A few days ago I was a player in another session of my game Hammercalled. This one was interesting because we brought in a new player (one new to tabletop roleplaying entirely, I believe), and also had a chance to see some other stuff in play.

As usual, new people means that a lot of the play time is spent on character creation. Even though Hammercalled can in theory make characters very quickly (15 minutes) it doesn't wind up that way in practice because people spend a lot of time figuring out concepts and the like.

The Good

Hammercalled has a great system for actually making characters useful in the specializations/attribute department, and they're really distinctive. The addition of tools to the mix can be interesting. There's a lot of power to players in this.

Although the fact that we don't go into specific details about a lot of stuff is a little overwhelming for new players, the fact that it means more opportunity and flexibility is much appreciated.

Another thing that I really liked is the fact that we were able to have the new player build his concept fairly easily. Dual-wielding weapons, for instance, can be a pain in other systems, but in Hammercalled you just modify the attack to do what makes sense: if the character attacks faster, you do that, if the character hits harder, you do that, and so forth.

Generally the game felt really fluid.

The Bad

One thing that I've noticed right now is that the resource economy for Gear is lacking. I'm contemplating making it be a more common thing to spend Energy on activating Gear, but I'm not sure how that will impact everything. It's a very major change, but we could simplify out the Wear mechanic altogether. This would make a much smoother core experience.

Another thing that I'm feeling kind of dissatisfied by is the Talents system. I get that right now we're going off of the rules reference, but it's so milquetoast that it's barely worth picking some of the talents. I don't think I've seen a talent in play for all three sessions (which, admittedly, may be down to the shorter sessions, but even then we've had at least a full session and a half worth of play).

Whether that means the current talents need a rebalance, new talents need to be added, or there needs to be a culling of the talents that don't matter is still up in the air.

The Ugly

Cooperative rolls are weird. For instance, in the session there was a time where my character and another player's character were going through a library and looking for evidence. My character has Intellect 40, which is pretty solid, and the other player had a +20 specialization, so combined we were able to pretty much break the scale at 60 as our base TN when the average base TN is closer to 40.

Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. There is something to be said here for intentionally making cooperative rolls good. It was only a few points higher than my own personal roll would have been, but my specialization didn't fully overlap with our goal.

We also haven't had any combat yet in the whole time we've played. I need to talk to the GM and see if that's just because 60% of us are actively trying to avoid violence or if that's a consequence of him not liking how it's set up.

What's Next?

As much as I don't like doing this, I'm thinking about putting in "archetypes" that are basically pre-built/written blocks that people can toss together. For instance, you could have a bunch of Specializations already set up so that a player just defines a few, and Gear that matches it.

This could also be useful as part of the rank/faction system as a way to engage people. In practice, Hammercalled doesn't particularly endorse uniformity in characters, but it could work well in a situation where characters are being combined from disparate factions.