We won’t have another playtest this coming Saturday for a variety of reasons (most people won’t be available), so I’m hoping to take some time to really polish up the system.
The last session took the form of a series of tournaments, so there’s a lot of interesting things to consider here.
The Good
People generally get to do what they want in Hammercalled. A lot of the challenges (like a footrace, artistic competition, etc.) were able to be resolved quite quickly and easily, and players were able to think up clever solutions to them.
I’m really happy with the degree of freedom that the system permits.
Hammercalled resolves so quickly that we’re really able to cover a bunch of narrative ground even when people are messing around a little and having fun just hanging out instead of just focusing on the game.
The Bad
Really, this session went really well. The biggest ongoing issue revolves around rules for threats. The rules aren’t finalized.
One thing that I’m not sure whether to call ugly or bad is that stripping out Destiny means that there is no narrative control for players. Energy gives a boost, but it’s subjective. There’s no tool for a player to say “I want this to happen” other than just tinkering under the hood with game stats.
The reason why I say it could just be ugly is that a game’s not obligated to include something like this, but the fact remains that unless people really stack Energy bonuses (currently the only resource you can spend to boost a roll) you’re basically only going to stack the deck in your favor.
Maybe that’s enough, but I’m a sore loser and I keep flubbing rolls.
The Ugly
More explicit rules for combat order and initiative are needed. Right now people just sort of fumble around. I don’t want to go back to a fixed Initiative, but I do want to stress that there should be an attribute/attribute+specialization test done whenever initiative comes up.
Part of the issue with this when you have PvP (as in a tournament) is that Hammercalled doesn’t have a way of dealing with double-fails when someone needs to succeed. You can re-roll, but that seems awkward and inelegant, and it directly violates the “only roll once” method I’ve gone for everywhere else.
It’s also occurred to me that there are no rules for social connections in Hammercalled. An ally system could help with some of the issues that we have with animals while still functioning like a small change to the existing rules. Will contemplate.
To-Do
Figure out a solution to the problem with players having no direct narrative control.
Threats.
Begin work on Legacy of Eight things. I’ve settled on a Psionics talent that lets people burn more Energy on a roll (synergizing with Energy boosting rules as they currently exist).
Allies?