Playtest Focuses for Hammercalled (Public Tests #1)

By this time next week, I should have completed the first set of playtesting for Hammercalled since releasing the rules reference publicly. There are about forty pages worth of rules, which is quite a bit and I want to make sure that it's all well-spent (I'm probably going to do an editing pass just to reword stuff in a concise but sensible manner).

The first thing to test is obviously character creation. I've made a few characters for Hammercalled, but nobody else (to my knowledge) has under the new system. It's a fairly simple process, and I'll post an example up here in a couple minutes since I just ran through another character. The process takes about ~30 minutes, but a character sheet could make that go a little bit quicker (having to double-check what the attributes are called is a pain).

The second thing I want to test is combat, and particularly the status effect system. We make everything in the system dependent on status effects, barring damage itself, and since whether or not you can attack is dependent on a status effect that's not even totally correct.

That could be a good idea, or an awful one. We will see. We have abolished the battle-map, but that could be a bittersweet victory.

Our combat round is also very simple compared to most games. I consider that a plus. Weapons and armor hold our complexity, with their attacks being interesting in ways that usually add very little complexity.

Finally, I'm hoping and praying that our Specialization system is working well. It could be tweaked in a couple ways, but if it's not working well one of our major movements toward Hammercalled being a multi-genre system without being complex could be out of gas.

Although it's not a major focus of this playtest, I'm interested in seeing how having setting-defined themes changes the course of play. I'm cautiously optimistic.