I was a player in another game of Hammercalled, the game I've been working on for a while, this weekend and I thought it would be a good time to write down my thoughts.
I'm generally pretty fond of how things go. This session had more action than the last one, and the mechanics worked pretty well. There was some haphazardness to it, but I think it just came down to it being the first session for some of the players and a lot of us not having played anything for a while.
I'll stand behind Hammercalled's blackjack-margin system as being one of the best mechanics in any game (not that it's necessarily unique to Hammercalled), and I really think that it works well for speed and flow. People know instantly if they succeeded or not, and also know how well they succeeded.
That's tremendous. Compare it to something like D&D's combat (attack, then roll damage), or even the more similar Warhammer 40:000 roleplaying games that have an attack, then a damage roll factoring in the degrees of success, and the lack of any secondary dice makes things go a lot quicker.
Also on a positive side, I think people really feel like they like their characters and they're useful in the context of the story. This is partly due to the fact that we all collaborate on how it works, and we've used the system before.
What really is nice, though, is the fact that you can get a handful of people together and have them decide on what they want their characters to do, and have that work in the system without requiring any further complications.
Hammercalled feels really light to me. Admittedly, some of this is because it's so focused on minimizing math and doing pre-game prep, and once you're in the story you're just in the story.
But there are definitely things that need to be added. Characters feel as anchored to the world as their players make them to be, but I want to see mechanics (like the rank mechanics, which aren't finalized yet) that help with grounding, and also maybe a bond system so that characters have a reason to correspond with each other.
I also feel like with the new health/energy system there's economics issues.
For one thing, the game's now hyper-lethal. That might be something to tweak. I was able to do 11 damage with a hit, which is enough to wipe out a starting-level character if they're built wrong. Death and dying needs work as well.
Another important thing to do is to give people more reasons to use energy and communicate to players a culture of resource spending.
There may be a place to add in motivations or something like that and tie them into energy regeneration (e.g. if you accomplish a goal or at least act to pursue it you regain energy).
Downtime is also something that could be an opportunity that currently isn't in use. I'm going to go back to Segira, look at its downtime, and implement a more significant setting-agnostic version eventually.
So I thought I went through and changed or removed the big deal-breaker nonfunctional talents and gear qualities from the game.
I had not.
This is a simple fix, but it was a little embarrassing. Of course, there is a chance that I merely missed a couple, but it's better to have the game actually be in the state you think it's in.
