Reflections on Hammercalled Playtest 4/28

Yesterday I had another Hammercalled playtest. I tried for the most part to sit back and tell a story, with minimal mechanical intervention (the method I encourage in the rulebook), and I think it went pretty well.

One of the things that went amazingly, astoundingly well, was the combat that we had. My players didn't read the book very carefully (of course not), but they were able to figure out what was going on in combat very quickly and track it without too much effort once I explained the rules to them.

With all this, the first combat took about ~30 minutes, and technically only 25 minutes of that was true "combat", since the PCs chased down a fleeing enemy for some of the remainder.

I'm happy with the overall state of the game, though there are still things I'd like to add. One thing that I definitely have to do is better balance for Talents, since some are worth much more than others. Some of this will be tweaking the costs, some of this will be adjusting the bonuses and penalties they provide. I've been hesitant to give double-digit increases, since that could add up very quick on a 1-100 scale, but I've also found that many Talents simply don't do very much.

I'm not going to fiddle with this yet, but I'll be keeping an eye out for it in future playtests.

Players definitely like the IAAT system. It's liberating, and going with my gut on having IAATs apply to combat as well as non-combat applications has not come back to haunt me like I had feared it potentially could. Instead, it's been really fun, and also encourages people to play in a manner that matches what their character should do.

As always, here's a link to the playtest document for the session.