Part 3 of the Hammercalled Rules Reference focuses on how characters work. I thought this was originally going to be combined with Gear, but it would've been absurdly long for a Steemit post.

Part 1 focused on the dice mechanics, and Part 2 focused on the role of the GM.

Today, however, we're all about characters and how they let players interact with the world.

Characters

Characters represent the primary vessel for the players' actions in Hammercalled. The character is developed in conceptual layers, going from abstract (attributes and specializations) to specific (talents and gear).

The purpose of characters is two-fold; to allow players to build an agent to carry out their will in the universe, but also to provide neat mechanical disambiguation over what exactly this agent's potential, capabilities, and role in the story will be.

Attributes

Attributes are divided into seven groupings, Combat Skill, Brawn, Grace, Toughness, Awareness, Intellect, and Presence.
Combat Skill is kept separate for two reasons: first, it gets around convoluted multi-attribute setups for attacks; does my guy attack with Intellect or Grace or Brawn?

Moot point: he attacks with Combat Skill.

However, it also serves as a limiting factor. Each of the attributes other than combat skill has its own role in utility and combat setups.

Combat Skill is reserved for attacks. No attack can be made except via Combat Skill.

Brawn is used primarily for utility functions, but it feeds into Stamina and there is a Talent that allows it to add damage to melee attacks (which gets very powerful very quickly).

Grace is used for defending against melee attacks, and it's also used to calculate Initiative. Like the other non-Combat Skill attributes, it has obvious utility elsewhere.

Toughness is used to determine Stamina and Wounds, as well as in a lot of status effect removals. It's also recommended to be used with a lot of risks that don't necessarily work elsewhere.

Awareness is used to determine Initiative and defend against ranged attacks, in addition to its utility uses.

Intellect is used for a lot of skill-based utility applications; the most relevant of these to combat is healing, which comes from intellect.

Presence represents both will and interpersonal skills, so it's used to determine Stamina and helps with a few status effects.

In addition to this, any attribute can be targeted with attacks by using a weapon quality (so you can attack against, say, Intellect). Armors can also allow a substitute defense attribute, though the weapon quality supersedes the armor quality.

Attributes range from 20 to a theoretically infinite maximum. Going beyond 40 or so tends to make characters very powerful, and the tens places are important to determine bonuses.

The only non-tens place calculation used is Initiative, itself a derived attribute, which is the greater of Awareness or Grace plus half of the lesser (rounding down). This may be changed eventually, but doing so would result in us probably taking tens places and then rolling a single die, which results in a ton of ties in Priority order in combat and slows stuff down.

Advancing an attribute costs XP equal to its current tens place.

Stamina and Wounds

The Stamina and Wounds system may seem, at first glance, to be an extension of combat, but it is actually the primary resource that characters expend.

Stamina in particular is fluid; I like to call it a sort of "rainy day fund" for a character. Stamina can be lost for any reason that the GM deems appropriate; failing a Toughness+Specialization roll when traveling across a desert, falling into a pit, or taking a hit in combat. It returns relatively quickly (usually it is not worth tracking outside combat unless the players will not have an opportunity for downtime), but is a valuable reminder of consequences for actions.

Wounds cause small penalties (-2 each) and are slow to heal, making them a more reasonable disincentive for continued poor decisions or bad combat performance.

Stamina and Wounds are both dependent on Toughness (and Stamina is also determined by Brawn and Presence).

One thing to note is that there are some things that don't seem obviously intentional about this system that are. When you run out of Wounds, your next incoming damage kills your character, and during that time you're at a -30 penalty. Unless you have over 100 Toughness (technically we take the tens-place, so you'd be back to 5 wounds, but let's not be pedantic), that penalty is worse than a character who has lost Wounds but is not dying suffers, and whenever you gain a Wound you also gain a point of penalty-free Stamina to offset it.

Think of Wounds like an overflow health pool; you don't want to suffer them, but if you can put damage against them instead of dying, they're well worth it.

There is nothing that modifies wounds and stamina limits in the Rules Reference, and I'd hesitate to put it into play because of how it could interact with the system. It is theoretically fine to have a Talent or other system that goes into play to change the numbers, but low numbers work better for maintaining the value of the Stamina and Wound resources. Giving +5 Stamina gives a reprieve from worrying about Stamina in many situations.

Specializations

Each specialization is written as an "I am able to" statement. This is decided with the GM's help, but players are allowed to keep tailoring and tinkering after character creation (within limits) until they can refine their concept.

There is currently no distinction between special purpose IAATs (e.g. combat, magic, etc.), though there is a caveat that IAATs should not be too vague. Each should be evocative of something the character does frequently and does well.
A specialization runs from +5 to +30. Each advancement costs 2 plus half the current rating of the Specialization,
rounding down (so 4 to get to +10, 7 to get to +15, 9 to get to +20, etc.)

This might be a bit too cheap, but at the same time because specializations are capped and each specialization has a fairly high 8 XP cost to start, it hasn't been particularly exploited. In addition, it reinforces playing to a schtick, as opposed to making broad generalists by boosting attributes.

Unlike other games, you typically don't need a trained specialization to do something, though you might be in less favorable conditions depending on what you're doing.

Talents

I categorize Talents in three categories: utility, combat, and "fluffy".

Each character has five talent points to spend at the start of the game, plus an additional opportunity to buy more talents with further XP. Each talent point costs 8 XP; this allows a character to double their starting pool of talents with the XP granted at character creation.

The rule of thumbs for talents are as follows:

1. Balance is less important than being interesting, but numbers should look consistent on paper.
2. Talents are generally always on, and when they're not they draw from a resource or require an action to limit their use. Talents do not have 1/day or resource pool mechanics (at least not in the Rules Reference, and I use them sparingly in my own settings).
3. A character who is specialized in an area should be able to get a talent to go with it.
4. Talents are a way to add more complexity to a section of rules that would otherwise be a simple Attributes+Specialization roll: "While doing Z, you get +X when Y..."

Utility Talents

A utility talent is something like Deceiver or Negotiator. They typically give a +10 bonus to one specific thing, and since they stack with a specialization this can get a half-decent character to a high level of competence (TN 80, if they have a slightly improved specialization, decent attribute, and appropriate tool). This sort of talent costs 1 point, and doesn't scale up (+10 is the highest bonus I give from all but the most specific of talents, and those would have to be setting dependent; like having a spiderweb weaving species get a +15 climbing bonus).

Another thing that a utility talent can do is grant a reroll. This isn't quite as simple as a reroll in a simple "beat threshold" system because the blackjack system leads to interesting moments where a player may not want to reroll a mediocre successful roll and risk failure.

Typically a reroll utility talent costs 1 point.

Finally, utility talents can add Margin to a successful result. This is somewhat dangerous, since it does undermine some of the risk/reward pool of rolling, but it's recommended to have these for processes that can be frustrating.

One example of this is for Healer, which grants both a reroll on failed Immediate Aid tests and a +1 Margin on successful tests. This is because these tests can only be attempted after a significant time has passed, and a character who specializes around restoring health needs to be able to do so reliably. Combine this with the First Aid quality, and it works well.

I consider a Margin bonus to be a one point cost, but I don't put it by itself. I always combine it with a slightly changed bonus or reroll (e.g. a +5 bonus or a reroll failures only component) at a cost of two points, so it is not overly accessible to all players.

Combat Talents

Combat talents add one of three things: a situational bonus, a tweak to the action economy, or a point of interaction with resources/status effects.

Situational bonuses come from Talents like Dead Eye or Predator; typically it's +5 per talent point, and the talent point overall cost depends on how likely it is to be in effect. Dead Eye, for instance, is a lot cheaper because there are a lot of answers to it (sniper weapon and disengaged status go together, but they're by no means automatic). Predator, on the other hand, is harder for enemies to shake; they will need to spend at least one action, and they may not be able to restore health during combat.

Another thing to consider is how the talent applies to allies. Any talent that applies to allies gains a 1 point increase in its cost automatically, unless it's really cheap to begin with.

Talents like Adrenalin Junkie, Grappler, and Quick Reaction all interact with the action economy. Notice that the emphasis here is on a very small, relatively minor change. Adding attack or miscellaneous actions is very dangerous. At no point should characters have access to another one of these actions without paying a price for it. In Unsung Gods, there is a Talent that permits bonus melee attacks–at the cost of suffering damage. This should always be a resource-focused penalty. Adding a negative modifier may not be sufficient to maintain any sense of balance, since attributes and specializations can scale very high.

Adding new options during combat also clashes with a setting philosophy focused on making decisions ahead of time to save on the amount of calculation and recall during the middle of play. Since it is individually focused on a character, it's probably okay, but at no point should a character wind up with more than three or four options for what to do with any given action (this is true for any type of action, though Reactions have a little bit more on their plate to begin with).

Finally, you have the resource and status effect interactions. For the sake of the current discussion, I'm looking at the valid resources as Stamina, Wounds, Protection, Damage, Adrenalin, and Priority. Destiny is too powerful for use in most talents; talents that interact with Destiny change the way it is used, rather than relying on it as a fuel.

Typically, the rule of thumb is that 2 Damage is equivalent to one Protection anywhere in Hammercalled, and it's true here as well. Hardened only provides 1 Protection. Twist the Knife offers 2 Damage. There's some special circumstances going into play here (Hardened is always-on, but activated passively by defending, while Twist the Knife costs a Reaction, but is tied to attacking, which is intentional), but that's a topic that needs its own discussion.

Talents that cause damage to the user are rare. Incoming damage is an extra step for calculation and can bog down play, but it's also the best expendable resource, and you can make it more expensive by saying that it goes for Wounds first. This provides a limit to the use of the talent, but there are inherent downsides in that.

One of the best ways to limit a combat talent is via Adrenalin, which only functions once per combat turn, and eating an Adrenalin removes a +10 that could be given to another task.

Typically Talents don't interact directly with Priority, but Rallying Cry gives a bonus to Priority and it is possible to say, for instance, "Your next Priority will be after everyone else" as part of activating a talent, though this can get over-complicated. A narrative cost like this can also run into a problem with multiple activated talents for a single payment, which could result in people stacking Talents together (or, in the case of particularly nefarious infractions, using the same talent an indeterminate number of times instantaneously). This would be best done in conjunction with an Adrenalin or action cost to limit any abuse.

Fluffy Talents

Fluffy Talents are things like Always Prepared and Inspiration that don't necessarily have a clear parallel anywhere else in the abstract mechanics.

I generally like to have a lot of fluffy talents, and it's okay if they're relatively cheap so long as they don't become obvious picks (Always Prepared, for instance, is relatively expensive because it duplicates the ability to spend 15 XP on demand; however, you will find a use for it every session).

There's no hard guideline to adding a "fluffy" Talent. Just make sure it fits within the other bounds of the system; you don't want to create a whole separate game just to handle one interesting effect (at least, not usually).

Flaws

Flaws are generally very restrictive for their cost, often twice as bad as the Talents they're most obviously related to. This is to prevent min-maxing. It is generally recommended that characters only be allowed to choose one Flaw.

Because Flaws work a lot like Talents, I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail on them.

Gear

Gear will be getting its own section in the design framework, so this will simply cover what Gear does for a character:
Weapons and armor are beyond the scope of this section entirely.

Tools can provide a +5 to +30 bonus, just like a Specialization. They also open up new opportunities where it would not necessarily be logical otherwise to have things happen, like remote operation, or making an action impact a group rather than an individual.

Augmentations function generally like talents, but unlike talents they suffer Wear, which allows them to be limited in that way. Augmentations can emulate talents, but they also function to interact with other Gear; for instance, the +5 Combat Skill boost of Combat Booster is really just an Accurate quality for a weapon displaced to a separate entity where it can spread across multiple different weapons if desired.

Room for Future Expansion

One thing that I've avoided doing is adding any further layers to a character, but there are a few ways that this could happen.

In Unsung Gods, I add species to characters, though it's very "soft"; characters choose a species, but they only get access to new Talents and Flaws while doing so.

This is partly intentional; more options can mean problems in two ways:

First, you can have things that nobody should bother with. The Specializations system is chosen to prevent this from happening in terms of skills; it's directly narrative-aligned, so players can choose things their characters will do as their Specializations.

The more important issue, however, is synergy, especially with Talents and Gear. Having players have access to a set of talents that, as a whole adds an extra attack, adds damage to attacks, and gives a reroll on attacks. As a result, I like to put really powerful things behind a gate that locks players out.

Two things I've considered for Hammercalled at length are the notion of interchangeable bodies for something like transhuman fiction, where characters are no longer linked to a particular physical form, and adding species in more depth.

In both cases, this would mean adding a fifth layer to the character, which I'm just not ready to do. If it were the main hook of a setting, then it could probably work fine. However, both Hammercalled and Unsung Gods already have a handful of additional setting-related mechanics on top of the core Rules Reference. The balance and complexity of such systems make them difficult to layer on top of these mechanics.