOAR worked earlier.

SOAR came to be around like, 3 years ago at this point, at the time I was running Avatar Legends and thinking about how cool of a system it overall is: It has a focus on character driven stories (PC AND NPC alike, which is rare enough to mention) and what I personally believe to be a banger of a combat system that really represents how Avatar fights feel, I know exchanges are a bit of a controversial addition to that system, but I thought it was very fun.

So when I was running it, I was thinking about how much, in a weird way, it ticked all of the boxes for a Yakuza inspired TTRPG, and about a year or so ago, I started to adapt it.

This is how a very early, very rough prototype of SOAR came to be, its narrative worked exactly like a PBTA game and its combat was a BIG extension on how Avatar Legends did exchanges, it essentially worked like this.
You pick an approach: Defensive, Offensive or Reactive, this was the 3 phases of a given round.
Then you rolled the appropriate stat to see how many abilities you could use, after that you noted down your approach specific bonus.
NPCs did the same, and you also had to pick a style, which you could change during a fight but only during Reactive (the very end of a round).
Here is an example of how the Stone Style looked under this model

It had a lot of moving parts, I thought the narrative was extremely hard to design for too as it turns out, it is very hard to make Playbook moves that are actually interesting and not just stat boosts.
To say nothing about how the turn orders, I had to draw a turn order chart, which I will share here.

Combined, it was something I wasn't very proud of, and more or less actually avoided sharing as a finished product around because it just... didn't feel very good even to read.

I basically abandoned the project for close to a year after that, unsure where to take it, sometimes I went back to it adding some stuff, but my heart wasn't really in it.

Enter Maleghast, by Tom Bloom, otherwise known as Abbadon.
I played it, I had a lot of fun, so much fun it actually made me want to create something like it, but in my own way, a fun little combat system for a Gunplay based TTRPG: Project Violent Dance, a fun little side project I made because I realized there was a lack of tactical combat games with straight up pulpy gun fights in mind.

So, obviously it has changed a fair bit, the version I'm linking here has had a few changes, but when I started to work on it, I wondered if as a combat system it couldn't fit what SOAR wanted.
The idea of rolling a d10 to hit and a d6 to see what damage profile you use comes from that by the way, after I ran a single playtest by myself, I decided this was it.
This genuinely allowed me to get past a creative block, and a few weeks after I made the switch, I realized I had written more than I ever did before for SOAR.
So I made a new google doc, started writing a different set of Slash Of Life rules for the narrative engine, and it turns out going past the need to work like a PBTA also allowed me to do a lot more stuff I actually wanted to do.
I ran a playtest of the new SOAR model, and it worked, it was lacking a little something in juice for the maps, so I added stuff to throw people into and I think now it at least has a strong tactical identity because of this, and that's the version you are seeing today.
Hope this was interesting for folks !

A short update for V0.3, which should be on the horizon, I have written every style the game will have for players, here is some sneaky previews:

That's all for this devlog ! Hope y'all appreciated this dive into things !