The purpose of the Hammercalled Design Framework is to provide tools for Hammercalled content creators and serve as an internal reference for how to develop product lines. Part 4 focuses on gear, which is a particularly important part of Hammercalled and features a (hopefully) fairly robust gear creation system.

Also see Part 1 (Abstract Mechanics), Part 2 (GM Toolset), and Part 3 (Characters)

Gear

Gear is one of the pivotal elements of characterization in Hammercalled, and is designed as an emergent system so that it can be easily adapted to match the needs of any character concept or setting.

To achieve a further degree of flexibility, gear is split into four main categories: Weapons (further divided into melee and ranged weapons), Armor, Tools, and Augmentations.

It is theoretically possible for settings to add both additional gear qualities and categories.
Gear is defined in two ways:

1. Gear has a special "bonus" or characteristic (e.g. damage or protection) that can be increased with points.
2. Gear can be improved with qualities.

All gear is based on a point-buy system, and buying a new piece of gear costs a point before any improvements can be applied (to compensate for this, most gear has an inherent bonus or value). The purpose of this is two-fold; to place a limit on how many pieces of gear a character can have so that it does not bog down gameplay, and because it encourages a movement toward a few powerful, character-defining, pieces of kit.

Unlike other games, it is not generally considered worthwhile to track common items in Hammercalled; players can be assumed to have things like a knife, flashlight, length of rope, et cetera as is relevant to settings and characters. This is in line with Hammercalled's generally permissive philosophy: you can attempt the action, even if you don't have a particular reason why you would succeed.

Gear "Value"

Weapons, armor, and tools have what I refer to internally as a "value", or a boost that they provide of their own accord.

For weapons, this is damage, for armor, this is protection, and for tools this is a direct bonus that they provide to tests.

It's worth noting that each type of gear has precisely one value. In the past, I had experimented with handling things like damage and range separately for weapons, allowing them to be a single actual type in execution, but I wound up spinning the weapons out into two sub-types because of the difficulties that this created.

This makes the bookkeeping for the gear a lot easier, and it also encourages more gear to be defined using qualities, which provide more distinctiveness to a piece of gear than moving along the same scale as other gear.

Theoretically, it would be possible to have weapons with damage and armor penetration values, for instance, but I've found that this just means more math during play, which is one of the things I try to avoid during play.

Using qualities instead of having every weapon have a scaled armor penetration value (to continue the example) means that we only need to worry about armor penetration at all in a minority of use cases, and it streamlines the process for people who would otherwise have to worry about, say, the right armor penetration to damage ratio when spending points.

In addition, gear is intended to be built from relatively few (2-8) points, so having multiple scales to sink points into either negates qualities entirely (since all the points go to the values), or results in people opting out of the values in favor of qualities.

Gear Qualities

Gear qualities function as a generally distinctive way to define gear. There are somewhere around 60 qualities as of July 2018, and a lot of them have multiple possible point values (if you count these as distinct, the number of qualities could easily double).

Qualities can be available to all gear or a particular type of gear. Weapons, as mentioned above, can be further divided into ranged and melee weapons for purposes of determining which qualities apply.

Qualities are often very dependent on gear type, so each breakdown of the gear types will have a separate section outlining how those qualities differ from normal ones.

Gear qualities are functionally similar to talents, but they generally have some other limitations. It's not necessarily possible for them to have the same access to resources as characters' talents do; they pretty much never interact with the action economy, though a few may add a new Reaction. The goal of gear is to modify existing actions and tests within the standard framework.

One difference between gear qualities and talents is that I tend to give 3-point gear qualities a boost compared to their 1 and 2 point counterparts, to reflect the investment required by such specialization.

Weapons

Weapons change the way a character's attacks are handled. Their sole purpose is to increase the damage of an attack and give other boosts.

Weapons start with a base damage rating, which is added to the attacker's Margin whenever they attack. Although it is possible to have a 0 Margin, typically this means that an average weapon does damage equal to one or two points greater than its listed damage even during low-power play.

Miss chance plays a very significant role in expected damage value, as the Margin system gives a very high likelihood of boosting damage exceptionally for high-accuracy attacks, which is why accuracy boosts are rare and small (typically +5) relative to other boosts.

Melee Weapons

Melee weapons start at a base damage of 4, and require the In Melee status to be added to the target before an attack can be made.

Melee weapons are significantly more powerful in their interactions with armor; a novice with an unimproved melee weapon and a 40% chance to hit can hit for 8 damage (due to how Margin is calculated), which is equivalent to the best armor in the game's maximum protection rating.

They have more potent quality and talent interactions than Ranged Weapons, and generally have access to any damage boosting qualities those weapons may have. They also have access to the only guaranteed multi-attack feature in the game in the form of Multi-Strike.

Ranged Weapons

Ranged weapons are intended to be potent against unarmored targets but lag a little behind melee weapons. Starting at a base 3 points of damage, they offer fewer chances to overwhelmingly obliterate enemies, though they're still very potent. This reflects the forward-motion philosophy in Hammercalled's combat system.

While they do tend to have a fair number of accuracy interfacing qualities, these often require more effort (e.g. Dead Eye and Bipod/Tripod require very specific setups).

Weapon Qualities

Weapon qualities are generally available to both melee and ranged weapons, though ranged weapons have a fair amount of distinct qualities to allow the use of the Hammercalled system to emulate both real-life and fictional weapons.

As with talents, my general concern with defining a weapon quality comes down to whether it does something interesting, and balance comes afterward. For instance, Overwhelming provides much more damage to almost any user than an equivalent purchase of damage, but because it's "interesting" I want it to be more common.

The basic notion here is that I want people to feel like they have the ability to craft a unique and interesting weapon, not just follow a basic pattern. This leads to more memorable characters and stories, which is more important than balance in a predominantly cooperative experience.

Weapon qualities always have preference over armor qualities, and generally provide more direct bonuses to value than armor qualities do.

Armor

Armor is weak, starting at 2 points of Protection and working up to a maximum of 8. This prevents it from blocking the entirety of many incoming attacks, which is in line with our philosophy that combat should be moving forward every turn.

The value in armor comes from the effects it has on play. Unless the Armor-Piercing weapon quality is in play, typically a character who is attacked will still block a significant portion of an incoming attack. A character without armor can typically take three to four hits from low-tier enemies before going into Dying or heavy Wounds, but with armor this number doubles. As enemies become more powerful, the characters' defenses increase, but typically not at a pace that they fully outstrip enemies' expected attack values.

Armor Qualities

There aren't many armor qualities by design. While a piece of effective armor can be very useful, it's usually secondary to the main role of the character, and I want it to be minimal. For the most part improved armor allows a character to optimize their defenses, rather than making them impervious.

For instance, a character can add an energy shield (which is rather expensive), phase out as a reaction, or choose to use a particular attribute for all their defenses.

Armor qualities also play a role in negating particularly painful weapon qualities or threats, including in non-combat situations where protective gear is nice.

Tools

Tools are basically a way to invest in becoming a true expert at something. Stacking every possible type of bonus at once gives players a chance to really become powerful without treading on other players' roles in the party, since the amount of specialization that goes into this is tremendous.

In addition, tools cannot boost other gear, meaning that they don't help armor or weapons out during combat.

Tools are primarily intended to reward and promote players using skills, and also to give boosts to areas where the mechanics might otherwise be fairly weak.

Tool Qualities

Tool qualities allow them to add combat buffs or add special uses to the tool. They can be used to give group effects or allow characters to take actions at a distance during combat, as well as have special interactions with other game systems (like the First Aid quality does).

Augmentations

Augmentations are a tricky bunch; they're intended to be used for passive, slight improvements that don't necessarily fit anything else. They can boost other gear, but only within certain contexts, and they have no inherent value as opposed to other types of gear.

Augmentation Qualities

Augmentations are always driven by their qualities, because they have no effects based on a value.

Generally, they function similarly to talents; things that are too weak for talents, or which require some additional limitation in the form of potential Wear, go here. Augmentations are also typically used for the sort of effect that would represent a cybernetic implant, enchantment, or superpower in various genres.

They're resources that characters just have that don't necessarily shape the way they act, but certainly make them better at it.