Practical Changes in Hammercalled Testing Stage #2
I'm entering Testing Stage 2 in Hammercalled, and what that entails is starting to look at the late-game and make decisions that are based on what I need to do to make that appealing.
What this means is probably a character advancement overhaul, but I've already changed Gear to make it better. I also cleared up the combat section.
One of the things that I'm still going to try looking into is building Wound and Stamina levels that reflect a character's overall status. Right now the progression in that is very slow and has a diminishing return on investment, so that's something that isn't even a feasible character build path.
We've changed the Gear over to be linear in damage/protection improvements, which helps to compromise for this for the moment. Right now it's more difficult than it used to be to remove characters from play in a single shot, though it's still fairly trivial if you build to do so (high-damage weapon builds still are capable of doing so, and characters who optimize for damage output can do so reliably against unarmored or lightly armored targets).
The result is that the damage-dealing qualities on weapons may need to be re-examined. I feel confident that talents like Critical Strike remain fairly well adjusted relative to their current status. Incendiary weapons are the real winner in the new ecosystem, since their flat damage is unchanged and they can impact opponents' action economy.
One of the things that I'm thinking about as I'm moving toward this stage is how to avoid the "invincibility threshold" experienced in games like Shadowrun. Unlike D&D, where there is smooth(ish) linear scaling up to 20, we have a classless, milestone-free design system in play in Hammercalled, and that makes it difficult to really talk about what makes a character function at a certain level.
What we can do is look at three main points:
First, I'm keeping an eye out on resource management. I don't want too many resources to scale with character power level, and that's part of the reason why the Toughness talent was removed. It was something that led to a gold rush in preventing wounds, and that's the role of armor or defensive talents like Hardened. Changing Stamina and Wounds to be dependent on multiple attributes could be a good idea for this, I just need to find a solution I like.
Second, I want to constantly compare low-tier characters to high-tier characters. My goal is that four early-game characters should easily beat a late-game character, and right now this seems to be the case. One of the things that we did when we made damage/protection advances linear is that we also implemented a hard cap on damage/protection rating. As it stands, unarmed attacks by a talented amateur cannot scratch a heavily armored target, but even a flimsy weapon can easily pass that threshold.
Third, I want to make sure that every combat style has a counter. For instance, armor has the ability to be bypassed by certain weapon qualities (though armor can also counter this with qualities of its own; the highest-tier armor quality ignores the best weapon armor-penetrating quality). Building to maximize potential damage resistance means that you're not going to be able to move out of the way of really nasty hits that would make it count. This is easy to do in narrative play, since the IAATs funnel characters toward certain behaviors and the GM can account for that, but in combat I want to let people feel like their choices matter without building One True Choice that everyone is going to take.
Right now I think the system does that. Soon it will do that better.
Really nice to see your thought process on how you want to maintain a balance and not let things run away from you. I’ve never heard a game trying keep an upper limit of an higher gear toon be taken down by 4 low geared ones. If only more games thought of that when they try and balance things out. I can recall in a few games where one person is just so overpowered they can take down an army of players without much risk to themselves.
Sounds like you have an amazing thing going I wish you best of luck in your further testing and design.
Well, to be fair, the highest power level will be relatively uncapped. Since we use a die roll of 1-100, there is a chance that characters go off the north end of that pretty quickly in the grand scheme of things. Building a character with an arbitrarily high amount of XP, like 10,000, will result in someone who can trash four starting characters.
All the same, a more sensible character, even one who is very powerful, will not automatically win most battles solely by being who they are. There may very well be cheesy options to win fights, but these should have counters. For instance, someone who always moves out of range can be defeated with a ranged weapon with the Sniper quality–not a ubiquitous item, but not difficult to acquire either.
The important thing here is that maximum scale is capped. People can't walk around with nuclear weapons and just unleash them when they feel fit–at least not if they want the gear system to work with them. They can totally do that in narrative play, but that's not something I'm at all concerned with: if people get a nuclear weapon it's handled as the plot point that it is.
My experience with tabletop mechanics is limited. I dig the idea that a group of low lvl chars can hurt a high level one, and the realistic take on weapons hurting through armor even if they are flimsy, as opposed to fists that would actually impose damage on the one using those fists against a heavily armored target. The detail of these mechanics has always seemed weird to me in rpg computer games where it always just seemed to be about that ominous character level - no matter what gear was used. More realism makes it way more immersive and fun to dive in.
Making individual choices count is a really great take on it. It's my character after all, and I hate when the underlying choices of the devs become so apparent that I would opt out of my choice just for that maximum effect.
I actually came here to build a bridge to you to this recent post where Kenny is looking for some input, and I had to think of ya instantly, as you have both a deep knowledge of the archetypes as well as game mechanics, maybe it would be something you are interested in.
https://steemit.com/life/@kennyskitchen/the-importance-of-your-personal-vision-here-in-the-game-of-real-life
much love!