It's been a few months since I've deliberately worked on Hammercalled, and while my other game projects have fallen behind on the schedule I am now actually on schedule (more or less) to be working on Hammercalled again.
As I get back into working on the game I'm going to quickly go over my initial impressions of each of the sections as I read through them again for the first time in a while. I'm dictating these aloud, but I'm going back and polishing up any obvious errors.
I remember Clause 3 of the Tabletop Attribution License as being something important and I think it's holding up well, so that's good. It's the one that means that you can keep redistributing the book in its entirety, even if there are certain elements which are not openly licensed.
I see a lot of places to make the core mechanic less wordy.
It would be nice if I had an easy mnemonic for how to use dice rolls. Right now it's worded awkwardly: If something might fail, has consequences based on how well it happens. It works, but I'm not in love with it.
I seriously need to figure out what I'm doing with capitalization. I like capitalizing all the game terms, and I think that's what I've done consistently, but I want to make sure that I've got it all in order throughout the book. Gear is a bad section for this.
I realize that there's no notation in the introduction for how rolls can be described. Already fixed.
The spot where I talked about rounding down whenever you divide feels awkward. There's not really anywhere else we talk about math, but it just feels like a footnote that's easy to overlook.
I got rid of marginal failures, so I removed that from the margin description. I think I'm going to have to go through and check Segira and make sure that everything made it over: It feels like there's some things that have not gotten Polished in the core rules, which is entirely my own fault. I think I'm going to implement a threat mechanic to make things like enemy damage scale over time, which is what Segira does.
Rewrote the opposed rolls. Rolling with assistance needs to be revisited. I'm just not happy with it, it feels vague and meaningless.
Destiny pool still feels weird to me. I'm not sure if I really talked about it publicly since the most recent play testing, but in Segira it was entirely removed and replaced with an adrenaline pool. I think adrenaline works better I don't think there's any need for Destiny to exist alongside it. I'm going to replace it, or at least link the two.
The attributes and specialization sections are the oldest in the book. At the large scale, everything looks good.
The combat skill, brawn, grace, toughness, intellect, presence, and awareness write-ups look good.
Resources probably need a slight numerical rebalance, and they also definitely need to be updated once destiny changes are put in.
I'm kind of hesitant about the wound penalty. I feel like without it, there's a difficulty in reflecting risk, but it feels too much like a death spiral for what the core game aims to go for in tone. It works in Segira, not for Hammercalled. It's also really tiny snippet of a rule.
Initiative feels weird where it is.
In the specializations section, the IAAT examples look a little bit weird now. It might be good to have examples of non-combat characters, and maybe some from multiple common genres.
I removed the confusing experience rating terminology about specializations; it is now just a "rating" without any descriptor.
Now we come to the talent section. It looks like the adrenaline sections are already in, so it's just a question of bringing the stuff that currently works on Destiny over to the new adrenaline system.
More inspections of the talents are due to come later. For today I'm going to gloss over this section.
Flaws are interesting, but I'm not sure if I want to keep them. I think I cut them out of Segira to make the game play more simply.
I don't like the intro to the gear section, though I'm not yet ready to change it. It feels really awkward with how it starts. "Gear is treated as part of a character..." as an opening sentence? How did that survive so much play testing?
Wear rules within the gear section look good but definitely suffer from some capitalization conventions issues.
I think I'm going to drop the personal and found gear distinction. I think it should be good to just say each piece of gear has an owner, at people other than the owner suffer penalties. If the owner is, say, an institution who has given that gear on lend, it is much easier to handle that way (removing the penalty could be a rank bonus for members of the institution?).
There aren't many downtime rules in the core rulebook, if I remember correctly. I'm not sure Segira's would fit well, but there should be something.
Right now it's just healing and gear repair, both things that I honestly feel like abstracting out more than they currently are.
I'm not going to go into details on gear qualities for other stuff. That's been the most heavily playtested part of the game, and it'll get its own treatment later.
Health and wear maybe should be divided. I get the reason why I originally had them together, since they are tangentially related, but I think it becomes too much at once. Likewise, if someone were running a less gritty game where gear does not wear down, or if they wanted to create different rules for gear, this is over-entangled.
Character advancement is probably one of the more important sections, and it feels very awkward. I think I did a good job with this in Segira, but it's too bare boned in the reference.
I'm going to go into more detail on this section later. Right now, doing a quick skim of it, I think there's nothing that I feel a burning need to change other than making it a little more user-friendly.
Combat is one of the central mechanical elements in Hammercalled. Right now, the introduction to combat looks fine. Initiative and turn order looks good, but could use an example. This is especially important because initiative functions differently from most dice rolls.
Rework adrenaline. I prefer the method in Segira.
The distance system is a nightmare. It might be the best possible nightmare, but it's still a nightmare.
I need to decide how I want to handle NPCs. I changed this entirely in Segira, and I'm not sure it's the best possible outcome. However, I do like the idea of having battlefield threats instead of discreet NPCs. In my experience that works best for most power levels that Hammercalled is made for.
Status effects are a little over the top right now. I want to make sure that everything works well. Suborned needs work.
Vehicles are still a dumpster fire. I'm not going to use them in playtesting immediately, instead putting it off until later, once my groups have gotten used to the game.
The game master section is really ancient. There's a lot of general game design stuff in here, it needs to be stripped down to just what is relevant to people who want to run the game. I could have a later section for creators.
The core system principles section is wordy. Character creation overview should be more terse. Risk and reward looks good. Circumstantial modifiers explanation looks good. Parts will require a rewrite for adrenaline once it replaces destiny.
Hazards and traps should be expanded to match the threats that exist in Segira.
The representation of themes was something I really wanted to play with, but I don't think it worked. I'm going to get rid of it.
NPCs will be rolled into the new threats section. Generally they're unchanged, though there's some small things that need to be updated.
All in all, I feel good going into this new round of play testing. I hope to get an updated version posted here tomorrow, for both the public and my players.
