Reflections on Hammercalled Playtest 5/12
This week we had a lot of changes to Hammercalled, and my playtest group got a new member who is a total novice not only to Hammercalled but also tabletop roleplaying (but not gaming as a whole) in general.
It turned out to be a good experience.
I think there are really three reasons for this:
- Hammercalled is designed from the ground up to be authentic; you don't fit your character to the system, you fit the mechanics to your character within a flexible system.
- Hammercalled allows you to say yes, something which a lot of games either don't or don't do without consequences or requiring additional work.
- Hammercalled encourages a mentality of figuring out where you want to go after you begin, rather than requiring up front decisions: an "incomplete" character can still function, and be fleshed out during play.
Overall, there's not a whole lot to say because the playtest went fairly well. There wasn't any combat, though there was an injury when a player stepped into a spike trap (ouch!), and the next session is likely to end with a battle.
Everyone seemed very comfortable with the rules, even with very little time and exposure to the system for our newcomer (who, again, has never played a tabletop roleplaying game before, though he did have experience with other games in general).
The big concerns I'm having come with issues regarding characters. I'm not convinced that Stamina and Wounds are being handled right, and I'm seriously considering moving toward a system like the Initiative one where attributes feed into the two: maybe Charm and Toughness for Stamina and Brawn and Toughness for Wounds. That way there would be some more diversity, because right now the starting attribute array produces characters with identical health attributes regardless of player intent.
The idea I've got right now is to just add the tens places of the two attributes to the base numbers. I'm thinking about having a little inflation, because combat has been very deadly so far.
Other than that, the only announcement this week is that I've moved the Hammercalled playtest files over to IPFS instead of Dropbox so that it can be accessed directly instead of going through a third-party service.