Hammercalled Playtest Reflections 6/30

Today we had another Hammercalled playtest, and I want to quickly go over some quick changes and notes that are important:

Since our original focus, we've made characters a lot more powerful. A lot of talent costs have been reduced. Some talents had their effects made universal, and then were either replaced to have a new effect or simply struck entirely. Attribute costs have decreased significantly from twice the current tens place to simply the tens place. Most of these changes were done as part of Aftermath and its streamlining. I believe that these changes should help players feel more "heroic", without making the game too quick to hit a guaranteed win-state.

The next big push is vehicles. I think some progress has been coming on those, but it's going to be the topic of a longer post tomorrow once I get some time to work out what I want to say.

Some things I want to talk about:

• Adding a custom magic system via Unsung Gods.
• Reflections on combat
• Improvements to streamlining

The custom magic system in Unsung Gods is psionics, which functions as a Stamina/Wound-fueled method of achieving dynamic effects. It's modeled off of gear, but has a few new status effects (Suborned and Conflux) which are not currently accessible in the core ruleset, and interface with things in an interesting way. Conflux makes everyone impacted In Melee all the time, which is a counter to characters who try to run away and use Sniper weapons all the time. Interestingly, the player who had a Sniper weapon also has the Compact quality on that weapon, and referenced Equilibrium (which I had forced him to watch a few years ago) and seemed excited to do some gun-fu when Conflux came into play.

Obligatory YouTube clip

Combat works well, but players need a way to be clever and add status effects without necessarily having them on their weapon. I don't necessarily want to go the route of Open Legend here, where players get to choose between damage and status effects and wind up accidentally drawing out combat for extra turns when they could have finished off an enemy, but there needs to be more flexibility.

Defenses are another sore spot. Technically, NPCs can have any number of items, allowing them to attack multiple thresholds, but right now there aren't really rules for making attacks against things other than Grace with melee weapons and Awareness with ranged weapons that make sense. I've been using Presence+Specialization for psychic attacks, but it's a bit of a hasty fix.

Overall, the PC-focused nature of combat means that NPCs really need to be treated a little more distinctly than they have been. Some effects slow down play when they're on NPCs or don't make sense because NPCs don't typically roll, and others just get confusing. I'm not sure if the fix is to have separate NPC qualities/talents, handle some NPCs like PCs (which could be problematic for a number of rasons), or simply to encourage GMs to make do and provide some guidelines.

Streamlining efforts from the Aftermath quick-start guide have been pretty successful. There's less rolling in insignificant moments like combat distance determinations, and there's some other stuff that's been going well.

Current Rules: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c0kpbz246y2thkf/Hammercalled%20Rules%20Reference.pdf?dl=0
Current Character Sheet: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0j2bxn57jaabv3r/Test%20Character%20Sheet%20Hammercalled%20June%2015.pdf?dl=0