Okay, we're on to our penultimate part of the design framework as it stands. Combat is an important part of most roleplaying games, and Hammercalled is no exception, so you can bet that we've got a lot of content revolving around it.

This is by far the longest section of the design framework, since it's one where I feel a lot of impetus to explain why exactly I chose to do something as opposed to the alternative.

I don't stress this very much in the text, but one of my focuses is on trying to make combat as closely aligned to the core mechanic as possible. Other than Stamina, Wounds, and Initiative, characters don't have anything on their sheet that is automatically aligned toward combat, and while most characters will have some combat-focused Gear there is no obligation to do so in the system.

Since one of the goals going into Hammercalled was to avoid a situation where everyone felt like they had to play someone capable of violence (see D&D for a counter-example, where pretty much everyone is at least somewhat geared toward developing some combat ability due to the class system), I wanted the rules to be very simple so that players who don't care about combat aren't forced to sit out entirely for a whole session or learn a giant subset of rules they don't really want to use.

It's worth noting that with anything that has a lot of moving parts, this simplicity comes through what I consider a fairly Herculean effort of behind the scenes math and decision making that will always result in some things just not working the way they "should". For instance, Hammercalled just doesn't support the same granular detail many other games do in combat. That furthers our intention for simplicity. All the same, we want combat to feel good for players who enjoy it. We do a lot of under-the-hood stuff and have a lot of fairly painful decisions that we made to achieve this. People tweaking Hammercalled for another purpose may find that they don't want to follow our path on this.

If you're interested in the rest of the design framework, we've posted it on Steemit as well: Part 1 (Abstract Mechanics), Part 2 (GM Toolset), Part 3 (Characters), and Part 4 (Gear) are all up already. Part 6, for vehicles, should be up within the week.

Combat

Combat is where two elements of Hammercalled's design philosophy really come out.

The first is a focus on having speed and constant change whenever game mechanics are involved. During even a particularly "slow" combat round, it should be expected that at least one meaningful status change occurs (e.g. characters take a heavy hit), and typically combat comes to an end in two or three rounds.

Another is a lack of compulsion to have the mechanics function in a player-centric manner. With the exception of determining Priority and removing status effects, the GM never rolls during combat.

I feel like it's important to talk about where Hammercalled sits philosophically before I go into too much detail about the combat system.

Hammercalled sits at an odd crossroads between being a story-driven game and having mechanics that favor a certain amount of "realism" and crunchy gameplay systems, and combat is one of the places where this shows more than anywhere else. On one hand, there has been a lot of thought going into the combat system regarding how to make it feel passably realistic and deep, but also keep it going quickly.

This is done by having a lot of emphasis on decisions made by characters outside of combat, and less on decisions during combat.

For instance, there are a couple weapon qualities that characters can choose from (like Automatic or Charged) that add modes, but generally a character has four decisions to make during combat:

1. Who should I attack? (Note that this is not "Should I attack?")
2. Do I want to move in or move away?
3. Where should I spend my Adrenalin?
4. What should I use my Reaction on? (Ties into #3, but can also be relevant for characters with status effects)

Each of these questions is what weapons and armor ultimately interact with. A character with the Armor Penetration quality on their weapons attacks hardened targets first, but may hold their Adrenalin in reserve for if they suffer a counter-attack, while a character with the Automatic quality may want to pump their attack with Adrenalin and try to hit everyone before they hit him.

One thing to note about this is that combat in Hammercalled is very abstract. A five-hour sniper battle may be one combat round, and three seconds of urban combat could be a combat round (or two, if you've got cyborgs). It's when people would ask these questions that the rounds advance. This not only removes any delays, but it helps to iron out any wrinkles that would otherwise occur.

Another reason for this is that I'm of the mindset that while violence is an important part of a narrative, it's also something that shouldn't take up most of the time of a session of a roleplaying game. Combat is a culmination of conflict, and it can show the futility of human pride or the epic struggle between good and evil, but not if you're too concerned with numbers to let it serve as a part of a story rather than a story of its own.

Combat is made the way it is so that enemies can be mechanically interesting to match the narrative role that they play, but the ultimate goal of combat is to reach the end of combat, either in victory or defeat.

It's also worth noting that the combat section will talk mostly about PCs, since that's where the majority of the focus lies. The GM plays a very different game during combat; it's not necessarily adversarial, but it is asymmetrical.

Range

Combat is divided into three range brackets: In Melee, Engaged, and not engaged (the first two are status effects characters gain).

This is not only a vast time-saver, since you don't have to worry about extra numbers floating around during combat, but it also helps to provide a level of realism without being unrestrained. (In Melee representing a 0-10 meter distance, roughly, and Engaged representing a 10-300 meter distance; Sniper weapons can attack beyond this range and don't require the Engaged status effect to be on the target or attacker).

I've found that this works well both in "theater of the mind" combat, since all relevant information can be conveyed really quickly, but also when playing with miniatures, since you can still visually represent these systems.

One note is that the majority of situations that players have found themselves in benefit from this simplification and don't encounter a ton of issues. You could separate the Engaged range into multiple distances for certain purposes, but allowing Sniper and Artillery weapons to attack while their users are not engaged has generally served to allow people who want an extra degree of range to have that, without resulting in the addition of intermediary steps that would require more classifications of weapons (e.g. long/short/melee).

Right now, given how simple the In Melee/Engaged/not engaged trifecta has been to implement, I'm not against having that extra bracket because it would make things over-complicated; an In Melee/Short/Long could have a little extra consideration about who's engaged with whom(for instance, everyone who's Engaged is Engaged with each other, but not everyone In Melee is In Melee with everyone else who is In Melee), but it doesn't necessarily have to, as most combats tend to revolve around a central focal point when you're dealing with the number of characters you see in Hammercalled, or can be branched off into their own separate entities.

Another alternative to this, which I would probably work on if I ever made a combat-focused addition/setting for Hammercalled that I felt would benefit from this, is a "point-centric" combat system, with combat locations defined via a series of nodes; each character in a node is In Melee with each other, Engaged with adjacent nodes, and disengaged from nodes that are not adjacent. Characters move along passages between nodes, allowing some characters to find places that are Engaged with others but don't necessarily have a clean path to travel between.

I've done this experimentally in the past, and it lends itself well for larger-scale combats that operate on the same basic premise without becoming odious from a record-keeping standpoint, though it is a little too complicated to work without some visual representation in most cases.

Another reason why the three-tier system we have currently works so well is simply a balance consideration. A lot of characters have to change distances in order to be optimally effective, and having more distances makes it more difficult for characters who focus on that to do so. The three-tier system allows characters who need to be in a certain spot to get there whether or not they're specialized in doing so, but specialists still have a chance to shine. For instance, one of my players in the Unsung Gods test campaign can always avoid the In Melee status effect unless a bunch of enemies try to force him In Melee.

Adrenalin

One of the systems I added to Hammercalled relatively late in its development is the Adrenalin system, though it had its roots in the ability to use a Reaction to boost defenses.

Adrenalin allows the player to allocate a +10 bonus to any single action during a combat round (though Talents can modify this). The shift from a boost to defense to being used as a bonus on anything helped to speed up combat by allowing players to do more damage (see the Attacks section later on in this reference for more information about how exactly Adrenalin boosts damage), but also makes it function in a less confusing way; sometimes players were thinking that they had to use a Reaction to defend, rather than using it as a boost.

You need to spend a Reaction to boost a defense with Adrenalin, which was done for two reasons:

1. It makes Adrenalin slightly less valuable and helps maintain the value of Reactions.
2. It reduces the amount of time that players think about how to spend Reactions; if they're out of Adrenalin and not under a status effect, they no longer need to think about their Reaction unless they have something special to do with it.

This lets players prioritize what they really care about, functioning similarly to a "stance" in a lot of other games (systems in ADOM, D&D, and Shadowrun particularly helped to inspire this), but it is both available to all characters and very universal in how it functions to boost both attacks and defenses. Some characters can get bonus Adrenalin, or boost the degree to which their Adrenalin helps them, but they still have the same basic functionality.

Adrenalin also serves as a resource for activating certain abilities and talents (and maybe gear, down the road; this isn't currently a feature but there's no reason it couldn't be).

One thing that I'm definitely not doing is allowing characters to exchange Adrenalin to prevent Wear, just because that discourages players from using Adrenalin to boost attacks and slows down combat a little. Adrenalin also shouldn't be used for rerolls, since that slows down play as well.

Action Economy

Hammercalled is built around an action economy that is intended to be very rigid.

The three types of actions are attacks, miscellaneous actions, and reactions, and they don't necessarily "flow" into each other (e.g. we don't consider them to be full-action, half-action, free action; they are each distinct).

The reason why action types can't normally be exchanged is that each has a particular purpose:

• Attacks involve changing the state of other people in combat. Buffs are done as attack actions, as are traditional attacks.
• Miscellaneous actions involve moving around the battlefield primarily. They can be converted into Reactions, but only after the character's Priority arrives, making them more suitable for removing status effects than defensive use.
• Reactions involve responding to someone else's actions. They're largely optional for defenses, but are required to remove status effects and apply Adrenalin.

Attacks

The most important element in combat is the attack. With Hammercalled's focus on high-speed low-inertia combat, the role of an attack is to have a fair amount of power.

To determine the damage you can expect an attack attempt (not a successful attack) will do, take the attack's chance of success (in decimal format; so 34% becomes .34), multiply the damage rating by that (4 * .34 = 1.36), then add in margin. I believe a semi-accurate calculation for this is chance of success squared times five, but I'm not a mathematician (.34 * .34 * 5 = .578). So the expected value of a 4-damage attack with a 34% chance of success is ~2.

34%, however, is a very low number for Hammercalled, and you see a lot better results once you boost the to-hit rate; the same character using Adrenalin to boost an attack would have an expected value of ~2.7 with an identical weapon (4 * .44 and .44 * .44 * 5).

Low-level damage outputs look low, but you have to remember that typically there are three or four player characters in any combat, and they can use Adrenalin for attacks; the average party damage per round from playtesting looks to be between 0-30 damage.

If you tossed in four of the Hammercalled Quick-Start example characters, you can easily see a reliable 20 damage (before armor comes into play) on the conservative side.
Combat becomes much more lethal very quickly as players pass into higher levels of play, with the improvement being linear from the attack damage of weapons (and at higher level play it is reasonable to expect that weapons be boosted too), but somewhat more quickly from Margin (a character with a 90% chance to hit would expect 4 damage from their Margin alone!).

To mitigate player damage, GMs can implement NPC armor and evasion attributes. Generally low-tier enemies have neither (or a very small amount of one or the other, but light armor on a minion is worthless as we'll describe in a bit).

Defenses are worth more against stronger players, ironically, since the increased miss chance caps the potential Margin of a hit, and armor works better against weaker players, since there is a better chance of sinking any significant damage.

Miscellaneous Actions

Miscellaneous actions are used primarily for movement, but we avoid calling them "Move actions" or "Movement actions" because it is possible for some characters to convert Reactions into movement using Gear and it is also misleading.

The best way to think of a Miscellaneous action is that it's anything we want characters to be able to do during combat, important enough that it should dominate a certain amount of their narrative agency for the combat round, and not an attack or damage output booster.

For instance, Immediate Aid runs as a Miscellaneous action, not necessarily because it's less important than attacking, but because we want to give a medic who's holed up in a position something to do (heal a friendly character) without slowing down the game state by forbidding actions. Boosts that help combat performance don't count as Miscellaneous actions, because they're improving the likelihood that characters do significant damage to their enemies each turn.

Each Miscellaneous action can be converted into a Reaction after the character's Priority arrives.

This keeps them from being "wasted", since it gives a second chance for the Miscellaneous action to be useful. For instance, a melee fighter who suffers a negative status effect can remove it, if they are already In Melee and their opponent doesn't move away.

It also serves to mitigate the potential imbalance caused by talents giving characters extra Reactions, since there are multiple paths to multiple Reactions any situation where a character might need multiple Reactions to be successful is less painful for characters without those talents while still providing extra value to characters with those talents, which means that a GM can be more generous with things like negative status effects.

Reactions

Combat is centered around the player characters, and one important part of that is giving them agency in some situations that they might not have elsewhere. It's sometimes an illusory agency; Adrenalin and Reactions, for instance, don't allow a character to control every event, but they do let them choose one or two events per combat round that they really want to unfold a certain way and nudge them in that direction.

Originally I was contemplating leaving out Reactions from Hammercalled (anything that would require a Reaction to remove would instead require a Miscellaneous action), but that left players with too little agency to respond to events as they happened, especially if they came before their Priority (because even though in some versions a Miscellaneous action could be used to respond at any time, then the players would only have their Attack action to do later and not be able to do other stuff), and two Miscellaneous actions were far too many.

Reactions are used in very simple ways:

They remove something, or they can add Adrenalin to a test that doesn't require an action normally.

This is by design; minimizing the chance that players get confused and moving Reactions to a place where they're not necessarily always in play keeps things going smoothly.

Defense

Defense is handled as players rolling Attribute+Specialization with a modifier based on the difficulty of an incoming attack. Getting hit does a fair amount of damage, but this is usually offset by enemies having weaker weapons than PCs typically do (they almost always get 1 Margin because of the way the inverse Margin system works, but they have lower damage output to compensate for this).

Characters don't typically get a lot of options for improving their defense, and they're low to begin with, but an armored PC can easily avoid the worst of incoming damage and survive for 3-5 hits from an equivalent power-level enemy.

Another layer of balance comes in the fact that incoming attacks incapacitate PCs rather than killing them once they suffer all the damage they can take. This allows the GM to show mercy to players, but still gives players a significant disincentive to pursue fights they are likely to lose.

Priority

The one symmetrical element of combat, and one of the obvious ones where a GM will have to roll, Priority is Hammercalled's method of handling turn order.

Priority counts down from highest to lowest, and a character can act at any point after their Priority, so long as they are not interrupting someone else's action. The point of this is to make a high Priority very valuable (since you can then act whenever you want), and due to the nature of combat it is typically better to go first. However, players who wish to delay can have an advantage; for instance, a medic who moves early can attack an enemy, but patch up an ally later in their turn.

Reactions are an exception to this rule, and can be used at any time, though it's also worth noting that defense tests aren't actually an action to be interrupted in the first place.

The Priority system as it stands is pretty light, and that's not an accident.

NPCs in Combat

NPCs are both important and entirely irrelevant in combat.

On one hand, NPCs serve as a reference for GM consistency.

On the other hand, a GM can totally just make up TNs and handle combat narratively.

The downside of the latter approach is that it can cheapen gameplay and make it generally less important to have characters who are fleshed out and interesting.

Even following defined NPCs faithfully, they only really have two roles in combat: modifying the target number of attack and defense tests, and sinking damage.

We do provide a number of systems to help simplify combat with a lot of NPCs.

Minions

We refer to any single NPC or group of NPCs who are individually weak and not a match for players as minions.

A minion can take one hit that actually deals damage to them before being removed from combat.

Minions act as a whole group, typically, and are easily removed. They're intended to be a source of tension, with mechanics that reflect particular conceits—highly armored minions are resistant to unfocused attacks, for instance–rather than really give a lot of detailed data.

Minions can be encountered independently, but we also have horde rules for them, which can support an arbitrary number of NPCs. This is strictly a cinematic, rather than a realistic, mechanism, and doesn't at all try to be mathematically aligned to what multiple independent minions would do, because that would make it more complicated and difficult for the GM without too much of a real positive impact.

Adversaries

Adversaries are the closest to PCs, and don't warrant a whole lot of discussion. They have a pool of health that falls somewhere around the amount of stamina and wounds that a character would be normally expected to have at lower levels (unlike PCs, Adversaries don't take wound penalties, but to compensate they also go poof instead of being incapacitated, meaning that the GM doesn't have to worry about them even though a PC would still be able to function).

Mechanically, the only difference between an Adversary and a Minion is that Adversaries won't typically be represented in a horde (though they theoretically could be), and that Adversaries can take multiple hits. They usually go down pretty quick.

Bosses & Vehicles

Bosses and enemy Vehicles function like PC vehicles; instead of taking damage in a numerical pool, they take ticks of damage whenever they receive incoming damage in excess of their damage threshold, with extreme damage causing multiple ticks.

The reason for this is that typically it is much easier to do this than have complicated math, though there is no technical limit on how much health an Adversary would have. It also reduces the chance that a boss or vehicle is killed in a single good hit, and allows them to ignore threats that wouldn't realistically threaten them.

NPC vehicles and bosses don't need the improved armor that minions and adversaries need to feel armored, either, allowing PC-usable vehicles to be used as baselines. They can have a Scale rating as well.

NPC vehicles can also come in a minion form; where they only get to take damage once and are then removed from play.

NPC vehicles and bosses can violate the normal action economy, making more than one attack per turn.

Status Tracking

NPCs are built so that each has a relatively small portion of details to reference: four or five modifiers (of which only two or three may even be combat applicable), no status tracking for Minions, a single number for Adversaries (which will often be in single digits), and tick boxes for hardier enemies.

My rule of thumb is that you should be able to fit everything you need for an NPC's combat stats onto a single side of a 3x5 index card for an entire group of enemies, including both static things and changing things. This requires a little bit of organization, but is possible under the current setup.

Scaling with Player Characters

The real difficulty in combat is keeping the scale at the same point as player characters.
Hammercalled doesn't have a prescribed way to do this, but we do have a few guidelines for GMs who are struggling to keep up with players.

First, the obvious answer is tweaking the numbers. If you have powerful player characters, then you can slightly increase the number of enemies, or make them a little more likely to hit and dodge.

However, this isn't necessarily a workable solution for groups with extra players; lower power PCs can generally gang up on single powerful NPCs, but they're also at greater risk of getting hit too hard too quickly if the NPC is equipped with weapons that match their power.

Adding more enemies to offset more players doesn't necessarily bog down Hammercalled as much as it does some other systems, but it does pad out the run-time of battles somewhat, unless you're handling them using the horde rules, which isn't really suitable for non-minions.

Condensing a group of enemies' multiple actions down to a single action from a horde makes them better at dealing with high-powered PCs, but also results in them losing actions, and the action economy has a major role in dealing with anything combat related.

There are other options. The boss/vehicle system allows NPCs to be much more resilient, and can be applied to weaker enemies either openly or secretly to prevent players taking down encounters too quickly (since a well-armored boss or vehicle is very difficult to kill, since armor is factored into the calculation for doing multiple ticks of damage at once).

Ultimately, some of the scaling is handled as GM fiat. Adding more enemies to a combat as events roll on, rather than immediately at the start, is both cinematic and allows fine-tuned balance, and the more narrative combat system of Hammercalled allows it to work well (for instance, a sniper starts attacking, or enemies appear on the horizon: they're not Engaged yet, but they can be soon without having to nit-pick distance).