I'm working on a new revision of my rules for Final Hour of a Storied Age. My current working draft is: here. I know based on previous feedback that people have found the procedures in Part IV: Playing Out a Chapter confusing. I've tried rewriting them to make them more easily comprehensible. I was also planning to add a flowchart that summarizes the procedures — a working draft of that chart is: here. Now that I'm looking at my finished chart I am worried that it might be more confusing than it is helpful, because it might make the procedures seem more complicated than they really are.

I could use some feedback on whether the text in Part IV makes sense, and whether adding this flowchart into that section would help (or any other feedback, like ways to make the chart better, areas where the organization of the rules is making them hard to digest, etc.).

Have you tried using smaller text

Only one box at a time, when I was trying to cram the text in, and then I would usually give up because the smaller text would look strange relative to the rest of the chart. Until now it hadn't occurred to me to experiment with shrinking all the text, but I will try some experiments.

How much do you find players “grubbing for traits” in play (i.e. narrating spurious or unsatisfying things into the fiction in order to gain dice)?

In the previous version I actually had the opposite problem — the old action dice mechanic made it so risky to use multiple traits at once that it rarely ever happened. I haven't tested the new action dice exhaustion mechanic yet, but I'm hoping that it incentivizes people to use 1 or 2 or maybe 3 traits at a time — the idea is that rolling more dice will make you more likely to win (i.e. that you'll have at least one very high die) but that you'll do less "damage" if you do (because if you roll multiple dice odds are also good that you'll have at least one very low die, which is less likely to exhaust an opponent's traits). This is the biggest mechanical change in this new version, so it's the thing I'll be paying closest attention to on my next round of testing.

I have the same "helpful or confusing" question about another flowchart: pdf

This one is describing the mechanics in Part III: Starting a New Chapter from pages 27 to 29 in the rules (this chart would go on page 30).

Does the "parallel boxes" thing make sense? Should I just collapse the "roll ___ dice" boxes into a single box?