Pardon the pretentious title. The fundamental issue I had going into the design phase of Hammercalled is that it was designed as a replacement to the four main games I play regularly or semi-regularly.

Design by replacement or substitute is not a solid foundation in and of itself.

To prevent complacency and really get to a space where I got to the point where I was challenging myself and making a decent product, I had to ask myself what points of comparison I was going to draw between the systems that inspired and lent to my own design, and how I could draw out logical and meaningful improvements to this system.

Essentially, I wanted to do what OSR or 5th Edition did for D&D and create a system that was heavily inspired by its predecessors, but brought enough improvements and advancements to the table to be worth actually switching to.
And the crux of a tabletop roleplaying game is often (for better or for worse) its combat.

There were three objectives I wanted to build into Hammercalled.

1. If combat takes a whole session, it'd better be intentional.
2. People should be able to play well with low skill, so combat isn't about massive rulebooks.
3. Combat should feel like an interlude in narrative, not a separate game.

I've had some difficulties figuring out whether or not I want to name the inspirations for Hammercalled, but I'm confident that I haven't done anything that would provoke litigation (since anything "borrowed" is merely mechanical, not copied from the text, and pretty heavily changed from any of these systems).

Speeding Up Combat

The main reason I was inspired to create Hammercalled is that I love having combat in games, but I hate having combat be games. I like action stories and war stories (and I'm not ashamed to admit it), but I also like stories to have some actual heft to them–not just ultraviolence from wall-to-wall.

And it felt like fairly regularly my regular gaming group, that ran 2-4 hour sessions, would spend an entire session in a single combat encounter in D&D (fifth edition, for anyone interested). There were too many rolls, too much reference-lookup time, and a system focus on inflated numbers as characters grew in level that our group wasn't able to squash quickly.

This meant that every other session would basically devolve into something combining the difficulty of a boss fight with the mundane nature of pest control. That's not even the DM's fault; it's something that people like the makers of 13th Age noted, and it's something that is especially likely to happen in games where you have a mixed bag of powergamers and "normies" like my group, since having one character absent can screw up the whole design (and it is not terribly easy to adjust on the fly without feeling like you've messed stuff up, at least in my perspective: this may be bias, but I much preferred running seat-of-the-pants in Shadowrun to meticulously planned D&D when it came time to deal with issues like that).

Another game I play pretty regularly is Only War, one of the Warhammer: 40,000 RPGs. Its combat tends to be very high lethality, so it doesn't drag on for whole sessions like D&D 5e does for us sometimes, but it also has some frustrating moments. The action system is designed so that a character will almost always take an aim action if they can, which is whenever they haven't moved.

At best this means people declare a new aim action every turn, at worst they plan their course of action in combat based on the ideal that if they move they'll be at a disadvantage because they can't aim and move much, leading to very slow combat (if, admittedly, fairly realistic combat). Shadowrun, not a direct inspiration for Hammercalled but something that shaped much of my early gaming hobby, has this issue in its own right despite a system that mitigates some of this by encouraging craziness (and has dice pools that can be distributed, making minor bonuses less important than solid attributes).

To speed things up, Hammercalled walks a middle-line: it distinctly separates attack actions, movement actions, and reactions, like D&D does. It also removes a bunch of concepts like range from weapons (a weapon is ranged or it isn't, though special weapons can basically achieve LoS targeting).

One thing that is important is that the players (excluding the GM) do all the rolls. I'm going to credit Symbaroum for this idea; its system is delightful. There are a couple reasons for this:
First, it prevents distractions. The emphasis for each player is on their character, which means that they're more likely to roleplay rather than try to find out the AC of the monster.
Second, it allows the GM to focus on things other than dice. No need for a screen to hide rolls, no need for looking away from people. No temptation to run a simulation. The GM is a storyteller, and the PCs find their role in that story.

Reducing the Skill Barrier

One thing that I found to be important to a novice at RPGs is to give them the opportunity to be successful even with little skill, while simultaneously keeping their options open. For instance, any system where you have an objective "wrong answer" in character creation is going to be guilty of creating bad experiences for at least a few people. Eclipse Phase, which I otherwise love, is guilty of doing this hard in its first edition, as it presents a lot of options and opportunities that can lock characters out of future advancement.

Open Legend does this really well, however, with its focus on giving each character agency to be powerful in their own right.

I went a slightly different path than Open Legend, though, which I always felt left out ways that I wanted to define my character. Starting with the attributes, however, I knew I wanted to be different from most games. Combat aptitude is separate from non-combat aptitude as an attribute of its own, and as a result the other attributes feel more like an answer to the question "What makes a good job for me?" rather than "What gives me more AC and to-hit?"

Characters are defined by Specializations, which are defined as I Am Able To (IAAT) statements. This prevents having a huge amount of skills (GURPS, which looks like a really good game mechanically, has always been too intimidating for me because of sheer overload), but also allows characters to be easily customized for settings and preferences.

Then things like Talents and Gear arise, which are topics for another day.

The secret in Hammercalled is not that all characters are created equal in power, but that all characters are (if everything is working) created equal in interesting traits. There are a lot of pathways to success, and I'm willing to be patient enough to work and sort it out to make sure that characters, unless intentionally designed to be useless (like having overlapping IAATs and Talents not utilized in the player's preferred play-style), will have at least some redeeming qualities.

Combat is a point at which this philosophy shines brightest in Hammercalled. There are few special pathways to exceptional success in combat, and most of them involve passive, rather than active effects.
Characters generally get one option: attack with whatever weapon they have on hand. Movement can be used to move in or out of engagements. Abstracting distance nominally enables play solely in the theater of the mind, reducing the need for physical representation of scenes, but the more important function is that it reduces cheese and the number of variables: you are in melee, engaged, or out of combat. This means no tracking of range, and less focus on managing distance like a balancing act.

Reactions are solely used for defending or removing status effects. Characters typically get one, though it is possible to get more via boosts.

Movement is the most complicated part of the combat system, and it's not something that is even attempted every turn (and the more common maneuvers should be getting streamlined with revision and playtesting). It's also something that can be delegated because of how being engaged in combat works like a status effect, so a player who's uncertain with the rules doesn't necessarily have to be the one to do this (of course, it would be absurd to pass this responsibility around consciously, but since a skilled player can do location status effect manipulation for everyone there's no reason that a novice needs to master the one complex system).

Combat remains detailed because of gear: characters get to choose the methods by which they do damage, though there are some general rules. Most weapons have at least one special mechanic associated with them, as do many armors, so there is a tangible incentive to playing a certain part. However, you don't see people needing to use different mechanics on different rolls (unless they switch weapons frequently), nor are they using unfamiliar mechanics.

Combat as Interlude

I'll admit that this last part is an unfulfilled design goal of Hammercalled. That's on me, but I think that a certain part of the other methods help fulfill this.

One of my goals in Hammercalled is to abstract out a lot of the combat. It's meant to handle skirmishes or battles that can take seconds or hours in the same ruleset, just tracking flashpoints rather than every monotonous action. If a combat round ends and everyone is still in the same state they started the round, that's considered a failure of the design (and I don't count the gradual depletion of resources).

Combat has real consequences: being injured provides an overall penalty to your performance. Status effects and wounds heal easily, to keep them from becoming too burdensome for book-keeping or blocking play, but they're still something that you can't ignore.

The rules for combat, while they take place in an environment that cares slightly more about the flow of "time" (via
flashpoints, not via meticulous chronology), are really designed just to show how people react in a highly specific scenario, rather than as something that's a game designed to be played in and of itself.

Thank You

Thanks for reading, if you're still out there. As a reminder, the Hammercalled Rules Reference is available right now for free for everyone.

Feel free to send any feedback, ideas, or comments our way. We'll do our best to make this a game that everyone can play and enjoy.