After Aftermath

Aftermath, a stand-alone quick-start and adventure for 3-5 players based on the Hammercalled Roleplaying Game released yesterday (you can find it here), and I want to quickly go over some of the thoughts and changes that have occurred in the Hammercalled Rules Reference as a result.

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One thing that I did as I went through was give the talents that got used in the quick-start a once-over. Many times I found that they were arbitrarily complicated or underpowered, like the Rallying Cry talent that was using up a point of Destiny (!) every time it was used, which was far too expensive to justify.

I found that there weren't enough talents in the game that functioned with the slightly pruned back ruleset to really make characters have all-unique talents. I suspect that some of this is a result of the fact that most games don't give characters nearly this many talents, and those that do often have uniquely diversified ones (e.g. racial feats in D&D). Because I was drawing from a relatively small pool, though I usually felt there was a talent that matched what I was going for there weren't always ones that worked well.

Generally I've also gone away from having talents that require Destiny, though talents that interface with Destiny are still welcome. I removed the Aspiration talent, because it was basically discouraging GMs from rewarding other players for sticking to their character concept (or being worthless).

I removed the requirement to make a test to add location status effects in combat. Rather, talents can make it so you test to prevent the application of status effects and test to prevent the removal of status effects. You can also get a talent that allows you to move people In Melee with others.

Gear qualities that have centered around this have been modified to be compatible with the new system in general, but a few examples may have been missed.

Some of the weapon qualities that required another test to cause a status effect have had those tests removed.
I moved the Energy Shield quality to armor. The reason for this is that I'm rebalancing augmentations, and I've been pushing them toward a different role. Mechanically, it also increases the rate at which an associated piece of armor suffers Wear, which is better balance-wise.

Altered Sense and Camouflage were removed, because they're so incredibly mechanically complex and dubiously balanced. A good Tool accomplishes what they do, and in their current implementation they only cause headaches and allow some stacking processes that don't work well.

Recharging is now a universal gear quality, and is a little more expensive.

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Let's talk about what my objectives are going forward.

First, I want to get the vehicles up to snuff in Hammercalled. They didn't fit in the quick-start, but even if they did they're just not ready for prime-time. Augmentations need a serious overhaul as well, since they got pretty heavily changed.

I'm also going to be writing more for Steemit, especially my archetypes series (I've taken some time to start on a book for that, but that's still a long whiles out).

Another thing I want to get to work on is some fiction writing, both for Unsung Gods and for one of my other games that I've mentioned in passing a few times.